Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Avengers 1. Prologue

a/n: this takes place a few months after The Return to Asgard and Bagel Thursday. Just a fun little romp before the events of The Dark World change everyones lives.

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**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

**Prologue**

"How often is it that new contacts turn out to be a camel in the desert wearing a life jacket? Far stretch from a guy that can melt things with his hands." The woman said.

Her partner grinned. "Yeah, well, we don't always get to operate on the best intel. Not everything we see turns out to be an Asgard alien or guy bitten by a radioactive spider." He replied. He adjusted the duffle to his other shoulder. The pack was laden in the typical desert gear that kept them alive for the past day walking in the rough heat. The ground was anything but flat, making their boots work hard to keep above the sand and stones. They weren't far from the rendezvous now. He'd be happy to leave this desert behind for a little R and R in the Antarctic.

At the top of the first hill he turned to look down at his partner's progress. She'd made it abundantly clear how she was less than enthused about scrambling around on Tatooine, but she was doing her best. He looked back the way they'd come. The light wind had already covered their tracks in the sand. Ever since leaving the camel herd he had endured a strange feeling that they were being followed. It wasn't unsurprising. The area they were in now was relatively remote. The people that lived here didn't take kindly to outsiders and a random man and woman deciding to take a desert hike was definitely out of the norm. He had yet to actually see anyone, but that didn't make him any less wary.

He helped her to the rocky hill top. From their position they could see the mobile SHIELD base parked with their other four team members. The hill gave them a fairly good vantage of the area, despite the intricate rock boulders rising up on either side of them. The man threw an arm over his head and gave a wave down to the three staked out in lawn chairs around the van.

"I don't know about you, but I am taking a bath in ice when we get back." She said.

"You're going to have to beat me to that one." He said, heading across the small plane of flat rock to begin the climb down to camp.

She squealed in response.

He chuckled, turning to check her progress again but only caught a brief glimpse of his partner before the butt of a rifle slammed into his eye. He fell off balance and struggled to right himself as his training kicked in. He shifted left, grabbed the rifle and attempted to draw it in an arc to dislodge it from his attacker.

His partner screamed again.

Someone came at him from behind. Another rifle slammed into his side, dropping him to one knee. His hands slackened reflexively on the first man. He twisted backward, finding the handle of a knife that he worked free enough to use. The first now had three others behind him. The SHIELD agent took another heavy hit in the face and the world unfocussed. He fell forward. His head snapped sideways as his battered cheek impacted the rock beneath him. His eyes were toward the van. His fellow agents were standing, running, guns were drawn.

A final hit and the agent knew no more.

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More fun to come ! Should have relatively quick updates on this one

Next Time: Thor Appears with News


	2. Chapter 1

a/n: Thank you for all the great reviews! Again, this takes place after my other stories, so if you have not read them, you may experience some periods of confusion.

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**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

**Chapter 1**

It wasn't until a day in early September that Thor returned to the group he considered his team. The Avengers were, at the time, living in Stark Tower in New York. It two years since the invasion of the Chitauri.

In Thor's absence, the Avengers continued their work in his stead. So much had happened since Thor's last show on Earth that, when he eventually did reappear, it was difficult for the group to catch him up. Tony and Steve were in the Tower at the time Thor came calling. He materialized in the common room on the first floor and, without having to explain himself, was escorted to the security booth where Steve was able to collect him.

"Where is Clint of Barton?" Thor asked when they walked into the Avenger's floor. Tony was in the kitchen mixing something cake-like in a bowl.

"Been out the last month." Tony answered. "Tasha-tots is out on some Chinese peace trip or something. Banner's off teaching physics. Hawk was sent to find some guy that can melt stuff with his mind."

Steve grinned at Thor's peculiar face. "Yeah, it's been interesting while you've been away. Saw you on the UK news. Everything all right with that?"

Thor's shoulders tightened. "He's not here? Then why did Heimdall send me? I _need_ to find Clint of Barton."

Tony stopped mixing.

Thor looked like he'd been dragged through a few fields of cow crap. His ordinary armor was absent. In fact, he was dressed so simply it was difficult to tell he wasn't just some homeless guy they invited up. And Mjolnir was nowhere.

Tony had spent time with Thor, on Asgard, during the latest war against the Frost Giants. When they parted last, Thor was just as jovial and life loving as any royal should be when a war is won. Now, he looked like someone just went right up and crushed him. Tony wiped his hands on a dish rag and circled the counter to lean on a stool beside Steve.

"Ok, so I can tell something's up. What's wrong? Do you need our help again?" Steve asked.

Thor balled a fist. It was difficult to tell at first whether he was willing to clock one of them or not. Every muscle was taught.

_How long has it been since we saw him_, Tony wondered to himself. _The UK attack was less than a week ago. That translated to perhaps a day in Asgard time, maybe more. Plenty could have happened._

Thor remained silent for a time, arranging just what it was he could say. Eventually, he just turned away and leaned on the back of the couch, his shoulders slouched. He held his hands on his lap as his eyes looked down into his palms.

"My mother." He said quietly. Steve and Tony left the kitchen to be closer to him as, for once, he was speaking so low it was difficult to understand him.

"My mother." He repeated. "There's a ceremony and an archer is required. I thought...or...it was my hope Clint of Barton may be a part of it."

"What kind of ceremony?" Steve asked.

Thor's head remained down, slowly shaking it from left to right. "It is a funeral. My mother's funeral."

Tony and Steve exchanged a glance. Both had known Frigga. They were introduced at the conclusion of the Frost Giant war and they had come to thank her for many blessings in their lives. Not only had she gone out of her way to heal Clint's mashed in brain when he took a bullet to the head, but she was also able to smuggle them behind Asgard's walls when the city was under siege.

Then there was the wolf-in-the-room of course. Arrow was a dire wolf, a gift from the wolves Freki and Geri to Clint during the Frost Giant war. He'd lived with and become an Avenger ever since. At the sound of anything referring to Barton, the growing pup sauntered over and plopped down at Thor's leg. He placed his head into the Asgardian's open hands. The wolves were everything to Frigga. Giving one up to Barton was like giving a piece of herself along with him.

Thor's mother had a strength that was difficult to match and a love that extended beyond her immediate family. It was well known that, despite everything Loki had done against his friends or family, Frigga never gave up on him. Her love was that great. Her death was a monumental loss; not only for Thor and Odin, but for all of Asgard.

"Thor, I'm so sorry." Steve said. "Of course, anything we can do to help, we will. Tony, do you think you can hack into SHIELD and find out where Barton is?"

Normally, Stark would cock a wry wit at Steve's invitation to hack into SHIELD. It was such a contrast to what he was normally ordering Tony to do. The circumstances, however, were understandable. He nodded without saying more, patted Thor's shoulder and headed past him to the JARVIS interface to the left of the television.

Thor thanked him. His attention was drawn to stroking the silver nose Arrow presented to him. "That is not all." Thor said.

Tony stopped in his tracks. Steve encouraged Thor to go on.

"My . . ." Thor's eyes closed. He clasped his hands together and swallowed the lump in his throat. A thousand names ran through Steve and Tony's minds. Men they saw either in passing or fought beside. Men whose loss could be felt so painfully by Thor.

"It was my brother." Thor forced out.

Steve tried to remain still, as if the news had not phased him in the least. Tony, on the other hand, wasn't prone to such self-control. He came flying back to stand in front of Thor.

"Loki!" he exclaimed. "You're telling us Loki is dead!"

Thor's head snapped up. His voice became thick with emotion and fury all at once. "Yes. My brother died defending my very life. I would have been slaughtered had he not defended me and, yet, I cannot even mourn him! He was killed doing the one thing to redeem himself and I can do _nothing_ for his memory! My brother is lost to me forever. My mother did not even know of his bravery...she will never know."

"She always saw good in him." Steve said soothingly.

Thor nodded his head, the fury gone from him again. He was a man going through the process of grieving and disbelief all at once. He was probably sent away by Odin out of mercy; giving him this small task of finding Clint Barton would help Thor take his mind off the tragedies weighing him down.

"We'll find Clint for you." Tony said. He was at his computer table again, pulling up a three dimensional phone system. Arrow abandoned Thor to rush to the phone.

Tony's first choice was always just to call Clint's cell. Sometimes, the simple method worked, usually rerouting him to a SHIELD handler first before he was able to get Clint directly. If that got him nowhere, he was fully prepared to get creative.

"Thank you." Thor managed to say.

"Do you want to stick around for a while? Give us a chance to hunt him down for you?" Steve asked.

"If there were not so many things I must do, I may. There is much to prepare."

"When do you need him by?"

"The funeral is on the morrow...Perhaps four days here."

"I'll find him by this afternoon." Tony professed. "So don't worry about it. You go take care of Thor stuff."

Thor pushed off the sofa and nodded his head. "You have my thanks. My invitation extends to all of you, if you wish to come. I do not want to intrude on your time here if you desire to remain."

Steve dispelled Thor's cordiality. "We'd be honored to come."

He shook Thor's hand and, without more of a sendoff, Thor headed down the hallway to Clint's traditionally open door. There was a balcony within that Thor tended to use for his comings and goings via the Bifrost. When he left, Steve approached Tony's work station. It was already clear Tony had failed to get any contact from Clint's cell phone, even his private Avengers' line, so he was now attempting to crack some SHIELD files for a general correspondence of where Clint had been sent off to.

"Any luck?"

"I can tell you what kind of bra Agent Hill has on today, but, as for our little bird-brain, it seems some higher power deemed it fit to hide his log files. Or...Clint hasn't filed any paperwork in the last month on whatever mission he's on."

"Can I tell you which one is more likely?" Steve asked, smiling.

"Yeah, Clint never did like the report filing part." Tony affirmed.

"Think you'll be able to track him down?"

To that, Tony didn't even deign a reply. He lolled his head to the side and stared intently at Steve. Under that glare, Steve held his palms out in supplication for daring to think Stark's all-knowing abilities could somehow fail him. Arrow thumped his tail against the floor excitedly.

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:(:):(:):

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The room was dark and hot. He had initially fallen asleep with the light scratchy blanket thrown over his bare back but, sometime in the night, it had fallen to the floor. The heat was enough to dry out his mouth...maybe it was hanging open while he dreamed. Another hand shook his shoulder, bringing Clint closer to the surface of being awake.

Someone was calling his name, but after all he'd dealt with the last seven days on the field op, he was inclined to ignore them. Field Marshall Hatcher, a man who pinned a target to Clint's back since day one, was probably exercising his right to give Clint a hard time. What could be so important at three a.m. in the middle of nowhere Libya?

"Agent Barton?"

Clint growled into his sweaty arm. He recognized the voice. That meant he must be awake.

_What the hell?_ He wondered to himself. He rolled off his arm and squinted up past the flashlight in his face. "What? I just got back two hours ago, you know! Even Director Fury gets to sleep every three years."

"Sorry sir, I was told to come get you. A call came in through the comm for you." The young agent, Chedlowski was his name, replied.

"Seriously, Ched, this can't wait like six more hours? Tell Hatcher to deal with his own calls. I'm not an errand boy."

"He's still asleep, sir. This is a call direct from a friend, or at least that's what they said. I was told to tell you that a Mrs. Nesbit was on the line."

Clint batted the light out of his face and rubbed his fingers against his eyes. "Mrs. What? If this is some prank—"

"I assure you, sir, it's a true call. I assumed it was code. I was told to retrieve you immediately."

Clint sighed, debating whether he should ignore the Mrs. Nesbit call and return to the bed (floor mat) that he had been dreaming about for the last week. If someone called him up at this time of the morning, it was either really important, or they had zero concept of time change.

"Tony." Clint came to the conclusion immediately. He dragged himself to his feet and followed Ched out of his tent.

It was a moonless night. The SHIELD field team had been deployed to the middle of the desert for the last thirty-five days. They'd started their journey just south of the Egyptian Border, but given rising tensions with a local economy, it was deemed safer to stay in Libya and continue mission operations there. There was a facility, using that term loosely of course, housed in an underground shelter somewhere East of Kufra. SHIELD sent an initial team to scout out a location, none of whom returned. An extraction team went in – one man returned, missing four fingers with half of his face dipped in a vat of acid. It was decided that the base was too hot for a typical SHIELD team hit. Delta was called up and Clint was sent into in. He wasn't given much to go off of, but that rarely kept him down in the past. It had been twenty-six days since the last hard contact was made with the initial SHIELD strike force. Some still held out hope they were alive, but experience told Clint it was most likely not true. A thermal flyover of the area showed over a dozen potential new holdouts. The insurgents continually moving their operations base wasn't helping matters, either. For the past week, Clint had been following up on a lead he hoped would pan out. At the same time, he'd established himself in the local populace as a buyer and trader of women for his private sex trade. He hoped the persona would help him with any potential extraction should the option ever present itself. According to the incredibly sparse file he'd had to go off of at least two of the SHIELD agents captured were women.

He'd returned to the make-shift base camp after scouting the Ribiana Sand Sea on his own. The base commander gave him Hell for it, throwing Clint all the old lines he'd heard so many times from Coulson in the field. _He shouldn't go out alone, he should have some sort of backup, and why didn't he maintain radio contact? _Coulson learned, after a while, to stop pressing. Clint got results, if given the space to do things on his own. If other unqualified agents went out with him, they had a tendency not to keep up. Therefore, they didn't often make it back in one piece. The base commander didn't like that excuse either. Clint didn't have patience for idiots. If anyone was going to find this base, get in, neutralize it, and get out with the potential hostages, it was him. Maybe Hatcher resented that. After all, he'd been heading the ops since before things went belly up. It took precisely four minutes, after Clint hit the ground at the field base, for Hatcher to decide his new gambit was no better than the bubonic plague.

"This way, sir." Chedlowski indicated the communications van. It was typical SHIELD tech with a little Stark know-how thrown in. A black van in the middle of the desert was a little too ominous a sign, so Clint convinced the operations Chief to at least throw some camo netting over it. Already, whoever these gorillas were, knew SHIELD hadn't left. It didn't do much good to keep advertising.

Clint hopped up into the back of the van. After seeing the looks on the techies, Clint realized he'd left his tent without a shirt or suitable pants. There wasn't much more freedom he could get in the world than to go waltzing through the desert night in nothing but his boxers. The woman blushed as he grabbed the handset she offered to him.

"Sorry." He mouthed, shrugging. No one really needed an explanation. It was hot and he'd just been dragged out of bed.

He held the headset against his ear, cringing when his hearing aid began to crackle with static. He put the headset down and pulled out his auricular device. He didn't often sleep with them in, but, when he did, they occasionally gave him problems. Lately this one in particular had been annoying. When he got back to the Tower he intended to have Stark look at it.

"Anyone got a paperclip?" he asked.

The blushing tech searched frantically across her desk. Pens and papers went flying. A few metal gear boxes hit the floor and, after what looked like a mad struggle, he was provided with a choice of twelve. He grinned at her and picked one. He worked one end free and inserted it into his reset port.

"Happen to need a hand with that?" The girl asked. She had a distinctly British accent.

"Gemma, really, I think he can manage." Another technician replied.

Clint looked up from his work to see the other technician near the front of the van. He was working on data entry into a new interface device. From Clint's angle, he could see what looked like an aerial search pattern of where Clint had spent the last week.

"Did you bug me?" Clint accused.

The technician jumped. His jaw dropped opened, but only small coughing noises came out. The woman answered for him.

"Do forgive Fitz, he's a bit . . . well . . . we just haven't had this much ground time, you see. And you hardly noticed."

"Did Hatcher put you up to this?" Clint demanded.

The male technician stood and leaned over Clint's consul. "That he didn't, friend. Actually, it is a bit of our team you've been sent out to find, you see. We're concerned, is all. Had to convince that ogre to even let us stay, given the circumstances. Everyone keeps sayin' they are just dead out there but we don't believe them. We would know, wouldn't we? Don't you think we would?"

Now Clint's attitude changed a little. He looked at the two. They were genuinely concerned but something else was apparent on their young faces; they were starting to lose hope. Clint had seen that before on other missions he'd been called in on. The survivors looked guilty, lost, grasping for whatever faith someone could give them. Clint may not play nice with others, but he wasn't heartless either.

"Doing what I can about that." He told them. He reset the button on his hearing aid and replaced it in his ear. He picked up the handset and cradled it on his shoulder.

"Hawkeye zero-nine-five-three responding, go ahead away team. Contacting a Mrs. Nesbit apparently. This Iron Man's grand idea by any chance?"

Behind Clint's back, Gemma and Fitz exchanged geeky-star-eyed stares.

The man on the other line, there was no doubt now that it was Tony Stark, laughed into the receiver. "_You said it! Hear that, 'Merica, you owe me five bucks."_

Clint propped his elbow on the dashboard and set his head on his palm. His eyes slid closed. If this was all the conversation he was going to get, he might as well just fall asleep sitting up. "Tony, do you realize what time it is here?"

"_Actually I don't, but give me another three minutes to triangulate your signal and I will. You know, typically, I would just track your Asgardian bow signal but somebody hasn't been firing many arrows lately."_

Clint smiled, shaking his head. "Hey, look, I know I've been gone awhile, but I'm fine. No need to come flying down here and stop hacking me! I've, apparently, had a lot of that, lately. Believe me when I say I'm on a sensitive assignment, but I'm ok."

"_You're sure?"_

"Tony, if I was being held at gunpoint by twenty-four men in leotards, I would tell you I was fine. Take it how you want."

"_But if it was twenty-five you'd tell me?"_

Clint pulled the handset away from his ear and again rubbed the sleepiness away from his eyes. He yawned. This was definitely not the time to deal with Tony's I-miss-you calls. He put the receiver back to his ear, picking up the tail end of whatever Tony was going on about.

"—_sitting down. I know it's a shock, but I figured if I didn't just come out with it you might do something. So Thor wants you there for this archer thing."_

"Wait, what? Back up a second say that again."

"_I know you were close. Look, I'm sorry I'm telling you over the phone like this."_

"Tony? Tony, stop a second. Go back, I missed what you said. What happened? Is everyone all right?"

"_No, they're not. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Loki's dead too."_

"'Too'?! What do you mean 'too'? Tony, hang on a second." Clint motioned to the technicians. "Out. Both of you, out! Shut the door behind you." When the two lab technicians froze like a pair of deer, Clint got to his feet and added with a no nonsense attitude, "I'm not kidding, clear out!"

Fitz and Gemma hurriedly made their way out the back of the van. Chedlowski helped them shut the door. Assured he was alone, barring anyone listening in or hidden bugs planted in the van, Clint returned to the conversation with Tony.

"All right, let me get this straight. You said Loki, Thor's brother Loki, is dead? How?"

"_Baywatch didn't exactly elaborate. Apparently, he saved Thor's life...died in the process. The body is in some Dark realm something, you'd understand that more than me."_

"Ok, you said Loki is dead _too_. Who else died?"

There was a long pause on the other line. Clint prepared himself. A thousand names swam through his head.

"_Frigga_."

Clint's body stiffened. His mind flashed with the images of the Frigga he knew. Her beautiful smile. The locks of her long hair pinned up behind her ears, but escaping their clasp when she fought like a devil beside him. How they spoke late into the night about everything and nothing, during a party he drank himself stupid at. The blessing from her he took with him from Asgard.

"She's dead." Clint said quietly.

Tony didn't reply at first. After a time of allowing Clint to soak it in, he said, _"I know. I'm sorry. You two were close. Thor came by looking for you. He was pretty distraught over it all. First losing his mother, then Loki. I know I'm not all choked up on that one and I doubt you are either. I guess if anything was going to be good news, that was. I'm sorry about Frigga."_

Clint nodded, though Tony couldn't see him. "Yeah, well, thanks for telling me."

"_Thor said there's a ceremony on Asgard tomorrow. They need an archer for some reason. He didn't say why. He wanted to know if you'd do it."_

"Yeah, of course. Tomorrow you said?"

"_Tomorrow. Do you think you can get away?"_

That was a loaded question. Sure Clint could get away. All he had to do was stand in the middle of camp, call out for Heimdall, and he'd be on Asgard before anyone knew what to do with themselves. But his conversation with the lab techs gave him some pause. He had just agreed to do what he could for the missing team. When he got called into a mission of this kind, it was only because there was no one left to call. If he walked away now, SHIELD would most likely just bag the operation altogether.

"That's complicated." Clint admitted.

"_Can we help?"_

"Who? You and Steve? No, but thanks for the offer. It would take too long to catch you up. Besides I have a good idea how this is playing out. I do need another two days maybe. Ceremony is tomorrow?"

"_Asgard time." _Tony pointed out. "So technically you have 3.7590 days."

Clint ignored the specifics. Tony wasn't necessarily showing off, he just preferred to be exact. "Might give me the couple days I need. Do me a favor and grab a hold of Natasha. I haven't kept track of her since we split up a month ago. Just let her know what's up. Are you coming to Asgard?"

"_Thor invited all of us."_

"Ok. I'll see you in Odin's Palace in a couple days. Meet me outside the Maiden's Tail. If you don't remember how to get there, grab Veurr and he will show you. It'll be faster for me just to go there direct than to fly to you and go up together. All right?"

"_Steve wrote it down. Something about me being incapable of taking directions properly, of which I do not agree."_

"Hey, did you feed my dog?" Clint asked, attempting to turn the conversation in a positive direction.

"_**Our**__ dog is fine. He's sitting here ready to swallow the phone since he can hear you. I stuck a hologram program to his collar, remember? Yeah, well Banner added a few breeds to its index. Today, I'm going to take a Bernese mountain dog for a walk."_

"I don't even know what that is." Clint admitted.

"_Yeah, that's because you live under a rock. Oh, hey Clint, what are you up to in Libya?"_

Barton smiled. "Good bye, Tony." He reached up and flicked a switch on the satellite radio. The communication cut out and he was left in the hot silence of the van. He had hoped to get more sleep, strike out in the morning for the farthest sector of the desert from their position. He wanted to stake out the compound he found for at least another four or five days. Given the new timetable, that was definitely out of the question. Some mess, this was all turning out to be. He stood and rapped his knuckles on the van window. Fitz and Gemma were standing at the ready with Chedlowski shouldering his rifle a few feet away.

"So sorry for the loss, Agent Barton." The woman piped up.

"Although you mustn't be too tore up on the whole god-of-mischief thing though, aye?" Fitz said.

Clint craned his neck at them. "Is nothing sacred between the two of you?"

Fitz smacked Gemma's arm. "I told you we shouldn't be spying."

"Well, forgive me Fitz, for being so concerned about our ONLY hope just taking off some place. Sorry for having feelings and not being just a robotic . . . robotic thing!" She cried back. She pushed past Clint to return to her station and dropped into her swivel chair. Her forehead dropped onto her desk.

Clint watched her reaction before turning back to Fitz. "Look, I'm going to be honest with you. The trail's been cold since they sent in the extraction team. I'm doing everything I can and I'll keep at it."

Fitz nodded. "Yes, we know, but isn't there any way we can help? Sure we haven't had the field experience, but is there anyone who can go with you? Or scan the area perhaps?"

"Did you get a name change?"

"I don't see how that—"

Clint interrupted him. "Because unless your name is Melinda May or Natasha Romanov, no I can't use you."

Fitz's mouth dropped open a little and he threw a look into the van to Gemma, who'd spun around in her chair. Clint didn't miss the very public look of shock on their faces. Chedlowski shifted on his feet and grabbed Fitz's arm. He shook his head, warning them to stop now before they said too much. What Ched didn't understand, was Clint's determination when he was faced with a serious dilemma. And the fact that Fitz already said too much.

Clint grabbed Fitz and dragged the technician into the back of the van. Ched attempted to stop him, but a single punch had him spinning into the sand on his back. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. Clint pulled the van doors shut and turned on the two trapped technicians.

"One of you is going to start telling me what's going on, right now!" Clint demanded.

Gemma pressed her lips together like a toddler attempting not to spill a secret. Her eyes flicked up to Fitz. The Englishman folded his arms and squeezed his eyes shut. Making them fess up was like trying to extract information out of a pair of new recruits.

"Seriously?" Clint told them. "I just leveled Ched out there and you two are going to clam up? When I got assigned this op, I was sent out here with zero information about the potential hostages. I knew there were four of them, and that is all. I know there was an attempt to get them back, which means they must have at least had some pull with SHIELD for them not to be just left out there to fend for themselves. You two, the only team survivors?"

"They are not dead!" Gemma shouted.

Clint sat across from her again. He propped his elbows on his knees and looked caringly at her. She was definitely going to be the one to spill the beans if he compelled her the right way.

"Who are they?" Clint asked quietly.

Neither wanted to answer him. He was sure they had been threatened with dereliction of duty, or worse, being ordered to leave the outpost if they gave it up. But if a secret was this worth hiding from Clint, then wasn't he just going to find out anyway when he was sent in for the rescue?

Clint sat back in the chair. "Look, I'm not going to tell anyone. And if they ask, well I just figured it out myself. The way I see it, I have two options anyway. Either I'm going back out there to find your team, or I'm calling Heimdall and I'm going to the funeral of a very dear friend of mine. If you have some reason for me to stay, you'd better start talking now."

At his threat to abandon them, Fitz's eyes flew open. He leaned over the back of Gemma's chair. "Please, don't. It is May. She is one of the hostages and so is—"

"Fitz!" Gemma exclaimed.

"Look, do you want to see him just walk out on us? Or do you want to get Skye and the others back?" Fitz reasoned with her.

Clint put his hands out to gain their attention back. His brain was still trying to wrap around exactly what it was they had decided to divulge. "Whoa, now. Let me get this straight. _The Calvary_ is in there? And what, she hasn't come traipsing out of the desert in the past thirty seven days? Or sent any contact of ANY kind?"

Gemma chewed her lip, nodding her head very slowly. Her voice was a little strained. "We had to beg the field officer to bring you in. I'm so sorry, they said we couldn't tell you anything. I'm just so—" Her eyes flooded with tears and Fitz searched around before handing her a monitor wipe for a tissue.

"Four of our team are out there. We were sent to investigate a strange report of a man who could melt things, was going around half the bloody dessert turning sand to diamonds or some sort of nonsense. It didn't pan out, but while Gemma and I were in the van Ward was taken by some hostiles. Our hacker, her name is Skye, was taken along with him. He's her field officer. May and—"

Gemma squeezed Fitz's hand before he spoke the last name. She shook her head very swiftly.

Clint dragged his chair closer, getting her attention back on him. "Gemma, right? " Her eyes returned to his. "Gemma, I'm not here to tell you that this is all a fool's errand. I'm not even going to mention the fact that the last time Ward and I saw each other, he was trying to put a bullet in the side of my head right after he stabbed me, right here." Clint stretched up his chest to indicate the particular scar. "I was sent here to fix things. That's what I do. Now who is the fourth person? Was May and another agent sent out after Ward and Skye?"

"They were. They told us to stay with the gear and we did that. Then, they never came back. We called SHIELD and they sent the extraction team."

Clint took in the new information politely but he didn't neglect the fact that they still hadn't given him the last name. He had read the rest from the mission brief. When the first team was taken, an extraction plan was established. A basic location was known as to where they were being held, but when the team went in, they were bottlenecked. Bad recon, on top of an even worse judgment call from the field commander, resulted in a slaughter. The hostages had been moved at least six times since then. Clint had some idea where they currently resided, but, in his opinion, the place was another death trap.

After thinking the initial situation over some, he came to his own conclusion. It was a stellar one. The last time he'd seen Ward was in New York. Clint had just come off a mission not far from where they were now. Only, on that particular occasion, he returned nearly deaf. SHIELD agents of Clint Barton's caliber who were irreparably harmed on a mission tended to get scrubbed out, meaning a hit team was assigned to their case and they were murdered in the most accident prone way possible. Somehow, despite everyone's best efforts to hide Clint's malady, Ward had discovered the secret and took it upon himself to end Clint's career, and life. The only thing that stopped him from succeeding was an old friend.

"Phil." Barton guessed. He looked at the two for confirmation. It wasn't difficult to read them.

"But, how did you?"

"You _are_ good." Gemma commended.

Clint sat back in his chair. Things had gone from relatively simple, to very, very complicated in the span of half an hour. At least he wasn't tired anymore. This was a tall order to fill. Not only did he have to somehow locate Phil and the others in the last sector of a vast dessert wasteland, but he had to do it in three days or miss Thor's mother's funeral. That would be unforgivable.

"So you must be Phil's new team. Well, so much for the proper introductions. I'm Clint Barton, Hawkeye, and one of Phil's first recruits. What do they call you science twins?"

"I'm Gemma Simmons, and this here is Fitz. And we are well acquainted with you, of course, and a pleasure to meet you as well, even in your …um…underthings and all that. But how could you have possibly known? About Coulson, I mean?"

Clint stood. "Probably better you don't know that. Now, look, I'm going back out. A little while back, I found a little camp. I need to pick up a few things in the village a ways from here. Then, I'm going to try to get into the camp again. What I need you two to do is please remove whatever wire you've plugged in to me. Because if I do go in, and they have AIM or Centipede level security in that place, then I'll be made in four minutes, if I'm lucky. So far, that hasn't exactly proved to be the case."

As Fitz went off to grab some extraction gear, Gemma remained in her seat with her mouth hanging open.

"AIM and Centipede are Level 7 clearance files, how could you possibly know about them?" She asked. There wasn't a hint of malice in her voice. She was genuinely curious.

Clint shrugged. "Look, I might be a SHIELD agent, but I'm an Avenger first. That comes with a few perks, like Tony Stark. I think we all know SHIELD isn't big on information sharing and I don't exactly like being sent on my no extraction plan missions against high level operatives I get no back-grounding on."

Fitz returned with a toolkit full of impossibly small items. A few, he'd recognized from Stark and Banner's lab, but, as to what they were for, he refused to acknowledge. Fitz indicated Clint's ear. "Stark labs. My, how I would love to see that one day. I have dreams of waking up there. Your right ear piece, please."

Clint wanted to stop being surprised by the man and woman but it was becoming more difficult with time spent in their company. He pulled out his hearing aid and handed it over. "You know it took months to get that working right for once. I don't even know how you got a hold of it."

"It was a difficult signal capture and, I admit, we did sort of shoot you with a neuroleptic compound twelve days ago and extracted it while you slept."

Clint rubbed his face with his hand. He decided that he should stop complaining about every time Tony and Banner intruded on his personal life. Having to survive day to day with these twins was enough to send him crawling up a wall. "Let me make a wild guess and say you were top of the geek class."

Gemma smiled. "You have us there. Youngest recruits to pass. But, you wouldn't really know that. You never did attend SHIELD operations, did you?"

Clint thought about his answer to that. He didn't want to lie. They knew his file was only a click away. Most likely Coulson had a copy of it lying around some place for pure nostalgia. "No, I didn't. Coulson recruited me. I'm not the schooling type."

Fitz finished removing the micro tracker from Clint's ear piece, reassembled the outer carriage, and handed it back. "This is great craftsmanship." He commended.

"Tony." Clint said, replacing it in his ear canal. "Bruce designed the aural implant it's hooked into. None of the ones I had before were very permanent. Don't ask me how it works without all the wires and rods or whatever. I don't know." He stood as much as the cramped van would allow. The two followed him out into the desert sand again. Ched was still passed out on the ground where Clint had dropped him.

"I want a trauma kit, a rolex, and a new suit." He told them over his shoulder. He stepped over the fallen body and headed unceremoniously back to his tent.

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There you go! stay tuned for the latest:)

Chapter 2: A Proposition and an Ugly Sister


	3. Chapter 2

a/n: I've never had so many annonymous and guest reviews! you guys are wonderful, thank you!

If you would like a summery of Clint's history in my story arc, let me know. I have one written up that would save you the time of reading all of my other stories to understand the pieces in this one:)

want additional content? check out the quiverofbarton page on tumblr to see some fun fanart and character histories. look here: quiverofbarton. tumblr or just find PeechTao on facebook:)

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**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

**Chapter 2**

The ungodly rattle from the belly of the 1984 Toyota Pickup was enough to shake Clint right out of his bucket seat. The brakes ground with thirty years of desert sand trapped between their gears as the engine block thumped out each rise and fall of its fist-sized cylinders. Someone back in the nineties had attempted to resurrect the old beast. Its paint had been updated from the original silver to an exotic puke green. Obviously, the tone was meant as a deterrent to any potential thieves. Fortunately for Clint, he'd come prepared.

SHIELD black cards were unlimited cash credit lines issued to specific agents left in the field for extended periods of time. Clint had only been trusted with such a card twice. The first, he'd lost three minutes into his mission. The second, he'd managed to hang onto until the end of his six month stay in South America, but he did rack up nearly a million dollars in expenses. Since that time, the command on high had seen fit to limit his unlimited access. On this mission, he didn't know what to expect, but bribery was never far from his mind. Between three ATM stations, he filled his pocket with enough small bills to buy Mozambique.

The early prep was paying off now. He purchased the truck flat out with enough gas to get him to the death trap of a base and, if he was lucky, halfway back to the SHIELD outpost. He was relying on the fact that, despite being under enemy control for the past month, the SHIELD operatives were not only still alive, but that they would be somewhat mobile.

"A lot of 'ifs'." Clint said aloud to his passengers.

The two men looked over at him, but said nothing. They were dressed in full black burqas with niqabs hiding the features of their faces, despite being men. Their predilection to remain silent, even in the stifling heat of the truck cab, was due in part to the rope gags Clint had tied across their mouths.

"You're going to have to play your parts well." Clint said to them, despite knowing they couldn't reply. "I'm going to leave you back with your buddies, but if my people are around still, I'm staking them. Got it?"

Neither replied.

His plan was simple. Clint had already spent time in the local town, spreading the word that he was buying up unclaimed women to bring back to Saudia Arabia and India. In certain circles, a good young woman could turn a pretty profit. Most men looked down on kidnappings for this slave and sex operation, but buyers? That tended to shine a different light on his assumed profession.

He'd chosen to wear a suit and tie, his shirt crisp and pure white. A white handkerchief was stuffed in his jacket pocket, and his tie was a sharp jean blue that was thin and long. His plan was straight business man. He had nothing to hide, nothing up his sleeve, and money to spend. He was connected enough to be missed should they decide to rob him and kill him, but at the same time if the two women were still alive, this would be the prime opportunity to get them out without bloodshed.

Clint was taking a direct approach when it came to storming the compound. The days it took finding it, then assessing the outside, then taking hostage the two men currently riding shotgun, had left him little time for reconnaissance. He had intended to take the next few days on that alone, but with his new time crunch of having to get to Asgard, he couldn't afford to wait. This was not the way Clint liked to run an operation. Just his presence could cause a trigger happy case commander to kill or move the hostages. Being that one of the hostages was Phil, his stakes were even higher for a positive outcome.

There was a knock against the sliding window that separated the truck bed from the cab. Clint reached between the two niqab-clad men and pushed the window open. He tossed his head back as his hands vibrated on the rickety steering wheel.

"How you doing back there, Alaina?" Clint said.

Alaina was a local prostitute he'd brought into his confidence when she noticed him dragging the two captives into his rented room at six a.m. that morning. At the promise of enough cash to keep her happy lifestyle afloat, she'd agreed to come along with no further coercion. She had an indistinct accent, due mainly to her preponderance for globetrotting. If she had the ambition to stay in one place long enough, she could have a successful career in the adult film industry. Apparently, being self-employed, as she called it, made her feel more alive.

"And how are these men sitting here?" Alaina asked, shoving her upper half, sans arms, thorough the window. Her voluptuous curves rested on the men's shoulders. Clint didn't need to see their faces under the veils to know what they were thinking.

"Sitting well, I'd say. How's the back riding?"

Alaina might have shrugged her shoulders but it was difficult to see from her position. "I think I'd prefer a seat better. But you said these men might have thrown themselves from the back."

"Wasn't sure if they'd prove to be dumber than they looked." Clint replied. "We're coming up to the stop point now. Once we get to the iron gate there, I'm getting out with you and we'll leave these two in here to bake. I'm going to need you to bat your eyes some, darling."

The men's heads bobbed from side to side as she shook her assets prodigiously. "I can do more than bat my eyes, Agent man."

Clint smiled. He edged the ancient Toyota from its roaring forty miles-per-hour top speed to a stuttering stop not ten feet from the iron gates of which he spoke. Most of the compound was underground, as far as he could see on initial inspection. The entire area was surrounded by a tall sand stone wall with only a single access point inside. The gate was two tiered. The inner was made of wrought iron tipped in hand made spikes. The outer was comprised of movable stakes coated in razor wire and lashed together like something out of the Walking Dead.

When Clint pulled the truck up and turned the screwdriver to cut the engine, the two guards standing out front approached with their AK-47s. The safety switches had been turned off. Clint had no doubt there were rounds already in the chambers of both rifles. He put on his brightest smile and kicked his door open with a wave.

"Hi boys!" he exclaimed. He slipped seamlessly into his alter ego. "Pleasure to meet you. Wow, is that thing real?" He approached the rifle with an inquisitive finger outstretched like a two-year-old.

Thrown off by his strange behavior, the guard slapped his hand away rather than shoot him in the face.

Clint pulled his hand back swiftly. "Oh, sorry! Yeah, real. Wow, didn't know they actually made those. I always thought it was a movie prop or something."

Alaina leaned over the truck bed. Her dyed blond hair was impossible to distinguish from the brown it had once been. Her eyes were contact-lens blue with false lashes larger than anything once glued to the eye of Lady Gaga. She wore a skin tight white t-shirt that professed her love of New York and a pair of authentic daisy dukes.

"Hi fellas!" Alaina shouted.

Her finger nails were long, painted red, and they curled seductively toward the men. Clint would have sworn the girl had been trained by or with Natasha. To alleviate the fears that she'd been playing him in the day he'd known her, he requested a DNA background check. Despite a few very personal medical maladies, she was clean.

The attention drew away from Clint and his winged tip shoes to the bobbing girl in the pickup bed. Two crooked smiles spread across the guards faces. They looked into the cab of the truck, at Clint, then the scantily clad woman.

"Oh, Tareq right?" Clint reclaimed their attention. The guns were still in their hands, but their fingers had removed from the triggers.

One, Tareq, pointed at his chest. "Me?"

Clint nodded. "Yeah, remember me? Two nights ago at that little crap hole pretending it's a burger joint? In town, you remember."

Tareq exchanged a look with the other guard. The name tag sown into his shirt read E. Aja'Awana. Clint took a wild guess on the first name.

"And Eric, right? Awe, come on, Tareq, his nose isn't as bad as you said. Can't hardly see where the rock hit him."

Another exchange of looks. Clint must have guessed right. He was fortunate that Eric was one of the most common names around. Eric had a distinct cut across the front of his nose. By the bruise accompanying the side of it, and the area they were in, the most likely cause was a rock had either fallen on him, or been thrown at him.

"I told you of him?" Tareq said.

"Of course you did!" Clint exaggerated his body movements. His hands never stopped moving as he spoke. He acted like a friend from ten years ago trying to coax a memory out of his acquaintance. "Come on, you can't forget that. Alaina was along, wasn't she?" Clint turned to the prostitute who wiggled her eyebrows. She'd mentioned that a man by the name of Tareq was employed on the base. He'd gone to purchase her services two days ago while she operated out of a little burger stand on the outskirts of town. Clint was hoping he had the right Tareq, but he matched the description and his first initial was T.

With Alaina's smile enticing the memory out of him, Tareq began to feed into the coercion. He had spoken with someone at the bar, hadn't he? Maybe it was the American. Perhaps without the fancy suit and fancy shoes, but he had spoken to someone before Alaina arrived.

"You enjoy that little night? She's good, isn't she?" Clint went on.

The things he wasn't saying began to fill their minds. The woman in the back. The two in the cab. The man in the suit. Setting up a date. Talking to a john. The friendly attitude. The complete unconcern for the fact that he was literally in the middle of the desert standing beside a couple of rifle bearing men. The two guards came to the same conclusion almost simultaneously: Clint was a pimp.

Eric elbowed Tareq. "I gave you money. You said you paid!"

Tareq shouldered his rifle. The safety was now off. "I did pay." He said back. Then he repeated himself for both Clint and Alaina.

Clint held his hands palm out. "No, no, no. You mistake me! Please," he turned his head back to Alaina and he laughed. Then on command she laughed. He turned back to the men. "Oh please, I'm not here for money. Actually, I'm here to spend some money."

Eric pulled his rifle over his arm and adjusted the strap to let it hang. He too switched the safety on. "Looks to me like you got enough to have a few good nights." He said, indicating the two would-be women in berqas.

Clint hiked a thumb back. "Who, them? No way. Ugly mugs. There's a reason I don't let people look at them. I'd lose business. I actually make people take them only if they promise to leave the lights off."

Eric and Tareq both chuckled.

"No, what I'm looking for, and let me tell you Alaina is great, but I think you already know that, is some fresh youth. Just something, I don't know, exotic. See I've got this guy in Shanghai that's been a pain in my –"

There was a mess of shouting in a dialect Clint wasn't familiar with. Suddenly, a throng of men rushed the iron gate. It unlocked. One overweight white male, in his mid-fifties with halitosis bad enough to kill a lake of trout, came at him. Clint had to keep himself lax. If he tensed up too much, he would likely throw a punch and blow his cover and chances for good.

"Who is this man!" The white male roared. Behind him ten armed men lined the gateway. They were edgy looking. Most of their munitions were mismatched from one person to the next. Some were in indiscreet fatigues that resembled cast off US army surplus, others were wearing thawbs. Clint had the distinct impression he wasn't dealing with a highly organized crime syndicate. At that, most of the men sounded either American, or South African. That may prove beneficial for his goal.

Tareq and Eric both began to respond in the Arab dialect most familiar to them. Clint caught only a few words overall. He waited and smiled with Alaina over his shoulder. Her elbows were proper on the side of the truck and her heart shaped face rested in her palms.

"Women?" the white man said. He threw the back of his hand into Tareq's chest. He easily tossed the smaller man off his balance. "You idiot!"

Clint continued to smile. He pushed his traditional, sharp shades to the top of his head so he could see this man eye-to-eye. In his mind, he was trying to decide whether he was in charge of the operation here or if he was the second hand.

"My name's Jimmy Renner." Clint called up his typical alternate name. "Clients call me Jimmy Dean. I think it has something to do with the suit, cuz it sure isn't the country music."

The man's face remained as solid as a stone. "So what's that to me? What's a fancy dress like you doing in this hell-hole desert? Driving that beast of all things?"

Clint hiked a thumb at the truck. "This is a disgrace, I'll admit. Frankly, though, the Maserati wasn't fitted with its sand tires when I landed in the land of the camel." He stuck his hand in his right pocket, showing off the Chanel belt looped through his Armani pants. All too conveniently, the line of sight would also have his Rolex watch on display, as well.

The hint of a smile appeared behind the boss's eyes. Clint knew he was smelling the money in his pocket.

"Now, as to what I'm doing, I was just about to explain to our friend Tareq here; I'm a fixer upper. You tell me your type, and I fix you up if you know what I mean. I have a few clients out East looking for something special that I don't have in stock, so-to-speak, and I'm shopping around. Hear tell some of your men might have a daughter . . ." Clint lifted an eye brow. "or a wife they aren't keen for and might be willing to make a bit on them. This economy has been rough and I'm looking to stimulate it a little."

The man looked at him incredulously. His mouth hung open, letting Clint exam the state of his rotten back molars. For a moment, Clint thought perhaps the game was up. This guy wasn't taking the bait. In fact, he looked almost repulsed. Clint thought fast of another way he might get into the gates. He kept a gun on his ankle, should he require it. But, then again, all the fire power he needed he could just take from the men around him. Then, there were the two grenades he taped into his captive's hands. The pins were removed, and that kept them compliant enough for now. If Clint needed to make a big mess of things, though, that option was still available.

Finally the man threw his head back and laughed. He wound his arm in a circle and bid one of the men in the gateway to come over. Between the breaks in his guffaw, he said, "Miguel's this crazy Mexican that end up in a Libyan labor camp two years ago and broke out. Miguel, don't you still have that ugly sister?"

"At home."

The boss hiked his finger in the direction of the desert all around. "Well get running home and pick the girl up. This guy says he'll pay you cash for her."

Miguel looked at Clint with a glimmer of, dare say, hope.

Clint shrugged. He had to hide the genuine smile spreading beneath the skin of his face. Maybe he wasn't so crazy after all. "Hey look, I'm not looking for some trashy half-toothed knot. I already got saddled with these two." He indicated the "women" in the truck cab still.

"Niqabs, nice touch." The white man commended.

"Only way I could face driving with them." Clint replied.

Not to be dissuaded, Miguel gave his gun to the next person in line and went back into the encampment. After a minute, he came roaring back out in an old army jeep with two other men sitting in the back seat. Apparently, they all had women they were intent on getting rid of, by any means necessary.

Now Clint did smile as he turned from the sight of their departure back to the white man.

"Besides that ugly sister and whatever those two come back with, you got anything else of interest?"

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Stay tuned, and please review. I have 5 midterms this week and reading your comments brings a ray of sun shine to my unhappy life


	4. Chapter 3

a/n:so here is the latest. Thanks for all the support on my midterms this week guys and gals!

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**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

**Chapter 3**

By the third hour after they'd taken Ward away, Phil Coulson had become concerned. By five hours, he was nearing hopelessness. He'd overheard the guards as easily as Ward surely had. They'd been here long enough. It was obvious none of the prisoners were talking, despite what had been done to them. How much longer were their captors going to risk a SHIELD incursion? It was going to be easier to kill them and dumb the bodies where they would be quickly discovered. Any day now and that would happen.

Coulson sagged against the chains at his wrists. He'd only been taken out of the shackles twice. The first time, he'd taken down four armed guards before he was grabbed again. The second time, he got much farther. He unlocked Ward, stormed the central office, and nearly vaulted over the gates before a shock grenade took them out again. Now, the guards knew better. They knew that if they were bored, they could unlock his cell and take a couple of lead pipes to his ribs without getting heat from the higher ups. With a side full of cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder, there wasn't far Phil could get on his own. He needed Ward.

They agreed early on that Ward would be the cooperative one. He wouldn't make a move he wasn't sure he could see to the end. He needed to gain trust and leverage. He also needed to ascertain if the women were alive. Both Skye and May had been separated from them early on. There was no way to know their location, let alone whether they were still alive or not. If they were contemplating Coulson and Ward's demise, no doubt the women were on that list as well.

Coulson hated hanging there like a piece of meat on a hook. They'd tried to chain him sitting on the floor, but between Ward and him, they were able to peel apart splinters of wood from the floor with their fingers. They unlocked their own shackles that time. So for the last fifteen days, Coulson was chained to the ceiling. His feet barely brushed the floor. If he stretched, he could take some of the pressure off his dislocated arm and support his weight on his tippy toes. But the stretching made it hard to breathe through the broken ribs and he could only manage it for short periods of time.

The heavy door swung open hard enough to rebound off the wall. Long after he'd been taken, Ward was carried back in. His feet were mangled. Something very much like a whip had stripped the flesh from his soles. He was too bloody to see whether any of his toes were missing or not.

One of the three men hauled Ward up by his arm pits while the other two chained him back into position. The biggest of the three left a parting jab in Coulson's chest as they went out. The door swung shut behind them.

"Ward?" Coulson asked. They were both panting in pain. It was a familiar position of late.

"Ye-ah?" Ward responded. His speech was garbled. He cleared his throat and spit at the floor. A wad of blood, phlegm, and fillings dropped from his mouth.

"Good to see . . .you haven't checked . . .out."

Ward gurgled. It was a sad state to be laughing in. "Wouldn't give me . . . back my se—curity deposit."

"What did they ask?"

Ward managed to lift his head. His chin was coated in the blood leaking from his damaged mouth. His eye socket suffered a fracture twenty days ago. It was still green and purple, though most of the swelling receded. It gave his right eye a caved in appearance.

"What are we . . . still . . . doin' here?" Ward asked.

"I'm sorry." Coulson told him. He'd been saying it since day one. He didn't know what else to say. He had no idea going after Ward and Sky would lead to this. If he had, he would have called for back up sooner. He would have done something differently. He would have taken his time, done more recon, and acted smart rather than impulsively. He would have done so many things differently. Coulson had plenty of time to be reminded of that each moment Ward was returned to him looking worse than when he left.

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_:(:):(:):_

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"We are a small operation. An outpost you could say. We don't like to hang around long, and I can't really divulge what it is we do here, either. I hope you understand."

The white man's name was Hazim al'Jazari. Clint was told his original name. Hazim changed it on entry into Saudi Arabia fourteen years ago with his conversion to a new way of thinking. It was obvious from the men, the fortifications, and the various paraphernalia along the walls Clint had walked in to the mainstay of an extremist group based on a fundamental ideal inspired by a neo-Nazi American with a Middle East terrorist backer. He didn't have the heart to point out al'Jazari was actually the name of a prominent philosopher and not nearly as menacing as Hazim hoped it would be. For the sake of reclaiming his team, Clint played ball.

"Oh I get it. Hey, I don't exactly pull out my moral compass when this guy in Yellow River tells me he wants a petite Asian with good teeth, if you know what I mean." Clint told him. Inwardly, his stomach was beginning to knot. The further he was led into the compound, the worse the feeling got. The place was just the fortress he assumed it to be. There was a single central house that had been mostly gutted. The majority of the living quarters, if they could be called that, were below ground in the extensive underground network. Clint didn't know what these men had moved in to in order to have access to such a barricade, but it was a logistical nightmare. If the four man team was here, it wasn't a surprise to him they hadn't gotten out on their own by now.

Hazim had his arm around Alaina's shoulder as he showed off his place. Apparently there was a woman, perhaps of Clint's caliber, that they were in the position to find a ready disposal of. She'd been a little hell cat initially but was now the most cooperative of the lot. Clint was hoping to come across Melinda May. But no matter what woman he was shown, Clint planned to buy them out of this place.

The two men in the niqabs followed close to Clint's back. Some men had offered to pay for a round with them, but Clint turned all the offers down. He needed to get them tested in Bali first before he allowed any potential clients to partake of the goods. He was an upstanding business man, after all.

Hazim laughed in his repulsive way and clapped a gnarled hand on Clint's shoulder. "You know, for an American, I do like you."

"You'd like me even more after you show me this girl. You said she's older? I'm not looking for a grandma to take back with me."

"Mature!" Hazim announced. His meaty fingers pinched Alaina's nose playfully and she grabbed a full bite of his ear. "She is a good one, I tell you. And worth the money I plan to swindle out of you." He leaned in close enough for Clint to be forced to hold his breath lest he pass out.

"What about this girl of yours, then? She available?"

Clint lifted one shoulder as if it didn't matter. "Alaina's freelance. She brings me business, so she sets her own prices."

Hazim grinned and played in the dyed blond hair. Clint vomited some in his mouth but swallowed it down to keep his cover in check. He needed out of this place...fast!

They arrived down a line of locked doors behind a metal gate. Hazim pulled out a ring of keys, picked out the right one and inserted it into the lock. Clint took note of the size and shape of the key. They walked forward into the cells. There were six doors, index-card sized portholes cut through the thick wood to allow a free view of the occupants within. The archer's sharp peripheral vision told him the first two cells passed were vacant. The third one on the right brought Hazim to a pause. He pulled his arm from around Aliana and thumbed through the keys to find the right one. Clint kept track of the key for the gate as it swung along the ring.

Finding the correct key, Hazim inserted it into the lock. The door sprung open and pushed it the rest of the way inward. Clint swept his hand to the side, inviting Hazim and Alaina to go in ahead of him. He had no intention of getting shoved into a cell with the door locked behind him. Hazim entered first.

Clint let the internal shutter roll through his body. "Ugh!" he exclaimed. "Tight quarters, man. Just kills me every time. No wonder prisoners hate prison. I just can't get over the claustrophobia, you know?"

Hazim nodded in agreement. "It is like living the life of a rat! I can't stand this place."

Clint nodded and agreed. He stayed by the door, assuring it would not be thrown shut. The two men wearing niqabs Clint lined along the wall opposite of Hazim and he. Positive the players were in position, and the area was at least somewhat secure, Clint looked down on the potential goods.

It was difficult to tell at first that the person dumped against the wall had ever been Melinda May. She'd cut her hair, or they had. A hard life put extra lines on her face Clint didn't remember seeing before. She'd been stripped. Both legs showed signs of obvious breaks above the knees. She had a bullet wound high through her right shoulder. There was some blood on the wall and floor, but not much. Her lip was purple. Two fingers were pulled back and out of joint. That was just his cursory exam.

Clint knelt down, ignoring her nakedness in a trained professionalism. The enemy, whoever the enemy happened to be that day, often used such degrading tactics to break down one's sense of safety. Clint, in all the time he'd worked with May, had never seen her broken by anyone. If this was her, broken, then he hated to be a witness to it. His jumbled thoughts came and went in an instant. He still had to locate the others, negotiate a release, and get out without getting himself killed in the process.

"This is it?" Clint asked, trying to edge a hint of revulsion in his voice. "Aww come on, she's not even conscious! If I came all the way down here just to stare at a naked body then I could have just stayed in the truck."

Hazim rushed over to May. He picked up one of her arms. "But look at her! Asian, strong arms. Good teeth in there."

"Yeah but I didn't come here for a fixer-upper." Clint replied. He stood from his couch and leaned on the door with his arms crossed. He had already spied out the girl curled into the corner. She was sitting on the floor with her knees up to her face and her arms hugging her calves. She, too, was bare naked. He assumed she must be Skye.

"Ok, so she is a bit of a fixer, I'll grant you that." The man replied. "I'll give her half what you usually pay. You said what, $100,000? That's American dollars isn't it?"

Clint feigned ignorance of what he prattled on about. He focused his attention of Skye. He approached her cautiously. He had to play this right. So much was riding on this deal.

"That one?" Hazim said.

Clint continued to ignore him. He grabbed a fistful of Skye's hair and dragged her to her feet. She covered herself with her hands. Her almond shaped eyes held nothing but fear of him. That was exactly what Clint needed. Roughly he grabbed her by the chin and forced her jaw to open. She screamed against him. Modesty gone now, she struck out with a balled fist and caught him in the side of the head. He could have dodged it but didn't.

Hazim started forward. With an open palm, he cracked Skye sideways and she dropped back to the wood floor. She sobbed into the unforgiving wood.

Clint staggered back. He pulled out his handkerchief and shook it open before holding it to his temple. He pretended to appear shaken by the violence but smiled despite it all.

"Oh, she is a feisty one!"

"She is normally the more cooperative one." Hazim said.

Clint waved him off. His hands were shaking. He never really thought how hard it was to do that after years of making his hinds not do just that. "It's all right. I like a girl with a little spunk still in her. Goes for a good price, if you know what I mean. Not all men want a tame one."

Hazim's gnarled teeth peeked from his sunburned lips. "Yes, I do know."

"I'll take that one." Clint said, indicating Skye. "I can cut her eyes up a bit. Angle them out. That thing," he said indicating May, "I don't know that she's worth the work I've got to put into her. Healthcare, these days? I'm better off finding a good veterinarian."

Hazim was disappointed about the sudden switch. He looked hard at both women. Clint watched the cogs turning in his mind as he tried to come up with a reply to the offer.

"You said men like spunk more?"

Here it came.

Clint nodded just a little. "I did say that, didn't I?"

"Means they pay more for that, doesn't it?"

Clint pulled his handkerchief from beside his eye. "I guess I should have kept my mouth shut, huh?"

"I like this one." Hazim said, indicating Skye. "Nice skin, you know. What I say, you pay $200,000."

Clint laughed. He indicated that the niqab men should follow him into the hall. "Yeah, for that price I'll stick to Miguel's ugly sister."

"One-fifty then?"

The archer put a hand on his hidden men and moved them away from the doorway. They obeyed. He knew he had a hook in Hazim now. There was no way he wasn't leaving this base with the two.

"One-fifty?" Clint parroted.

The gnarled smile. "Good for that price."

Clint twisted his face while he debated. He stepped over to where Skye remained on the floor sobbing. Then he looked over at May.

"Ok," he said after the internal battle. "here is what I propose. I will give you one-hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars American and I get both of them. One fifty for the one in good condition and I'll take my chances that this one isn't going to die on me before Bali. If she does, then the body dump is on me. How does that sound?"

Hazim looked at his options, but, given an hour ago, he had planned to shoot them both and dump them in the desert. Now he had someone willing to give him money for the useless bodies he was inclined to agree.

"One provision." Hazim said. He pointed a finger toward Alaina. "I get a turn with this one."

Clint was not planning to stay around this place long enough for Hazim to catch Alaina's herpes. He looked over at Alaina. "I told you, you set your own prices."

Alaina curled her lip seductively and bounced on her toes. "Oh, I think he's a doll!" She said and Clint knew she meant it. Sometimes the SHIELD agent could swear women were absolutely crazy. Without waiting for his permission, Alaina jumped into Hazim's arms and buried his rotund face in her ruby lips.

Swallowing bile for the second time, Clint struck out a hand for Hazim to shake. "I have fifty in cash now. I will give you this," Clint handed over the unmarked SHIELD black card. "Call the number and have the remainder transferred to the account of your choice. And don't get greedy now. I am calling my contact to have the specific amount set aside. I want to get these two squared away myself."

As Hazim took the card from one hand, Clint reached beneath Alaina's leg to steal the ring of keys with the other. With the card, cash, and Alaina in hand, Hazim headed out of the cell block to his private room.

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Coming next: Agent Barton, Master Spy

please review!


	5. A BRIEF ASIDE: SHIELD MISSION FILE

A/N: So this is not a new chapter (but Chapter Three is, so please do enjoy that) but this is Clint Barton's "SHIELD Background" according to my story canon. For those who wished a little of his agent history without reading the entirety of my series, this should suffice to catch you up

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**A Brief Aside: The SHIELD Mission File of Agent Barton**

**Clint Barton aka "Hawkeye" aka Jeremy Renner aka Benedict Mackelmore (but only by Tony Stark)**

**General Background:** Clint Barton is a top secret agent that is currently employed by SHIELD under the faction of the Avengers Initiative. His SHIELD clearance level is some grey zone between Level 6 and Level 7. His main weapon of choice is the bow (Director Fury often remarks how many bullets he has saved SHIELD over time) though he is also proficient with rifles, handguns, and knives. He is a skilled hand-to-hand combatant.

**Story Arc Background:** Now this is where I have my own fun with Barton. His history progresses as thus: Clint was recruited for SHIELD in the days before the Helicarrier was in service and most work was done on the ground in the field. His recruiter was Agent Phil Coulson, who picked Barton up one Thursday morning after Clint was given a reprieve from jail time for attempting a bank job. Accepting Phil's offer to join SHIELD was a decision of opportunity. He had nowhere else to go.

Clint wasn't cut out for the Operations Academy and often got into fights with either his senior commanders or competitive peers. One such peer was Agent Grant Ward. They developed a rivalry that time will not soon heal. Seeing Clint's potential, Phil decided to accept Clint on as his personal agent-in-training and pulled him from the Operations Academy. After a punishing stint at the SHIELD field office in Norway, Clint was stationed with Coulson in the Iraqi War. Clint soon proved his efficiency as a team leader (and his aversion to being anything but in control) and was granted a four man squad of his own to run. Dubbed the "Omega" squad they ran various high level operations throughout Clint's five year stay in Iraq and the surrounding areas. After this time, he was granted full Agent status and promoted to security level five.

During his time in the desert, Clint was occasionally assigned solo missions with Natasha Romanova. A newly defected agent from the Red Room initiative, Clint's prowess for rooting out traitors was put to the test by accepting many missions beside Natasha. Accepting her loyalty, they soon became friends.

When Tony Stark was reported kidnapped by the Ten Rings, a terrorist organization Clint and Natasha had been attempting to take down, Clint's Omega Squad was ordered in to find Stark's location. During that Time, Natasha fell off the grid. She resurfaced in Budapest before Clint's team was able to track down Stark's precise location, and fearing Natasha's defection, Coulson sent Barton to bring her back to SHIELD. The decision nearly ended in Clint's death.

Natasha, having rejoined with her old friends in the Red Room had taken out an influential contract killing. Clint was able to stop her by allowing her to capture him instead. For three days she tortured him in a lone room. After shooting him, pinning his hands with syringes to desensitize his bow fingers, and torturing him for three days, Clint developed his long-since held fear of syringes and nervous habit of picking at his fingertips.

Despite the torture, Clint won Natasha over by refusing to kill her when given the opportunity. Coulson located them, and with Clint's hearty instruction Natasha was given a second chance with SHIELD.

After Tony Stark was recovered, word reached SHIELD that an undercover movement known as Blackstone had infiltrated the Phase 2 operations at the Tesseract headquarters, Clint was sent in to assess the situation. While he was said to be babysitting the tesseract and Selvig's team, he spent the majority of his time tracking down rogue agents and adding them to what became known as the "Blackstone List". During his time it was discovered that the agents involved were stationed in all factions of SHIELD's infrastructure. Director Fury issued the kill order on the Blackstone agents, and Clint was assigned to take the agents out discretely. He was in the middle of finishing his mission at headquarters when the Tesseract activated.

Under Loki's influence, declassified case files displayed a list of Operatives involved in Blackstone and those killed by Clint Barton directly in the SHIELD Helicarrier attack. The lists were concurrently matching. As a resultant combination of Loki's influence, a concussion suffered from a fight with Agent Romanova, and breaching a plate glass window, Clint suffered periodic memory loss. Knowledge of his involvement with Blackstone was forgotten and for SHIELD security reasons it was decided not to reveal the details.

Upon returning from his SHIELD ordered medical eval on the Helicarrier, Clint was informed of Coulson's death by Steve Rogers. Though already suffering the early signs of psychological instability from the conditions mentioned above, active duty was not immediately revoked. For sensitivity reasons, Clint Barton was not permitted to attend the funerals of the SHIELD operatives killed during the Helicarrier attack.

Clint was assigned a mission immediately after the New York attack. He was hired as an IMF analyst under the pseudonym William Brandt and meant to shadow the corporation to validate potential leaks in security protocols. Tony Stark reportedly attempted to join but was denied access to case files due to his "inability to perform undercover work". During that undercover mission, Agent Barton was thrown into contact with Agent Ethan Hunt. Officially blacklisted on IMF channels and out of contact with his SHIELD handlers, Clint survived the mission with the deposed IMF agents and return to SHIELD headquarters in Los Angeles.

Not wanting to stay still long, Clint Barton returned to field duty only a day after his IMF mission. The new details required a trip to Mexico to track down the remaining high grade targets from the IMF mission. Alone, Barton was taken into custody by the superior man power he faced by rushing into the field without back up. Attempting to circumvent his capture, He placed a desperate call to Tony Stark, only to be rejected. The call proved to be near fatal. Recognizing Barton's status as a gambit against Stark, he was held for questioning and suffered a broken femur. After escaping the compound, Agent Barton's reckless behavior was taken into consideration by Director Fury. After a long-drawn decision, Barton was assigned permanent status as an Avenger with Agent Romanova (now agent Romanov) and given a two month leave of absence to recover.

Towards the end of his leave, Barton was granted a small assignment to pilot Tony Stark from the Helicarrier of the Antarctic coast to an international Defense summit in Amsterdam. Desperate to get out, Barton agreed to pilot. Over the coast of Africa, the plane was shot down by unknown rogue fighters and crashed into the African coast. SHIELD has no permanent records on the happenings within the plane, but following the rescue of Stark and Clint, a permanent bond was observed between the pair.

The defense summit was reassigned while Barton and Stark recovered from injuries sustained. It was during this attack Barton's right tenth rib was removed due to extensive damage and the right ninth was shortened. A wedge shaped scare was surgically closed in her ear at a later date. The day before the defense summit, the Avengers were found to be under siege by a faction of resurfaced HYDRA agents (after a night at a bar, which has been redacted from most ongoing SHIELD records). During the attack, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Thor were taken to Manhattan General after Clint Barton orchestrated their rescue by working in tandem with the Hulk. SHIELD records indicate a new friendship between the Hulk and Clint Barton.

After a second surgery to repair damage done during the rescue of the other Avengers, the Defense Summit was again reset, it was decided that HYDRA's influence was directly related to the Africa plane crash. Stepping up security measures, Clint Barton was assigned to the sewers beneath the Department of Defense with Thor as back up to patrol the area. Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers, and Natasha Romanov were assigned to attend the meeting directly.

SHIELD records reveal a loss of fifty-three agents in total from the ensuing attack by a Loki-led HYDRA faction. As suspected, the sewers beneath the defense building were overrun and Clint Barton was left to defend the SHIELD teams alone, Thor having fallen into the phenomenon known only as Odinsleep. A Vibranium mine was discovered beneath the city of Manhattan, operated by the Department of Defense, and was in the end Loki's game plan. In order to spread mass panic, the Defense building was destroyed with charges left by HYDRA agents. The Avengers team barely evacuated in time.

While the Avengers team secured the Vibranium mine, Clint Barton attacked Loki directly. Signs existed of an intense fight, though it was witnessed by none but Clint Barton. When the Avengers did rejoin Barton, Natasha Romanov mistakenly fired a shot on the Agent that caused severe brain trauma. Before medical aid could be given, Loki, a massive wolf, Thor, and Barton were taken presumably to Asgard.

After being declared dead for two months following his disappearance, Clint Barton returned having been healed of a grievous head wound by the advanced Asgardian healing techniques. He returned to Earth with an alien bow reportedly made by the same artist who fashioned Mjlonir.

Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov were granted a two-week leave after Clint Barton's return. During that time they took out a flight plan to Alaska for field training. An encounter with a bear caused SHIELD officials to extend their leave an additional three weeks.

Agent's Barton and Romanov were separated for three months following their leave of absence for individual missions all over the European and South American continent. After a joint mission with the Avengers returning from South America, Clint signed out a sick leave for eight days, stating influenza and gunshot wound. Further questions were not asked at that time.

Another series of missions were issued to both Agents until in late August they were required for a joint mission in Miami. Due to their close proximity, the Avengers joined though they remained observational members only. After the completion of the mission, and returning to New York, Clint Barton was called back to Asgard as an unofficial emissary to lead the investigation in a friend's disappearance. During his few days of absence, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner joined Dr. Selvig and Jane Foster's lab in Memphis where they proved the Foster Theory of interdimensional travel.

Clint Barton did not return back to Earth with the Avengers for three weeks. During that time he was witnessed to be in possession of a new pet (canid) he described as a malamute. SHIELD genetics indicate the dog is of wolf origin and not of any earthly genetic sequence. His name is Arrow.

After returning to Earth, Clint Barton was assigned to the Egypt field office with the other Avengers, save Thor who remained at this time on Asgard. While on a mission in the desert with Rogers and Stark, Clint's medical records suddenly alter. According to new accounts, Agent Barton has been deaf since the spring of 2002 or 2005. This oversight was brought to Director Fury's attention due to the official "scrub-out" policy for all non-fully-functional agents. A source of the oversight was traced to the Level Seven office of Phil Coulson. Agent Ward was said to have undertaken the office as executioner though how Clint Barton survived the interaction is unknown. The Scrub-out policy was redacted in Agent Barton's case and he was allowed to live.

Functioning with 80% hearing loss, Agent Barton was given a medical implant designed by Dr. Banner and Tony Stark. After the medical implant, Clint was assigned to another mission in Egypt to trail after the kidnapping of four SHIELD agents from the Level 7 office.

SHIELD history ends here…

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Now that was a massive undertaking. Please, continue to enjoy.


	6. Chapter 4

a/n:For those of you looking for Clint's case history, just check out his Mission File I've posted. I like the idea that all of Jeremy Renner's spy roles have always been as an undercover "Clint Barton" so I've incorporated Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Hurt Locker as part of his background history in my stories. One day I will also describe the time he posed as a professional baseball star and ran a breakfast stand while working as a SHIELD agent undercover as a New York detective (the basis of the storyline of The Unusual).

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**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

** Chapter 4**

When the coast was clear, Clint pushed the cell door shut on himself, the two men, May and Skye. He used the cell key to lock the door from the inside. The first thing he had to do was get the information he needed from Skye before he even tried to get her out.

"Skye?" Clint said. He approached her cautiously, staying low. The very sound of her name, however, drew her face from her arm.

"What?" she whispered through her snot and tears.

"Agent Skye." Clint repeated, glancing around. His initial sweep didn't pick up listening devices or video monitors but that didn't mean they weren't still around. "I'm Agent Barton. I'm here to get you out. Nod, if you understand me."

Her jaw was open, her eyes wide and unbelieving. Slowly she nodded.

"Are they monitoring you?"

She was the comm and tech specialist, that's what Fitz and Simmons said. She would be the one to know.

"Nah—" she swallowed. Her throat was tight. "No. They aren't."

"Good." Clint stood. He went to one of the niqab men and pulled open the black garment. Strapped to the man's chest was a spare niqab. He went to the other and took the spare off of him as well before closing their garments up again. He returned to Skye with them in his hands.

"Here," he said. "Get dressed. Put one on you and one on May. Leave off her veil, understand me? I need you to do this, so I can find the others. Do you know where they are?"

She was still in shock. She could hardly sit up on her own, so Clint knelt down and began to work the drape open himself. He fed her arms into the sleeves and pulled it over her head and down her body. He gently gathered her hair in his palm and pulled it out from beneath her collar.

"Skye, I need you to help _the Cavalry_. That is your job now. I need to find Ward and Coulson. Do that for me?"

Skye looked down at the simple black cloth and then back to Clint's face. Her confusion was endearing in a way. After a time, her small voice agreed. She took the other burqa from him, and crawled her way to Melinda.

Clint motioned to the men. He unlocked the cell door and checked the hallway. Thus far, Hazim had not returned and neither had anyone else.

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:(:):(:):

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Coulson was surprised how easily he could fall asleep, even in the state he was in. His head would loll forward, his eyelids would slide shut, and then the world would just disappear. He lost track of time easier now that he couldn't reach the walls. He had been scratching a time chart in the corner. But now, in this dark place underground, nothing was for certain. He knew he was reaching the point of no return. His body wanted to just give out. He was starving, thirsty, filthy. He just wanted out and all he could think of was how he had failed everyone.

The door forced open under the jarring of a key. Coulson tried to put on his brave face. Usually the men didn't come back this soon. Maybe this was the time. It was all going to end soon. He invited death to come right in.

The chains rattled beside him as Ward turned to see what was going on. His bleeding feet left rivulets on the floor beneath him. The depression under his eye was swollen again. Someone must have hit him.

When the door opened, the overhead light was flicked on. The two agents squinted through the intrusion to watch as two black-clad figures were shoved into the cell. A third entered behind them and the door was shut and locked.

"Coulson!" a voice exclaimed.

Phil gasped as a pair of arms wrapped around his waist and pushed him up. He groaned and hissed. One hand pulled free and worked the lock over Phil's hands. The pain was blinding. He tried to see who could possibly have him, but all he caught was the back of an unfamiliar head. The two occupants in the corner were dressed in burqas and niqabs.

"Oh my God." Ward exclaimed. "Barton! Oh my God, Barton!"

Phil's wrists came free. Clint reached up and grabbed them before they could fall at Coulson's side. With impeccable strength and control, he slowly lowered Coulson against his own body to the ground. Clint kept Phil's arms stretched above his head until the adjusted to the weightlessness.

"Take it easy." Clint told him. "Don't move too fast and just lay there until I get Ward down, got me?"

Coulson wanted desperately to say something, even to look into Clint's face and convince himself it was all real but Clint was already gone over to Ward. In a similar manner, Clint supported Ward's weight one handed while unlocking the shackles. He lowered Ward to the floor. With both men down, Clint returned to his hostages. He stripped them down one by one. Each had their hands duck taped into a fist with the live grenade in their hands. In their mouth was a second cherry grenade. It was enough to keep them both silent the entire trip through the compound.

"You know those are remote pressure triggers?" Clint told them. Both men knew already not to shake their heads in assertion, otherwise the bombs were liable to go off from the friction of bouncing between their teeth.

"Nobody swallowed it?" Clint translated their terrified looks as affirmatives. "Good. Sit and don't move. Keep doing what you're told and I'll switch off the bombs with my remote trigger. Understood?" Clint patted the pocked of his suit jacket. There was nothing in that pocket, but they didn't need to know that. He was lucky that this outfit of men, pretending to be extremists, were nothing more that unhappy anarchists that went to the desert and formed a club. Had these men been true loyalists to a cause, they may have ignored their own self-preservation and blown Clint up a long time ago. How they were going to do that with dummy bombs in their mouths, Clint wasn't sure, but they would have at least tried.

Clint returned to Coulson first. He aired out the large burqa and as Coulson's hands were still stretched over his head, he fed his arms into it and pulled the fabric down the length of his old CO's body.

"Hawk?" Coulson whispered.

Clint patted his good shoulder carefully. "Later, boss, I don't have much time to get you out."

He left Coulson to get to Ward. "Don't you go telling anyone at operations that I had to dress you." Clint told the man with a smirk on his face.

"Burqas?" Ward questioned.

"I need them to match your veils. Wouldn't want you to go into public with that ugly face of yours." Clint replied. He tenderly grabbed Ward's arms and eased them down at the agent's sides.

"Now look, you two," Clint said. "I need you walking out of here. Understand? This isn't going to work unless you walk out of here. Ward, I'm getting those shoes on your feet so get ready for it."

"Did you get my size?" Ward smirked back.

"Yeah, a perfect sized jerk-head in a variety of sandy colors, makes, and models." Clint replied. He helped to prop Ward against a wall and effortlessly tied the nabiq into position. Next, he tackled the shoes. They were large, at least size twelves. Clint anticipated running into a broken foot, or worse. With the state of Ward, he definitely received the "or worse" end.

Clint didn't have time to assess the damage now. He shoved the shoes onto Ward's feet and lightly tied them in place. It was impossible to see Ward's face behind the mask.

Clint situated his two hostages. With their backs turned to the door, he shackled them to the ceiling. They weren't an exact match for Coulson and Ward's height and weight but, hopefully, it would pass off if somebody doesn't look too close. All they needed was a head start.

Clint returned to Coulson.

"Ok, sir. You've got a dislocated arm?"

"Clint?"

"It's me, sir." Clint said with finality. The absolute relief in Coulson's face was heart wrenching. "Sir, I need to set this arm if I can. How long has it been like this?"

Coulson closed his eyes. He had to find some reserve strength somewhere. They were getting out of this. Clint Barton was getting them out. When he opened his eyes he was ready to go. "Long."

"Too long?"

"Too long to set it now." Coulson answered.

"Can you lower your arms to your sides?"

As Clint helped Coulson sit up and got his shoes and nabiq situated, Ward struggled to stand. He didn't protest, but there was a lot of grunting coming from beneath his veil. Clint hooked his arm around Coulson's waist and together they stood. Clint looked at Ward who pushed off the wall. He staggered, almost falling flat if Clint didn't throw out his other arm to catch him. Coulson pulled away and stood, albeit shakily on his own.

"All right, Ward, I'll help you for a minute, but then you're on your own. You've got to walk. Understand? You have to." Clint ordered. With a nod to Coulson, Clint led them to the door. He keyed the lock, pulled the cell open, and stepped out.

Clint closed the cell door behind them, locked it tight, and left Coulson and Ward in the hall. He pushed open Skye and May's cell. True to her word, Skye had dressed May. Clint walked over to her.

"Look, Skye. Those two people in the hall are Ward and Coulson. Don't say anything, understand? Not a word!" Skye bit into her lip. The tears were pouring down her face again.

"That's fine, go ahead and cry it out. It actually helps our case this time. I'm taking Melinda. You go stand beside them while I carry her out."

Skye needed little more encouragement than that. As she left him, Clint grabbed Melinda as carefully as possible and lifted her over his shoulder. With _the Calvary_ in tow, Skye and the others on foot, Clint marched his troop back through the halls. So what if SHIELD's bank account was a few hundred thousand lighter? They could just follow the bank money trail and recoup their losses in no time.

"Mr. Jimmy Dean, indeed!" Hazim said loudly.

Clint spun in a circle to locate the source of the voice. He propped May on a table in a fashion that looked haphazard. He still had an image to uphold after all.

Clint grinned at him. "That's me. Didn't get greedy with my cash, did you?"

Hazim gave him a devilish glare. "Aw, now I may have miscalculated some!"

Clint and he laughed in tandem. The archer looked into the room behind Hazim where Alaina was standing on the man's bed. She was hardly clothed as she slipped a few stacks of Clint's and now Hazim's cash into a hidden seam of her daisy dukes. So maybe the girl wasn't as crazy as he thought.

"Deal done?" Clint asked. He shook Hazim's hand prodigiously. With a slight of hand, he also returned the stolen key ring to the man's jacket pocket.

"Pleasure doing business. Now, if you do find yourself in a position for another transaction," Clint produced a slip of paper from seemingly nowhere. It was a business card with nothing written on it but a phone number. "Do get in touch."

Hazim agreed, shoved Clint through the door, and returned to Alaina's ministrations. Clint went back to Melinda, hoisted her back onto his shoulder, and the company was gone before Miguel returned with his ugly sister.

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Coming next: Next time: The Beast in the Desert

please review!


	7. Chapter 5

a/n: Here's the next installment!

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**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

** Chapter 5  
**

The heat in the cab was hard to overcome, despite the windows being cranked open as much as the corroded gears allowed. Clint had already gone through the motions of stripping out of his suit jacket. He loosened his tie, with one hand steadying the wheel, and it now lay on the seat between himself and Skye. Without asking, she helped him pull out of the sleeves on his button down dress shirt. The sweat had already plastered it to his body. Perspiration still collected in the crease between his shoulders.

He laid May, Ward, and Coulson in the bed of the truck. Clint had the option of fitting one, maybe two in the cab between himself and Skye, but given their poor condition, he preferred to keep them as flat as possible. They were going to need rest, especially with the hike back to camp still ahead of them. All of them were worse off than he surmised would be the case. If he allowed himself to consider the other alternative, that all of them were dead, then he had to admit they made out fair.

Not for the first time, Clint reached forward and tapped the gas gauge. It had a tendency to stick so he was attributing the current rating of empty to that. He knew starting out that getting all the way back to base wasn't going to happen. But he had to try and get close. Doubling back and forth in the desert, hitting the main road and turning off into the desert flats did nothing to improve their fuel situation. He wanted to be positive, absolutely positive, that no one was going to follow them.

"Thank you."

Clint glanced at the girl beside him. Her legs were under her chin and her back was against the door. She'd been staring at him the entire three hour drive without saying so much as a word.

"You're welcome." Clint said.

"Are you Hawkeye?"

He grinned a little, wondering if Coulson spoke about his favorite pain-in-the-butt with his new team. "Yeah, that's my call name."

"Like Avenger, Hawkeye."

He looked at her a little longer, rooted around on the floorboards for another water bottle and handed it to her. That was his job: Keep driving, hydrate the passengers.

"Drink the rest of that. And I am part of the Avengers Initiative, if that's what you mean, so yeah."

"And you just walked in there with a pocketful of cash, and got us out. That's it."

_Ah ha,_ Clint thought. That was what her hang up was. It seemed too easy. When she put it in those terms it sounded simple. Anticlimactic, almost.

"You just talked to that guy and he agreed to let you just walk out the door with us, no questions asked. No badge, no gun—arrow—nothing. You just walked us out." She went on.

"Is that all you've been thinking about this whole time?" Clint asked.

"It just doesn't make sense. If that was all they had to do, why didn't SHIELD do that before . . . before—" Her voice hitched in her throat. She stopped looking at him and instead concentrated on the desert rolling in the distance.

"It wasn't easy."

"Sure sounded easy."

"If it was then I wasted a lot of time coming here to do it myself." Clint told her. He didn't mean his voice to come out as irate as it did, but the heat was getting to him. And the gas. And the fact that at any point, their 40MPH truck could be overtaken by an entire compound of angry men he just pulled an epic con on.

"I'm sorry." She said after a time.

Clint sighed. He righted himself in the vibrating bucket seat and tried to relax into the threadbare cushion. "It's not your fault. It's been a long mission for everyone. Me included. I wasn't brought in until after they sent in the second team to retrieve you."

"Second team?" Her attention returned to him.

Clint figured there was no reason to keep the truth from her, and he'd had a run of honesty lately. Con excluded, that is. "Yeah, the first team responded to the distress call from your technicians, Fitz and Simmons?"

She nodded, her eyes watered again at the realization they were all right.

"The field team arrived within the day and set up a mobile operations base. Hazim, your captor, moved your location at least seven times that we recorded. Our base commander, Hatcher, sent out a scout team of seven agents to track down your location. None of them ever came back. Egypt was too hot to continue operations there, and they kept moving you, so the outpost packed up and moved across the Libyan border. So far we've been invited, but we'll see how long that holds out. Field nailed your location through an IR feed from one of SHIELD's satellites. They decided to hit Hazim with a head on full extraction team. Guess how many agents made it out of that one?"

"I don't know." She said quietly, dreading the answer.

"One. He came back missing most of his fingers and half his face melted off. After that, it was decided our friend Hazim was too hot to hit head on with standard personnel."

"So they called you in." She guessed.

"I was brought on base in day seven of your captivity. You've been officially out of SHIELD hands for the past thirty seven days, including today that is. I tracked your movement through the desert from one rat hole after another till Hazim set up what I hoped was a semi-permanent residency. I finally found the compound seven days ago. I had no clue whether you were actually there or not, but I was running out of time. So I decided it was better to act now. I set up sort of a reputation for myself in the local town about thirty miles south of here. They know me as a sex trader. I buy up women to sell across the country borders. So when I got to the compound-"

"You told them you were there to buy us." She guessed.

Clint shook his head. "No, I let them suggest that. I didn't know what I was walking in to. I just got a tip from the prostitute I befriended after kidnapping a couple compound guards this morning. I needed a way to get Coulson and Ward around without people getting suspicious."

"So you dressed the guards in the veils."

"And switched them in Coulson's cell." Clint ended. He looked over to see how the news was sinking in. "Yeah, so it was not as easy as you think. A place like that you can't just barrel into, guns blazing, Tony Stark style. You have to spy your way in. We got out lucky...real lucky. There are a thousand other ways that could have gone down."

She quieted. She was still staring at him, as if trying to understand how this unassuming, normal (if not hulky) man could have done so much just for them. Then she remembered a familiar scene, one of the only introductions she'd ever had with Coulson's other half of life.

"Are you the Bagel Thursday guy?"

Despite himself, the heat, the worry over being overtaken, Clint laughed. "Yeah, why? Does he still do that?"

She smiled. She looked cute when she smiled, he thought.

"Every Thursday, no matter where we are. It's like this homing beacon he has and, all of a sudden, it's all hands on deck, Coulson needs a bagel."

Clint continued to giggle to himself. He cast a glance in the rearview mirror to see if Coulson was listening in. it was hard to tell. From where he'd placed his mentor, all Clint could see were his borrowed black shoes.

"I wrote that program for him."

Clint rolled the hardly drank water toward her again. "I said to finish that up. Drink it slow, but all of it." She picked it up and began sipping as instructed. "What program did you write?"

"The one to change your file. Your personnel file with the medical records in it."

He knew someone had tampered with his personnel file some time back. Actually, he knew that person was Coulson, but, in order to do a lot of the finer integration work, he wasn't surprised that his mentor had an accomplice. Changing Clint's personnel file had become a paramount part of his continued existence. He had gone deaf very suddenly on a mission and risked SHIELD pulling the cord on his agency work. Coulson stepped in and practically rewrote Clint's history to make it seem as if he was still on active duty with his physical impairment since the early 2000s. The change literally saved his life. After the change in his personnel file, Clint had received an anonymous e-mail alerting him to the alterations. At the end of the e-mail was a signature written in code. It didn't take Tony Stark to figure out that the signature was from Phil. It was the first indication to the Avengers that their good friend was alive.

"I guess I owed you one then." Clint told her.

"No, after all that I don't think so. Can I ask you something? Are you really deaf? Like, its not just some ploy or something?"

He got that question a lot lately. Especially after the implantation. It was difficult to cover up the fact that he had undergone brain surgery. He extracted one of his ear pieces and passed it over to her. He figured with her credentials as a tech specialist, she'd be able to handle it without dropping it out the window.

"And this links in with the implant?" She asked.

Clint held up a finger. He removed the implant in his left ear and placed it temporarily in his right ear. "Sorry, wind is strong from the window and you have my other hearing aid so I can't hear you. What did you say?"

"You really are deaf." Her surprise was difficult to hide.

"No, I just like to wear them for the fashion statement."

She inspected the work of the device. Almost imperceptibly on the long end was the Stark seal. "What's it like?" She asked. She wasn't sure why. Maybe she just missed having a conversation for once.

"Being deaf?"

She nodded.

"Weird. You can't hear yourself talk, which makes it hard to control your volume or what your voice sounds like. Tony says its like I'm talking with marbles in my mouth if I don't have my hearing aids in for a couple days. I learned sign language just in case I should ever need it. We worked out a sign system for the few of us. Keeps me on track. Then there's my wol-dog. He's been trained as a search and rescue and a service dog. If I miss something he picks it up. Like cell phone calls and alarms and things."

She handed it back to him and watched as he re-situated them in their proper positions. As small as they were, it was impossible to see them unless she really got close to him.

"I had tinnitus for four weeks after the assault. After that went away, there was just...nothing. I can hear Tony's TV, but only with the volume at one hundred with the external surround sound going. That pretty much clears the top two floors of Stark Tower. I can hear fire engines, loud alarms, things like that but they have to be really loud. JARVIS built in a light sensor into my room for an alarm clock. I wake up with the sunlight. If that doesn't do it, the bed vibrates and I usually get up. Most of those I never really have to use since I got my dog. He wakes me up at five sharp. I lip read now even though I can hear with the aids in."

"Do they ever not work? Like on a mission or something?"

Clint shrugged. "The biggest problem is I've already lost one of my senses. If I lose another one, like my sight, then I'm going to have serious issues. That's one of the reasons I learned sign language. As far as having hearing aid issues, I haven't had a problem yet. Then again, most of the time, I'm out in the field with Tony or Banner. Either of them could fix it. "

"Iron Man and the Hulk." She said.

Clint smiled. "I don't call Tony that. His ego would explode."

"What about the Hulk?"

"I call him whatever he wants. He's OK with the name, I think. At least he's never complained about it. We get along pretty good together."

The engine to the lugging Toyota coughed and sputtered. Clint cursed under his breath as he tried to drop the lugging truck into a lower gear. They were hardly making it over the sand hills at their current pace as it was. The field base remained another hour out, at least. On foot that amounted to a three hour hike. The truck just made the crest of the hill before rolling down the other side. Clint pressed the gas, trying to steal whatever fumes he had left to propel them even a little bit farther. Eventually, they rolled to a stop and the beast was dead.

Clint slammed a palm against the steering wheel. "Hell." He cursed.

"What just happened?" Skye asked, looking around the area through the windows. As far as she could tell, there was no potential SHIELD base in sight.

Clint threw a foot into his door to jar it open. The engine was smoking and out of fuel all at the same time. He knew they didn't have much left to go on, but he hoped that they could have made it. It was a pipe dream. Into the cab he told Skye, "Finish up that water like I told you. We need to hike."

"Hike?!" she exclaimed.

"Yeah, hike."

He reached inside and fished another couple bottles from the floor panels. He'd packed seven, but two fell through one of the rusted holes in the floorboards sometime before he infiltrated the base. With the liquid in hand he went to the back of the truck to rifle through his duffel bag and check on the rest of the passengers.

"Everyone still intact?" He asked. He lifted the hitch on the tailgate and dropped it down to aid his climbing in. May was still sitting against the sidewall, unconscious. He felt beneath the protective shade of her visor with a hand. Her face was warm, but not overtly so.

"Who taught you to drive? A bumper car clown?" Coulson joked.

Clint held out one of the clear water bottles to him. "Yeah and his name was Bronzo. He had a dancing Chihuahua he called Taco and a flying monkey too."

Coulson smiled as he took the bottle and undid the cap one handed. Between Ward and him, they'd fashioned a sling out of a veil which now kept his arm close to his chest. Clint didn't even want to attempt putting the arm back into its socket after it had been out so long. More likely than not, the muscles were so tense that Clint could try all afternoon to reset it and get them nowhere.

"Hey, I never had a Chihuahua." Coulson pointed out.

"Yeah, and you're the one who taught me to drive, so stop complaining about it." Clint replied. He stooped down to grab his duffel from beside Ward. From inside, he pulled out a pair of track pants. He wasn't about to trudge across the desert in his dress clothes. At the bottom of the bag he'd packed a trauma kit. This, he pulled out and gave to Ward.

"There's some cotton batting and hemostatic packs in there to get your feet patched before we start walking. Skye's too short to carry you, I need to carry May, and Coulson's one-armed with, I bet, at least six broken ribs. So you need to be able to walk at least some of the way on your own."

Ward accepted the trauma kit with little more than a nod. Clint at least expected a wise crack, but that was something he could do without. With track pants in hand Clint vaulted over the side of the truck to strip down. Skye had come out on the opposite side to stand near Ward.

"How far are we?" Coulson asked.

Clint looked up, gauging the position of the sun. He'd started out early, reached the base by nine in the morning. Now, three hours later, it was just after noon nearing one. "If we keep a good pace, I can get us in by four. We'll be there before night."

Clint half folded his pants and left them over the side of the truck. He was traveling light, which meant the suit was staying behind with the puke green Toyota. He climbed into the bed again and, as Ward began wrapping his left foot, Clint rooted around the trauma bag to come up with the emergency fluid line he'd packed. He grabbed the catheter with hub, a role of tape and alcohol prep pad.

"Skye?" Clint called, indicating for her to climb up beside him.

She approached. He sat her on the side of the truck bed and placed the fluid bag in her hand. He went back to the trauma bag and grabbed a syringe.

"Hawk?" Coulson said.

Clint smiled. He couldn't resist the urge to show off, just a little, in front of the man who'd been like a father his entire adult life.

"Yeah?" Clint asked.

"Not that I want to stop you or anything, but do you know what you're holding?"

Clint pulled the syringe cap off, jabbed the needle into the fluid bag and drew himself a catheter flush. With the cap sticking in the side of his mouth, Clint said. "Yeah."

"That's a syringe."

"Very observant." Clint twisted the catheter open and analyzed the veins on May's right hand. Then the left. Neither was good enough for him to feel confident getting a line in. He opened the crook of her arm and flicked the skin a few times before prepping it with the alcohol pad.

"But, Clint, that's a needle."

Clint extracted the catheter from the cover and, with precision, slid it right on target into May's vein. He grabbed the catheter hub and twisted the end in place before he began to tape it down.

"Yeah, it's a needle." Clint said.

Using the prepped needle, Clint flushed the fluid through the catheter. The clear fluid entered smoothly without puffing up her skin. It seemed his impeccable aim included hitting veins with catheters too. With the strips of tape he pre-ripped, Clint secured the catheter in place.

"Clint you just gave her an IV line."

Clint attached the fluid line to the port on the catheter hub and opened the line. He pushed Skye's hand up a little higher as she created the gravity necessary for the fluid to flow down. Clint turned his attention to a thoroughly proud, and confused, Phil Coulson. He felt like an absolute champion.

"Yes, I did. I handle needles now."

"When did that start happening?!"

Clint shrugged as if him handling the one absolute terror in his life was nothing at all. "Bruce taught me one day. I went for a recertification on my CPR techniques and he came along. Then we stayed after for an advanced trauma course."

Phil's mouth would have hit the truck bed if it could. "You did a COURSE? Like a class."

"Yes, I did a class. And if you don't believe me, I have witnesses and a certificate. And," he indicated his perfect catheter. "apparently I even had the ability to learn something."

Ward and Skye listened to the exchange like a set of outsiders watching as a married couple bickered. Actually, it was more like a prodigal son proving his worth to a father who always knew he was priceless. The pride on Coulson's face was difficult to surpass. His heart could seize and kill him now, and he would die with a smile on his face.

"Well, you went to the Academy didn't you?" Skye interrupted them.

Ward, Clint, and Coulson all answered a resounding "No" at the same time.

Skye held her hands up. "Whoa, OK, apparently I was wrong."

"I was field op trained." Clint explained.

"And his officer training was under me. Like Ward is your supervising Officer, I was Barton's." Phil said. "He didn't exactly gel in the academy."

Ward snorted He was finishing his second foot, packing enough gauze and cotton between him and the oversized shoes to make walking feel like he was dancing on pillows. "That's a laugh. You never even finished high school."

"Grade school." Clint corrected, as if it helped his case. "Get your facts straight if you want to insult me. The reason I didn't go through Operations grunt school was because I was already enlisted in the army at the time and running my own ops with Coulson."

"Seriously?" Skye asked. "He wont let me do anything until I memorize the hand book."

Clint threw Ward a sideways squint but said nothing. The fact that Ward even had an officer-in-training was news to him. Skye seemed like a good kid. Young and naïve maybe, but she had a decent heart. Apparently, Clint was an expert on those.

"I was different back then." Coulson said. "SHIELD was different. Starting out, there was no Helicarrier. No mass operations base. Clint and my first outpost was in a bunker in – "

"Norway." Clint said with a chuckle. "That place was cold in the winter."

"You froze your hand to the door knob." Coulson recanted.

"Because someone told me it was thirty degrees and it was negative forty five." Clint replied.

"The thermometer broke."

"Because someone threw their shoe at it."

"I was aiming for you because you threw it at me."

"Because you were snoring and it woke me up."

Skye's head bobbed back and forth as if she was watching a tennis match between the two. Years after the incident occurred, it was apparent neither had forgotten a single detail. It was surprising and sweet to see Coulson and Clint together again. They had a history Skye could never have even dreamed up. Now that they were thrown into each others path again, the magnetism was intoxicating.

Clint inspected the line as the fluids ran dry and he stopped the flow from the bag. He disconnected the line and tossed the empty bag into his trauma kit. It wasn't much but some hydration into her now was better than nothing. It was time to get moving. They had a long walk ahead of them.

* * *

Coming next: Next time: Carrying the weight of the world

please review!


	8. Chapter 6

a/n: nothing much to say except a smile has come your way :)

* * *

**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

** Chapter 6  
**

Clint was lucky May had lost weight in the years since he'd worked with her last. Lifting the distressed body of a downed agent for three hours of desert hike was never his idea of a good time. Then again, May wasn't his only trouble. Ward had fallen behind. His beaten feet, like two hamburger patties mashed beneath a mallet, slowed him down. Skye was walking beside him in an attempt to hold him up. The month long ordeal was wearing on her too. Coulson moved along at his own pace between Clint and Ward. He'd started panting only an hour in to the hike and had yet to catch his breath, despite various stops along the way. Clint knew they weren't making as good a time as he'd hoped.

As they crested the next hill, Clint laid the limp May out on the ground. He descended the sand dune to Phil and picked him up first. His former CO didn't voice a complaint to being manhandled up the ridge. Clint deposited him beside May and descended the hill again for Skye and Ward. He edged himself between them, displacing Skye and picked up Ward. With the fellow agent slung over his shoulder, Clint crested the hill for a third time. Skye managed to make it up with her own power. With the agents arranged in a line, Clint set his trauma bag down and rifled through the contents. He handed a bottled water to Coulson for him to drink and pass along down.

"How much farther is it?" Skye groaned.

Clint checked the position of the sun. He extended his hand, counting the palm breaths before his pinky touched the horizon. It was an old boy scout trick for telling time. There where exactly three hand breadths between the sun and the horizon, which translated to three hours before the sun set. This time of year, a Libyan sunset was around seven o'clock. So he'd already missed his four-o-clock deadline. He pulled out the trifold map from the trauma bag and spread it over the ground. He had a general idea of where they were located currently but he didn't want to believe it. With the pace they set, it would be at least another hour of hard terrain before they came within sight of the base. With Ward hardly walking, Skye losing momentum, and Coulson stretched out on his back and panting like a bulldog, Clint was feeling low on options.

"Hawk?"

Clint turned his attention to his mentor.

"How far are we now?" Coulson asked.

Clint meticulously refolded the map and tucked it back into his duty pack. "At least another hour, sir."

Skye groaned. "You said that an hour ago."

"I might mean it this time." Hawkeye told her.

"Somehow I'm less inclined to agree _this time_." Ward said.

Clint shuffled from his knees back to May. He pulled out his last bag of fluids and used the scraggly remnants of a dead tree to hang them. He hooked the line into her ready IV after flushing another syringe full through first.

"We'll get this into May now. When it's done, we need to get moving. From what you were saying about the constant checks, I imagine that our friend Hazim's already realized the switch. We can't afford to wait here long."

Skye groaned and lay down on her back. "All I want is a cheeseburger. That's all. Just one massive cheeseburger."

Clint and Coulson snorted at the same time.

She sat up on her elbows. It wasn't hard to see the private look between the two old friends. "Ok, so what did I say that's so funny?"

Coulson sniggered to himself. "Go ahead. Tell her." He said to Clint.

The Avenger sat in the sand with May's arm extended in his lap. He sat his chin on his palm. "Well, it's not all that funny. Just that Tony said the same thing after his kidnapping."

"Tony? Tony Stark? Is that who you're talking about? You know Tony Stark?"

Clint playfully nudged Coulson with the toe of his boot. "Crap, boss, what do you tell them about me? Nothing?" To Skye he said, "Yeah. I thought we already went over this in the cab? Tony and I work together. In fact, we even live together. That's not really saying a lot though, given how big Stark Tower is. It's the kind of arrangement where, if I eat all the peanut butter, he gives me hell for it. Steve, you know Steve Rogers? He's on again, off again. SHIELD's been keeping him occupied. He has an apartment in upper Manhattan, but sometimes he stays over in the spare room."

As he was now holding everyone's attention, Clint sat back in the sand beside May. Agents tended to love this about him. Everyone wanted to know what the Avengers life was like. What was it like to be with Tony Stark? If you left the toilet seat up, did Bruce Hulk out? Did Natasha bring home any victims? And how many dogs did Clint own? The last was due in part to the constant alterations Tony made to Arrow's hologram projection. He thought it was funny, but there were only so many breeds of dog in the world that could contain the fact that Arrow was a Dire Wolf and not an Irish Wolfhound, or Golden Retriever, or something. Clint used to mind talking about it. Now, it was getting to be common place.

"Banner's been looking for a place in Princeton. He's lived at the Tower since the New York attack and wasn't big on venturing out, ever, but he started teaching at the university and now he's excited about getting into his work again. Not genetics or radiation theory, he's keeping it to low grade physics for now. He got a lot of recognition after Tony and he went public with my aural implant. They're working on some medical enhancement projects now to fine tune it for public use. A lot of people forget the medical side of Tony's company, but it's a mass producer now."

"How's Tasha been?" Coulson asked.

Ward whispered, "Natasha Romanova, The Black Widow." For Skye to relate. Her pupils dilated.

"Good." Clint said. "Things have been different since the last trip to Asgard. It kind of rocked the team. We're putting things back together now, but SHIELD's been keeping us in separate field assignments."

Coulson was up on his palms now. He held a look of pure incredulity. "Hawk, are you and... you know...a thing-thing ... Now? Did that really happen?"

Clint chuckled. The fluids were running dry, so he set to repeating his earlier movements disconnecting them. "Well it's not just sex, so yeah, dad, we're a 'thing-thing' now. I got a place, I have friends, I took a class, I play with needles, I have a dog, and a woman. Oh, and my new bow." Clint called his Asgardian weapon to his hands and left it on the ground between them. "So yeah, I'm a big boy now."

Coulson scooted over and ran his good hand along the intricate carvings. He had seen work like this, up close, too many times to count now. "Is this what I think it is?"

The empty bag joined the first in the trauma pack. Over his shoulder he said, "Yeah, it is. The Elves of Alfheimr retrieved the coals from the volcano's core. The metal is from a dying star, forged in the same manner, by the same hands, which created Thor's hammer Mjolnir. The details were carved by Thor's father, Odin Allfather, the King of Asgard. And the string was made from the eight legged horse, Sleipner's mane. It's unbreakable."

At this fantastic description, there was nothing to stop Ward and Skye from getting a closer look for themselves. The craftsmanship was beautiful. Many people remarked about that already but it was always the same reaction. It was a weapon not of this world. It appeared and disappeared to no one knew where. And Clint's favorite part, no one could pick it up except for him.

Skye tugged at one of the limbs and smiled. "An eight legged horse?"

Clint zipped the trauma bag closed and slung the strap over his chest. "Yeah, I thought the same thing when Thor said it to me. Then I met Sleipner and I started believing all that crap he kept saying. You ever see me with a dog?"

Skye quirked up the corner of her mouth. "I showed everyone your Youtube video of a puppy sucking on your nose a few months ago."

Clint rolled his eyes and picked May back up in his arms. "Yeah, Tony has a wonderful sense of humor. Well, that dog isn't a dog. He's a Dire Wolf and the offspring of Odin's wolves, Freki and Geri. He's the runt of the pack, so he shouldn't get as big as them, but, believe me when I tell you, during the Frost Giant war; I rode those wolves to the Flaming Falls and back." With May on his shoulder, Clint extended a hand down to Coulson and helped him to his feet. Skye assisted Ward and they continued walking again.

"Clint Barton?"

Clint slowed, turning to Coulson who'd spoken. Rarely had his mentor ever referred to him by his full name. And usually, it was never a good thing.

"I'm proud of you." Coulson said. He squeezed Clint's bicep, as close to a hug as Clint ever received from him, and Phil kept walking. There was something very much like pep in his step.

* * *

:(:):(:):

* * *

The North Star came up on Clint's left before the moon crested. The heat of day was swiftly changing into the freeze of a desert night and, still, the SHIELD base was one hill of loose sand away. The liberated hostages were drifting further and further apart as the exhaustion they fought at last caught up with them. Ward fell behind first. Despite the brave face, he could no longer keep up. Even with most of his weight dropped on top of Skye, it wasn't enough to overcome his pain. When he fell, Clint improvised. He still had the trauma bag across his chest and May being rotated from one of his shoulders to the next. Clint paused long enough to slip the strap of the bag around Ward's chest. With it secured in place, Clint walked on. Now Ward and he were tethered to each other as Clint dragged him through the desert. Coulson protested. He was the next to drop back but, with Skye free, she helped him along. He objected to the fact that Clint was now carrying two bodies back but, given the limited option and resources, there wasn't much he could say against it. Clint already made it perfectly clear no one was being left behind, despite his ability to go to the base faster without them.

The final hill was a struggle. May was proving difficult to maneuver as his shoulders were losing feeling. He held her across his arms instead with her body pressed against his own. Wards legs were snagging along whatever rocks or debris remained in the area. He'd stopped complaining about the handling after Clint knocked him unconscious. He always did prefer Ward when he was quiet.

At the top at last. Clint could see the field operation tents and the camouflaged technician van. He knew it wouldn't be long before the lookouts picked up his location and the whole place became as jumpy as a bag of cats. He set May on the hill crest, unclipped the trauma bag from his chest to release Ward, and looked down the hill to where Skye and Coulson struggled.

Clint left the two he'd carried up and slowly dropped back down the hill again, rolling through the softer spots. He was covered in sand, sweat, and grime. He wanted nothing more than to shed himself of his boots and jump straight into the Asgardian ocean beneath the Bifrost. First, though, he was going to see this through.

"Doin' fine." Coulson said, putting his palm out to stop Clint from working his way to them. "Be up in . . . a bit."

"You're not fine, sir." Clint said dutifully. He nodded toward Skye and she pulled away. Clint slipped into her place on Coulson's good side and effortlessly lifted his mentor along. Behind them, Skye skidded into the sand to catch her breath.

"You been . . . working out?" Coulson heaved.

"With Thor, Cap, and Tasha to keep up with, there's a lot of workout time I build up. Besides, I'm an archer. Use my upper body every day. This is nothing." It was sort of a lie. Clint did have a workout regime that could rival any ordinary human. Tony and he, being the same size and height, were familiar enough with each other to train together like a couple of possessed men. Then Tony would cheat and climb into his suit, making training more of a one-way beating. Clint couldn't remember the last time he carried four hostages across twenty four miles of desert in six hours. To say he was well equipped to the task was a gross overstatement. Passion, as sappy as it sounded, kept him trudging forward long after his tenth wind left him. He was happy. He saved the team and no one died in the process. He walked in and out of a death trap without a scratch. Most of all, he had Coulson back.

When he crested the hill the second time, he could see the away teams scrambling into their jeeps. Men and women were running in all directions. It was difficult to distinguish faces with the naked eye from this distance, but Clint didn't have to. He eased Coulson into a seated position between Ward and May and looked down the hill after Skye. She was struggling. Granted the woman was crawling hand over knee to join them. If he left her like that it would take another half an hour before she ever made it up so Clint went down the hill for a third time to help her.

In an emulation of Coulson, she waved him off. "Nope, I got it." She said. "I'm getting there. Tortoise and hare and all that."

Clint knelt beside her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and lifted her into his chest. "Uh, huh. I get up there with you fast enough you can tell everyone you won the race too." He felt like she might be the kind of person who resisted help when it was offered. Now, she just crumbled against him.

"Yeah. Might just do that."

"Can tell all your friends you got yourself out too." Clint went on. He didn't like how quiet she'd become.

"Yah huh." She mumbled.

"Skye did you drink all that water I gave you?" Clint asked, his tone serious now.

"Ish dad mad?"

He stopped. They were only half way up. His feet had sucked deep into the sandy hillside. He placed Skye on the ground in front of him and looked into her face. She was flushed, sunburned. Even her eyes looked dry and red. Her lips were tight, cracking, dehydrated.

"Skye?" Clint repeated. He tapped her face, trying to bring her around. "Skye, stay with me. We're back now, and I need you to stay awake for me. Can you do that? Skye?"

"Clint?" Coulson called down to him.

The archer didn't need to conjure up images from his critical response class to recognize the signs of shock. She was slipping. For how long, he couldn't tell, but she was in deep trouble now. Clint braced himself against the ground to pull his legs free.

"CLINT!"

The gunshots and scream of warning came simultaneously. Clint dove into the sand again, taking Skye with him as his body encompassed hers. The sand exploded around him as bullets peppered their position. He couldn't tell at first whether a SHIELD paper pusher had raised a false alarm and decided to take the rescued team out, or if Hazim had caught up with them at last. Clint had brought a gun, he'd left it in the trauma kit when he entered the prison compound and once they left the truck he'd placed it in his right dress sock. Curled over Skye, his hand could just reach it.

Clint grabbed the pistol, cocked the slider back and flicked off the safety with his thumb. At the same time he retrieved his weapon he turned in place as fluidly as water. His back lay pressed against Skye, but now his chest and head faced his attackers. They were right on top of him. A bullet whizzed past his ear as Clint struggled to find his footing. He fired at the same time, taking out the man farthest from him as the closest was within arm's reach. He noticed the thatch sand bags thrown back against the hill and the open snug holes dug beneath them. Somehow Hazim's men had overtaken them and laid in wait to spring their trap. Clint knew the first SHIELD team was taken in this same way. He had no intention of losing the team again. As the first victim fell with a bullet through his left eye, Clint's hands were already a hold of the closest. It was Miguel. Clint spun the man in place, using him as armor as the next volley of rifle fire blasted toward him. Miguel was dead in seconds. The archer threw his body backwards, letting it drop over Skye for protection as he reached the second assailant.

The man was too slow with his rifle. Clint robbed him of the weapon, used it as a club and dislodge the kidnapper's jaw four inches to the left. Seven more men were in the immediate vicinity with another four on the ridge opposite of where Clint left the SHIELD team. The men had sniper rifles, perfect equipment for a target that was not moving. Unfortunately, Clint was no such target. As the man with the broken jaw reeled backward, Clint grabbed him by the collar and threw him into two others. On his left the men were staggered in position, making it difficult to take out multiples. Again Clint shot the farthest man, took on the closest hand-to-hand and felt the sting of a bullet as it rained down from the sniper rifles. He shifted his feet, putting the man between himself and the ridge. The sniper bullets nearly cut the man in half. Clint let the body drop, following it to the ground as he tucked, rolled, and came up swinging at the next man. Clint's stolen rifle caught him in the gut. The SHIELD agent turned, fired four rounds int the remaining men, turned back to the one already in his grasp and swung the rifle into the side of his head.

He hurried now, his eleventh wind kicking in as he rushed back to Skye. Before the ruckus hit he knew she'd begun to show the classic signs of shock. He couldn't wait around for the snipers to come sailing down the ridge after him and as for chasing them down, that was out of the question. The rest of the camp could deal with that. He crested the hill with Skye in his arms. He didn't stop when he reached the top. He headed down the other side to meet the incoming jeeps head on. A few screeched to a halt at his approach, others continued up until their tires could no longer find purchase in the sand. Agents flung their doors open and scrambled across the dunes like bees in a swarm.

"I need a trauma kit here!" Clint ordered. He commandeered the back of a jeep and laid Skye on the seats. The passenger seat he kicked forward enough to give him access to work around her.

"Trauma kit!" an agent shouted.

Clint looked up swift enough to grab the bag and return to his work. As he set to calculating an emergency fluid dose in his mind he shouted order to the others.

"Phil's got fractured ribs, right side. Dislocated shoulder needs surgery. It can wait. Get an IV line started on Ward and Phil, May needs a fluid bolus to be hooked onto a constant drip. She already has one liter of saline on board. Gunshot wound high right side." Clint watched the happenings on the hill out of a corner of his eye as he squeezed a bag of fluids into a pressure cuff and flooded Skye's veins.

"Take it easy with May!" Clint shouted when he noticed a few agents fumbling with her. "Two broken legs, get those stabilized before you do real damage! And get those shoes off Ward." Men who had stopped to receive his orders rushed away now to relay them. Clint grabbed one by the arm. "Four men on that far ridge two points off six-o-clock. Check the others, should be dead or wish they were. Where's the base doctor?"

An agent Clint didn't know went running by him. The man had a stethoscope around his neck. With a solid grip he shook Clint's shoulder. "Good work, agent!" the base doctor told him. He stayed there, with his eyes conveying the depths of his congratulations before running over to the three other agents. From there on out, Clint relinquished giving out medical orders.

"Hmm?" Skye hummed beneath him.

Clint turned his attention back to the one patient still in his care. Her eyes had reopened.

"Hey, look who's back." Clint said. "Next time I tell you to drink all the water, are you going to do what I say?"

She smiled a little. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Good. And the next time you decide to go into shock, you are going to say something beforehand?"

Her small chin nodded.

"Good. We're going to drive you back to the base now." Clint turned to the driver and indicated he should start heading in. Clint braced his back against the passenger seat to avoid being thrown over Skye's IV line.

"Yessir." Skye slurred and let her eyes shut.

As they guided back into the field operations base and for the field barracks, Clint at last let his mind relax. It wasn't lost on him the fact that the entire conversation he just had with Skye, he experienced the opposite end of time and time again by either Banner or Phil in his past. Even Steve got on him once about collapsing during a flight after he came down with a horrible strain of flu. Clint wasn't big on sharing his personal health issues. Even while he watched the fluid drip into Skye's line, he assessed himself to decide whether someone was going to be hooking him up to a bag of fluids. He felt dehydrated. He also felt hungry sometime twelve hours ago but that stopped the minute he loaded his kidnap victims into the front of his truck. He had to eat. He had to rehydrate. He was bleeding somewhere, though not seriously, from the bullet graze in his side. He had to get to Asgard.

* * *

Coming next: Next time: I Thought I Killed You

please review!


	9. Chapter 7

a/n: this is the "Final" chapter

* * *

**In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp**

** Chapter 7  
**

Ward maneuvered his crutches past the holotable in the main cabin. His jaw throbbed from where Clint's fist came down and knocked him out. He was an idiot to assume the Avenger hadn't enjoyed it just a little. After Ward spent his time tracking Clint through New York then attempted to kill him, he could understand the sentiment. The crisis of conscious he was currently experiencing was how SHIELD deemed it possible that Clint Barton, the screw up, could continue to be an active agent despite being as deaf as a rock. Regardless of the mission file Ward had been showed on Clint's amazing feats, it wasn't enough to convince him fully.

If Ward had done what he set out to do, then Clint wouldn't be alive to pull him out of the worst situation he'd ever endured as an agent. If Clint was dead, who would SHIELD have relied on to liberate the team? Obviously, they were hard up to even allow Clint near the case at all given how hard they worked to keep him and Coulson separate.

As Ward headed back to his bunk, he tried to arrange just what his mind was attempting to justify. Passing by Coulson's closed door, he was brought to a full stop.

"_I didn't even go to your funeral." _Ward could hear Barton's voice, though no one was replying to him. "_I didn't think I was welcome. After everything that happened, all the agents that died, I couldn't bring myself to go."_

Ward considered heading back to his room. It was obvious he was overhearing a private conversation. Or confession. He decided to stay a little while longer.

:(:):(:):

He kept the light dimmed low to allow Phil to sleep a little longer. With all the drugs swimming through him to keep the rib and shoulder pain at bay, Clint doubted he'd be waking up any time soon. The wheels were going up soon on the Globemaster III military craft Coulson commissioned for his new team. It was the fastest jet available to get the crew back to the trauma center in Jerusalem. Clint knew he had to get off before then. He just wasn't sure how to leave. He was sitting on the floor with his back to the room door. Coulson was tucked into bed with three lines flowing from his arms into the swinging bags over his head. His burqa had been replaced with a hospital gown and rolls of rib tape.

Clint grabbed his canteen and tipped the last of the water in his mouth. He had allowed the base doctor to check over his gunshot wound but didn't let himdo anything more than wrap it. It wasn't much already, more than a graze but less than a full hit. Asgard could heal him better than the tech on planet Earth. He re-screwed the cap of his canteen and left it on Coulson's desk.

"You know, Steve was the one who told me you were dead." Clint said. Coulson stirred, but didn't wake. He went on, unable to stop now that he started. "That was back before we really knew each other, right after the attack. I had the bright idea of breaching a plate glass window. I felt like hell. Hadn't seen you in the infirmary before. I thought it was weird, but Natasha didn't tell me. Steve didn't know what you meant to me. We never met before, so how could he. So he just said it. 'Coulson's dead'. That was all I got."

"I wanted to know how many when I woke up. I wanted their names. I wanted to know exactly who died because of me. But Natasha wouldn't give me the file. Said I shouldn't put myself through that. Then, when Steve told me you were dead, I just…" Clint felt his throat constrict. He tilted his head back to rest the top of his head against the door panel. "I haven't thought of this in years now. I never told anyone either. I thought it would be true. I thought that if I said it, maybe Tony would get that look in his eye when I figure something out I'm not supposed to. Coulson, I thought that story of the Chitauri staff was crap. I thought they made it up to make me feel better. When I heard something pierced you in the chest, I told myself it was one of my arrows and no one could tell me otherwise."

Clint tried to relax his shoulders. They tended to tense and knot with his mood. He knew he was running low on time. After all, he still had a funeral to get to and if Tony's calculation was accurate, he didn't have long. He stood from his crouch and crossed over to Coulson's side.

"I have to go. The whole reason I moved up this extraction was because I needed to leave. Thor came back to the Tower with news from Asgard. I guess maybe you saw the attack in London. I don't have all the details, but he did say that Loki is dead. A very good friend of mine, someone who has been very special to me, was also killed. Her funeral is in a few hours on Asgard and Thor wanted me there to help."

Clint poked his finger, not too hard, into Coulson's side. In response, the agent's eyes flung open. He crunched up and groaned.

"You never were that good at feigning sleep." Clint told him. "And thanks for not interrupting, or saying I was wrong. I've been shouldering that for a long time now and it was nice to get it out."

Phil eased back against his bed and considered his longtime friend. It was strange, seeing Clint like this. The guy was talking, willingly. He wasn't wise cracking every three minutes, he actually showed emotion. He was always proficient at managing himself in a solo mission, but this time he had gone above and beyond any extraction he'd pulled off in the past. Coulson made a promise in that desert to get Clint every commendation he could think of. But now, that mattered a little less.

Whereas Clint had made him proud in so many ways, Phil felt as if he'd completely failed him. He had assumed, convinced himself even, that all of his agents had been properly debriefed following his death. But he knew Clint personally and should have seen this coming.

"You never touched me, Hawk." Coulson said with emphasis. "You can look at the scar yourself. You know what your arrows do to people."

Clint sat on the edge of Coulson's cot. He felt like one of their father-son lectures was coming along and there was no leaving until Coulson had his words on the matter.

"I don't know how much you remember from the attack on the helicarrier, but you and I were never together. I went to monitor Loki's cell to make sure you didn't try to release him, but I was too late. He rammed his spear through my heart and I was dead within the hour. I never even knew you made it out of his grasp until months after my recovery."

At this news, Clint's head snapped up. "Wait, what?"

"I was out of commission for a long time, Clint. I haven't even had my new team for that long. When I came around to active duty again, I caught up on Natasha, and you. I even ran into you once in New York. You were at that bagel shop off Main Street."

Clint smiled. "Which Thursday?"

"The one right after you lost your hearing."

"Ah, that one."

"I couldn't help myself, I wanted to talk to you. Captain Rogers and Natasha were both there. I didn't want to let the whole cat out of the bag, so I sat behind you. Then you didn't respond when I called you. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't imagine what. I thought maybe you lost your memory of me. That I disguised my voice too much. That you were giving me the silent treatment. Then when the three of you left, I realized the truth. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. That was pretty awesome work you did in Egypt, Clint."

Clint shrugged. "Yeah, well, someone has to be a hero, right?"

"It's more than that." Coulson said, ignoring Clint's attempt at deflecting the praise. "When I said I was proud of you, it wasn't because you got us out or how you did it. I'm proud of you because you've changed. You're relying on people, Clint, and that's never been your thing. I should know."

"I needed you." Barton said. Their eyes met. "I'm sorry I didn't know that before."

A long pause extended between them. All the words they spent so long repeated in their heads, should the time ever come to say them, went unsaid. It didn't matter what scripts they had written for this moment. All that mattered was moving forward.

After a time, Coulson said, "Funeral?"

Barton heaved a sigh. He stood, leaving a pile of sand behind. He hadn't gotten the chance to change his clothes or shower. He'd wait until he got to Asgard for that. "Thor's mother. Her name was Frigga."

"You were very close?"

"She saved my life more times than I can count." Clint confessed. "No matter who you were, what you did, she just loves—loved—you like her own." The constriction returned to Clint's throat. He picked at his fingertips, an old nervous habit that never seemed to let go.

Coulson reached out with his tubed arm and stilled Clint's hands with his. It was the same familiar move that Clint didn't remember until it was gone.

"Stop that." Coulson said. An echo of their past. "You'll get through this. When you get back, come find me."

"Will I be able to? Or are you going to get stabbed by another staff while I'm gone?"

Coulson let him go and took a weak swing for Clint's leg instead. Barton shuffled toward the door to avoid him.

"Not unless you've got one." Coulson said. "Now will you let me sleep already? I've had a trying experience."

Clint snorted and grinned. He did have to go. He'd stayed too long already. With the engine of the big jet kicking on, he knew it was time. "I'll see you soon." Clint said, opening the cabin door.

"Soon." Coulson assured.

The archer walked through the doorway and pulled it shut behind himself. He headed into the main room on his way to the hatch and found a ring of Coulson's new team there. The two technicians, Fitz and Simmons, along with Ward looked a deal too relaxed as they lazed about the main room. Having already been violated by the tech twins, Clint didn't even need to guess why they were there.

"Really!" Clint exclaimed. "Can't a guy even talk, ever, in your presence without you vultures hanging off my back."

Gemma's eyes were red and watery. Apparently, Clint and Coulson's words had been moving to her. Ward was leaning on the holo table with his arms stacked over his crutches. Fitz opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out of it.

"You should get back in bed." Clint pointed his finger to Ward as he passed him. He liked yelling at bad patients. Maybe that was why Banner gave him such a hard time, some of him enjoyed being a mother hen too. Unsurprisingly, the three followed him on his walk to the hatch.

"Are you leaving now?" Fitz asked.

"I've got important archer-crap to do." Clint said. "So yeah."

"But how are you ever going to make it there on time?" Gemma asked. "Best calculations of Asgard's location are centuries away even by the best of earth vessels and the only one with direct access to trans-dimensional portal jumping is Thor."

Clint threw a look over his shoulder. Even Ward was cruising after him.

"Yeah, well, Thor doesn't control the Bifrost, Heimdall does." He said.

Fitz's jaw found itself working after it unhinged this time. "Bifrost? Are you seriously traveling that way?"

Clint hit the button for the ramp to lower from the hatch and waited with the three for him to be able to disembark. "The Tesseract is locked in the vault. If there's been an attack on Asgard, the vault will be sealed. They were repairing the Bifrost when I left. I have no doubt its complete."

For the first time, Ward decided to speak. "You've been up there. To Asgard before?"

Clint shrugged. "You've seen my bow. I went to the Spring Festival last month before coming here. Before that, I fought in the Frost Giant War and the Amora Civil War, both on Asgard. And before that, I spent time recovering there after Natasha Romanov shot me in the head after the DOD building crumbled in New York. Yes, I've been there plenty of times."

When the ramp was down, Clint strode down it to the tarmac outside. Intrigued beyond reason, the two technicians followed him down with Ward beside them.

With his face turned up to the night sky, Clint took in a deep breath and let it go. He knew what awaited him. The overwhelming beauty of Asgard's climate. The rolling waves, massive walls, splendor, gold, people, and life. The Bifrost made of rainbow light. Heimdall, Odin, Thor, and Loki. All of this awaited him. But beside that was the pain. The forgetfulness of leaving Earth behind and never wanting to return. Forgetting those on Earth he held dear. Then there was the pain of loss. All of Asgard was going to be mourning, Clint Barton included.

"Heimdall," Clint said into the night sky. "Open the portal. I'm ready."

Fitz, Simmons, and Ward waited with baited breath for Clint to disappear into thin air. But he didn't. They looked around, expecting to see a chariot of fire lashed to eight legged horses meant to carry him into the stars, but there was no one. There was only night.

"Um," Ward said, "think you missed a step or something?"

Clint's bow appeared in his hand. He felt that overwhelming, familiar magnetic pull of Asgardian tech, but this time it was amplified. He felt like his entire body was being drawn up and pulled toward the stars. He looked over at the others. "You may want to stand back."

"For what?" Fitz asked.

In an explosion of light, the dark night became day. The three stumbled back onto the ramp as the tarmac surrounding Clint was engulfed in pure unfiltered energy. After a few moments, the lights died away as swiftly as they came and the world went still. Simmons rushed down the loading ramp to trace her fingers along the intricate symbols left behind on the ground.

"He really did it." Ward whispered.

"These match the designs in the Foster Journal!" Simmons announced giddily. "The theorem says that they consist with the location being connected to. If this matches, then that means—"

"It is Asgard." Fritz cut her off. He looked up into the blackness."

* * *

Thank you for reading and enjoying this ride so much! I may decide to do a follow up where we get to see what happens when Clint does go to Asgard but I haven't really started that just yet. It is also possible I will make an epilogue, but I haven't started that either:)

Please lend me a final review!


	10. Epilogue

now normally all of my stories are now cleared through my editor before they reach here,but I was SOOOOOO excited to post this, i couldn't possibly wait.

Disclaimer: While this is the Prologue for "In Which Hawkeye is a Pimp" it will refer to the ending of "Smashed Through the Heart" as you know, all my stories are interconnected and I could not post this until that story was finished.

**Epilogue**

He felt it before he saw it. A strange tingle in his fingers that reached up his arms and crawled across his chest. He pushed away from the holotable, wondering if somehow there was a shortage in the system setting off a high radio wave frequency. His head swiveled left to look at Skye.

"Do ya feel 'at?" Fitz asked her, rubbing his fingers together. He stayed away from any protruding metal surfaces, worried he may produce a jarring shock.

"I thought I was just crazy." Skye replied, standing from her seat. They both looked around them as if to discover the source. The clouds outside were clear for now, no obvious sign of passing storms. It was unlikely the plane had been hit with a bolt of lightning without them noticing. May was back behind the wheel against all doctors' orders. Her firm opinion was two weeks of convalescence was more than enough for a _grazing_ wound. Everyone with a brain disagreed, but she was holding the gun at the time and they were not.

Ward peeked out of his cabin and looked into the main room. "All right, what did you two science geeks do now?"

Fitz meant to dispel such nonsense at once had he been given the chance. But he wasn't. In fact, the minute Ward threw his accusation, the entire outer room exploded in a kaleidoscope of rainbow light. The plane drop in the sky. Warning klaxons sounded and the team was thrown from their feet into whatever nailed down object was closest. A surely cursing May fought the controls to straighten the plane out from the right angled barrel roll that sent the bus spiraling toward the ocean 35,000 feet straight down. Air blasted outward, tossing chairs, papers, laptops, and everything not secured in a tornadic vortex.

Ward grabbed the wall to his cabin and dragged himself forward. He drew his weapon, having no real idea what he was going to do with it. It seemed like . . . was it possible? A man was in the center of the internal storm. He was kneeling, then standing, and then as if an invisible switch was flipped in the off position, the world was normal again. The magnetic storm disappeared, the plane righted itself and began to climb again, and in the midst of the blown apart main room stood a single man.

Clint Barton turned slightly to take in the wreckage around him. "Well, that was a first." He muttered.

Fitz shot up from behind the table where he was thrown. "Agent Barton!"

Clint patted down his clothes. They were strange, a pair of peculiar trousers and a tunic-like top with long black riding coat over top. He was nothing like the Avenger who had left them weeks ago. As his hands passed over the fabric little sparkles of dust faded away from him. To Fitz, it looked like the diamonds of a thousand stars.

"That be me." Barton said. "Forgive the entrance. I did not realize you were in flight. Heimdall likes to think himself clever sometimes."

Skye released the death hold on the back of a swivel chair and slowly rose to look at him. "You're back? Like, you just came back **_from_** Asgard?"

"Where else should I have been? And I thought it prudent to come here directly rather than follow Tony back."

"Why are you talking like that?"

Clint gave her a strange expression. Then realized what she meant. "Ah, sorry. Asgard has that affect. I will—I'll return to proper Midgardian-speak soon. I wasn't there long."

Fitz picked up a few computer tablets that hit the floor in the whirlwind. "Not long? Ya were gone a good three weeks near like."

"Time on Asgard is much altered to here. I was only there a few days to assist in the funeral procession and life celebration." Clint explained. He turned slightly to see Ward approaching behind him. "Someone is off their crutches."

"Didn't take me long, Barton." Ward said coldly.

Clint smirked. "There be the Mr. Smiles I remember. Did you ever grow that molar back I knocked out of your face?"

"How's that left kidney feel?" Ward growled back.

Skye attempted to slide between them and keep the clearly incompatible agents from going for each other when her job as a distraction was taken over by Melinda May. She blasted out of the hallway ready and raring to raise pure Hell on whoever screwed up her flight plan.

"Fitz, I swear if you decided to test that magnetic—" She was shouting already before she appeared in the entryway. Seeing Clint brought her up short. She blinked at him, no doubt trying to understand how on the planet he managed to get on her bus without her ever knowing it.

"Barton." She stated.

"Hey, Cookies." He said.

Her eyes narrowed at him. "Really? Are you still calling me Fortune Cookies?"

"You said the next time I called you that you were going to skewer me with your chopsticks, I just wanted to see if you remembered."

The standoff that once existed between Ward and Clint, now shifted to May and Clint instead. They stared at each other for a few moments before, at last, May caved. She strode forward and extended her hand toward his. While Clint knew that displays of affection like this were as rare as a rainbow striped zebra, he allowed her the character slip. They shook hands. She let go and stepped back.

"Thank you." She said.

He continued to smirk. "Oh, I believe that hurt."

"Not as much as you will when I throw you off my plane."

"Will I at least get a parachute, Calvary?"

Her eyes rolled in her head. She retreated back toward her cockpit. "This makes us even, Hawk."

"Do not think that I don't know that." Clint said. He smiled at Skye and winked. "She ever tell you it was me she pulled out of the no win scenerio? I called her the Calvary for it."

Skye's jaw dropped, she meant to say something but a voice across from them cut her off.

"Hawkeye?"

Barton looked away from her to the figure descending the spiral staircase. Phil stood there, the same stunned look that everyone else bore was in full display on his face.

"How did you get here?" Phil asked.

"Transdimmensional portal through the Bifrost guided with the sword of Heimdall to be specific." Clint said. He pointed up. "Can we talk, sir?"

:(:):(:):

Clint stood by Coulson's book shelf like a child. He couldn't resist the touching, playing, and fiddling with every small knickknack which received a coveted place of honor among Coulson's things. The little tin plane he collected from a World War II friend of Steve Rogers. There was a hacky sack from the time they spent in Khufar together. A few arrow heads he'd unearthed from New Mexico when Thor first hit earth's soil. He gave one of them to Clint a long time ago. It was strange to think just how many years it had been.

"Quitting?" Coulson repeated, the shock not hidden from his voice.

Clint picked up a slide ruler and angled away from the shelf as he held it. He was facing Coulson now, but looking at the object in his hands.

"Yes, quitting. I'm leaving SHIELD."

Coulson had been in his chair, but he stood now. He crossed his desk and perched on the corner, facing his friend. "After all that? After everything you just did for us? Clint, if this is about the person you lost—"

Clint put the ruler back on the shelf and looked up. He wanted Coulson to see the determination in his eyes. "Frigga didn't want me to leave SHIELD. She would want me to help, however I can. Bruce asked me to leave."

"Banner?!"

The archer nodded. "We found something. Someone very close to him, she was SHIELD, assigned to infiltrate Stark Tower, get close to Bruce, and steal secrets. She changed her mind on that. She told me she worked for Blackstone. That Blackstone is operating within SHIELD. Bruce, Stark, everyone agrees. I'm leaving. Someone who understands how SHIELD operates needs to be on the outside looking in. That's why I wanted to come here and see you first."

Coulson looked at him sadly. For as long as either could remember, SHIELD was everything to Clint. For Bruce Banner to ask him to leave it all behind was not only shocking as a request, but that fact that he agreed to it was even more distressing.

"Are you sure?"

"It's already set." Clint said. "I'm going to be a liaison for a little while, work on a few small missions with Steve and Nat, they are staying in SHIELD, but at a certain point I'm going off grid. Deep cover. You won't be able to reach me when I do."

Coulson wasn't sure what to say. It was obvious this plan was already well into motion and there were no words he could conjure that would work to convince Clint out of it. Perhaps it was for the best. Clint was always good about finding the truth of things. He could read people, situations; he knew things others couldn't come up with even though he never finished high school. If Clint was determined to leave and follow this Blackstone thread, the least Phil could do was help him.

Phil walked around his desk and pulled open a familiar drawer. When he was feeling especially nostalgic, he liked to peruse these files and remind him of the good he'd done in the world pre-T.A.H.I.T.I. He found the right file and extracted it.

"What I'm going to show you doesn't exist outside this room." Phil explained.

Clint straightened. Phil placed the file on his desk and Clint approached to read the top.

**Agent Clint Barton**

**"Hawkeye"**

**Blackstone Project Analysis**

The archer pulled the file toward himself and flipped through the first few pages quickly. He recognized his own handwriting immediately. Two lists of names, one was eerily familiar, a list of all the men he'd killed on the Helicarrier under Loki's possession. The second was in his own writing. Many of the names matched, though there were more he had listed in his own hand. Some were crossed out. There was only one reason he would have done that.

"I can at least help you start back where you were before." Coulson told him.

Clint looked up. "I remembered this. Some of it. Like a dream I could never quite get. What is this? How did I forget it?"

Phil returned to his seat with Clint pulling up a chair directly beside him. He slid the file onto his lap and began turning all of the pages.

"Fury ordered it. When you came out of it, the possession I mean, you were about as fried as Selvig was. Fury wanted to spare you a little of that, and try to mellow you down too. They apparently gave you half a hit of something called the G.H. serum, part of a T.A.H.I.T.I. project that is now defunct. They replace your memoirs with something else. Something they think you can handle."

Clint looked up. "I don't remember anything else."

"A small hit." Phil reminded him. "Trust me. The only reason I'm walking around now is the mass slap they gave me with the stuff and . . ." he shook his head. "Let's just leave that alone for now. What matters is if you are leaving SHIELD to investigate these men, you are going to need all the research you already did on them. Fury didn't trust it to anyone else, but after all that happened in New York this dropped to a priority ten, if that."

"Tony couldn't find these files. We knew they were part of my personnel entry but we couldn't even find a ghost of where it may have been and got deleted."

Phil sighed. "It was never digitalized for that reason. Anything anyone knows about Blackstone is in those handwritten pages. Fury didn't know how deep it went so he didn't want to risk someone knowing what you were involved in."

Clint closed the file. "I'm trying to pretend that you didn't tell me someone wiped my brain after New York and failed to follow up on a team of sophisticated infiltrators."

Phil shrugged. "I'm trying to do that every day."

Their eyes met and for some time they sat in the collective silence. It was strange how much they wanted this moment. It was them again. The father and prodigal son meeting together and no words were enough to fill all the things they wanted to say to each other. No time together would be long enough to make up what they had lost.

"It'll be weird thinking of you without a SHIELD patch on your arm." Coulson admitted.

Clint nodded, "Yeah, well, I owe them a lot. But I've got to follow Bruce on this."

"He's right to ask it of you." Coulson told him. "Don't hold it against him. I don't want you to leave, not really, but if it's to help with this, and if it keeps you safe, then I want you to do it. When do you go dark?"

The archer's head shook left to right. "They haven't told me yet. Steve and Banner are working out a good time frame. A couple months maybe. Expect a fall out between Stark and me. I'll run off. And that'll be it. When I think it's safe, I'll contact you and let you know I'm all right."

"How long will you be off the grid?"

To that Clint could only shrug. "As long as it takes to get to the bottom of this." He set a finger on the Blackstone file. "This goes deep, Phil, I think you know it as much as I do. And there's something else."

Phil's eyebrow raised.

"I still don't know how it all fits. She said something else, the agent Bruce loved. She said Hydra. It was as if she meant that Blackstone and Hydra were working together. Does that mean anything to you?"

"No, I'm afraid it doesn't."

"Us either. I need to follow these on the outside. If there is still an agency working in SHIELD it's too risky to stay an agent while I investigate."

"Natasha and Steve are staying inside? On the ground?"

"They're going to feed me info as needed. I'll tail them once in a while, or other agents. I'm sorry I can't say more. I will always trust you, sir, but I don't know your team and I know Fury likes to bug his toys." Clint raised a hand and gestured around them.

Coulson indicated he understood. He decided to change the subject. "The funeral?"

Clint lifted the file and dropped it on the desk. He leaned back in his chair and tried to relax. "I helped how I could. Veurr, the captain of the guard now, was happy to see me again. Odin was melancholy but who could blame him? God, Thor was torn to pieces. I had a hero's welcome. The people do love their champion of Midgard, Brother of Asgard, and all those other titles they decide to ordain me with. Arrow was happy to see his siblings and sire."

"What about you?" Phil asked sincerely. His gaze was fixed steadily on Clint, breaking through that calm, diverting face he put on.

The right shoulder shrugged. His fingers came together and he began to pick-pick-pick at the pin point needle scars.

"Fine. I didn't know her that well. I was with her a few times. She saved my life and all. But that's it."

Phil leaned forward and placed his hands over Clint's. The archer stopped picking.

"I'm sorry, Clint." He said gently.

Clint bobbed his head. "It's nice to have you back, Phil."

Ward stalked quietly away from the door. He had a few calls to start making regarding this very difficult development with Clint Barton. The last thing he needed was that archer to start peeling back the onion layers of Blackstone and unearth what Ward's S.O. was trying so desperately to keep under wraps. Hydra had its own plans in progress and letting that agent walk out of SHIELD and start poking into Hydra's secret information gathering ventures was no good. He had no problem taking out a second kill order on the agent if necessary, all he wanted was the clearance.

He ducked below the main level of the plane into the corridors below by the stock rooms. He slipped into the supply closet and keyed the speed dial on his cell phone.

"Yes this is Agent Grant Ward looking for Agent Garrett? Priority one." He waited while the line connected. After a characteristic click, he began again. "Sir, is this line secure?" the man on the other line responded. "I have information that Phil Coulson was not the only one involved in the T.A.H.I.T.I. trial. I also know that Agent Barton is planning to reopen the Blackstone investigation. I don't think I have to tell you how bad that can be. Would you like me to take care of it?"

He waited, listening to his C.O.'s all powerful reasoning. He nodded to no one at the various points. He didn't like it, but Garrett was right, as always.

"Understood, sir. But if the Barton brother wants to pick Hawkeye up, he has to do it soon. He's planning to drop off radar. I'll wait for your instructions."

Ward pressed the button to end the call and slipped his phone back into his pocket. While he would have enjoyed the satisfaction of strangling Clint Barton to death with his own two hands, Garrett was right. Given the new intel, it was important to keep Charles Barton happy. If he wanted Clint alive if only to torture the T.A.H.I.T.I. right out of him, then Ward would take a step back and let the chips fall where they may. Besides, Charles was more sadistic in his need to end Barton than Ward could ever muster.

Did Ward feel he owed Barton one the way May and Clint obviously kept score? No, not really. Barton had been a thorn in his side longer than Ward could think. Coulson tried to make Ward see the good in Barton not long ago, and while it was impressive the things Clint had accomplished, it did nothing to change Ward's true opinion. Barton was a loose cannon who killed a lot of Hydra men Ward considered friends. This was going to be a sweet sort of revenge for him. If he was only allowed to sit back and watch the firestorm, then that was enough.

If there was one thing to be said of the future now, it was this: so much more was still left to be written into history.

* * *

ok, so that IS the final ending!

stay tuned to the new stories coming:

Arrow's Little Hits: Clint has quit SHIELD, what trouble does he and arrow get into with all that free time on their hands? series of oneshots about Clint and his little dire wolf

These Memories: Clint wakes up to a reality he has trouble remembering. Natasha is his wife, he has twin boys, and he runs an archery range in his spare time. The only problem? He can no longer use his bow. Something is amiss in this wonderful fantasy life he is leading and when those memories break away he returns to the real world: Steve and he are being held captive by none other than Clint's only brother: Charles Barton

Unnamed Alfheimr: Don't want to give out too many details yet, but takes place at the downfall of SHIELD. Clint is whisked to Alfenheim where instantly his life is in jeopardy.

PLEASE REVIEW!


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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Avengers, Adventure, Suspense