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domarzioneA reverse cross-post to celebrate the start of a new adventure:
Thaw
Avengers/Captain America mashup; Clint Barton POV
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Summary: The Winter Soldier was the dog that ate the good guys' homework during the Cold War, a convenient bogeyman to explain failure, and Clint Barton was pretty sure those tall tales died with the fall of the Wall. But reality is stranger than fiction, something Clint really shouldn't be as surprised by as he is at this stage of his career, and now there are ghosts to chase once more.
Notes: Thaw is a sequel to Freezer Burn plotwise and a successor to BOHICA in terms of characterizations. Neither is required reading for this. However, I do recommend reading the post-credit scene to FB to establish the Winter Soldier within the context of this universe, which is compliant with Phase One movies but diverges afterward.
The first Clint heard of anything was when Stark emailed him to ask what was screwed up on the operational end of SHIELD. Stark said Natasha was being weird, an assessment Clint couldn't do anything with because as far as Stark and Natasha went, it was always a little weird, with different reasons for both of them. Also Stark said Cap was off the grid, not even returning texts, which usually meant he was on a mission, except he hadn't said anything was coming up, not even elliptically, which meant it was a sudden assignment. Which in turn meant that something was wrong.
Clint replied that (a) he was in the field himself and had been for more than three weeks, (b) Cap did lots of things without prior approval from either Stark or SHIELD, and (c) why didn't Stark ask someone on the Helicarrier, Clint knowing full well that Stark already had and had gotten nothing. Which was why he was emailing Clint.
Stark had a lot wrong with him and how he operated, but his trouble radar wasn't completely broken. Clint had been running silent for most of the last month and he'd maybe wondered himself if something was up when he'd logged into his email for the first time in seventeen days and seen a lot less personal communication than he'd normally accumulate in that timespan. Especially because there wasn't a single thing from either Steve or Natasha after the sixteenth. Nat had finished up her last mission the day after Clint had arrived in Beirut and they'd been in contact until Clint had left for Syria; she'd had a list of suggestions for where to eat and drink and buy toys that SHIELD would not provide, the last of which mattered more to her than to him because he had a posse of crazy people at Mattituck who'd give him whatever he wanted.
He skipped trying Tapper or Corrales or anyone off the Helicarrier and went straight to the phone number Natasha answered always (which wasn't the one SHIELD knew about).
"What's going wrong that even Stark's noticed?" he began with instead of hello. "I have just returned to what can pass as civilization after three weeks in hell and instead of pictures of puppies or cranky old man observations about Park Slopers or whatever it is Rogers is into this week, I have this. I don't want this."
His team had crossed the border into Iraq that morning and gotten to Mosul in time for an expansive lunch at a popular restaurant after first checking into their hotel (no USG quarters for men on a mission that did not exist) and washing the road and the horrors of Syria off of their skins if not their memories. What a fucked-up place, even by Clint's very well calibrated definition of fucked-up-ness. Kurdish Iraq was not like the rest of Iraq and Mosul was nice in many spots - Clint had spent a happy few hours walking off lunch at the air-conditioned mall looking at the fancy toys with no fear of being blown up - but even Ramadi in the early days would have looked good after Syria. He'd seen more dead children in the last month than in the last five years and he hated Fury for insisting that no, really, Clint was exactly who he wanted for this mission and then trading on the better part of a decade's history of trust to get Clint to drop his protests.
Natasha's answer was a profound sigh.
Clint hadn't decompressed enough to properly appreciate the tale of Yasha Yachmenev, who had probably been her lover (Clint could read epics in her ellipses) and perhaps less probably Sergeant James Barnes (because he would buy a lot more shit than he used to since he'd started running around with aliens and rage monsters, but his Cold War paranoia only went so far). But even if he couldn't feel the rhythm, he could at least follow the beat and even if he wasn't sure what was going on or was not yet in a position to care deeply enough to respect his friends' stresses, he could understand how this was sending the Avengers reeling off-center. Steve was their backbone, the steady bass in a jazz group (to carry the metaphor way too fucking far) that could play the standards together but still tripped each other up when the improv stretched on for too long. All of them felt entitled to their own dramas because Steve would be there to make sure one of them didn't bring all of them down. Funny how that had changed so much in so short a time. All of them were lone wolves, aggressively antisocial and not playing well with others, and then along came one defrosted hero and one crazy Asgardian and, all of a sudden, they were a team. It shouldn't have mattered to a bunch of independent operators if Steve was off somewhere on a highway ignoring phone calls, but it did matter and now that everyone else was suddenly grasping for their Cap-colored lifeline at once and finding out that it wasn't there, there was panic.
It would be at least a day before he could laugh about the irony of how both Tony and Natasha had decided that he could fill in in the interim. He sent Steve a text to that effect and considered the matter closed because Steve would get back to him - or not - when he was ready.
A day later, he got a reply in the form of a photograph from Birmingham of a plaque commemorating Martin Luther King's letters from jail, which Clint took as Steve saying that he didn't want to talk about it.
It took Clint the better part of a week to get back Stateside because, to his utter not-surprise, there was something for him to do in Iraq first. There was always something to be done in Iraq and Clint seriously doubted that it had to be done by him, but his controller back in New York -- he didn't bother remembering their names, they were all interchangeable idiots -- had probably not even considered anything beyond his own promotability when he'd agreed to it on Clint's behalf.
By the time Clint did get back to New York, Natasha was off on a mission and Steve had returned from his walkabout and promptly been sent to Ecuador with Corrales's team to intercept a shipment of HYDRA materiel, so Clint could go straight to Fucktard Controller #4 and explain in very small words (mostly of four letters) that he did not appreciate being turned into the Nearest Available Asset for a mission a rookie agent already in country could have handled, especially not after such a miserable primary mission.
"I am not a fucking lawnmower for you to lend out to whoever needs to cut their grass," Clint told FC4 in front of a room full of analysts, because FC4 had been operating on the faulty premise that there was safety in numbers. "Pull that shit again and you are not going to live long enough to redeem these brownie points you're banking off my ass."
And then he went down to the range and emptied his quiver three times, destroying two dummies in the process.
"If you keep this up, I am going to put you on an equipment allowance like Cap," Tapper said from the back of the booth where he was leaning against the wall. Clint had noticed him five arrows ago, but since Tapper had stayed put instead of interrupting, then Clint was happy to delay the inevitable chewing-out until he was calm enough not to take Tapper's head off, too. "At least use the dummies without the sensors; they cost a third of the price to replace and you already know you can hit whatever you aim at."
"I'd be happy to use a certain operations analyst instead, save SHIELD the payroll and the pension," Clint said as he hit the button for the target recall and what was left of the dummy started moving jerkily toward him. "I am fucking sick of this shit, Tapper. This wasn't the first time. Do you know he had the nerve to tell me I shouldn't be upset, at least it was in the same country? As if the travel was what was pissing me off?"
A loud sigh from Tapper and Clint finally looked over. Tapper had been a field agent before his unfortunate injury and an even more unfortunate promotion that had kept him out of the field once he'd been cleared to return. He understood why Clint was pissed, but his sympathy was not going to cover the entire cost.
"I'm not going to defend Frade," Tapper said, walking closer so that he didn't have to raise his voice. This range was for non-firearm weapons -- knives, arrows, throwing stars, whatever pointy things people wanted to aim -- and quieter and less crowded than the pistol range, but that wasn't quiet or empty. "But you used him the way he used you -- to make a point to any interested parties. You didn't need to make a scene."
"I was trying to speak a language he understood," Clint said, wiping down the bow and folding it. "Because 'field agent' is not one he's fluent in."
"No, you were trying to humiliate him for pimping you out to CENTCOM," Tapper replied sourly. "And you were making it that much harder to replace him."
Clint looked over sharply. "You're not going to keep us together, are you?"
It wouldn't be Tapper's decision, of course, but Tapper had pull with the people who would make that decision.
"Frade would be the fourth controller you've burned through in the last two years," Tapper reminded him. "You're more than pulling your fair share in adding to the Avengers' reputation as hard to work with and incapable of taking direction. Don't make that face -- you are all, the lot of you, a bunch of prima donna special snowflakes and I have better things to do with my time than dig up people who are willing to work with you and pay off the ones who already have."
Clint had been putting his bow back in its carrying case but paused. "Are you calling Captain America a prima donna? And is that why he's in Ecuador?"
Tapper frowned at him. "Cap is the most special snowflake of all of you, even if he doesn't have an ego. He's got other complications that more than make up for it. And no, he's in Ecuador because Corrales is down three men and asked if he wanted to go."
Clint finished packing up. "What are we doing about the Winter Soldier, by the way?"
He was a week's sleep away from being able to care about it like he ought to, but the details could be processed.
Tapper rubbed his face and sagged a little, frustration with what he perceived to be avoidable problems replaced by the frustration that came with the unavoidable kind. "Do you mean 'what are we doing about Yasha Yachmenev' or 'what are we doing to keep Widow and Cap from running off and doing something really stupid'? Because the answer to both is just a fancy way of saying 'pray a lot.'"
They parted ways at the outer door to the range, Tapper warning him once more to stop making work for him. A quick trip to HR confirmed that he was alive and still on payroll and would be on official stand-down once he finished his debriefings, which was a completely pointless administrative status considering that anyone who really wanted to use him had the authority to override it and even less respect for HR than he did. He spent the elevator ride down to the street using the app on his phone to order dinner from Lucky's so that it would get to his apartment a few minutes after he did. His plan for the evening was to sit in his underwear, eat his cheeseburger and fries, drink beer, and catch up on Dog Cops, which was not only relaxing, but also the fastest way to readjust to being Stateside after more than a month of sleeping in his battle rattle with his finger on his trigger guard.
The next day was spent eating out (pancakes with as much processed pig meat as could be mustered after six weeks in Muslim countries), organizing his notes for his written reports, eating in (delivery from the Thai place that had the extra-spicy papaya salad), making a half-assed attempt at getting over his jetlag (working from home meant that nobody could tell if you itemized your expenses with a nap in between tabulating each pile of receipts), and ignoring the increasingly offensive emails from FC4, who progressed to texts and phone calls by mid-evening to no greater success. The three days after that were spent in conference rooms with various department reps and FC4, being asked questions about whatever that unit had interest in -- Iranian involvement, Turkish involvement, Islamist involvement, were there HYDRA weapons, were there chemical weapons, how many other foreign agents? The actual details of the fighting in Syria weren't that important, but like a society wedding, who was there and what were they accessorizing with, that was the thing.
After that, Clint was told he was stood down, which was not the same thing as 'on vacation.' What it meant was that he was a fixed target for every department he normally could avoid by fleeing the country -- his physical was due, his mandatory quarterly psych eval was three quarters overdue, he hadn't made his benefits selections, he hadn't signed the paperwork for his pension reinvestment, and he owed $532.51 to Finance unless he re-submitted the expense sheet for last year's visit to Gambia. And then there were the media availability requests from PR, which Clint forwarded to Tapper without comment because they'd agreed that he could suffer through the occasional bowhunting magazine feature, but he'd be excused from the mainstream stuff. Once that was done, he made plans to spend the rest of the week at the proving grounds in Mattituck before there was a workplace incident on 44th Street.
Yang, his unofficial official armorer, was happy to see him even before Clint produced the char siu baos and peppered him with a thousand questions about arrow performance and maintenance and then showing off some new ideas, most of which were not at the testing phase. Which didn't stop Clint from trying a few out. The cluster-bomb arrow would be really cool once it did what it was supposed to, which was split into a dozen smaller projectiles that continued on the same trajectory in a wider grouping, instead of what it currently did, which was send a dozen smaller projectiles in every which direction and then everyone running for cover. There were also new bow designs, which Clint was never as eager to try out because his relationship to his bow was far more personal and this felt far more like infidelity. But Yang did have a pretty sweet compound bow that folded into next to nothing and could still manage a 70 pound draw weight and Clint agreed that that was one worth working on.
There were more traditional weapons, of course, and Clint placated Tapper -- who had not been thrilled by his flight from bureaucracy -- by requalifying on the pistol and rifle, making 'expert' on both without trying too hard. Then it was the weekend and Clint spent it at Orient Point Park at the far eastern edge of the North Fork before returning to Manhattan on Monday so that he could pee in a cup for his drug test.
Steve returned from Ecuador on Wednesday, so they had dinner and watched the Cards-Cubs game and did not talk about Bucky Barnes or Syria. Friday morning, Natasha blew up a factory in Cote D'Ivoire, apparently by accident although sometimes it was hard to tell with her, and Clint and Steve totally were not hiding out in the Situation Room watching events unfold on satellite. Hill gave them the stink-eye anyway. Steve offered to let Clint tag along on his visit to Offut, but Clint was not so desperate that he'd prefer to go glad-handing airmen in Nebraska to whatever SHIELD could do to him.
"You'll beat all of them in the PFT," Steve offered as they broke for lunch at the kosher bagel place on 43rd. "It's good for the ego, so I'm told."
"They're airmen. Peggy Carter can beat all of them in the PFT," Clint replied, repositioning his lox. "I'm gonna get activated any day now. I've managed to complete enough HR tasks and drive Tapper batshit enough that they'll punt me at the first global crisis they can find."
Steve sucked whitefish salad off his thumb as he picked up a bagel half. "You would have liked Ecuador. Casimir made it rain bananas when he fired one of the toys we found."
There had been HYDRA weapons in Ecuador, nothing too exciting but there'd been a lot of them and they'd been intended for nothing good. Steve confirmed to Clint that yes, he'd been asked about Latveria, too, which had seemed a little weird because Latveria had had no truck with HYDRA whatsoever, had probably shot most of the HYDRA followers inside their borders, and Clint hadn't really considered that Victor von Doom would be a market destination for what HYDRA had left behind. But that's why he was a field agent and not an analyst, or so he'd been told repeatedly during his own debriefs. From Steve's expression and tone of voice, he must have been told the same things.
By the end of play, Natasha had made good her escape with a spectacular amount of collateral damage -- she'd stopped being in real peril before lunch, so Clint felt that video-game jokes were appropriate by the afternoon, although Hill seemed to think differently (even if he caught her fighting a smile at the Q-bert joke) and Steve kept missing the references. Clint wished Steve a good trip to Nebraska and went over to the Pakistani taxi-driver place on Ninth to pick up dinner before walking home.
Sunday night, there was an email from Hill telling him to be at 44th Street for a pickup to the Helicarrier at 0830; he was back on duty.
Thaw
Avengers/Captain America mashup; Clint Barton POV
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Summary: The Winter Soldier was the dog that ate the good guys' homework during the Cold War, a convenient bogeyman to explain failure, and Clint Barton was pretty sure those tall tales died with the fall of the Wall. But reality is stranger than fiction, something Clint really shouldn't be as surprised by as he is at this stage of his career, and now there are ghosts to chase once more.
Notes: Thaw is a sequel to Freezer Burn plotwise and a successor to BOHICA in terms of characterizations. Neither is required reading for this. However, I do recommend reading the post-credit scene to FB to establish the Winter Soldier within the context of this universe, which is compliant with Phase One movies but diverges afterward.
The first Clint heard of anything was when Stark emailed him to ask what was screwed up on the operational end of SHIELD. Stark said Natasha was being weird, an assessment Clint couldn't do anything with because as far as Stark and Natasha went, it was always a little weird, with different reasons for both of them. Also Stark said Cap was off the grid, not even returning texts, which usually meant he was on a mission, except he hadn't said anything was coming up, not even elliptically, which meant it was a sudden assignment. Which in turn meant that something was wrong.
Clint replied that (a) he was in the field himself and had been for more than three weeks, (b) Cap did lots of things without prior approval from either Stark or SHIELD, and (c) why didn't Stark ask someone on the Helicarrier, Clint knowing full well that Stark already had and had gotten nothing. Which was why he was emailing Clint.
Stark had a lot wrong with him and how he operated, but his trouble radar wasn't completely broken. Clint had been running silent for most of the last month and he'd maybe wondered himself if something was up when he'd logged into his email for the first time in seventeen days and seen a lot less personal communication than he'd normally accumulate in that timespan. Especially because there wasn't a single thing from either Steve or Natasha after the sixteenth. Nat had finished up her last mission the day after Clint had arrived in Beirut and they'd been in contact until Clint had left for Syria; she'd had a list of suggestions for where to eat and drink and buy toys that SHIELD would not provide, the last of which mattered more to her than to him because he had a posse of crazy people at Mattituck who'd give him whatever he wanted.
He skipped trying Tapper or Corrales or anyone off the Helicarrier and went straight to the phone number Natasha answered always (which wasn't the one SHIELD knew about).
"What's going wrong that even Stark's noticed?" he began with instead of hello. "I have just returned to what can pass as civilization after three weeks in hell and instead of pictures of puppies or cranky old man observations about Park Slopers or whatever it is Rogers is into this week, I have this. I don't want this."
His team had crossed the border into Iraq that morning and gotten to Mosul in time for an expansive lunch at a popular restaurant after first checking into their hotel (no USG quarters for men on a mission that did not exist) and washing the road and the horrors of Syria off of their skins if not their memories. What a fucked-up place, even by Clint's very well calibrated definition of fucked-up-ness. Kurdish Iraq was not like the rest of Iraq and Mosul was nice in many spots - Clint had spent a happy few hours walking off lunch at the air-conditioned mall looking at the fancy toys with no fear of being blown up - but even Ramadi in the early days would have looked good after Syria. He'd seen more dead children in the last month than in the last five years and he hated Fury for insisting that no, really, Clint was exactly who he wanted for this mission and then trading on the better part of a decade's history of trust to get Clint to drop his protests.
Natasha's answer was a profound sigh.
Clint hadn't decompressed enough to properly appreciate the tale of Yasha Yachmenev, who had probably been her lover (Clint could read epics in her ellipses) and perhaps less probably Sergeant James Barnes (because he would buy a lot more shit than he used to since he'd started running around with aliens and rage monsters, but his Cold War paranoia only went so far). But even if he couldn't feel the rhythm, he could at least follow the beat and even if he wasn't sure what was going on or was not yet in a position to care deeply enough to respect his friends' stresses, he could understand how this was sending the Avengers reeling off-center. Steve was their backbone, the steady bass in a jazz group (to carry the metaphor way too fucking far) that could play the standards together but still tripped each other up when the improv stretched on for too long. All of them felt entitled to their own dramas because Steve would be there to make sure one of them didn't bring all of them down. Funny how that had changed so much in so short a time. All of them were lone wolves, aggressively antisocial and not playing well with others, and then along came one defrosted hero and one crazy Asgardian and, all of a sudden, they were a team. It shouldn't have mattered to a bunch of independent operators if Steve was off somewhere on a highway ignoring phone calls, but it did matter and now that everyone else was suddenly grasping for their Cap-colored lifeline at once and finding out that it wasn't there, there was panic.
It would be at least a day before he could laugh about the irony of how both Tony and Natasha had decided that he could fill in in the interim. He sent Steve a text to that effect and considered the matter closed because Steve would get back to him - or not - when he was ready.
A day later, he got a reply in the form of a photograph from Birmingham of a plaque commemorating Martin Luther King's letters from jail, which Clint took as Steve saying that he didn't want to talk about it.
It took Clint the better part of a week to get back Stateside because, to his utter not-surprise, there was something for him to do in Iraq first. There was always something to be done in Iraq and Clint seriously doubted that it had to be done by him, but his controller back in New York -- he didn't bother remembering their names, they were all interchangeable idiots -- had probably not even considered anything beyond his own promotability when he'd agreed to it on Clint's behalf.
By the time Clint did get back to New York, Natasha was off on a mission and Steve had returned from his walkabout and promptly been sent to Ecuador with Corrales's team to intercept a shipment of HYDRA materiel, so Clint could go straight to Fucktard Controller #4 and explain in very small words (mostly of four letters) that he did not appreciate being turned into the Nearest Available Asset for a mission a rookie agent already in country could have handled, especially not after such a miserable primary mission.
"I am not a fucking lawnmower for you to lend out to whoever needs to cut their grass," Clint told FC4 in front of a room full of analysts, because FC4 had been operating on the faulty premise that there was safety in numbers. "Pull that shit again and you are not going to live long enough to redeem these brownie points you're banking off my ass."
And then he went down to the range and emptied his quiver three times, destroying two dummies in the process.
"If you keep this up, I am going to put you on an equipment allowance like Cap," Tapper said from the back of the booth where he was leaning against the wall. Clint had noticed him five arrows ago, but since Tapper had stayed put instead of interrupting, then Clint was happy to delay the inevitable chewing-out until he was calm enough not to take Tapper's head off, too. "At least use the dummies without the sensors; they cost a third of the price to replace and you already know you can hit whatever you aim at."
"I'd be happy to use a certain operations analyst instead, save SHIELD the payroll and the pension," Clint said as he hit the button for the target recall and what was left of the dummy started moving jerkily toward him. "I am fucking sick of this shit, Tapper. This wasn't the first time. Do you know he had the nerve to tell me I shouldn't be upset, at least it was in the same country? As if the travel was what was pissing me off?"
A loud sigh from Tapper and Clint finally looked over. Tapper had been a field agent before his unfortunate injury and an even more unfortunate promotion that had kept him out of the field once he'd been cleared to return. He understood why Clint was pissed, but his sympathy was not going to cover the entire cost.
"I'm not going to defend Frade," Tapper said, walking closer so that he didn't have to raise his voice. This range was for non-firearm weapons -- knives, arrows, throwing stars, whatever pointy things people wanted to aim -- and quieter and less crowded than the pistol range, but that wasn't quiet or empty. "But you used him the way he used you -- to make a point to any interested parties. You didn't need to make a scene."
"I was trying to speak a language he understood," Clint said, wiping down the bow and folding it. "Because 'field agent' is not one he's fluent in."
"No, you were trying to humiliate him for pimping you out to CENTCOM," Tapper replied sourly. "And you were making it that much harder to replace him."
Clint looked over sharply. "You're not going to keep us together, are you?"
It wouldn't be Tapper's decision, of course, but Tapper had pull with the people who would make that decision.
"Frade would be the fourth controller you've burned through in the last two years," Tapper reminded him. "You're more than pulling your fair share in adding to the Avengers' reputation as hard to work with and incapable of taking direction. Don't make that face -- you are all, the lot of you, a bunch of prima donna special snowflakes and I have better things to do with my time than dig up people who are willing to work with you and pay off the ones who already have."
Clint had been putting his bow back in its carrying case but paused. "Are you calling Captain America a prima donna? And is that why he's in Ecuador?"
Tapper frowned at him. "Cap is the most special snowflake of all of you, even if he doesn't have an ego. He's got other complications that more than make up for it. And no, he's in Ecuador because Corrales is down three men and asked if he wanted to go."
Clint finished packing up. "What are we doing about the Winter Soldier, by the way?"
He was a week's sleep away from being able to care about it like he ought to, but the details could be processed.
Tapper rubbed his face and sagged a little, frustration with what he perceived to be avoidable problems replaced by the frustration that came with the unavoidable kind. "Do you mean 'what are we doing about Yasha Yachmenev' or 'what are we doing to keep Widow and Cap from running off and doing something really stupid'? Because the answer to both is just a fancy way of saying 'pray a lot.'"
They parted ways at the outer door to the range, Tapper warning him once more to stop making work for him. A quick trip to HR confirmed that he was alive and still on payroll and would be on official stand-down once he finished his debriefings, which was a completely pointless administrative status considering that anyone who really wanted to use him had the authority to override it and even less respect for HR than he did. He spent the elevator ride down to the street using the app on his phone to order dinner from Lucky's so that it would get to his apartment a few minutes after he did. His plan for the evening was to sit in his underwear, eat his cheeseburger and fries, drink beer, and catch up on Dog Cops, which was not only relaxing, but also the fastest way to readjust to being Stateside after more than a month of sleeping in his battle rattle with his finger on his trigger guard.
The next day was spent eating out (pancakes with as much processed pig meat as could be mustered after six weeks in Muslim countries), organizing his notes for his written reports, eating in (delivery from the Thai place that had the extra-spicy papaya salad), making a half-assed attempt at getting over his jetlag (working from home meant that nobody could tell if you itemized your expenses with a nap in between tabulating each pile of receipts), and ignoring the increasingly offensive emails from FC4, who progressed to texts and phone calls by mid-evening to no greater success. The three days after that were spent in conference rooms with various department reps and FC4, being asked questions about whatever that unit had interest in -- Iranian involvement, Turkish involvement, Islamist involvement, were there HYDRA weapons, were there chemical weapons, how many other foreign agents? The actual details of the fighting in Syria weren't that important, but like a society wedding, who was there and what were they accessorizing with, that was the thing.
After that, Clint was told he was stood down, which was not the same thing as 'on vacation.' What it meant was that he was a fixed target for every department he normally could avoid by fleeing the country -- his physical was due, his mandatory quarterly psych eval was three quarters overdue, he hadn't made his benefits selections, he hadn't signed the paperwork for his pension reinvestment, and he owed $532.51 to Finance unless he re-submitted the expense sheet for last year's visit to Gambia. And then there were the media availability requests from PR, which Clint forwarded to Tapper without comment because they'd agreed that he could suffer through the occasional bowhunting magazine feature, but he'd be excused from the mainstream stuff. Once that was done, he made plans to spend the rest of the week at the proving grounds in Mattituck before there was a workplace incident on 44th Street.
Yang, his unofficial official armorer, was happy to see him even before Clint produced the char siu baos and peppered him with a thousand questions about arrow performance and maintenance and then showing off some new ideas, most of which were not at the testing phase. Which didn't stop Clint from trying a few out. The cluster-bomb arrow would be really cool once it did what it was supposed to, which was split into a dozen smaller projectiles that continued on the same trajectory in a wider grouping, instead of what it currently did, which was send a dozen smaller projectiles in every which direction and then everyone running for cover. There were also new bow designs, which Clint was never as eager to try out because his relationship to his bow was far more personal and this felt far more like infidelity. But Yang did have a pretty sweet compound bow that folded into next to nothing and could still manage a 70 pound draw weight and Clint agreed that that was one worth working on.
There were more traditional weapons, of course, and Clint placated Tapper -- who had not been thrilled by his flight from bureaucracy -- by requalifying on the pistol and rifle, making 'expert' on both without trying too hard. Then it was the weekend and Clint spent it at Orient Point Park at the far eastern edge of the North Fork before returning to Manhattan on Monday so that he could pee in a cup for his drug test.
Steve returned from Ecuador on Wednesday, so they had dinner and watched the Cards-Cubs game and did not talk about Bucky Barnes or Syria. Friday morning, Natasha blew up a factory in Cote D'Ivoire, apparently by accident although sometimes it was hard to tell with her, and Clint and Steve totally were not hiding out in the Situation Room watching events unfold on satellite. Hill gave them the stink-eye anyway. Steve offered to let Clint tag along on his visit to Offut, but Clint was not so desperate that he'd prefer to go glad-handing airmen in Nebraska to whatever SHIELD could do to him.
"You'll beat all of them in the PFT," Steve offered as they broke for lunch at the kosher bagel place on 43rd. "It's good for the ego, so I'm told."
"They're airmen. Peggy Carter can beat all of them in the PFT," Clint replied, repositioning his lox. "I'm gonna get activated any day now. I've managed to complete enough HR tasks and drive Tapper batshit enough that they'll punt me at the first global crisis they can find."
Steve sucked whitefish salad off his thumb as he picked up a bagel half. "You would have liked Ecuador. Casimir made it rain bananas when he fired one of the toys we found."
There had been HYDRA weapons in Ecuador, nothing too exciting but there'd been a lot of them and they'd been intended for nothing good. Steve confirmed to Clint that yes, he'd been asked about Latveria, too, which had seemed a little weird because Latveria had had no truck with HYDRA whatsoever, had probably shot most of the HYDRA followers inside their borders, and Clint hadn't really considered that Victor von Doom would be a market destination for what HYDRA had left behind. But that's why he was a field agent and not an analyst, or so he'd been told repeatedly during his own debriefs. From Steve's expression and tone of voice, he must have been told the same things.
By the end of play, Natasha had made good her escape with a spectacular amount of collateral damage -- she'd stopped being in real peril before lunch, so Clint felt that video-game jokes were appropriate by the afternoon, although Hill seemed to think differently (even if he caught her fighting a smile at the Q-bert joke) and Steve kept missing the references. Clint wished Steve a good trip to Nebraska and went over to the Pakistani taxi-driver place on Ninth to pick up dinner before walking home.
Sunday night, there was an email from Hill telling him to be at 44th Street for a pickup to the Helicarrier at 0830; he was back on duty.
