Chapter 6
Clint was feeling antsy. He wasn't sure why; everything should have been great. He was no longer at odds with his fellow Shield agents now that they were on board and cooperating with the Glorious Purpose. He'd gotten to see Phil, and his handler had assured him that he wasn't mad at Clint, that everything was going to be okay. He'd told Clint to lie down and get some sleep, so he'd be fresh and alert when he was needed.
Clint had dutifully found an upper bunk in the dorm room and laid down on it, but for some reason, he couldn't sleep. Normally, he could sleep under any circumstances, but now he found himself staring at the ceiling, unable to even close his eyes. His gut was shrieking at him that something was wrong.
Maybe it was that he hadn't seen Loki in a while. Shouldn't he have sent for Clint to consult on achieving the Glorious Purpose? Or was Clint no longer needed, now that Loki had the combined resources of Shield to draw upon?
Clint took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. Loki wouldn't forget him; he was just undoubtedly busy briefing Nick Fury and Phil, and taking advantage of the much greater amount of data available to him. When he'd decided what he wanted accomplished, he'd come to Clint to get it done, like Phil and Fury had always done. Loki had just always given Clint a lot more discretion as to how he accomplished things, only occasionally vetoing him.
For example, he wasn't sure why Loki wanted to allow Dr. Heinrich Schafer to reach the gala before using the Optical Immobilization Scanner on him. Loki had explained that it ill-befit the honor of warriors to take the lives of scholars, but they could have easily have used the OIS on Schaefer's living body in the van after kidnapping him if it was that important to Loki.
But on second thought, keeping Schaefer contained afterward while they extracted the iridium would have been a pill, so perhaps Loki's way had been best at that. Clint had never used the OIS on an innocent civilian before, so he wasn't too sorry to have been overridden in this regard. And he had to concede that Loki's very public use of the device had made a brilliant distraction, even though it was far higher profile than Clint was used to.
Clint frowned. Thinking back on it, something was troubling him about that operation. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it also gave him an uneasy feeling. Maybe it was the fact that he'd allowed Loki to get captured? He wasn't used to bosses who insisted on inserting themselves into the line of fire. But Loki couldn't be dissuaded; apparently, Norse gods believed in leading from the front.
Loki had been quite calm about the possibility, simply saying that he trusted Clint to rescue him should that occur, and Loki was unable to free himself. "The only thing which worries me is the thought of my brother showing up, Clint."
At the time, Clint hadn't questioned that statement. He'd been preoccupied with planning his part of the operation. But now he couldn't shake the memory of watching a mortal Thor beating down one Shield security guard after another. Knowing that Thor's powers had been restored since then -- and how weak Loki was right now-- made him very anxious. Loki had said that they had an alliance with Shield now; but Thor wasn't part of Shield. Clint had had his own experience with "difficult" older brothers.
He couldn't stand it another moment; he had to find Loki now. Once he found him, surely the twanging anxiety in his nerves would relax.
In a single, fluid motion, he sat up, grabbed the bed rail, and vaulted himself over it down to the floor, startling the agent sitting by the doorway into dropping his StarkPad. The graphics of 'Justice League Academy' were displayed on its screen.
"Sir? Is there anything I can do for you?" asked the agent a little nervously.
"Nah. I'm just going to walk around a bit, clear my head." Clint tried to give the agent a reassuring smile, but he wasn't sure how successful he was. From the agent's reaction, it hadn't worked.
"Uh, sir, you're supposed to remain in the trainee barracks for now," said the agent nervously.
This gave Clint's free-floating anxiety a focus. If they were Shield allies now, why were they being treated as detainees? "How come?" he asked the tense agent.
"Um, why don't I get Agent Coulson or Agent Romanov to explain it to you?" The agent picked up his StarkPad off the floor, did some swiping, then looked up and said "Uh... it seems they're not available right now. Let me see if I can get someone else to talk to you." The agent was obviously flustered as he paged rapidly through his screens. He was also obviously inexperienced and in need of more training; he didn't even look up as Clint moved closer and knocked him out with a single expert blow.
Without pausing, Clint turned and scaled his bunk. He popped the vent cover open and slid through the opening, pulling the vent cover back into place after him. Then he crawled through the vents as rapidly as he could, trying to put distance between himself and his last known location.
He cursed himself as he crawled. He should have known better than to accept this "alliance" at face value. Shield didn't do world peace; they were a cold war organization specializing in covert ops. Loki was smart, but as an alien couldn't begin to understand the layers of deception which were Shield's modus operandi. Clint remembered Loki's shock when the use of the remote retinal scanner was explained to him, despite his quick masking of his reaction. It struck Clint that going by Thor and his buddies, it wouldn't take much "trickery" to get a rep as a devious mastermind in Space-Viking Land.
Clint listened to the chatter over the coms; fortunately his hearing aids doubled as his com link, so he always had access. His escape hadn't been noticed yet, but his luck wouldn't last long. Now he had to find weapons and Loki. He could kick himself for having stored his bow in the barracks locker. He still had the knife Tasha had given him, but he needed something with longer range. He began moving toward the nearest weapons locker. He knew he could jimmy them open, but he couldn't hack the armory's security. Not without another eyeball, anyway...
He flinched at the sudden mental image of Phil's motionless body, blue eyes staring sightlessly at nothing, deep puncture wounds around one reddened eye. He shuddered. He'd make do with the weapons locker.
"...Loki..." Clint raised his head instinctively as that name caught his attention in the com chatter. He tuned in and learned that the Avengers were headed back to the helicarrier, and that they had Loki and Selvig with them. The pilot was requesting permission to approach and land on D deck. Nick Fury himself granted approval, his voice sounding tense and grim.
Drawing on his memories of the helicarrier schematics, he started on the fastest route through the vent shafts to the hangar. He was going to find Loki. Loki might need help; it hadn't escaped his attention that the pilot hadn't stated that Loki was accompanying them, but that they "had" him. Maybe that wording wasn't significant... and maybe it was.
And once Clint found Loki, things would start making sense again. Surely.
As he crawled, he tracked the progress of Loki's quinjet through coms chatter as the pilot touched down and taxied into the hangar. He calculated that the best point of interception was Corridor H. He found a vent that gave him a good view of the hall just past the hangar archway, and waited.
He didn't need to wait long. He soon heard voices, Phil's among them, then the group came into view. An EMT team was with pushing a stretcher, speaking in urgent medicalese. Someone was in bad shape; not Phil... where was Tasha? Ah, over there, looking down at the stretcher's occupant, who was...
Every muscle in Clint's body tensed when he saw that it was Loki on the stretcher. There was an oxygen mask on his face, but it was unmistakably him, though looking amazingly young and vulnerable. Enraged, he kicked out the vent panel and dropped down behind the group. The conscious members of the party whirled around to gape at him.
“What the fuck happened to him?” he growled, feeling his throat vibrate with his intensity. “What the hell did you do to him?” Dimly, one part of himself realized that he sounded crazed; the other part couldn't care less.
"Clint, calm down," said Natasha, moving slowly toward him, hands held out in a soothing gesture, though her eyes were wary.
"No! I trusted you-- he trusted you-- and this is how you repay him?" he spat out scathingly. He shouldn't give way to anger; he was on a mission. Or was he? He couldn't remember now, all he knew was the acid taste of betrayal, and the feeling of wrongness was roiling in his gut. "Why did you do this to him?" he demanded.
"None of us did anything to him, Clint Barton. He caused his own injury, attempting to right the wrongs he himself committed." said Thor defensively.
This self-righteous statement gave all of Clint's confused emotions a focus. He pulled out his knife and lunged toward Thor. The demigod's eyes were almost comically surprised as Steve Rogers pushed him out of the way.
Before Clint could make a second attempt, he felt a stabbing pain his arm. He looked down, and saw a Shield-issue tranquilizer dart embedded in his biceps.
He turned in the direction the shot came from, and saw Phil Coulson holding a dart gun, his eyes meeting Clint's with sympathy. "I'm very sorry," Phil said compassionately as everything went black.
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The first thing Clint was aware of was that he was half-lying, half sitting on a padded surface, and that he felt terrible. When he opened his eyes, the world swayed in a seasick fashion. He immediately squeezed them shut again. When he tried to reach up and rub them, he discovered that his wrists were bound. A quick check revealed that his ankles were strapped down also. What the hell happened?
As if asking the question opened Pandora’s box, all his memories came rushing back. The Pegasus Project… the Tesseract going crazy… the hurried evacuation… Loki’s arrival… being touched on the chest by Loki’s spear, and then…
God! Clint groaned as the memories of all his actions of the past few days unrolled before him in pitiless clarity. He remembered shooting Nick Fury, recruiting a ton of eco-terrorists and hacktivists, appropriating weapons and gear from Shield caches… and ruthlessly attacking his fellow agents and whatever civilians got in his way. He wanted to puke.
“Clint, you’re going to be alright.” Natasha’s calm voice. He opened his eyes to see Tasha watching him sympathetically.
He laughed, harshly and without humor. “You know that? Is that what you know?” He pulled against the restraints, more to relieve his feelings than out of any expectation of getting free. “I got… I got no window. I have to flush him out.” He writhed futilely against his physical bonds, and even more futilely against the fact that despite everything, he still felt loyalty and protectiveness toward Loki. Well, alongside a desire to put an arrow through his eye socket.
She rose, and walked to the counter behind his head. He heard the sound of pouring. Over the gurgling, Clint heard her say, “You gotta level out. It’s going to take time.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand.” He took a deep breath, then blew it out. “Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Pull you out… and stuff something else in?” He lifted his eyes to her, and asked “You know what it’s like to be unmade?”
Natasha turned to him and met his eyes unflinchingly. “You know that I do,” she said quietly, a world of unspoken pain behind her dead-level delivery.
Clint took a few hard breaths, knowing the truth of that statement. “Why am I back?” he asked after a few seconds. “How’d you get him out?”
She shrugged, and replied “Loki said that with the control on him broken, you and the others should gradually come out of it. We learned from Selvig that a grade three concussion will break the control at once.” She gave a slight smile. “Cognitive recalibration.”
Apparently coming to a decision, she sat down beside him, and began releasing his restraints. “Phil hoped that tranking you would have the same effect, without risking permanent neurological damage. Guess he was right.” She looked up from her work and added wryly. “I was going to try hitting you really hard on the head.”
“Thanks,” he responded sincerely. Then the meaning of what she’d said registered. “Wait… Loki was under control too?” Thinking about the condition Loki was in when he came through the Tesseract, that made sense. Still, Clint wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, the fact that even a god could be mind-controlled made him feel less… weak... for having succumbed. On the other hand, he didn’t like the notion of viewing the man who’d raped his mind as a fellow victim. It was Loki’s face playing in his mind’s eye as remembered the experience of losing himself…
Clint squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, trying to shake himself out of that memory. To distract himself, he asked Natasha, “How’d you break him loose? And who was controlling him?”
Natasha went back to undoing his bonds. “Phil shot him with an untested 0-8-4 that fortunately turned out to be an ‘anti-mind control gun’. As for who… Loki called him Thanos. He also mentioned someone he just called ‘the other’. Don’t suppose he told you anything about them?”
“Nope. He once or twice walked off saying something about needing to report, but…” Clint shuddered, chilled again by the memory of how it felt to have his mind enslaved to another purpose. To distract himself, he asked “Hey, how did Phil guess that an untested weapon would have an anti-mind control effect?”
“He didn’t,” Tasha replied absently, concentrating on freeing his feet. “He was going to get one of the Phase II weapons out of the armory, but he couldn’t get into it because of battle damage…” she broke off there, but it was too late.
Clint swallowed. “Natasha,” he asked in a small voice “how many agents did I…?”
“Don’t!” She interrupted him before he could finish asking the question. “Don’t do that to yourself, Clint. This is magic. This is gods and monsters and nothing we were ever trained for.”
Intellectually, he knew that was true. Emotionally… it was far too much to unpack right now. He changed the subject. “Loki… what did happen to him?” He sat up and swung his legs off the operating bed. Natasha stood up to accommodate his movement. Clint grabbed the water Natasha had prepared earlier and drank some.
Natasha sat back down down on a wheeled stool and replied. “He’s in critical condition; the doctors are going crazy trying to get him stable. Based on what Erik Selvig said, we think Loki stuck his arms through an active force shield in order to turn off the Tesseract before it could open a mini-wormhole to… somewhere.”
Clint put down his water bottle, suddenly feeling nauseous. That was the “Glorious Purpose”; letting an alien army in to ravage his world. That was what he’d been doing with such zeal and at the cost of innocent lives. Putting his own family in danger…
Natasha rolled her stool forward, laying a hand on his arm. “Clint, it wasn’t your fault. Remember that— Thanos is the bad guy here, not you.”
Clint looked away, for a second, then looked back at her. In a clogged voice, he said “Well, if I put an arrow through Thanos’s eye socket, I’ll sleep better, I suppose.”
Natasha gave him a smile. “Now you sound like you.”
He managed a half-smile back. In a slightly more natural voice, he added “Assuming Thanos has eye sockets, that is. What intel do we have on him?” Concealing the movement from the security cameras, he used their private sign language to ask Family?
With the same discretion, Natasha signed back Safe! Out loud, she replied, “Not much. Loki told me his name, then teleported out. I could tell that he was terrified just to say his name, though.” She looked thoughtful. “Now that I think about it, he was acting as if he was afraid he’d be hurt for saying the name. Or maybe just for attempting to say it.” She frowned as the implications of this struck her.
Clint frowned too. “A couple of times during… while I was… Loki would suddenly jerk his head so sharply to the left I thought he’d break his neck, with this grimace of pain on his face. I thought it was more muscle cramps from dehydration, so I kept giving him more Gatorade to drink. He would always thank me, but once said ‘I’m afraid this will not be able to remedy the situation, Clint’ in this kind tone…” Clint punched the operating table hard to vent his sudden fury. How fucked up was it that he felt guilty for not seeing that his abuser was being tortured? It would have been so much easier to just be able to hate Loki, and have done with it.
Natasha reached out and clasped his arm again in silent support. “Clint,” she said after a moment. “There’s something you should know. The 0-8-4… it didn’t just free Loki, it kind of… de-aged him. It turns out he’s a different species than Thor… and Phil suspects that by his race’s timeline, he is just a kid. Or he’s supposed to be.”
Clint felt his face contort with confusion. “What?”
She shrugged. “Apparently, he’s a shapechanger on top of everything else, so he makes himself appear as old as he wants to be. Or believes he should be; I’m not sure how it works.”
Clint scrubbed his face with his hands. “Sounds like there’s a lot of backstory on Loki and Thor that we don’t know.”
Tasha smiled suddenly, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Fury’s assigned Agent Rose Arden to debrief Thor; I get the feeling he’s fed up to his eyepatch at Thor’s idea of information sharing.”
Clint barked a laugh. Rosie was sweet and charming with a fluttery manner which masked a mind like a steel trap. She could get the most hostile and defensive of witnesses to reveal everything down to their short's size while feeling like they were idly chatting with a new acquaintance. Natasha viewed her as a colleague worthy of professional respect.
At that moment they were interrupted by Phil Coulson opening the door. He did a double-take when he saw Clint up and free, and shot an inquiring glance at Natasha. At her silent nod, he visibly relaxed.
“Agent Barton, it’s wonderful to have you back”, said Phil with a dry half-smile.
“Thank you, sir; it’s great to be back.” He nodded at Phil, still feeling awkward. He hoped Tasha was right, and with time he’d feel normal again.
Phil’s nodded back supportively. “If you’re up to it, we need you both in the conference room ASAP.”
Clint and Natasha both stood. “What’s up?” asked Natasha.
One side of Phil’s mouth quirked up. “We have the Queen of Asgard— or rather, her hologram— on the command deck, asking to see her sons.” He stepped back, and motioned to them to follow him.