*
A few moments into the villain’s speech, Hawkeye fights a smile.
About two minutes after that he gives in and laughs, careful to mute his comm first. This guy is hilarious, his screeching, overly passionate tirade against the Avengers playing more like a comedy roast than the soul crushing truth bombs the guy is probably aiming for.
Tony is angry, snapping back, meeting every derisive comment with two of his own, and Clint keeps chuckling. He can’t imagine how Tony isn’t laughing his ass off, too. Tony loves nothing better than a clever person; he should be clamoring to take this guy out for a beer instead of being so irritated.
Clint rests against a bit of wall near the edge of the roof. It’s highly inadvisable to let his guard down even slightly while this thing is still in progress, but no one is nearby and Clint thinks he can manage it. It hadn’t been particularly challenging fight—aside from one guy armed only with a knife all the footsoldiers had been surprising inept—but it was definitely a long one. Clint’s tired as hell and constantly shivering from the rapidly falling temperature, and if the grey sky is any indication it should start snowing soon. That’ll make it harder to keep an open line of sight to dispatch Chatterbox if he ever decides to move back from monologuing to fighting, or until Tony decides if that remote strapped to his body is actually connected to a bomb somewhere. Clint personally thinks the thing is a fake; the leader has been almost as disappointing as his minions.
But goddamn, the guy is funny.
“Where is Thorn? I wish to see him at once!” Chatterbox demands imperiously for the third time as Tony sputters with nearly incoherent offense.
Clint, however, is laughing again, breath hitching, abdominal muscles spasming in the way that means he’s going to be sore tomorrow, as if he’d done a thousand sit ups. Chatterbox is either legitimately confused about the Asgardian’s name or one of the most effective trolls they’ve ever come across—either way, Clint’s in love.
Roast ME! he wants to scream, because Tony is obviously the favored verbal target, followed by Cap, who’d been accused early in the fight of having an unreasonably thin icicle dick. Both teammates are still red faced and blustering, and God, Clint wants his turn. He has a bow and arrow and no superpowers and it’s just too easy to make fun of him. Clint’s heard every conceivable joke over the years—even most of the ones Tony’s come up with he’s heard before—and it’d be fantastic if this guy could think up a new one.
“Alright, I’ve had just about enough of this,” Steve’s voice warns over the comms. He's probably still a little touchy about the icicle comment.
“So then I suppose you’ll release your green monster to subdue me! Wasn’t it always going to end that way?” Chatterbox is really getting frenzied now, looking both hopeful and horrified at the idea of a Hulk set loose upon him. “You bring Bruce Banner anywhere with you and it’s just a matter of time before ‘Chekhov’s tantrum’ comes into play!”
And that does it. Clint’s done. He braces his hands against his knees and howls with laughter, not bothering to be quiet now. He wipes absently at the tears running down his face, caught in endless aftershocks of helpless giggles with deep breaths in between, trying to get it under control before Natasha’s sixth sense for Barton shenanigans kicks in and she comes to murder him.
Clint takes another long breath and his sore muscles catch painfully, just enough to cut into the high humor, just enough to center him a little. “Okay,” he tells himself with a grateful exhale and a few errant, quieter chuckles. “Pull yourself togeth—” The words die on his lips.
The roof top beneath his feet is splashed in red. Bright red, a color he’s intimately familiar with, a color that encompasses everything in a spectrum from triumphant I did it to panicked Shit, I’m dead meat. While he’s staring, his brain shorts out, trying to reconcile what he sees with what he thinks he knows, the puddle ripples, a small splash coming from a drip above. From his torso, more specifically. His tac suit is the same black as ever, but it’s a shiny black. Wet.
“But I didn’t,” Clint says with an almost childish incredulity. “I wasn’t. I’m not.”
He digs at his uniform, pulling it apart as quickly as he can, and crap, his hands are already moving too sluggishly and clumsily, and there’s just no way there can be this much blood without him noticing it. He holds out the brief, foolish hope that it’s someone else’s blood that somehow splashed copiously onto him. Then he finds the knife wounds and sags against the half wall he’d been so merrily perched upon only moments before.
Steve, Tony, and Chatterbox are still arguing in Clint’s ear, while Natasha waits silently somewhere, hidden, and Bruce frets in the jet, hopeful that a transformation will not be needed—all still in battle mode and blissfully unaware of the personal drama above them. Clint feels himself slide down to the ground, landing in the middle of his own blood, still just aware enough to be a little unhappy about that.
“Nat,” he tries, but no answer comes. The feeling of devastated betrayal makes him curse her name before he remembers that he muted his comms a hundred thousand years ago, when everything had been inexplicably funny. He twitches a hand up toward his ear to turn it back on, but he’s just too tired all of a sudden. It’s highly inadvisable to lose consciousness when alone and injured, but he doesn’t think he’s going to get a choice in the matter.
“Okay,” Steve says, the final word in a conversation that Clint has missed entirely. “This is just not working out. Anybody else feel like the diplomacy thing is just not working out?”
“Oh my God, YES!” Tony sounds so angry and alive. Clint sighs. Stark is going to be so upset when they find Clint’s body up here. Hopefully they find it soon, before the crows—
“Hawkeye, can you incapacitate him and avoid those wires?” Steve’s voice pauses meaningfully. “Hawkeye?”
“I can’t, Cap,” Clint whispers to the grey sky above him. Steve still can’t hear him, and Clint can’t apologize for that, either. Steve’s going to be pretty pissed about this, then feel guilty for being angry after they find out that Clint died. Poor Steve. He’ll undoubtedly blame himself for—
Clint can hear Chatterbox over his teammate’s open comm lines, taking the Avengers’ moment of inaction to start ramping up his crazy again, yelling about perceived injustices and the bomb that may or may not be real.
“Clint, where are you?” Natasha says suspiciously. She sounds like she’s running. She probably knows something is wrong. She always knows, and she’ll—
“Hawkeye, take the shot!” Steve roars suddenly.
Clint Barton has been a SHIELD agent too many years not to respond to an order like that, lurching automatically and woodenly to his feet. The hand that was too weak to reach his own comm suddenly has strength enough to do what he’s done thousands upon thousands of times before—reach back and grab an arrow from his quiver, set it to the bow he drags up off the ground, and fire it into the air. The blood is rushing in his ears and he can’t see anything but light and dark splotches across his field of vision, and it’s highly inadvisable to shoot an arrow down to where his friends stand too close to a madman, but Clint does it anyway.
He’s sure the arrow will still somehow strike true. He never misses.
Clint hears the dim roar of an explosion and his teammates screaming in his ear as he tumbles to the ground.
And then Hawkeye just…dies.
*
Or not, because his eyes snap immediately open at the unmistakable hum of the Iron Man suit, and sure enough, there’s Tony hovering gracefully a few feet above him. Clint feels a rush of relief and a small tug of annoyance.
Leave it to Tony Stark to barge in and ruin his quietly dramatic death scene.
“Found him!” Tony singsongs, and there’s that irritation again—the man is so thrilled to be the one to locate the missing archer that he hasn’t even noticed the gigantic pool of blood. In fairness, Clint may have fallen directly on top of it…but still.
“That was awesome,” Tony says reverently as his armor peels back and he steps onto the roof. “That guy just blew—oh, shit!!”
And there, finally is the reaction Clint had been expecting, and he’d feel a little happier about it if he weren’t so cold, if his body didn’t feel like it would shake apart if it had strength enough to shake in the first place. He tastes blood in the back of his throat; that means the injury is a bad one, which he had sort of guessed already. He’s dying, and for the first time in a life full of near misses he doesn’t even care, but wonders fleetingly if Tony would hold his hand or something. It’d be so nice for someone to hold his hand at the end.
*
But he doesn’t fucking die.
Instead his body and the entire world explodes in screaming pain as Tony pushes down as hard as he can into Clint’s abdomen, trying to staunch the bloodflow. The agony and pressure are so intense that Clint’s body scissors until he’s sitting upright, his face a perfect, wide eyed, open mouthed mirror of Tony’s.
And then, from a combination of shock, pain, and an ill-considered seafood lunch, Clint throws up extravangantly—all over himself, his gaping wounds, and Tony’s blood soaked hands before flopping bonelessly back down again.
Tony screams—actually screams—in horror and disgust but doesn’t move his hands so much as an inch. He looks angry and frightened and repulsed and vaguely admiring all at the same time; a volley of concurrent expressions that only Stark could pull off.
Sorry, Clint tries to say, but settles for a dry, soundless laugh as Tony just leans down over him until their noses are mere inches apart.
“Fuuuuuuuck youuuuu, Barton!”
Clint would laugh again if he could. It’s snowing at last, the flakes falling gently around them. Clint opens his mouth to try to catch one. That’d be poetic, dying with a snowflake on his tongue. That’d be—
*
Clint wakes up again, unaware that he had even been gone in the first place, bound to a bed by wires and IV tubing and sheets tucked too tightly around his legs. He blinks in surprise at a bland wall with a gloomy Rate Your Pain poster and a dry erase board with No known allergies handwritten in neat red letters. Steve, Bruce, Tony, and Natasha are all camped out in chairs a few feet away.
This all probably means he’s going to live.
“Did I get him?” Clint rasps, startling them from varying degrees of bored dozes. He sighs at Steve’s questioning look. “Chatterbox” just has too many syllables and hard consonants for his addled brain to deal with, and he never knew the man’s proper name in the first place. “The guy,” he tries instead. “Did I get the bad guy?”
“Oh, you got him,” Steve says carefully.
“I’ll say!” Tony interjects, relief etched into every line of his body as he moves over to Clint’s bedside, knocking his hand away from picking at the IV. “You blew the motherfucker up! Hit him with an exploding arrow!”
Incapacitate him, Clint thinks he remembers Steve saying, the suspicion confirmed by the Captain’s raised eyebrows and Bruce’s sympathetic smile.
He must’ve grabbed the wrong arrow.
“Oops,” he offers sheepishly, unable and unwilling to form any more complex explanation.
“Clint, how could—”
“Well, if you’re in an apologizing mood, apologize to me.” Tony cuts Steve’s disappointed lecture off neatly, narrowing his eyes at the team leader and inclining his head minutely toward Clint’s heavily bandaged midsection. “I spent hours in a decontamination shower and Pepper still had to talk me out of a double hand amputation. I will never forgive you for ralphing on me!”
It’s highly inadvisable to laugh after having your guts sliced open and repaired, but somehow Clint still manages it.