Chapter Text
Clint wakes and his heart is thudding from a nightmare that he can’t remember. Phil is snoring like a jackhammer beside him, and he lets the noise calm him down, steadies his breathing, keeps his eyes closed until he’s calm enough to open them again.
Phil’s alive, New York is safe – for the moment at least – and Clint is completely in control of his own mind. Everything’s okay, for a given value of okay.
He climbs stealthily out of bed and peeks out of the window. It’s just starting to get light, pale lavender trails spreading lazily across the horizon.
“JARVIS?” whispers Clint, careful not to disturb his sleeping Phil. (‘Boyfriend’ is for people twenty years younger, ‘lover’ is trite. ‘Partner’ Clint kind of likes, but only in the context of ‘partner-in-crime’.) “What time is it?”
“Five thirty-two a.m.,” says the AI, equally quietly. JARVIS is a sweetie.
“Thanks,” says Clint, and shrugs on one of Phil’s ratty old shirts. Phil does own old shirts, he just refuses to wear them in public. Not even Phil wears a suit jacket to bed. Well, except on special occasions.
He pads down to the kitchen in bare feet, stomach grumbling. Tony is a crazy person and he’d planned out a whole floor of Avengers Tower for each of them, but the one thing Steve had insisted on was a communal kitchen. As much as Tony had grumbled about it, everyone knows he secretly loves shared mealtimes. The rest of them like it too, even if they’ll never admit to it, and even if the sight of Tony eating bagels is a cruel and unusual torture that they are forced to experience on a regular basis. Nobody should abuse bagels the way that Tony does. It’s tragic. Ancient Greek levels of tragic, with lots of murder and incest.
Despite the early hour, the kitchen isn’t empty when he gets there. Pepper’s reading the Financial Times and Tony’s slumped on the kitchen counter, possibly unconscious. Pepper’s wearing orange cotton pyjamas that clash horribly with her hair and Tony’s wearing Iron Man boxers and nothing else. The arc reactor glows softly in its mess of scar tissue, but Tony’s marvellously unselfconscious about it. Clint’s not nearly as blasé about his own scars, but then again, Tony’s scars mark him out as a survivor, as a saviour. They’re noble. Clint’s scars are the exact opposite.
“Morning,” says Pepper, turning a page of her newspaper.
“Coffee,” moans Tony, flopping dramatically onto Pepper’s shoulder. Pepper is unsympathetic so he levels his puppy-dog stare at Clint. “Coffee?”
“I am not your coffee slave,” says Clint firmly, and starts to make himself some toast.
“Why do I keep you around then?” asks Tony, sounding honestly baffled.
Clint grins. “My charm and lovable wit?”
“Nope,” says Tony.
“My unparalleled aim and accuracy?”
“I have robots for that.”
Clint shrugs. “Then it’s probably my ass.”
“That’d be it,” says Pepper. Tony doesn’t say anything but his gaze drops down to Clint’s ass and he looks kind of shifty, which Clint takes as affirmation.
Because Clint is a beautiful, merciful human being, he fills the coffee pot and slides a mug across to Tony, who makes grabby hands and then slurps the whole thing up in about two seconds. After that he looks marginally more awake, or at least awake enough to steal the coffee pot. He doesn’t refill his mug; instead he starts drinking directly from the pot, but only after spooning in an absurd amount of sugar.
“You are a disgusting creature,” Clint tells him.
Tony makes an incoherent noise and Pepper rolls her eyes. “He knows,” she says long-sufferingly. “Believe me. He knows.”
Clint snorts and reaches for the mail robot.
This might require some explanation. It comes as no surprise to anybody that Tony is a massive technophile, and that his technophilia extends to every part of his life including the kitchen. Only Steve’s disapproval had prevented him from supplying every appliance in the Tower with an artificial intelligence, which is lucky because his blender is already plenty violent enough without giving it urges. Clint knows exactly what happens when you give AIs absolute power. 2001: A Space Odyssey is what happens.
Still, nothing and nobody had been enough to prevent Tony from creating a tiny little robot to fetch the mail from the lobby up to the kitchen. Because Tony is evil, he’d named it ‘the Mailinator’. Clint just calls it the mail robot.
Clint doesn’t actually get that much mail but the mail robot gets antsy when they don’t pay it enough attention, so he makes sure to check it every morning. Because otherwise it might sneak upstairs and murder him in his sleep. He’s not paranoid, he’s realistic.
Today is one of the rare days when he has actual mail, which is strange, because SHIELD just emails him and the only real, physical mail he usually gets is the occasional postcard from Natasha and Natasha’s not on any kind of op right now. In fact, as far as Clint knows, Tasha is still upstairs in her suite, curled up in her Egyptian cotton sheets and dreaming of beating people up.
It’s not real mail, anyway. Not a postcard or a letter or an electricity bill. It’s a flyer, printed on cheap, flimsy paper, and as soon as Clint sees what it’s advertising he feels as if all the air has been sucked out of his lungs.
Carson’s Carnival of Travelling Wonders! shrieks the flyer, in obnoxiously huge and purple script. Now on its 51st Tour! Featuring Trick Shot, Madame Cassandra, and Various Marvellous Acts that will Take Your Breath Away! Six Magnificent Shows – Don’t Miss Out! Buy Your Tickets Now!
He turns it over numbly, and then freezes. On the back of the flyer someone has scrawled a frantic message just beneath his address. It reads: Barton, and then, Help us.
He knows that handwriting. There is a very short list of people in the world that Clint knows well enough to recognise their handwriting, and Marcella Carson is maybe third on that list.
Come to think of it, most of the people on that list are dead.
“Hey, Katniss,” says Tony. He pauses. “Clint? Clint, are you in there?”
Clint shakes himself out of his reverie and turns to face him. If Tony’s using his real name then something is definitely wrong.
“Clint,” says Pepper, eyes widening. Obviously she sees something in his expression that worries her. “Is everything all right?”
“No,” says Clint, and breathes out slowly. “No. It’s not. I have to – I have to talk to Director Fury.”
“What, right now?” says Tony. “It’s not even six o’clock.”
“Yes, now,” snaps Clint, and then passes a hand over his eyes. “Sorry. Just. I can’t do this right now. I have to go.”
“I’ll get Happy to drive you,” says Tony at once, uncharacteristically serious. “JARVIS, wake up Phil, will you, tell him we’re –”
“No!” says Clint too loudly, and then winces. Tony and Pepper look shocked. Tony’s jaw is actually hanging open, though that isn’t actually that rare for Tony in the mornings. Tony just isn’t a morning person. “That came out wrong. Of course you should wake him. Tell him to meet me at base.”
“You don’t want him to come with us?” asks Tony carefully. Clint doesn’t miss the us, but he doesn’t challenge it, either.
“This can’t wait,” he says, cutting his gaze away. He’s all turned around. That damned flyer... He hasn’t thought of the circus once in more than twenty years, and he’d hoped to keep it that way. It looks like his past is coming back to bite him on the ass whether he likes it or not.
“Sure,” says Tony. “Okay, sure. JARVIS, tell Phil to meet us at base.”
“Of course, sir,” says JARVIS. There is a brief pause, and then he says, “Agent Barton, Agent Coulson would like to inform you that he will meet you at SHIELD headquarters and that he would like an explanation upon arrival.”
“I’ll explain, I promise,” says Clint, feeling sick. As if he and Phil don’t have enough problems, after all the mind control, stabby aliens crap. Marcy Carson has the worst cryptic-distress-call timing in the world. If Clint weren’t so worried right now he’d be pissed as all hell.
The Helicarrier’s still being repaired, and in the meantime SHIELD’s decided to make the very sound tactical decision of camping out in a base that can’t be shot down by a couple of rogue agents and an alien with a grudge. For the moment the base is still in New York, but Fury’s been making noises about moving them out to somewhere less conspicuous. Still, being in New York means they’re right at hand for all the crazy shit that goes down here. Clint’s not sure if the Avengers chose to stay in New York because New York is a total danger-magnet or if New York is a total danger-magnet because the Avengers settled here, but either way it means they can respond quickly to supervillains and aliens and zombies and whatever the fuck else, so he’s not complaining.
The base is in Lower Manhattan, so it doesn’t take them long to get there, especially since Tony decides to drive Clint there himself in a show of solidarity. Tony drives like a maniac, which isn’t at all surprising because Tony is a maniac.
Fury is not impressed.
Fury’s sort of perpetually unimpressed though, which is what happens when your surname is Fury.
“So let me get this straight,” says the Director, mainlining coffee with his feet propped up on his desk. Usually he’s all Show No Weakness, so it’s a little disconcerting, but then again the sun hasn’t even completely risen yet. “You got a flyer in the mail from the circus that you grew up in and now you think that shenanigans are going on, and you want to investigate.”
“Shenanigans. Yessir,” says Clint.
Fury stares at him. It’s very easy to tell when someone’s giving you the stink-eye when they only actually have one eye. Clint feels a little uncomfortable but it’s not as if he doesn’t have a couple of decades of practice of withstanding Fury’s hardass glaring.
At least he’d managed to convince Tony to wait outside, even if Tony’s definition of ‘waiting outside’ is ‘bouncing around like a toddler while harassing every SHIELD agent in sight as loudly as possible’. The walls of Fury’s office are made from reinforced steel and Clint can hear the guy from in here.
“I owe a debt,” says Clint. “If something’s going down at Carson’s then I need to be there.”
“You want me to sanction an undercover op into a circus,” clarifies Fury, eyebrows raised so high they look like they’re trying to escape off his forehead.
“It’s not that ridiculous,” says Clint defensively. “It could be a matter of national security. That circus birthed the Swordsman, you know, sword-wielding maniac mercenary for hire? It could be swarming with supervillains.”
Fury sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fine. You’re due for some downtime. Think of it as a holiday.”
“A holiday where the holiday is actually an undercover op,” says Clint.
“Yes,” says Fury. “Exactly that kind of holiday.”
Clint can work with that.