Clint Barton ➶ Hawkeye (barton) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2014-01-30 19:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | clint barton / hawkeye (mcu), maria hill (mcu) |
Who: Clint Barton & Maria Hill
When: Tonight, after Maria gets home from work.
Where: Maria Hill's apartment, undisclosed location, NY.
What: Hawkhill haven't hung out since Clint went on the run with Papa Furies. So he snuck into her apartment through the air vent to have the world's weirdest SHIELD reunion.
Rating: Low, for swearing & unresolved sexual tension.
Status: Incomplete, in Gdocs. To be updated as it progresses.
Hill's walk home today seemed more perfunctory than usual -- not because the route from SHIELD HQ to midtown west was easy (it was) or because she wanted to stay at work (she didn't), but because she knew she was being watched. Like all human beings under observation, the knowledge of it resonated through every action despite all best intentions to the contrary: the tight line of her mouth as she pushed well-worn earbuds into place (a police scanner phone app had been the best 99 cents she'd spent in, oh, months), the stiffness of her shoulders as she turned right on the wishbone of East and West 49th. At SHIELD, they had always been monitored (they were an intelligence agency, after all), but it was different now, after the upset -- after the betrayal (though Hill's mind couldn't quite connect the events of the last few days to the word treason, not where Fury was concerned, not where Sitwell was concerned). In her gut, she felt the uncomfortable pang of suspicion, though it was impossible to say whether it was at Fury for absconding, or at the council for trying to have him arrested. Maybe she thought subconsciously that she was unworthy of the promotion -- and under the heat of someone's watchful gaze, she wondered if the council thought so, too. Inside her apartment, safe from prying eyes, she would exhale and feel honest again, allowed to be angry at Sitwell for crippling SHIELD, angry at the council for interfering, and, most of all, angry at Nick Fury for abandoning them at the worst possible moment. Her pace quickened slightly, unconsciously, and she slowed it back down to that unnatural gait perfected by the observed. Like most upper level agents at SHIELD, she knew when she was being watched -- here was a red-bearded man with no interest in his newspaper, there was a brown car with too-new plates -- but it took training to let them pass into her periphery without a second glance or any trace of acknowledgement, to resist the urge to comfort-touch what she already knew was present: a full hip holster. She listened to the scanner with a new resolve, every step towards home feeling more leaden, until at last her foot was upon the first step of the building stairs, until at last she could let her hand drift upwards and pull keys from her pocket, until she could rest her thumb on a hard edge near her hip. But even the closed door didn't feel secure enough, even the bolts slid into place. She took each ear bud out with ceremony, abandoning them to a nearby counter as she pocketed her phone and then looked. To people like Hill, apartments were just rest stops between tasks, places to power up, wash, fuck, and not even the best options as far as those were concerned. The place was bare, by habit and by design, and she catalogued everything she'd left in this spot or that, searching for discrepancies, searching for reasons not to feel safe in her own home. This would become a new part of the routine, a new necessity as they watched her for any signs that she'd follow her former boss, and though she had never considered this place a home, it made her angry nonetheless to do this, to feel that she must. Clint liked to think that his current situation wasn’t so much unemployment as… an unexpected transfer to an unpaid internship with Nick Fury. But then, when you’re sort of on the run and everyone you know is being watched and there might be people out to kill you, that does suck some of the fun out of not getting paid and waiting for instructions. The most difficult thing, really, had been the radio silence between the two “factions,” with Clint and Fury largely cut off from those who remained at SHIELD while they tried to organize a plan to restore the natural order of things. Perhaps all that strategizing explained why Clint had used up most of his good plan ideas before he hatched this one. Clint had considered a lot of different options for communicating with Hill without attracting the attention of whoever was almost certainly watching her. He considered training Pizza Dog to deliver messages like a sort of mangey carrier pigeon. He considered sending her actual coded messages using topping arrangements on pepperoni pizzas. And he briefly considered firing some messenger arrows through her window at midnight, but that— that wasn’t really a serious idea, that just sounded like fun at the time. Ultimately, he settled on a plan that was more convoluted, but less ridiculous. The old, “hire some kids to break the air conditioners in your boss’s building and then borrow the identity of a new hire on their maintenance team” trick. He (or David Spencer, Air Conditioner Repairman) had been in and out of the building several times over the course of the last two days without managing to attract any undue attention. And now, armed with a greater knowledge of the building’s ventilation system, Clint made his move. It didn’t take him long to find the vent that led to Hill’s apartment, although it would have been shorter if his goddamn pant leg wouldn’t keep getting caught on all those goddamn exposed nails. (Honestly, it was like they didn’t want people crawling around in there, or something.) Armed with a screwdriver (and some other stuff he couldn’t easily reach in this position,) he had just started to loosen the screen as Maria’s keys jangled in the lock. “Please don’t empty that clip into your air vent,” Clint piped up, knocking on the inside of the wall and peeking out through the loosened screen. "I did think far enough ahead to wear the vest, but — I’ve sacrificed about a quarter of a pant leg to a loose screw already, I’d look real weird walking out of here with bullet holes. Have you ever tried to crawl through an air vent in a mechanic’s jumpsuit? Would not recommend to a friend.” Hill did not startle easily -- SHIELD had a policy of training that out of people, possibly too vigorously considering that agency crisis response team personalities bordered on the apathetic -- but there was something just novel enough about a person actually invading through an air vent to take her aback. Not so far aback that she'd leave her pistol in its holster, of course, though she kept her finger off the trigger. "Barton, is that you?" Rhetorical question: Hill made it a point to know everyone's face and voice from level six up, and most of level five... as if a skill taught in management level workshops was the only reason she'd recognize Barton's voice. Anyway. "Don't you know real secret agents don't pull that Mission Impossible crap?" Gun directed at the vent, she ran one hand around the underside of her lamp, the crooks and crannies of the TV-side table. There wasn't much to check, but she might as well be sure before an AWOL agent of SHIELD popped out of her vent under possible surveillance. "I knew I should've stayed away from places with central air." The back of the television, the corners of the pathetic wood crate it rested on. "Maybe I should shoot you just to teach you a lesson." The underarms of a tired old sofa. The edges of the kitchen counter. She wouldn't shoot Barton. First of all the noise, second the mess. Third, there was a vague possibility she missed his stupid, easy smile and carnival of a mind. It had been a few days, and she missed all of them. Kind of said something about the state of her social life. "Clear." “Haven’t you heard? I’m not a real secret agent anymore. I can pull all the Mission Impossible crap I want. I mean, not legally, but without worrying about violating any secret spy craft codes. Although I hadn’t meant to still be in the vents when you got here,” Clint countered, flashing the screwdriver and a smile through the screen door. He was glad they hadn’t turned the unit on when they left. That would have really put a clock on this conversation. “But If you do decide to shoot me to teach me a lesson, I’d appreciate it if you waited until I have insurance again. It’s surprisingly difficult to stay off the government’s radar while filing for unemployment benefits. And they always ask questions.” Pushing another screw through the screen door and onto the floor in front of him, Clint looked up with a sudden expression of mock-chagrin. “Sorry, how rude of me. Can I come in, or did you want to continue this conversation through the ventilation system? I’m good either way, but I thought I’d get some feedback before I really committed to one option.” She smiled -- or, at least, approximated something smile-like through the weight of tense muscles -- and then hunkered down, gun unholstered but low between her knees, an unspoken acknowledgement that he was probably who she thought he was. She'd never been a good hostess and she didn't reform now, abstaining comfortably from helping with the other screws and taking a certain, bemused pleasure in watching him work to get inside. She enjoyed it because it was terrible manners, because it was laughably convoluted, because this entire scenario was a punchline to an off-color joke. It was very Clint Barton. "You'd better work on your timing or some military brat in a corner cubicle's gonna be recycling your resume." A beat. "Although I hear Hammer Industries might be making a comeback." “You know, Hammer didn’t want me. It was the weirdest thing. Apparently they don’t like it when you interrupt your interview with, ’STOP! Hammer time.’ And they really don’t like it if you do it twice.” He shrugged, as much as one could while trapped in an air vent. "But their loss, your gain.” Clint made quick work of the remaining screws before finally lifting the screen and letting it drop. His slide from the vent to the floor was… not nearly as graceless as it should have been, actually, ending in a tuck-and-roll that would have made Sonic the Hedgehog proud, (if confused as to why he was being consulted.) Flashing a slight smile as if to express an unspoken, Ta da, Clint rose to his feet, the imposition of his 5’10” frame drastically undermined by his navy jumpsuit, his shredded pant leg, and a smudge of what looked like engine grease covering most of his left eyebrow. “If you’re going to have regular air vent guests, you should consider installing carpet,” He suggested, dusting himself off and flicking a spider from his shoulder. Gross. “If this whole thing proves… less temporary." "Goddamnit, Barton." Part of it was the ritual, the facade: he bumpkin, she humorless work drone, a chewing out of familiar syllables precisely because they were familiar and eased some of the ache for what was. But part of it, too, was a quiet edge of anger that he could be the buffoon when it suited him, playing outlaw -- or whatever the hell her rogue ex-coworkers thought they were doing -- only to roll on in to her apartment whenever he saw fit. Hill didn't get to play, not when she was busy cleaning up the biggest damn mess of her career (including NYC post-centauri). They said it was lonely at the top, but this top, this promotion, felt lonelier still -- a constant pirouette on a stage where she didn't belong, somehow powerful and powerless all at once. The nagging, gut feelings of alarm didn't help either; she was always on alert, she was always ready for the real punch to land. Firing Fury had been the warm up. An impending storm crackled in the space between her nerves. Hill wanted to crush him in a hug and push him over at the same time -- she debated doing both as she straightened up, but did neither. Where Barton's height was diminished by a feeling of disorganization, hers was enhanced, creating inches out of order, squared shoulders, and resolute hips. She didn't raise her gun, but there was something in her eyes, something wary and unfamiliar as her finger brushed the trigger guard. It wasn't reflected in Barton's expression, all good humor and bravado, but she couldn't quite allow herself to believe it was just fine. "Or roll out street spikes, depending on the guests." A wan smile. He looked like Barton, messy in attitude rather than cleanliness, and weirdly energetic; he sounded like Barton, amused but dry enough not to be quite childish. But was he Barton? "Want some coffee?" Goddamnit Barton was music to his ears. He shouldn’t have smiled, not when she actually sounded a little upset, not when he was standing in her living room dusted with cobwebs and smeared with industrial oil from an air conditioner’s fan motor. But he couldn’t help the momentary tug at the corner of his lips when he heard it, or the slight ease of the persistent tightness in his chest. He wouldn’t have known “normal” if it bit him in the face, but this was almost theirs, wasn’t it? Clint doing something ridiculous, Hill staring him down with judgy eyebrows. He used to think that wasn’t meant to encourage him, but now he wasn’t so sure. He liked to think that he was just the only one who’d cracked her code of head shakes and sighs. He’d come up with a whole metaphor about this if he could just remember any of the names from the Enigma Code exhibit at the Spy Museum. Up to this point, he had failed to give adequate consideration to how hard it must have been for her. To be the one stuck in the office, maintaining an uneasy loyalty to an organization she believed in, but one that had fallen into strange new hands and let several of her friends and coworkers go under suspicious circumstances. But he could read the discomfort in her stance now. Maybe it wasn’t fair of him to show up like this. To bet his freedom that her loyalties to him would surpass her loyalties to SHIELD and she wouldn’t call this in. But he wasn’t going to cut and run. “If your coffee is of the 'Mountain Dew in a coffee mug’ variety, then yes. I mean, it’s still yes regardless, but then it would be like a disappointed yes.” He smiled, scrubbing at his stubble with the pads of his fingers. The wild thought that he could grow a beard now that he was unemployed passed through his head, but he quickly remembered how bad it looked last time and thought better of it. Hill might accidentally alert her secret security detail of his presence with the volume of her laughter. One more silver lining shot down, almost as disappointing as the realization that life on the run would prohibit him from watching Quantum Leap in his pajamas. “How have you guys… been holding up?" The tautness of her trigger finger eased, an almost imperceptible flutter of fingertips punctuating the precise moment when she exhaled through a lungful of tension and allowed some of it to leak away. There was no real notion of relaxed in SHIELD, no stand upon which to hang the burdensome intelligence hat -- some let it sink them into the ground, haunted by early retirement or the dreaded desk job, and some wore it well. Maria was at the fashionable end of this spectrum, carrying her secrets like armor and pushing back against the weight of old and new responsibilities until she grew stronger from them. This weight, though, this sudden straw in her blind spot: she hadn't known the weight of it until it was suddenly relieved. A scrape of plastic on leather was the silent end to the accusation (to a reason), and she reached to out to rest her hand on his chest, a second. Two. He was warm, considering it was on the ugly side of freezing outside. Warmth, oil, dirt, and a steady heartbeat, winding down from a brief acrobatic exertion. Hill didn't know yet if her loyalty to him, or to the others, outweighed her instinct to rake him over through the coals. If the situation were slightly different, she'd have arrested him where he stood, but maybe not knowing if she would meant that she had already decided she wouldn't, that she'd already relented. They hadn't issued a warrant for Barton yet (her pedantic line in the sand) so she wasn't under a directive to report him. She patted his chest, a gesture of insouciant friendliness that both seemed and felt entirely wrong when she wanted to grab him and shake him, and. "It's been -" horrible? disastrous? "- stressful. Let's get that Dew." Hawkeye would never in a million years have thought to describe the chest pat as insouciant; however, that spoke not to its fitness as a descriptor, but to his inability to use it in a sentence. The incongruity between the casual gesture and the soft, steady touch that preceded it almost made him laugh, but he suppressed this expression of mirth in favor of a wan smile. “Sorry.” His response was not flippant or dismissive, but didn’t invite further elaboration, which he assumed she would prefer. Wiping a dark streak of motor oil from the edge of his jaw with his shirt sleeve. Or possibly just smearing it around — it was hard to tell without a reflective surface in which to check, but he also didn’t particularly care if his efforts had been successful. In the back of his mind, Clint couldn’t help but recognize the absurdity of this situation, of the sudden stiffness and tangible tension that almost felt oddly formal despite their casual surroundings. Hill didn’t know, yet, what was happening, he wasn’t even sure of the specifics, but it kind of seemed like the world was in the process of collapsing in on itself. Maintaining a sensible distance, worrying about procedure, it felt a bit like mowing the lawn while the house was on fire. (And would anyone be surprised to hear that Clint could make this comparison from a position of actual knowledge?) “As you can see, I’ve been using my, uh - time off to learn valuable trade skills,” He plucked at the front of his shirt as he followed her into the kitchen — or he assumed it was the kitchen, it was possible that she had a secret rogue-agent-murder-room hidden somewhere back there, but he was prepared to take his chances. He wanted to ask questions, he wanted to tell her what was going on, but he knew the position that doing either would put her in. “Going a little stir crazy since someone broke the wii. You know I can’t maintain this physique without wii tennis.” She repressed the instinctive response, but Hill didn't have to speak for the 'are you?' to come through loud and clear; the tight curve of her jaw sharpened briefly as a well-worked muscle tensed below a dark side-glance. The temptation to grab him returned, and maybe she did wish for a murder room hidden beneath the kitchen -- it could be activated by the garbage disposal, and then she could yell at him until she felt better, since she knew he wouldn't crack. Or murder him. That was certainly a possibility. "Yeah. Nice outfit -- David." Hill flicked at the nametag, the stupid smear of oil across the front, as if annoyed by how ordinary it was, how mundane. When she'd imagined him dropping in to give her a fucking clue what Fury was up to, it had been a little more high pressure than this. In her mind there'd been a lot of yelling, and maybe some punching. Now it was too quiet, too polite, too bemused. Like it was the middle of any damn week, and he'd dropped by to say hello after hours. The light from the fridge poured over her, bright and white in the early dark. She didn't move for the soda. "Well at least the origami will keep you nimble." She said it quickly, tightly, when it was meant to sound casual, and the muscle in her jaw flexed again. “Thank you. I wanted it in more of a gunmetal gray color, but apparently you don’t get to customize outfits you steal from repairmen like you would if life were Skyrim,” Clint countered, further demonstrating his remarkable ability to make light of grave danger and respond to situations in emotionally inappropriate ways while also scanning the room for sharp objects. It was a spy thing, probably. Or maybe it was just a weird Clint thing, but Clint liked to attribute all of his weird things to being a spy. Even things that had been present long before he joined the army. It just made it seem more functional. As if using dubious operant conditioning techniques to lure pigeons onto his neighbor’s window sill and storing all of his important documents in the freezer could somehow be considered adaptive behavior. Hill stalled in front of the refrigerator, lighting her face from below in a way that reminded him oddly of watching Selvig leaning over the tesseract. His mind was clear now — or as clear as Clint’s mind ever was — but the air seemed almost as thick now as it had then. I took him a moment to register that Hill had spoken, though he couldn’t have told you what she said. Instead, he nodded, watching the muscle in her jaw tense in agitation. This is what they call a pregnant pause, he thought, conceding that the imagery was sort of appropriate, but still believing that it was a weird thing to call the act of not saying anything for a while. Still, who doesn’t like alliteration? Right. He’d been silent for a beat too long, making meaningful eye contact with the grocery list affixed to her refrigerator with an eagle-shaped magnet. (How hard was it to remember to buy peanut butter? Aside from CVS brand sour gummy worms, that was pretty much all he ever bought.) “Look, I— I'll grant that I'm prone to doing some crazy, stupid things. But you know I wouldn't do this without a reason.” When he spoke, it was with a certain reticence that had not been present before, a measured quality that was strange to his own ears. “I wouldn't have been around long even if I'd stayed. It's no secret that I'm Fury's guy.” Years and years ago, Fury was the one who had given him a chance. Fury had been the guy who brought Clint in, sat him down in a SHIELD office, and offered him a way out. A way to be something other than a crack shot carnie turned ex-marine turned mercenary. Maybe he’d fudged on his evaluation when he said he had “absolute faith” in Nick Fury, but he did owe him his loyalty. And of the guys on team SHIELD, Clint was demonstrably more probable than most to break the rules in the interest of his own perception of goodness, which made him exactly the sort of agent a dubious new SHIELD wouldn’t want anything to do with. The pause certainly seemed pregnant, heavy and full of an uneasy anticipation (at least that's what Hill imagined pregnancy to be like, all waiting and discomfort); she filled it with a slow rummage, though the contents of her fridge didn't warrant any kind of rummaging: three bottles of beer, an onion that had seen too many better days, a single egg of dubious origin, and two mountain dews strung together in loops of plastic. She hooked her finger around one of these loops and considered it before dragged it out. Cold, inorganic, rigid, hostile -- or was that her, waiting for him to make an excuse? He seemed more interested in a curling piece of paper, remnants of a long-abandoned attempt to make this house more of a home. I wouldn't do this without a reason. It sounded hollow, felt cheap. To Hill, there was no 'dubious new SHIELD,' only a SHIELD that Nick Fury had abandoned (irrational) and Sitwell had sabotaged (rational) and Barton had given up on (...); there was only herself and Hand making the best out of a fucked up situation. There were weird murmurs from above, but she hadn't had enough direct contact with the security council to know the difference. The only measure of suspicion she could justify was the one provoked by Jasper's bank accounts -- namely, how clean they were. No signs of corruption, no signs of a bribe. It didn't sit right, not when that friend of his had desperation written all over his accounts, not when the council seemed content with this monetary motive for treason. And here was Barton, Fury's guy; she couldn't tell if he knew what was going on or if he'd just trusted in the director enough to follow him into exile. How long would it be before the council branded everyone who'd vanished without paperwork a traitor? It had taken less than a day for Sitwell's name to come up red in hand delivered paperwork. How could anybody trust that much? Hill leaned against the inside door of the fridge, hip pivoted so the door felt more like a wall between them, a protective barrier. "I want to believe there's a reason." Hill cut the honesty with a raised finger, two cans and some empty plastic loops dangling. [...] |