You, little bird, are stronger than you know
NINE
You, Little Bird, Are Stronger Than You Know
He comes awake with a yell, water sloshing around him. It’s so cold he thinks he can feel chips of ice running down his arms and the fabric of his shirt sticks to his chest. His heart is hammering in his chest from being woken up so suddenly and his muscles are tensed for a fight, but his wrists are tightly bound at his back with rope. He twists his arms and listens to it creak, but he can already tell it’s too strong for him to break. He bares his teeth at the man holding the bucket in front of him. He’s wearing a black mask that hides his face completely from view but Clint just skips over his face and registers information based on the way the guy stands, how he holds the bucket, the state of his fingers, and the frayed edges of his pant legs. He considers going full Sherlock Holmes on this asshole but decides that he would make better use of the information by holding it close. Clearly he’s being held captive, his neck still hurts where the needles (needles, plural!) punctured his skin, and he’s incredibly pissed off at whoever decided to wake him up with a bucket of cold water.
“How about some soap?” he asks with a sneer. “I’d like to wash off the smell of bitch, if you don’t mind.”
The man didn’t say anything. Probably hoping to hide the fact that he spent most of his time in an office. Yeah, douchebag, I’m not just a pretty face. But better to keep information like that tucked away in his head where it was most useful. Gather all the intel he could and then blow this popsicle stand.
“I don’t remember ordering a wake up call. Your Yelp rating just dropped a couple stars.” Office Dude ignored him, walking to the wall and pressing against the metal in some pattern that must have meant something to him. “I wanna talk to a manager,” Clint said loudly from where he sat, dripping. “And someone call maid service. I need to have my laundry cleaned. Someone has soiled my drawers.” The man turns to look at him and Clint gives him his best I know it was you look. “Were you trying on my briefs? Does your boss know you steal his captive’s clothes? Oooh, or do you steal his, too? Have you shit in the big man’s long johns?”
The man turned with a frustrated sigh and opened the door to leave.
“Don’t forget I wanna talk to the manager, asswipe!” Clint shouted. The door shut with a bang. “And where are my fucking pillow mints?”
The cell he’s in isn’t a cell by nature, only by its present function. It’s ten feet wide and twelve feet long, roughly, at least, he’s not a walking tape measure for all that his judgments of measurement are usually pretty close.The walls were once painted white. Now, there’s still paint there, but it’s covered over with a black stain that smears his hands if he rubs hard against it but doesn’t clean off. The ceiling is a mix of black and green, like a nearly-healed bruise that’s turned into blood poisoning, and he wipes his hands on the rags he’s dressed in - grey scrubs, like an orderly outfit, or a prison uniform. If he had to guess, the room had once been an office of some kind, but it’s been abandoned for years. Probably after whatever flooding condemned the building. The ceiling is drenched in mold and its growing down the water-stained walls.
Fuck but breathing this shit in is already bad enough for his health and he doesn’t like to think what else they have planned for him.
And it’s cold.
Fuck but it’s cold.
It doesn’t take long before his fingers start to ache, and that’s after his toes have already gone numb. He’s in grey scrubs but that’s it. The maid’s apparently been out because they didn’t even bother giving him a pair of boxers, nevermind that he’s barefoot. The floor is concrete and already turning into ice where they threw the bucket of water on him to wake him. Looking around, though, he suspects there was more than one bucket involved. The entire floor is soaked, probably for his benefit.
“I’m a fucking Avenger, you know!” he shouts loud enough he hopes it ruins some poor bastard’s ears. Maybe there’s audio recording going on for the room. He hopes some damn fool was wearing a headset turned on high. “Don’t I deserve the red carpet treatment? Come on, guys! Who’s the VIP in the house?”
If there’s any verbal answer, he doesn’t hear one. His hearing aids are gone with wherever they’d taken his pants - probably taken by the same obsessively fuck who decided to undress him while he was unconscious. “Sick fucks,” he mutters to himself. “Who took my fucking pants?! Loved those pants. My ass looked so damn fine in those pants. Seriously unflattering dress code, guys. Do you not see this face? This is a royally awesome face, bitches. Purple all the way.”
He stalks through the room, back and forth. He doesn’t like being caged. Doesn’t like being buried. He likes being up high, away from the action, somewhere he can look and see the big picture. He can’t see everything that’s going on when he’s neck deep in shit, and if this isn’t shit, then he’s Queen Elizabeth and has even bigger problems than he thought.
Pacing keeps his blood circulating, helps keep his feet from cramping, which would be a serious mobility hazard for when the assholes who took him come back in. He is going to go through those fuckers like he’s a goddamn arrow himself. But he knows that pacing makes him look weak. It’s a nervous gesture. Tigers pace in their tiny cages in zoos. Dogs pace when they’re crated. Hella-awesome super-spies do not fucking pace.
But he’s cold and he knows the dangers of remaining still. Worse, of sitting down in a place this cold. His muscles will cramp and become useless. He’ll be a sitting duck, and yes, he might be a bird, but he’s no fucking duck.
And he’s not nervous, either. He’s pissed. So he paces, and fuck them all if they think he’s scared of them. Maybe they’ll underestimate him, think he’ll shy away. He hopes so. Hopes he can get a few in the throat with his elbows. He’s got boney elbows. Like daggers all their own. And he is going to use them.
There aren’t any windows in the room, no way to tell time, and Clint’s internal clock has never been very specific. Crouched waiting for a mark, he could tell the passing of the hour by his need to shift position to keep his legs from cramping, but there’s none of that here, in this ice box.
He’s stalking along the far end of the office, of course, when the door opens. It slams against the wall and the reverberation shudders beneath his feet as he’s turning his head. He’s halfway across the room, ready to plow into the bastards, when someone is thrown into the room.
He slams against the wall with a grunt, hand clutched to his throat, as he’s shrieking. “Fucker bit me!” he screamed, blood welling up beneath his fingers and rolling down his shirt. “Fucker fucking bit me! Fucking killed me!”
Two more people stagger into the room, a third person grasped between them. They’re grunting as they strain against him and Clint could use this moment. He could use this moment to his benefit, except he can’t move, because he knows that lean body, that oily hair, the pale tone of that skin. He doesn’t even need them to turn him around. He knows exactly what that man looks like. Can never forget.
He’s bucking in their arms, tugging first one way, then the other, his strength pulling them forward but not enough to break their grip. A fourth person enters the doorway and Clint has just enough time to see the coldness in that gaze before two pairs of long legs come up and, like a horse, kick the man hard in the chest, sending him back out through the door with a thud and clatter.
The man laughs, a wild, half-mad sound, and then he leans to the right and his voice is lustful, “Would you like to be next, my dear? Your grip is so wanting.” The man’s arm is twisted in a move that Clint knows from experience is painful, but rather than cry out, he snaps his teeth audibly by the man’s ear and lets out a sound like a purr.
“Fucker killed me!” the man against the wall screams again, his voice the wailing cry of a child.
“Oh, it was barely a nip,” Loki says with an eyeroll that is audible. “If I’d wanted to kill you, it’s not your throat I would have bitten. There are much nicer ways to go.”
“Shut up!” the man on the right snarls, tugging Loki’s arm back hard and this time, the god’s head leans back, trying to compensate for the way his muscle is being pulled. The man leans over the god, a grin on his face that shows all of his teeth, and that’s when Loki’s pain seems to cease, abruptly.
There’s a moment where the man just stops, confused. “Huh?”
And Clint doesn’t even see Loki move.
There is a flicker of grey and black and the man is on the floor, blood pouring from his throat, his legs working hard against the ground as he struggles to push himself upright, but it’s a futile effort. His throat has been torn open and the blood is gushing out. The man is already dead. He just hasn’t realized it yet.
But Clint’s attention is stolen by Loki as the god turns on the other man who held him, both of his arms now free. His lips are pulled back from teeth stained with blood and its dripping off his chin. His eyes aren’t the manic blue that Clint recalls, nor the calm, unbothered green he saw in here. They are vibrant. They are wild. The eyes of an animal, not a man, and when Loki tilts his head to the side, he looks like a snake preparing to strike, or a cat eyeing a trapped mouse, and his bared teeth are a threat but also a grin so frenzied that Clint is not sure that he will get out of this, either.
When he attacks the man, it is quick, and he is dead before he hits the floor, and those wild green eyes turn on him.
“Of course it’s you.” Loki sneers at him and turns to leave.
They’d both forgotten the fourth man.
There is a flash of blue - the blue that Clint still sees on the edge of his nightmares - and Loki hits the floor with a scream, his hands clutching his head, fingers digging into his hair. Clint recoils from that blue, sickening shade, but it fills the room, turning the walls radioactive in color, consuming everything in its wake.
Loki’s scream turns into a snarl and Clint watches, entranced and horrified as bones begin to shift beneath the loose-fitting scrubs the man wears. His spine arches, extending, and his dark hair thickens, growing longer. Fur sprouts from smooth, pale flesh, the color of golden sands, and the grey uniform disappears, pulled into his body, it seems, as hands and feet become thick, heavy paws.
The snarl becomes a roar, and where Loki had lay prostrated upon the ground, a lion now crouches, tail lashing furiously.
Clint’s breath is sharp in his lungs and his arms are covered in gooseflesh, but as terrified as he is at having witnessed this moment, he is also exhilarated. The otherworldliness of the moment leaves him trembling and he can feel a laugh trying to bubble up out of his throat, edged in hysteria.
The lion leaps and Clint had heard, once, that they could throw themselves forward thirty feet, but he had never thought it was true. Certainly, this space isn’t large enough to demonstrate, but the force behind those powerful legs is enough to kill a man on impact, and yes, this will be their ticket out.
The man has just enough time to raise the sceptre.
Loki hits hard.
He hits the opposite wall harder when the doorway shines a bright, blinding blue and flings him backward double the force of his leap.
The crash of his body against the wall shakes the room and the lion doesn’t rise from where it landed. Clint stares at it - him - for a long moment before looking back toward the door.
The man sends him a cruel smirk and waggles the sceptre in his fingers tauntingly. “No one leaves.”
The door slams shut with a bang.
It sounds very final.
It’s a few hours later, he thinks, when Loki finally wakes up.
Clint hadn’t gone over to check on him after the door had been shut. Somewhere in the shuffle, the man who had spent the whole time claiming he’d been killed had left the room, and the two bodies had been removed. The blood remained, of course, and Clint didn’t think housekeeping would be coming to clean up.
Well, he’d wanted a red carpet.
The lion groans, rising to its feet with slow movements that look aching. It shakes its head, tossing the thick black mane in a wave of ebony, and then bright, intelligent green eyes are studying the room. He, and it is he, that gaze is far too intelligent to be locked in the mind of a simple beast, lets his gaze linger on Clint for a long moment before moving on. At the end of his perusal, the god sniffs hard, gives an eyeroll that incorporates his entire leonine body, and lays down for a nap.
“Is that it?” The ears twitch but the huge cat doesn’t rise or even open his eyes. “Hey, fucking look at me, you mewling--”
“Do not finish that sentence,” the lion says in Loki’s dulcet tones, and Clint just stares at him. There is a heavy sigh and the head lifts, turning toward him, green eyes bright. “You Midgardians lost most of your magic long ago. I dared to forget.” The head rests on thick paws but Clint can still see the mouth moving in a manner he didn’t know a cat’s mouth could move as the lion speaks. “I suppose you’ve never seen words come out of the mouths of anything but your own wrinkled offspring.”
“Parrots can talk,” Clint says, not really thinking about the words he’s speaking, just letting his mouth work, “and crows.”
“Mm… corvids are one thing, but parrots.” And wow, lions could sneer. Who knew? “Mimicry is the part and parcel of mockingbirds and their ilk - vermin, all of them.” The tail lashes once, scattering ice crystals. “But I’ve no desire to spend my imprisonment here conversing about birds. Or with one.” He closes his eyes. “Now let me sleep.”
“So, what? You’ve given up? I thought you were at least more stubborn than that.”
“I am attempting to restore some of my energy, you buffoon.” Those green eyes open and pierce him with a hungry gaze. “Now still your flapping tongue or I will risk disease by eating it so to silence you.” The great head lays back down and the eyes close and Clint doesn’t say another word.
He did not want his tombstone to read “kissed by lion, died from Halitosis.”
It was best to just…
He shivered.
Chill.
They’re fed bread and water like this is some campy movie from the forties and Clint complains loudly to anyone in earshot until Loki rumbles a massive growl that sounds a little too close to a snarling, hungry stomach for his comfort. He dips his bread in his water and lets the mush melt on his tongue slowly, spreading out the meal, if you can call it that, so it takes him nearly ten minutes to eat it.
He has gone hungry before. He knows that scarfing his food will do him no good. Better to trick his stomach into believing he has eaten more than he has and stave off the pains for as long as he can.
Loki is still asleep, curled up in a tight ball, his tail idly flicking up and down in lazy movements. Clint wonders if he even knows he’s doing it.
He’s gotten up again and is walking around, rubbing his hands together to try and warm them. The water was lukewarm, which he was grateful for, as he wouldn’t have been able to let it sit without it freezing, but drinking ice cold water would have done him no favors.
It is cold enough to freeze the water to the floor, so he knows it must be at least 30 degrees Fahrenheit and he wonders what exactly they are planning that they need it so damn cold.
In retrospect, he wished he hadn’t wondered.
The touch of the sceptre is different in the hands of these men, but the blue taunts him with its glow. He can feel its presence, like a living thing, like a mind of its own, as it nears him. They touch his chest with the sceptre in the same way that Loki had (“You have heart.”) and while nothing happens, he doesn’t lose himself to the call of that blue void, the memories still take him and, for a while, he isn’t Clint.
They never take him and Loki at the same time. He wonders if it is because they have a limited number of people to key an eye on them or if they find it simply safer knowing where one is without risk of them wandering around. He hopes for the former because that will make it easier to escape but he suspects the latter because that is his luck.
It doesn’t matter either way. After they taunt him with the sceptre for a few hours, running whatever tests they are running with the wires connected to his head and chest, they toss him back in his cell.
Loki is human again that first time he comes back after the tests. Or looks human. Clint knows he really isn’t.
The god eyes him as he passes but says nothing.
They keep him for far longer than they kept Clint.
They keep Clint and Loki on a schedule that is only semi-predictable. It runs water, lashes, needles, sensory, tests, and continues in a repetitive path, but that’s where the predictability ends. He knows what day is water, but he doesn’t know if that means he’ll have his feet shoved down into buckets of boiling water, or if he’ll have ice water poured over his face until he’s choking on it. Will the lashes be on his back or will they slice into the backs of his thighs? The needles are sometimes blood being drawn and sometimes concoctions being unleashed in his bloodstream, and he never knows what the second is going to cause. Only the sensory deprivation is consistent. They blindfold him and put him in a room of bare, smooth walls, let his blindness and deafness turn the world into a monstrous place all on their own. It is somehow worse than the poking and prodding tests to see if they can unmake him.
Today is a water day, probably Clint’s least favorite. He can handle the pain of lashes, but there’s something about being subjected to water that brings out an instinctive terror. It’s bestial, this innate fear of drowning that makes his heart race when he spies the bucket. It’s animalistic, a fear he cannot logic away because the terror of it is all too logical, and it makes him feel the blur of blue in his irises, the cold calculation of action without his own thought. He is not in control of himself. He is back under the scepter’s thrall. He is not Clint anymore. He is just another finger in the hand of a creature he has neither name nor face for. He is less than a pawn in a chess game. He is a tool. A disposable one.
“Good morning, Mister Barton.”
Clint looks at them but his eyes gravitate back to the bucket. He wants to keep it in his sights. Like a snake that’s prepared to strike, he feels better knowing where it will be coming from. He is aware of the men who move around him, of course. There are three of them, plus the speaker, and at another time he might have felt vindicated that it took four strong men to make them feel comfortable against him, even with his hands tied behind his back.
“We’re going to try something new today,” the speaker says. He’s the only one that ever talks and Clint knows to keep him in his sights, but there’s nothing particularly interesting about him. He reminds Clint of a rat, although that may have been the circumstances.
“I have this friend, you see. Well, not really a friend. Let’s call him an enemy. He ended up in Afghanistan a few years ago, completely by chance, and there were… developments.”
Clint knows he’s talking about Tony. He doesn’t know anyone else with that particular backstory and everyone knew Tony Stark had been kidnapped and was found months later in Afghanistan. “Of course, the whole world knows Tony Stark came back with more issues than he has brains, and that is saying something. Most people have been focused on what’s happened since then, and with good reason. After all, we both know how dangerous Tony can be.”
This had to be someone that knew Tony well. Maybe someone he had once been close to? The use of his first name was casual, not forced, and that only came from years of familiarity. He wished Natasha was here. She would’ve been able to figure out who it was in a second.
But she wasn’t here and he should be glad for that. He knew Natasha could have taken it, but she shouldn’t ever need to suffer something like this.
“Of course, I’m of a different sort. Oh, what Tony’s done since he’s gotten back from Afghanistan is certainly interesting, but not nearly so much as what he did while there. Or rather, what was done to him.” There was a soft laugh. “Did you know they recorded it? It was never televised, of course. They weren’t interested in something as simple as a ransom, but they did make sure to record what was done, and I’ve found it very… educational.”
One of the other men in the room moved over and picked up the bucket. Clint’s body tensed without his meaning to and the speaking man dropped his hand down on his shoulder in a mockery of reassurance. “Oh, don’t worry, Hawkeye. I said we’re doing something different this time, didn’t I?”
A movement in his peripheral vision had him turning his head. The man holding the bucket had grabbed the edge of a thick tarp and pulled it to the ground. It had looked like a table when Clint was brought in, but he saw now that it was a small pool.
He breath hitched in his lungs as the man slowly poured the bucket into the pool. Water sloshed over the sides and onto Clint’s feet and he slammed his teeth together with a click, determined not to make another sound.
“There’s a reason you’re here, Hawkeye. A very good reason. You see, you were under the control of a god, and then you broke free. I want you to tell me what it was like.” The hand on his shoulder squeezed and those rat-like eyes, beady and cold, burned into his. “Tell me what you saw in his head and we can put the pool away. We can take you back to your cell. There doesn’t need to be any water play today. What did you see, Hawkeye?”
Blue.
Endless blue, like midday skies that stretched on forever, the sun shining bright, glinting off the edges of the world as though there was an end to the land and Clint knew where the door lay to the next.
Pathways that twisted and turned but never seemed to end, crossing back upon themselves even as they passed by doors to places Clint knew but didn’t know.
Whispers of emotions, half-felt but mostly hidden, as he spied doors in his vision. Knowing this one, somehow, led to cold and snow, and feeling shame and fear and hate hate hate burning inside him like frostbite.
And this one, reeking of moss and wet earth, shining black as the smoothed edge of a piece of black coal, humming with a sound like a lullaby. It felt like an end that was endless - a stretching sob that went on and on and didn’t so much as end as it was buried in a sleeve and muted, shoved beneath so many layers of pretending that it had been suffocated into silence.
This door, golden as sunlight and sharp as glass, that felt like wanting and hope and despair and an endless wound where pieces of himself - of him? - had been cut off to try and fit the mold, but the blood from the wounds was both too repulsive and somehow unrecognized. The only truth in the jagged edges of unhealed hurts was that no blade could cut him to proper size. He would never fit.
And blue.
Blue like the sky and blue like ice and blue like a stretch of mirror that forced you to see yourself and recognize that you left the world wanting. A mirror that forced you to see inside yourself even as you lost yourself. A blue like losing all control and yet also like relief, because finally, finally, it didn’t matter and he could close his eyes and not care. Someone else would do the work. Someone else would carry the burden. Someone else would cut him to the size they needed and here, here, here was he was the right, proper size. Here, finally, he had found his place.
Clint exhaled a silent breath, the same sort he would exhale while holding his bow trained on an enemy. Because that’s what this was. He was in the field. He was on a mission. He was sitting high on a ridge and staring down into an enemy that well knew he was there. He was Hawkeye, the archer, former-assassin, Avenger, and there was no one better at wielding a bow than he. He could see better from a distance - this fact was well-known to any who had worked with him even peripherally - and that didn’t mean seeing things only in the physical sense. Hawkeye’s gaze stretched far and wide and he saw what others didn’t, or didn’t want to.
It would be easy to hate Loki. It would be easy to blame him. It would be more than easy to tell this asshole what he wanted to know - to tell him that the inside of Loki’s brain was filled with so much self-hatred and pain that the right words, the right incentive, might have the god just giving up. Clint thought he could even give them the words, if he focused on the echoing murmur that never seemed to end - as deeply consuming as that blue in his mind. Clint could give them just the right words to sew strings to the god that would let them use him like a puppet. He could, and it would be so easy.
Except, Clint had seen inside Loki’s head. He had been there. Telling them wouldn’t save him. They had no intention of letting Clint go free ever, and if he gave them this, if he helped them turn Loki into a puppet, then he would have no right of rescue or release, because Loki had also been enthralled, and Clint knew that.
So yes, hating Loki, blaming Loki, would be so easy, because it would make Clint feel better to have a face to that blue shade, to have a name to the hands that maneuvered his limbs as though he were nothing more than a doll. If he blamed Loki, it might help the feeling of weakness that still burned inside him, the idea that he was somehow less than the others for succumbing to that color. He was only a man, after all. He stands next to super soldiers and gods and genetically modified monsters and whatever the hell Natasha is, and he knows that he is only human. Even Tony is more than a man, although Clint would never be so callous as to say so. It’s more than the suit. The man had an artificial heart, or as close to one as modern science could manage. He was practically a cyborg - part man and part machine - but he doesn’t think that Tony would find either humor or comfort in that, so he never says such a thing out loud. Not even to Tasha.
But Clint knows what he is. He is a man among people who are more than men, less than them in strength if not skill, and sometimes he fears that he is the link that will break the chain. They are all so broken and their coming together so haphazard that it sometimes feels as though if they pull too hard on one frayed thread, they’ll all unravel.
He doesn’t want to be that thread. He doesn’t want to be the chink in their armor, the weak piece that tears the Avengers apart and scatters them to the four winds. But sometimes, he fears that he already is. Sometimes, in the long nights after a hard battle, when his body is exhausted but sleep just won’t come, he thinks he might be more than just the weakest member of the team. Sometimes he thinks he can still see blue on the edges of his vision, that the color is lurking there, waiting to flood back in, to take over again. Sometimes, he thinks that he’s still compromised, and it would be easy to blame Loki, then, because if it was Loki’s fault, then Loki could undo it. Or he could give them Loki, give them the words they needed to break him, and in his breaking, that blue might finally recede. That feeling that he was lost, that he was out of control, that he might never be Clint again might finally leave.
It would be so easy.
Clint looked at the pool of water. He had read Tony’s file. It was far from complete and quite a lot had been redacted (probably by Tony himself), but Clint knew how to read between the lines and there wasn’t much here to be left to the imagination. This… this would suck.
This would suck, but Clint saw better from a distance, and there was no way that he could hand Loki over to these bastards, and no way he could get out of this. Not now, anyway. Not yet.
He chuckled and forced himself to relax in the chair.
“No.”
The speaker tsked behind him and the hand pulled away from his shoulder. Clint drew in a breath. He’d need it.
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Hands under his arms hauled him to his feet and pulled him over to the pool, standing him in front of it. He stared down into the water, momentarily grateful for the dark bottom of the basin. The water appeared almost black. That was fine. He could deal with that. So long as it wasn’t fucking blue.
“One last chance,” Speaker said, walking around the other side of the pool and staring at him through his mask. “Tell us what you saw in the god’s head.”
Clint stared into the man’s face, studying his eyes. They were dark brown, almost black, with flecks of pale brown within them. Clint committed them to memory, burning them hard into his mind so he wouldn’t forget them, and then closed his own eyes, forced his body to relax.
He wanted to tell this asshole that he looked forward to shoving an arrow in his eye, but he wasn’t in a position here where saying that would benefit him. Someday soon, though, he would find an arrow, and he’d know right where to aim it.
If there were words spoken after that, Clint didn’t know, but the man must have made some signal. The hands grasping at his collar tightened for just a moment before he was shoved forward, fingers like a clamp at the back of his neck, and for a while, all he knew was water.
He had to give it to the Speaker. He was tenacious, and patient. Most torturer’s held their captive’s heads under water for however long they could handle, brought them back up, and demanded the answer again. Not this guy.
Clint’s head was shoved under water and held there until his body started fighting to get out, ignoring his commands to relax because damnit, his lungs needed air. He was brought up, given a few seconds to suck in deep lungfuls of oxygen, and shoved back under.
On the third time, they held him under until his vision started to grey at the edges, until his lungs shouted out the stale air within them and demanded to be filled with whatever was handy. They pulled him back up, choking, spitting water and coughing hard, his sight wavering as it struggled against the high that always came with oxygen deprivation.
They held him up as the Speaker came closer, shoulders hunched and head tilted to suggest he felt apologetic. If Clint had had the air to do so, he would have laughed. He worked alongside Natasha Romanov. This asshole didn’t come close to her level of carefree manipulation. Idiot.
“Tell me what I want to know and I’ll stop.”
Clint tilted his head back, looking down at the man, and grinned the great big smartass grin that always made Natasha roll her eyes. “You mean we’ve started already? Fuck, man, you should’ve told me.”
Those brown eyes darkened behind the mask and the man turned away, waving a hand at the two holding Clint.
The message was clear. Again.
He had just enough time to suck in a harsh breath before he was back beneath the water.
They weren’t gentle.
Clint had been subjected to torture before. This was not his first rodeo. But these guys… they weren’t new to this. This wasn’t the first session they’d worked and Clint wasn’t their first guest.
He liked to think perhaps he was the best they’d had so far, though.
They yanked his head up from the pool by his hair, Clint wheezing for breath with lungs that didn’t want to work. The world was a grey forest of trees that blurred as they moved and he wondered when he’d fallen through a portal into Middle Earth. His head lolled to the side, resting against someone’s shoulder, and he thought he could feel his tongue hanging out, like a dog. Was he panting? No. That required breathing.
Something warm eased down his leg and he thought he heard a yell somewhere in the distance, but there was water everywhere and land was just so far away.
Something hard slammed into his stomach once, twice, and he was suddenly vomiting everything he had ever eaten. Water gushed from his nostrils, running over his mouth, and Clint choked and coughed and threw up what felt like a whole river. His body sagged in the arms of the men holding him and for a moment, they let him hang there, their arms the only thing keeping him on his feet. He breathed.
For a while, he just breathed.
“Are you ready to tell me now?” Speaker asked, walking in front of him.
Clint blinked blearily and kept breathing. There was a wet feeling in his lungs, a shuddering, webby feeling. Not good.
Fingers dug into his scalp and tugged his head up by the short strands of hair, forcing him to look into the man’s masked face, his cruel eyes. “Tell me what I want to know.”
Clint tilted his head back and let out a groan as lascivious as he was able to make it, rocking his hips. “Harder, big boy. I like it rough.”
The fingers held for a moment, keeping his head up, before they let it drop. Clint’s head dropped back to the shoulder of the man on his right and he smiled. “So sweet, lettin’ me cuddle you. You’re all a bunch of softies.”
He didn’t see the Speaker move but he had already expected it. The bad guys didn’t like lip. Hands dragged him forward and he was pushed back into the water and held there.
And they kept holding him there, no matter how hard he struggled. No matter that the breath burst out of his mouth in a wave of bubbles. No matter that the metallic taste of the water preceded it filling his lungs. They held him down until he felt his limbs finally go numb and blackness took over the blue.
He wakes heaving.
There’s water everywhere. It fills his eyes, his ears. It runs over his face from his nostrils and he’s choking on it as his stomach contracts, his lungs struggling to breathe around it. All he can taste is iron. His breath shudders into his lungs, choked in desperately around rivers of water, and the sudden oxygen only makes him cough harder until he thinks his own attempts at breathing will be the end of him.
But then the coughing subsides and he’s sucking in breaths so deep his stomach aches. His chest hurts and his throat is raw but there is blessed air entering his lungs and he doesn’t think he cares much about anything else.
A shadow moves over him and he opens his eyes to see Speaker. The man’s lips move and Clint can still read them through the blurring of his vision.
“Cooperation is key, Hawkeye. Remember that and next time perhaps we won’t have to take this route, hm?”
The man steps over him and Clint is hauled to his feet. He has no strength to even hold himself up, barely has enough to even keep conscious and he’s fighting that blackness as hard as he can. There’s a heavy feeling in him, like an anchor, and he thinks if he gives in even a little, he’ll be back in the water, so he struggles to stay afloat.
They drag him, these two big burly men with masks that shield their whole face. They’ve got one arm each wrapped over their shoulders and his feet drag out behind him uselessly as they carry him through corridors of sheet metal and industrial lighting.
They are in a warehouse.
An old one, he would guess, by the fact that the door they come to doesn’t have even an electronic lock. It’s all keys, baby, and Clint thinks, hysterically, Narrows it down in The Doctor’s manic voice and can barely keep himself from giggling.
The door unlocks with a loud clunking noise that he thinks would hurt Tony’s soul to hear and he’s dragged through. They toss him to the floor without a care just inside the door and close it behind him, locking it, before he can really register that his nose is only not broken because he had the presence of mind to turn his head at the last second, but the bone at his brow is all but screaming from slamming straight into concrete.
“Fuuuuck,” he says, drawing the word out until he starts coughing again, his whole body cringing at the sensation. It’s a wet cough. Pneumonic. This is bad. He knows this is bad. He does not need to be imprisoned in a warehouse in the middle of god-knows-where with fucking pneumonia because his captors thought it was a good idea to try and give him the world’s most thorough bath.
He lay there for a indeterminable amount of time, dozing off and on, waking to his own desperate coughing. His wet clothes were sticking to him and at some point, he had begun to shiver.
Hands curled under his arms, sliding around his back, and he whined as he was moved. He said something, he wasn’t sure what, but he thought he might have been begging. He didn’t want to go back into the water.
“Hush,” someone murmured, and it was almost kind, the way he was carefully positioned so he lay against someone, the warmth that suffused him from their skin.
He shouldn’t trust this. Knew it was a trick. Knew it was to get him to tell them things, but he wouldn’t. He never would.
He told them that. Told them that he would never tell.
There was silence for a long while and then long fingers dragged softly through his hair. “I know,” they murmured, and Clint nodded. Good. Then they knew this would never work. It would never work.
“Go to sleep,” they told him, and they were so warm he wanted nothing more than to follow that command. It sounded so good, sleep.
“Go fuck yourself,” he slurred, even as he nuzzled down into a more comfortable position. Maybe this was a trick, but for now, it was nice. He could take advantage of it while it was being given. It wouldn’t change anything. He would never, ever tell.
Sleep came easy. He dreamed of long expanses of high grass and a sunrise that turned the sky red and gold and never seemed to end. There wasn’t a flicker of blue in sight and he was flying on wings that had never known a cage.
It was a good dream.