Seven
"What are you doing here?"
He’s tired when he finds her on the stairwell to the roof, and doesn’t immediately see that she is protecting what – a second later as his eyes refocus in annoyance – turns out to be Darcy’s late night picnic gear. Clint has seen it in action often enough to know it by heart now; she broke it in with him gorram it.
The girl’s eyes widen almost comically and he thinks that a vicious part of him thinks that he should be pleased he still has this kind of thrall over a kid that could have out-shot him on her better days, given he was having one of his worse ones, but they are fixed on something behind him and Clint turns on his heels, glares at the poor sod that has brought the pretender up to his roof, into his house; glares to find-
Darcy.
“What is going on here?”
--
Finding James Barnes is hell on his sleep-cycle, hell on his last fucking damn nerve and hell on all sides – he feels like a Spiky Rubik’s Cube trying to fit into a soap-bubble. It’s bloody well exhausting and the return of Phil I Fucking Mourned You Coulson in Fury’s ‘old’ position is not doing his head any favors.
Neither is Bobbi’s presence but that’s just the barbed-wire-side-dish to the grenade-main-course.
May is turning her head, opening her mouth to whisper something at Director Coulson where he’s situated at the head of the table that Clint has been shackled to and before even the first word has passed her lips, Clint’s snarling mouth has opened and he can feel his chest vibrate with the anger in his voice: “You say something, Agent May, you say it so that all can conceive it or so help me fucking Thor I will blast this stupid bus from the sky and good riddance.” --because Coulson should know that he could be out of these things in under two seconds flat and out of this room in under a minute if he wanted to (and if he left no one alive).
The Director has the decency to look contrite.
The Cavalry – and damn it he pulled her out of that fucking OP – gives him a stink eye that would have chased Loki from his gourd.
Do you even know what you were about to do?
Yes… Yes he does.
And he’s not fucking proud of it.
“Contrary to what you may think of me, Agent, it is not my habit to waltz into a situation unprepared.”--and that was pretty much the lowest blow he could deal, and equally his trump card – should she recover sooner from his assault than anticipated he is going to have to wing it.
However, he’s always been kind of good at that. So he turns to Coulson.
And lets loose.
When Nat and The Falcon kind-of-not-really bail him out in a spectacular maneuver that leaves him falling through air with no parachute on and no airborne friendlies close to him any time soon, he swears that this is going to be the last time. He swears that SHIELD is going to have to be over and done with him – all sides of SHIELD; whatever SHIELD still existed.
Clint Barton is going to drop the bloody bow – he tells himself, closing his eyes against the sight of the airbus turning into a black, un-distinguishable spot above him – and his flarking arrows and he is going to return to his futzing house in Bed-Stuy, ask Darcy Lewis to be his whatever he could do best and live in secrecy under the very noses of the people that leave him falling.
A-fucking-gain.
It’s barely a scratch – Nat mumbles to him when they’re somewhat safely ensconced in a conductible Safety Pod and en route to wherever the intel has told the three neck-breakers to go.
Clint only tells her to drop him in New York and not contact him again for the foreseeable future. He doesn’t answer that one look she has never before given him; that one look he knows he will never be able to forget if he turns his head towards her.
...That one look she’s only ever sent opposing Agents she can remember from her Training Program.
--
So he has wanted to apologize. Sue him.
He’s thought he was going to be all smooth about it too – let her know what happened; let her know how it happened; what he’s been needed to do; what he couldn’t do.
For once, Clint has had it all figured out.
And now there is the one thing he’s always regretted and has never been able to correct in his life – staring at him from his stairs to the roof, giving him the biggest, most scared eyes ever and Darcy glaring at him with ice in her eyes that could have frozen Steve Rogers.
He wants to call it.
Today sucks.
--
Katie-Too stays.
Because Darcy looks about ready to rain fire and ice on him and because Clint knows – holy Thor he knows so hard – that he has a lot to make up for on the Katherine Bishop Front and allowing her to crash with Darcy who, apparently, has something weird going on with Archers, is just the first step.
Well… second, actually… alright, third. There’s still two outstanding apologies after all; and they will have to be spectacular and honest and everything.
However, on the upside, it doesn’t suck as hard as he thought it would.
Not only because now he has some kind of excuse to lurk around Darcy’s apartment a little more often, get to cuddle and spoil Lucky a little more often, but also because… well… Darcy.
Clint is not a daft man most of the time. It has, however, taken him a fall out of a besieged airbus, very recently, to admit that Darcy… there is something about Darcy that continually draws him in, gives him peace, gives him a center to orbit around that is neither SHIELD nor the Avengers; a gravitational middle that is more stable than any of those he’s had until now and he likes not just that.
There’s just… Darcy.
Beautiful Darcy who welcomes Kate with a small party on the roof and who draws his tenants back together when Clint himself has not been doing that much of a splendid job about it; intelligent Darcy who has hidden them away in times of need; strong Darcy who loses one job after another and instead of giving and up like many others would, dusts herself off and finds the next one with a wry smirk of naturalness on her face; soft Darcy who can’t stop taking in strays that she all loves equally and that Clint, when Grills makes them take a group photo, suddenly realizes he’s a part of.
He may be the landlord of the house.
But Darcy is the one who owns his tenants.
Himself included.
And so Clint returns to taking Lucky out on the early morning runs that he has started to do again – if only to be able to keep up with the Chaotic Three on their hunt for an amnesiac POW, he lets Nat know that he’s up for grabs whenever they need him again and somehow… somehow whenever he reaches for his bow to do some practice, Kate is always there.
She’s better than she was when he’s last seen her and she was pretty good even then, but her posture has calmed down, evened out; there is no hectic in her motions any longer, no anxiety that she is not going to make the shot. It’s something of a nice thing to see in a young archer and whenever he goes for trick-shots, it does not take the younger long to follow.
All in all, things around him calm down.
They have their regular roof-top-grill-outs again now that spring has come in full swing and whenever Matt or his colleagues have the time, it’s nice to see them coming up too, decompressing on his roof like a small group of elite Black Ops just back from a mission. But then Clint supposes that Court is just another hidden trench of war so he makes certain that the disgusting swill Matt’s blond boyfriend calls beer is in stock and gives the Devil a few heads up if he notices any uptake in Gang Mobility around his usual block.
That, too, is something that Clint allows himself to take up again.
Between the short inter-missions – har-de-har, not funny Rogers – Clint pulls out his weapons and goes patrolling around his block again. He finds the Hobo Signs that the people Darcy calls her Curious Georges leave behind and sometimes finds suspicious looking vans, and sometimes he gets to do a full drug bust.
It’s nice in a way.
If he’d manage to find the balls to actually talk to Darcy again it would be perfect.
--
The day he’s forgiven, he thinks, is the day when he comes to consciously seek Kate out. He arrives quietly on the doorstep to the apartment that the two young women live in now performing a weird dance of cohabitation that they do well enough to trick a non-inaugurated bystander into thinking they’d been living together for years now instead of maybe scant weeks, with both of their bows and arrows and holds the smaller set out across the doorstep in an invitation that doesn’t take Kate long to follow up on.
Darcy gives him a cautious look over the dishes she is putting away, but the anger is gone from her eyes, replaced by the glint of something Clint cannot quite decipher but he remembers it from that first day she took care of yolk-heads trying to find leverage in his house. It’s gone again the next moment and when he turns around, heeding the younger archer to follow, he’s, again, not certain if maybe it hadn’t been the light.
He takes the day to teach Kate how to shoot while hanging upside down; he’s quiet about his instructions, careful and all-in-all a lot softer on her than his own teachers were on him and she has enough raw talent and enough wiliness to persevere when she doesn’t immediately make the shot that Darcy has to stop them almost forcefully in order to get them to eat, drink and rest a little in the middle of the day and carefully heed them to end as evening falls.
Clint has almost not noticed time going by this quickly, and before he leaves for his usual rounds around the block and his part of the district, he gives Kate a questioning look that she answers with a decisive nod.
Tomorrow again.
--
Darcy finds him the evening as he tries to, unsuccessfully, stick a large band-aid over a larger scratch under his shoulder; the movement pulls the minor wound unnecessarily and the ensuing pain does not allow him to properly reach it which is why she finds him cursing up a blue storm over three bottles of beer at his feet and the band-aid partially opened in his right hand.
The lights flicker around him and announce her presence in a way she’s come to introduce around him after he has surprised her several times in her abode – because Darcy is a clever thing and she’s not going to even try to surprise a trained SHIELD Agent in a moment when he would feel comfortable and very jarred if, suddenly, there was another individual in their near vicinity.
He turns to find her closing the door behind her with a pensive look on her face and hesitant steps; but his swearing subsides.
I’d never presume such a thing but could you maybe need some help?
Clint swallows; wonders why his mouth seems so dry all of a sudden and if Darcy has been wearing the blouse earlier on, too – if maybe he simply hadn’t noticed over the Cardigan she was prone to wearing around the house or if maybe it was work-specific clothing. He sincerely hopes it’s the former as he nods, allowing her to step closer.
“I just can’t properly reach it.”--he mumbles quietly, breathing deep to feel his own voice reverberate with his diaphragm and thereby gauging the volume of the sound.
Her lips are red and the flush on her otherwise pale cheeks should be as painted as the dark rim around her powder-blue eyes, and she is suddenly close enough for him to feel the warmth of her body on his naked skin; the exhale of her breath as she steps around him to inspect the wound raises goose-flesh and suddenly he feels his heart in his throat.
It has not been like this a few weeks ago; he’s certain. A few weeks ago his body had not been on a mutinous rise with Darcy Lewis this close to him. Of course he’s wanted to hold her, embrace her and protect her from what he possibly could – and there are a lot of things out there, especially now, to protect her from – and he’s liked her in a gung-ho kind of way. This carelessly beautiful woman who stood her own damn ground in whatever situation was thrown at her.
But a few weeks ago, and he inhales sharply as the band-aid is laid over the disinfectant running cooling rivulets down the skin of his back, he has not seen her breathtaking competence in facing a SHIELD catastrophy; a few weeks ago he’s not been privy to IT-skills that would make Tony Stark happy to employ the slip of a woman; a few weeks ago he’s not seen her angry yet; a few weeks ago he hasn’t been privy to all the things that he is not when she’s not by his side.
And he’s a selfish sucker; a bastard really in that regard. He wants, he craves the feeling of something so raw and powerful at his side despite the fact that he has no idea what to do with this strange sensation – the knowledge of her as a capable, competent, individual, hell-bent on protecting what she possibly can, should not change his view of her as an entity to keep under wraps and away from his side where it could become dangerous.
Her delicate wrist in front of his nose literally snaps him out of his stupor.
He doesn’t know where he’s just been but Darcy is giving him a thorough look; one that lets him know that she is aware of just how many pizza slices he’s had in the past few weeks without her proper taking care of.
I wasn’t aware you are this much of a human disaster.--she tells him in a quiet way, her motions are slow and consciously chosen and her body is careful in what it lets through. And Clint’s heart – the traitorous little fucker – jumps a beat with the familiar words.
Pizza?--she asks and he could kiss her. He should probably, at one point, but maybe… maybe not now.
Pizza.
###
Clint is angry when he finds Kate and yet Darcy is uniquely surprised to realize with startling clarity: he’s not angry at Darcy; and neither is he angry at Kate. Clint is a man very angry with himself in a situation in which he is very fed up with the world. So he lashes out when first he finds Katie-Too sitting on the stairs to the roof-top waiting for Darcy to fetch them some blankets and huddle in for a quiet night on top of Bed-Stuy.
Angry dialogues in sign language are a thing to behold, Kate tells her later, letting her know that she can understand why Lucky – once he arrived at the scene – gave the two of them tennis-commentator-looks.
“I wasn’t doing any better.”--the younger woman admits. “Like… I know ASL exists and stuff and I know people communicate in it but… well… knowing of it and seeing it are two different things and the fight?”
Apparently it looked as ridiculous as it had felt.
Darcy has never before had a fight in Sign Language, and Clint wasn’t as fluent as he would like to be which ensued in a lot less capability during times of emotional upheaval. Add to that he’s had two broken fingers and apparently no sleep the last week when he’s been Lord Knew Where – out, obviously – and it found Darcy in a situation where she couldn’t respond to a question because she couldn’t follow the syntax of the sentence.
Hell.
Hell on all sides.
On the up-side… “I didn’t know you knew Clint.”--she starts when the two of them are enclosed in her apartment again; safe for now and Kate… becomes eerily quiet, before she gives Darcy a look that lets her know that there better be Tequila tonight – if only to be present on the table because Darcy has made it very clear that she’s not about to hand out alcohol to under-aged-people. No matter if they’ve already had a taste while on the streets.
“Clint Barton is kind of the reason I am where I am currently.”
There was Tequila on the table.
And a lot of Grape Juice.
--
Clint sulks.
Because it’s one of the things that the blond archer does extremely well, Darcy learns in the next week or so; he glares one-eyed through the narrow opening of a door, he gives a suspicious stink-eye around a corner and he generally acts so unlike the Clint Barton she’s come to know that it’s almost funny.
But just almost because it’s still a little weird to be the cause of tension to this man; to the person who took her in when she had literally nothing. It’s not a good sensation. Despite the fact that Kate is going to stay and Darcy has actually, openly, fought Clint on this – especially now that she is privy to Kate’s Archer Biography, which is vastly different from the Usual Biography that any other innocent bystander would be told. And apparently Kate has had a bad run-in with the Avengers before… kind of; she’s agreed to, maybe, take Thor out of the entity known as The Avengers Initiative because he was not present at that particular time. What remains is a certain level of animosity-see-hesitancy on both sides coupled with a healthy dose of destroyed hero worship in Kate’s case.
It rankles a little that Clint has been such a douche in the Curious Case of the Kid’vengers, but Darcy supposes that she can see, at the very least, where the older Archer might have come from – she couldn’t, granted, say for certain, but the job did tend to become dangerous. Even though the kids, from what Kate told her, had been successful in most cases. It was not a game and Clint, of all people probably, knew best what it meant to have one’s childhood annulled due to premature growing-up.
Maybe it is because Clint himself knows that he hasn’t been quite fair to Kate that he starts coming around at the end of the week a little more with a little less hostility in his actions. He starts out soft, taking Lucky on a run that he apparently can need quite well, helping her with a few heavy purchases and greeting her openly on the stairs again.
When Kate asks to allow Darcy to bother Clint during one of his Training Sessions, she is… well… she is confused at first. Because Kate is a very independent kind of person and for her to ask Darcy’s permission is a little inconsistent with the image that the older woman has cultivated of her friend but--
“I don’t want to strain your relationship any more than I already did.”
--it takes a little while to convince Kate that there has never been and probably never will be anything between Clint and her. It might be that Darcy herself needs a little convincing on that particular front too.
It gets better when Darcy has to start to feed the two Arrow-Nuts – it’s going to be her name for them; she’s dead-set on making it a thing – and force them to take a pause in what appears to have grown from simple co-practice to a full-blown training-session.
She wonders when she is going to have to ask Claire to help her stock up on her Med Kit and give her a crash course in… everything.
--
Clint comes to her in the dead of the night, fully dressed in Hawkeye regalia and his compound bow already slung around his shoulder. He is very quiet on his feet and if it hadn’t been for the sliver of light he stepped into, interrupting her falling-asleep-ritual, it’s possible she would not even have noticed him.
I’m going to be away for a few days.--he signs haltingly in the weak light, squatting on the very edge of her mattress – so carefully that it barely dips. His fingers are unused to the motions now that he’s grown used to reading lips and talking at an estimated adequate of volume and Darcy thinks that she should be signingwith him a lot more, but her eyes are bleary, her head feels a little like cotton and her own hands won’t properly cooperate when she tries to mold them into words.
Going.--she manages; hopes that her face is confused enough to convey the question she means to ask.
Mission.--Clint replies and yes, that makes sense – even to her sleep-addled brain. SHIELD needs their agents now more than ever, if only to make good on the shit that went down a few weeks ago.
Stay safe.
And she might be imagining it; but that could be a smile on his face.
--
Darcy returns from an uneventful night at Luke’s when she finds Clint’s apartment door open and Lucky giving her an unhappy look from the doormat of her landlord – she finds herself trying to call the man before she realizes what a stupid idea that would be and as she sticks her head through the door, she wonders if even her interference would be clever.
If he’s really here then it’s likely he just returned from the mission and if that’s the case then he was likely to need decompressing – Thor always handled that by engaging Jane in various bouts of boisterous bed-sports that had Darcy generally fleeing the premises. But she doesn’t know Clint in such moments and…
...and he’s a disastrous human who has not yet received the memo that back-wounds were a bitch to handle alone.
Darcy flickers the lightswitch; gives him a steady once-over as he turns and offers her help. Cautiously. Not because she’s afraid of Clint or because she doesn’t trust him but because maybe it’s not what he wants right now; maybe he feels a little too unsteady for it right now and maybe his pupils are a little dilated when she steps close to him.
He smells nice though.
About three days later she wonders if anything she’s told Kate about her non-relationship with Clint Barton has held any truth at all.
--
“Oh God Flarking Darn It!”
Darcy is not even surprised. She’s just… Well, she feels like resigning from the world and is freely expressive of her opinion as she throws the towel on the ground, upon finding Luke Cage bent over a beat up Matthew Murdock in Devil Regalia, on the very counter-top she has just cleaned. Damn it.
One of her Curious Georges is giving her a questioning glance from the other side of the street and she doesn’t even know how she can tell where he is exactly but all the shrouded figure needs is a decisive nod from her side and something like pressure builds between her eyes as she unlocks the door to the Bar and hustles towards the two men.
Darcy doesn’t doubt she’s going to have everything she needs in about a quarter hour. For now, Luke has to deal with her stink eye. She can see the bullet holes in his shirt. God damn Metas always findin’ ‘er.
“You, Cage,”--she starts as she pushes him away from Matt and bends over the wayward gauze around his torso, “you could’a told me you’re a Strongman and Devil damn it if he ain’t told the truth I’m-a undo the stitches we had done the last time ‘round.”
Matt is giving her a hesitant smile but it’s bloodied and worrying to be frank and she’s already pulling at the hidden straps that hold together the armor that is currently more hindering her work than anything else.
Good news is her old stitches held.
Bad news is that whatever it was that caught him it was not a bullet.
And she has absolutely no idea how to work it.
Only that she has to. Oh boy does she ever have to.
“Breathe.”--she orders the man in red with a stern Texan voice she can barely even recognize on her tongue, “an’ if you even think ‘bout stopp’n’ I’m’a slap ya, ya hear me? Hela ain’t havin’ you yet; you’re mine Li’l Red, don’t you dare stop breath’n’.”
###
Kate doesn’t know what is happening.
But at least Barton, himself, looks as if he’s having an out-of-body experience. So there.
--
Barton has practically heaved her up into his arm – it’s a little disconcerting that, at eighteen, she can still be carried around by a grown man as if she were a Chihuahua – thrown the Med Kit into her arms and hightailed from the joint they’re both currently somewhat calling home. She’s always thought that Bruce had patented the ‘Like A Bat Outta Hell’-Exit but apparently Hawkeye could do that just as well.
She doesn’t even know where they’re going because the old coot is taking the fucking high road and the flat-roofs without even a second thought to her, stashed away under one of his arms. But there’s a lull when she realizes he’s thinking about throwing her and catching her mid-air, she can see it in his movements and it’s in this hesitance that she suddenly recognizes the back-alley around Luke’s.
And suddenly everything comes into focus.
Because it can only be Darcy.
Kate is out of his grip before he can even try to argue, but she’s down the building as fast as he is and maybe they’re a little competitive because the very next instance they’re kind of fighting about who is going in first but fail spectacularly, falling through an unexpectedly open door.
Luke is giving them a wide-eyed look that she throws right back at him from her position on top of Barton – take that old coot, how’s the dirt taste, sucker – before her own eyes take in more than just his own position, but rather his surroundings.
Darcy is bent over what looks like the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and Clint is moving away from under her, kicking the door closed behind them and raising himself on his hands and knees, grasping for the Med Kit that she is already pressing into his hands because she might have a strong stomach but she’s not certain she can actually stand next to whatever bloodied mess Darcy is currently pressing her hand to.
Maybe it would have been better to call the Ambulance but she would not dare voice such a thing when Barton, at the very least, has every trust in her from what she can read in his stance.
“What do I do?”
Kate is surprised to hear him talk, voice so much smoother and calmer than she can remember ever having been, but Darcy’s head snaps up and something in her eyes – she has her back mostly turned towards Kate – must spook Barton, because he snaps back a step.
“Archer.”
And that… that is and is not Darcy’s voice.
###