Rewind
Tony had missed something in the ground rules for the tower.
He’d never said Clint couldn’t be in the vents.
Well, maybe the ‘ground’ rules only applied when you were walking around. Wait. Thor and Iron Ass fly around.
Well. It didn’t matter, Clint reflected as he lay on his back in the aforementioned vents, and munched on a pack of Skittles (The other Hawkeye’s deplorable eating habits must be rubbing off on him. Not that pizza, coffee, and whatever he could get his hands on counted as non-deplorable eating habits.)
And even if it had been in the ground rules, he’d still be camping out here.
It’s not like he could stay anywhere else. The team had left without much thought to their recently-no-longer-cleared-for-duty comrade, probably assuming he had somewhere he could be. The tower itself was being completely redone on the inside, and all personnel had been cleared while the (high-clearance) construction crew fixed all Loki had inflicted, and more.
Tony’s parting comment had been “SHIELD can babysit you. Tell Fury I’ll pay him his twenty bucks when we get home. Be in bed by eight!”
That situation wasn’t ideal either. He’d tried it, of course. After a day of glares and wariness that made him want to put an arrow through half of the agents’ heads-No, not again, no-.... Or something. Of course, he wouldn’t actually shoot an agent for no reason.
Again.
And worse, the pitying stares. He hated pity. It itched all over, and grated when the stares flicked away, but not quite in time. Or when people flinched from him, damnit. And not people fresh back from an op, people like Ollie from Records who had never been on a mission in their lives.
I’d avoid me too, after-.
Anyways.
And he couldn’t stay with Kate. He wouldn’t bring this on her, and anyways, wasn’t she offworld? Something about the Young Avengers, and the fate of the universe… Kids these days.
He smiled, and shifted slightly on the ratty blanket grabbed from his room in SHIELD before he had gotten the fuck out.
And the farm was off-limits. So…..
The vents.
They actually weren’t that bad, he reflected. He got out and about after the crews left for the night, and exercised on the rafters and the obstacle course being built in the big new room downstairs that would probably be a gym or something.
He ate stuff from the vending machine, using the same change every night, and breaking into the machine to get his stolen quarters back every morning. It wasn’t healthy, but hey, he was eating. Sometimes.
Up here, he had a blanket, a half-wrecked nintendo, pent up energy, and a computer taken from one of the desks. That had actually been a challenge to hack into, Stark knew his stuff, but whatever worker owned it had used their birthday as the password, so it hadn’t been much of a challenge. That had distracted him for a couple of hours. He probably had Mario memorized by now.
Sleeping… He wasn’t sleeping. Nope. No, not again. He’d tried that once, back at SHIELD, and waking up from reliving the past couple of days, opening his eyes to find the ‘hidden’ surveillance equipment had been stepped up in his room, stumbling out into the halls filled with unfriendly agents… It was a wonder he hadn’t jumped out of the elevator at HQ what with the incipient panic attack (He was Hawkeye, damnit, he didn’t get panic attacks...) but only a complete idiot would jump out of that elevator.
They’d think he’d gone rogue again.
Staying awake, oh yeah.
He stopped nodding off into his Skittles, and ignored how the room seemed to close in, and the shadows settle closer.
It was going to be a long week.