Recruitment
Calcutta, India
April, 2011
The only thought in Clint’s head was that if Banner was looking for a low-stress environment, he’d come to the wrong place. Calcutta was a screeching, chaotic mess of loud children, shitty cars, road rage, crazy druggies, and back-alley brawls. At least in this region.
He followed the child through the streets, confident in his disguise. She had no idea he was there as she dodged motor scooters, shrieking vendors, and grabbing hands with the ease of lifelong practice. Clint paused long enough to deck one sleazeball who grabbed at the poor kid’s bottom; he was sure he took out a few of the guy’s teeth and definitely broke his nose. The SHIELD agent almost lost track of his target, but it was so worth it.
Why the blessed hell did Banner pick this city of all places?
At last, the little girl cut away from the street and slipped through a door. Clint eyed the building unhappily before he set off down the alley to its left; it looked rickety and unstable.
The alley was worse than the street. There were three people passed out in varying stages of drug- or alcohol-induced lethargy on the ground amid rancid puddles and piles of garbage. Clint breathed through his nose, shot a grappler arrow into the shadowed eaves of the roof three stories above, and used the motor on the harness built into his suit to pull him up the side of the building.
He first spotted Barton through a second-story window.
The man was bent over four adults on pallets on the floor; curly, sweat-soaked dark hair was the only visible part of him. Three of the interior walls had been knocked out, turning the whole story into one big space. Eight more pallets were unoccupied, though Clint noted that three of those had signs of recent use; he’d have to be careful their occupants wouldn’t get in his way when he eventually confronted Banner. The walls were lined with shelves stuffed with various medical supplies probably purchased as outlet surplus; Clint could also see IV stands, two bathrooms, and an industrial-sized fridge-freezer set that had definitely seen better days.
Guess SHIELD was right; the guy’s running a makeshift hospital.
The little girl walked in seconds after Clint took up his post outside the window. He pulled a mike from his pocket, held it to the window, and listened.
She pleaded with Banner in a combination of Hindi and heavily accented English; Clint didn’t know the language, but he got the gist: the little girl’s father was here at the clinic, and her mother couldn’t scrape enough together to pay the doctor.
Banner calmed the girl after thirty seconds of her high-pitched and exhausted explanation, gave her a glass of water and a pack of fruit snacks, and said something along the lines of pay me later (it was a longer sentence with Hindi words thrown in, so Clint couldn’t be sure) and then said something that made the SHIELD agent’s ears practically perk up.
“I live upstairs,” he said slowly, pointing at the ceiling, and showed the kid a rope hanging along the wall. Clint squinted into the shadows of the far side of the room; sure enough, it seemed to go up through the ceiling. Some kind of bell-pull.
Banner showed the kid how to tug the rope, gave her another pack of fruit snacks, and sent her home. The way he watched her go, worry and affection showing on his face, told Clint a lot about the man.
Then the doctor’s posture changed.
In the span of a heartbeat, he tensed, head snapping up and eyes focusing. All softness vanished from his face, and he started to turn to the window-
Clint jerked away, pressing himself flat to the wall, barely breathing.
There had been something incongruous about Banner’s expression in that second. Clint trusted his gut, and right now, it was telling him two things: one, that he was no longer the only predator on the scene, and two, whoever had just been looking out of Banner’s eyes was not the same person as the one who’d given fruit snacks to a little girl and told her there was no rush on the payment.
Also, Clint was fairly sure that Banner’s eyes had changed color to a livid, radioactive green.
As if he didn’t already have enough weirdness in his life.
After three long minutes, he moved again - slowly, slowly, making no sound. Feet braced on the wall to keep him from swinging, he put tactical glasses over his eyes, deactivated the Night Vision they were set to, and pulled a periscope from his pocket.
It wasn’t a proper periscope, more like a button camera on a stick if he was being honest, but that was the name the little device had gotten in the agents’ cafeteria, and it stuck, much to the consternation of the scientists. Clint had told one of them to stop using nine-syllable names that were eighty percent technical jargon if they wanted their own names to stick. SHEILD’s R&D people still hadn’t forgiven him that one.
He carefully shaped the flexible periscope stalk and hit the button with his thumb. A slightly grainy image that was at least in color appeared on the inside of the glasses. Clint slowly maneuvered the device until it was just barely peeking around the top corner of the window frame.
Only years of SHIELD training and operations kept him from twitching. Banner was standing right there, less than two feet from the window, head turned slightly away. Clint suspected that only that small angle had kept Banner’s eyes from picking up on the movement of the tiny camera.
The man’s head turned slowly back toward the window. Clint held his breath when he noticed that fading neon green still flickered in Banner’s normally dark-brown irises.
At last the tension eased, the bright color faded, and Banner turned back to his patients.
Clint waited until one of the men was crying out in agony before he activated the winch on his harness; the faint whirring it made would be covered by the man’s noise. It lifted him quickly and easily up the side of the building until he could swing carefully over to a third-floor window. Clint disintegrated the glass with a Stark ionizer charge, tucked the spent black device back into his pocket, and climbed feetfirst through the window.
The apartment was small, dark, and cluttered. Clint was surprised by the things possessed by the man, considering he seemed ready to up and run at any minute; three minutes’ searching found four go bags and several guns stashed in easy reach in the room. Each of the bags had cash, clothes, and passports. Clint was mildly impressed. He’d met SHIELD agents with set-ups that were pathetic compared to this.
Mostly the things Banner had everywhere were books. Used, battered physics and biology textbooks shared space with stuff from the 1600s and spy thrillers of the last decade.
Clint at last settled in the kitchen, placing a table between himself and the door. There was a pistol taped to the underside of said table. He spun it so the gun was on his own side rather than the one that would be facing Banner when he came in, readied his bow, and waited.
It was forty-one minutes before weary footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Banner walked into the apartment. Clint heard him rummaging about in his front hall, probably trying not to trip over books, then in the shabby living space.
Then the sound of his movements came down the hall toward the kitchen.
Calcutta, India
April 2011
Bruce was having a bad day.
Three new patients were in with some mutated form of the flu; his rent was due and he was going to have a hard time making the payment this month; there were those three people who’d been asking questions about him at the market for almost a month and then mysteriously disappeared a week ago; and now this pervasive feeling of being watched. It had cropped up a few days ago and he’d seen nothing concrete, but the other guy’s instincts were rarely wrong, and Bruce could feel him growling and peering about restlessly.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to move again. He liked this little hospital he’d built. He was doing good, helping people-
Then he stepped into his kitchen and registered the man sitting at his table.
Bruce stopped dead in his tracks.
“Evening, Dr. Banner,” the man said. American, with that trained relaxation that only came from mastery of very specific skill set. Despite that, he seemed… goofy. Affable. Not the usual type Bruce met in these situations.
It was a mark of how upended his life had become that Bruce even had a baseline for strange armed men breaking into his apartment and very possibly preparing to threaten him for one reason or another.
“Who are you?” Bruce said warily, moving a few steps closer to the table. If he could reach the gun underneath it…
“Agent Clint Barton with SHIELD,” the man said, and Bruce stopped and sighed.
“SHIELD. Of course.” He worried at one shirt-cuff. “How’d they find me?”
“Didn’t have to,” Barton said. His left hand was out of sight beneath the table. Bruce would bet money there was a weapon in it. And - was that a quiver on his back? “We’ve been tracking you from a distance. Not your exact location, just - general area. We’ve stayed away. Even chased off some other nasties who were sniffing you down.”
Bruce didn’t want to show his interest, but he couldn’t help it. “Ross?”
“Among others.”
“Why?” Bruce asked.
Barton shrugged. “Wasn’t my call. At a guess, it’s because Fury trusts you.” Bruce couldn’t figure out what Barton thought of that assessment. “But now he needs your help.”
“Bet that was fun to admit,” Bruce muttered.
Barton smirked and leaned forward in the chair. “Just between us, when he got to that part of the briefing, I could’ve sworn there was a lemon in his mouth.”
“Just between us?” Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow. “So this place isn’t surrounded right now?”
“We’re in the middle of a city,” Barton said dryly. “I’m hoping you’re not going to… you know. Kinda my top priority, actually. And I can handle human you. So yeah.” He held up one empty hand. “Just you and me.”
“You, me, and whatever weapon is in your other hand,” Bruce pointed out.
Barton’s lips twitched, and he finally moved. Bruce tensed, but all the agent did was lay a complicated compound bow on the table.
“Why me?” Bruce asked when Barton didn’t seem inclined to speak more.
“You’re the world’s leading expert on gamma rays,” Barton said quietly. “And we need to track something that’s emitting them. That’s all I can say right now.”
“And… if I say no?” Bruce asked. He had to.
Barton tapped his bow. “I’ll persuade you.”
“That might end poorly. For a lot of people.”
“And you care. Don’t you?” Barton said, but it wasn’t really a question. “You care about people getting hurt. So you can say no, in which case I walk away, because I definitely don’t want to meet your lovely lime green alter ego, and I don’t want to introduce him to Calcutta, either. But if you walk, and we don’t find this thing we need…” His face darkened. “Let’s just say it will be worse. For a lot of people. Like, the whole world.”
“The whole world,” Bruce repeated. “You’re trying to save the world, and you’re calling in me, of all people?”
Barton nodded. “Take it or leave it. But if you leave it, and we fail…” he let the sentence trail off.
Bruce heard the unspoken words. It’s on you.
“I love coercion,” he muttered, and reached under the table.
His fingers came up empty.
“Looking for this?”
Bruce’s gun was dangling from Barton’s fingers.
He held up his hands. “I mean no harm.”
Barton looked skeptical but let it slide, stuffing the weapon into his waistband. “Look, Doctor, I know you’ve got three more of those hidden around this place. I know you don’t want to make any building pancake tonight, and I’m guessing you also don’t want to keep hiding in Calcutta while the world goes to shit. So are you gonna stay here and keep treating flu patients, or come with me and save thousands of lives?”
Bruce paused, unwilling to give up his answer so easily, but the truth was, from the minute they’d met in this dingy little kitchen, there was only one way this was going to end.
“I’m coming.”