Avengers Home Run

The Captain was a terrible running partner. Oh, he was perfectly polite and pleasant, which wasn't true for most of Clint's running partners. Tony wasn't polite, and would spend the whole run goading him until Clint ran him out of air. Natasha wasn't pleasant, as she drove herself and him too hard for the runs to be actually pleasurable. Only Coulson was really a good partner for runs, and he wasn't a challenge. Well, he hadn't been a challenge - it had been too easy for Clint to outrun him - and now he wasn't here at all.

Clint felt a twinge of pain in his chest at that, and wasn't sure if it was from the still raw memory of the absence of Coulson beside him or from trying to keep up with Captain Energizer Bunny. Maybe it was a good thing that Coulson wasn't here, he thought. He'd kill himself trying to keep up with his hero. Another twinge. No, that wasn't his lungs, that was his heart. Coulson would have loved this, going for a run with Captain America. He could feel himself slowing slightly, tears beginning in his eyes, but he was running too hard for them to squeeze themselves out.

He kept running, and sped up till his breath came shallowly at last, and, halfway through the second lap, the Captain slowed to an easy jog, and then to a brisk walk. Clint reluctantly settled into the same pace beside him and felt his muscles shaking slightly. He had outrun his tears though, and that was the whole point. He glanced over at the Captain, who was watching him intently, hardly winded.

"You've faster than I heard, Barton," he said, finally, and Clint just nodded, without enough air to respond. At least the Captain knew him well enough not to ask if he was okay, or to obviously notice the badly hidden look on his face.

Eventually, after a minute or so of the brisk walk, Clint spoke up. "You slowed down for me," he noted, and slowed again to a gentle walk past the empty baseball diamond. "Next time, just go on ahead. I'll see you again after your next lap." _And again, and again, after the laps after that._

"If you're sure," he hesitated, and Clint almost rolled his eyes. It wasn't as if the Captain did him a favor by hanging back and practically jogging beside him. Yeah, yeah, he was human, and the Captain wasn't. Clint was the only one on this team who was human and not wearing a multi-million dollar suit of armor. He could be proud of that, even if he couldn't keep up with the Captain in a footrace.

"I'm sure, Captain. Don't worry about it. You're different," he said, and saw a sudden flinch in the Captain's eyes, but he continued, "and you have different training needs."

He then sat down on a bench and stretched his legs.

"Right," Captain said, nodded to him, and took off running so fast that he left a cloud of dust which settled on Hawkeye's shoes. Thankfully no one noticed, as the park was empty at the moment - which, at seven in the morning, was just sad. Two hours after dawn, and no one was at the park in this little suburb? He guessed that was because all of the people who actually did anything were in town. People raised kids out here in the suburbs, went to normal jobs, did normal things, and weren't used to keeping military hours. A boring place to be sent to rest. Why couldn't they put him back on active duty with Natasha? She's been through as much as he had, and she hadn't been put on sick leave. He wasn't sick, damn it, he was bored.

At least a stake-out had some point to it. This was just... well, he could see that the reason they'd sent him out here with Captain Rogers was out of some sort of hope that Clint would take to the Captain. He knew well enough how SHIELD thought, and knew that they were hoping to keep him as useful an agent as he was by attaching him to someone he trusted and liked, like he had Coulson. There were few people in the world who he trusted, and even fewer who he was okay unquestioningly taking orders from.

So far, Captain Spangles hadn't impressed him. He was willing, for Coulson's sake, to give the guy a chance. And he was good, he admitted, at calling the shots in a battle. He knew exactly where Hawkeye would be the most use. He had kept Natasha safe, but not treated her like he had expected someone from the wrong side of the feminist revolution would.

Clint watched the Captain pass him, zipping around the track with another cloud of dust.

So yeah, he was as good, professionally, as Coulson had lead him to believe, but when he was off the job... he was still professional. As far as he had seen, Rogers had three modes. 1: Captain America; Professional, in control, focused, competent, and level-headed. 2: Gloomy Steve; depressed, quiet, nostalgic, and focused on how much the world had changed for the worse. 3: Scoutmaster Rogers; naive, good-two-shoes, self-righteous, bossy, and smiling too much.

He respected Captain America, ignored Gloomy Steve most of the time, and disliked the Scoutmaster. One out of three wasn't good, and Clint didn't want to like the Captain, who as far as he could see, when he was off the job, should have really just stayed in the ice. There wasn't much of a place for him now. The Captain knew he didn't fit in, and though he tried, it wasn't working. Too little of his own time had survived for him to get much of a grip on the present.

Whoever had decided that it was a good idea for Hawkeye to teach Captain America was going to have something bad happen to him when he was done with this mission. How bad it was depended on how many more times the Captain clicked on a virus before the month was up.

The Captain zoomed past again and Clint sighed. He was very close to saying to hell with his mission parameters and just making the next lesson in every swear word in English he could think of. He'd been a god damn soldier, you'd think he'd be less of a boy-scout about the fucking f-word.

And then, to finish breaking Scoutmaster Rogers' brain, he'd introduce him to twerking videos.

It was a nice thought to think about in the darker corners of his head.

.

.

Agent Barton had completely finished his workout for the morning by the time that Steve finished his laps. He was surprised the man hadn't already left by the time Steve returned to the bench, but he supposed that Barton's S.O.'s would disapprove of him leaving his charge alone. They couldn't have Captain America wandering off and getting into trouble in such dangerous territory as an idyllic New York suburb, now could they.

He _was_ grateful for SHIELD's providing him with a keeper, teacher, mentor and roommate who was reasonably helpful, and not star-struck or too sympathetic. He could deal with his own problems without someone's help, and especially not with the assistance of the SHIELD proffered psychologist. He'd been to enough doctors in his youth to have a definite dislike of their ilk, and that included people who tried to repair his mind. He didn't need someone telling him what was wrong with him. He knew _that_, he only needed time to figure it all out.

Barton was all right. Even though Steve could tell that this wasn't where he wanted to be, the agent did his best to explain any questions that put to him. He had a knack for explaining things that surprised Steve, given how taciturn Barton usually was. He had explained music videos to him yesterday: "Music can't really be made into pictures, so they just went _what the hell_, and made it as weird as possible so no one realized it didn't really show the music."

He was responsible, quiet, and he was an impressive shot, the best Steve had ever heard of. The agent was cold though. He didn't talk much unless addressed, never laughed, and avoided Steve if at all possible. He was possibly the least social person Steve had ever met, or perhaps there was something else. Sometimes, Steve could hear notes of humanity in his voice, but they were gone so completely and so swiftly he sometimes wondered if he just imagined it.

_Maybe, _Steve thought, _I'm being unfair._ He just missed the camaraderie of the Howling Commandos, the men who, even if he was somewhat separate from him due to being the Captain and not one of the enlisted men, included him in their jokes and tears without hesitation.

Still, there were worse places to recover, and worse people to recover with.

Agent Barton asked what his plans were, and how long he'd be continuing his workout, obviously eager to be away. Steve shrugged. "A while, a half-hour at least," he answered, to a lack of response from Hawkeye. He continued, "You head on back to the house. I'll walk back, after I'm done here."

The agent nodded, continuing his pattern of avoiding saying a single unnecessary word, and went back to the car, taking Steve's bag from the back and setting it down next to the bench. "Call me if there's any trouble," he instructed, and drove off.

Steve was already in peak condition, so he didn't really need the workout he gave himself that day. Taking a turn in an endless pool the affluent local proponents of swimming had available for the public tired him out in a way that made him forget everything but the movement, and he loved that. Maybe his body didn't need to be exhausted, but his mind needed it badly.

Walking back across the park an hour or so later, he saw a dozen teenagers approaching the baseball diamond, laughing and pushing each other around. One of them held a bat over his shoulder, and another was tossing a baseball up in the air.

He paused, struck by the familiar sound of a baseball smacking into the boy's glove, by the chatter of the kids as they approached to play a game on this lazy Saturday morning. He sat back down on a bench and watched as they set up the teams, the two team captains (apparently decided by who owned the glove and who owned the bat) chose teams, alternately calling out their choices.

Steve took out his sketchbook and balanced it on his knee, withdrawing a pencil and sketching with quiet abstraction. He captured the gist of the scene in a few moments. The way the morning light fell across the diamond, the two lines of children, the way they stood and how they smiled or frowned as they were chosen or passed by.

The last one to be chosen, a little blond kid, just seemed elated to have been chosen at all, even though he was a head shorter than all the rest. Then they jogged off to their positions, and the game began. It fell into a rhythm. The crack of the bat, kids yelling, pattering of running feet, the occasional slide, and then a mixture of cheers or groans.

Eventually, he put away the sketchbook and just watched, in a mixture of peace and nostalgia.

"Captain?" a voice behind him asked. Agent Barton had returned.

"Barton," Steve replied, absentmindedly. "Just watching the game."

"The game?" the archer asked and sat down on the opposite edge of the bench. "Oh."

There was a pause, as Steve continued to watch the game, and Barton said nothing.

Then Barton broke the silence. "Did you play much?" he asked.

Steve answered without thinking about it. "No, I didn't."

"... Coulson told me you loved the game."

Steve let out a breath and closed his eyes, leaning into the back of the bench. He didn't want to discuss this with Agent Barton, but now he felt obligated to explain his unthinking remark. "I do. I just didn't play it. Didn't have time during the war, of course, and before that... well, kids don't want a teammate with asthma on the field. So I watched." Bucky had tried, once, to get him on the team, but his mother had thrown a fit and prevented him from playing even a single game anyway.

"Oh." And that was it from the voluble Hawkeye. Steve opened his eyes as the agent stood. "I'm heading into town. Do you want me to pick you up on my way back? It'll be about a half hour."

Steve agreed, and the agent left without another word.

.

.

Captain Rogers was still where the agent had left him, his sketchbook now tucked away in his bag. The kids had stopped playing and were packing up for the day. Barton parked the car and got out, a shopping bag in one hand, and an interestingly shaped box tucked under his arm.

The Captain looked up at the sound of the car engine and nodded in greeting to him, his eyes flicking to the box Hawkeye carried under one arm. "What is that?" he asked, and the agent grinned, just a little, but didn't reply, instead handing him the box and swinging the shopping bag onto the bench next to him.

"You know how to play, right?" Barton asked, as the other saw what the box contained. A brand new wooden bat, far better than anything he'd ever handled when he was a kid. Rogers was still for a second, and then made a noncommittal movement that wasn't quite a shrug and wasn't quite a shake of the head. "Well good, because then you won't be able to tell when I'm cheating."

He heard Steve chuckle at that, so he continued, heartened. "I'll be the pitcher, and you can get the hang of the bat first," he offered. He just hadn't been able to let Coulson down by letting his hero continue having _never played his favorite game._ That was just... no, nope. That was something that just shouldn't have existed in this world: Captain America, who hadn't played baseball. And, more than that, Steve Rogers, who hadn't played baseball. Clint had played baseball as a scabby-kneed kid before he'd graduated to more interesting projectiles. Any kid who wanted to should have swung the bat at least once. "I was always pitcher."

Steve regained his voice after a moment, running his hand over the bat while he spoke, not meeting Clint's eyes. He knew it was ridiculous, that it shouldn't matter to him any more, but it did matter. It mattered enormously. He tried to pass off the flustered feeling with a bit of a joke.

"I've seen how you handle tennis balls," he replied, and Clint smiled proudly. "I'm in for a challenge." That had been one aspect of Barton that had convinced him that he wasn't entirely an occasionally sad or angry automaton - his habit of playing with tennis balls when he was bored, bouncing them off whatever surface was handy in complex and unlikely trajectories before returning them, infallibly, to his hand. Clint might have called it practice but Steve could see that the man was actually playing. Steve took the bat out of the box and held it in one hand, surprised at how light it felt in his hands.

"Oh, I think you can handle it, Cap'n." Clint drew out a baseball from the bag, and slapped it into his palm. "Ready?" he asked Steve.

Clint ran Steve through the basics quickly. How to stand, how to swing, and how to read the pitcher. Steve had taken to it slowly, and even with Clint going easy on him with straight no-frills pitches. He'd began blushing after he'd missed the ball for the seventh time, but he'd kept trying despite the curious stares of passerby walking their little suburban dogs.

"Again?" he'd call and toss the ball to Clint, who'd catch it with a snap of his hand and wind up for another pitch. Finally, he hit one - just a bunt, of course, as given his strength he'd be likely to break the bat if he put his all into it, and his face lit up with a brilliant smile as the ball sailed across the field.

And Clint, sounding just a little bit sarcastic, clapped, and picked up the next baseball. "Again?" the archer asked cheerfully. "Could have been luck."

So Steve tried it again, and missed, and tried again, and hit it, this time a little farther. They continued for almost half an hour, until Steve was hitting every ball, reliably, calling "Again!" over and over again, and they had to hurry around the field and pick up all balls they had scattered about the field in their enthusiasm.

Clint was annoyed though, in that Steve would never hit a baseball harder than a gentle bunt. He hadn't made a single home-run, and Clint knew he wanted to hit one out of the park, but Scoutmaster Rogers wouldn't let him do anything even a little risky. "Last one, Steve!" he called. "And really hit it this time, okay?"

Steve looked hesitant, but nodded, and there was the wind-up, the spring-loaded tension of all his muscles releasing as he threw the ball, and it sailed out and there was a loud crack, so loud that he wondered if the bat had broken - and the ball was a tiny white speck like a seagull soaring through the air. It was way, way out of the park and -

There was a faint smash of glass a long way away across the neighborhood, and the sound of a car alarm. Clint tensed to run, realized he wasn't eight years old, and stopped, puzzled for a moment on what to do. He glanced over at Steve, who was standing perfectly still, holding the bat with a stunned expression on his face. He hadn't meant to do that.

Then he tucked the bat under his arm, and walked towards Clint, saying, "I haven't broken a window in eighty years."

"_You'_ve broken a window?" he blurted out, unable to help himself.

Steve admitted, "I was a bad influence on Bucky, sometimes. I liked slingshots." It was funny, looking back on it, how his mother had always thought that any trouble her little boy got into was all Bucky's fault. As a kid, he hadn't deliberately tried to get into trouble, but somehow it had come to find him. Fights, trying dangerous stunts like climbing trees that were too tall for him, riding their bikes where they weren't really supposed to... sure, _most_ of that was Bucky's idea. And nothing of what they did had ever really been _wrong_, persay, but it was a definite fact that there had, occasionally, been trouble. Like broken windows. Clint hadn't replied, and had a baffled expression on his face.

Clint just could not...

Steve gave him a _look_. Clint could read it easily, saying as clearly as if he'd used hand-signals, _Give me a break, Hawkeye, really? _"I didn't deliberately break the window, Clint. And I apologized and paid for it to be replaced afterwards."

"Oh." In Clint's window-breaking days, he had just run whenever it happened, a synchronized tide of circus and local kids vanishing into the alleys of whatever town he'd happened to be in at the time. Breaking a window had been the least of the trouble he had gotten into (and out of).

Steve muttered, collecting a baseball off of the field and putting it in his jacket pocket, "at least I won't have to save up for a month to pay for it this time. Come on. Where did it land?"

So Clint followed reluctantly after Steve, off to pay for breaking a window with a baseball for the first time in his life.

Which was how they ended up being fed cookies and lemonade in a living room that smelled of lilacs and dust by a nice old lady who recognized that nice 'Captain America' and his 'friend with the bow' and eventually forgave them entirely for frightening her cat.

And that was how Clint finally decided that Steve was an okay guy, really, and Steve decided that Clint wasn't just an agent or an archer, but might be a friend too.


End file.

Avengers, Friendship