Chapter 14
Clint barely suppresses a shiver, watching one of his best friends’ son whale on the beast. The crowd’s loving it, and Hammer plays the part, whooping and cheering with the rest, but there’s a pale look to his face that Clint knows. He’s seen it after people’s first mission, watched it make its way onto Wanda and Pietro’s faces and then slowly leave as the horrors became commonplace. He feels it on his face now. The kid jolts with electricity and then falls off the massive green giant, smoking slightly. He’d taken a beating, but had given one right back. Peter’s jaw is flecked with blood, almost none of it his.
Clint’s shoulder twinges sympathetically, having suffered plenty of dislocations of its own. He decides that the finer details can be left out of his report to Tony and Steve. There’s no need to tell the grieving parents that their son is barely recognizable, that Clint only put it together because he was looking for it. There’s no need to mention the fact that Peter probably would have killed his opponent had the moderators not stepped in. Clint tries not to speculate about what might have happened during other fights to make the kid so uncannily skilled, able to take down an opponent at least four times his size. There’s no need to mention that he spat out two teeth in the middle of it, like it was nothing, less than nothing. There’s no need to mention the gaping black hole between his middle teeth and his next canine.
Black clad guards enter the stage, dragging the two fighters off. The cage is cleaned. Hammer chats enthusiastically with the supervisors sitting with them, and Clint gains a new level of respect for the man. The night continues, but Clint barely registers the other fighters. The ones that preceded Peter and his massive opponent slip away until every second of Peter’s fight is seared into his mind, from the sickening snapping crunch of his arm and shoulder to the way his jaw, the only portion of him visible, had been flecked with blood by the time he was made to stop. The rest of the night passes in some kind of slow motion haze. For six months, Peter’s been here, fighting. He turned sixteen, and he's nearly closer to seventeen than sixteen. Clint hopes that Steve is finding something far less unsettling than he is.