Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The summer air in Iowa was thick with warmth, heavy in a way that clung to the skin, humming with the ceaseless drone of cicadas. The Barton farm stretched in wide golden swells, rows of corn and grain bowing under the late sun, the fields running unbroken until they blurred into the far-off horizon. Beyond them, the sky bent, vast and open in a way Clint still wasn't used to after so many years in cities and warzones where horizons were always cut short by smoke and fire.

The house sat steady and sun-bleached at the heart of it all, its paint peeling in places, its porch sagging just enough to creak when you stepped too hard. Beside it loomed the weathered barn, red gone pale from years of storms, its doors thrown wide to reveal bales of hay stacked unevenly, the smell of oil and old wood hanging stubbornly inside. The fences traced the edges of the property like faded scars, some slumping with age, some patched with new boards that stood pale and raw against the weathered wood.

Clint Barton stood barefoot in the dirt, jeans cuffed at the ankle, the toes of his feet stained with earth. His shirt clung damp to his back, sweat tracing a line down his spine, darkening the collar where it met his neck. A hammer dangled loose from his hand, its weight familiar in a way that still reminded him, uncomfortably, of a bowstring pulled taut.

Before him, the fence sagged from long years of summer storms, its post leaning stubbornly to the left. The kind of work that was endless here - patching, repairing, holding together something always on the verge of falling apart. Farm work wasn't like missions. It wasn't about precision strikes or clean kills. It was patience. It was persistence. And still, Clint approached it with the same steadiness he had brought to every fight. Every swing of the hammer was measured, deliberate, like drawing back a bowstring, exhaling slowly, and letting an arrow fly.

Behind him, laughter erupted, wild and bubbling. It carried on the breeze.

"Dad!" Nathaniel's voice cracked with excitement. Clint turned his head just in time to see his youngest tearing across the yard, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, a kite dragging behind him. The paper wings flailed against the wind, jerking and stuttering as he sprinted. "Dad! It's not flying right - come help!"

Clint squinted against the sun, raising a hand to shade his eyes. His mouth curved in a tired smile. "I'll be there in a minute, buddy. Fence first, sky later."

Nathaniel groaned, spinning in a circle before racing back to his sister. Lila was already there, her face set in the look of absolute authority only an older sister could muster. She barked instructions at him while unspooling the string with exaggerated drama, the kite's tail catching in the grass.

Clint shook his head faintly, pressing another nail into the warped wood. He lifted the hammer, steady.

The cicadas swelled louder in the trees.

Then - a crack split the air. Sharp. Sudden. Too sharp.

Clint flinched, the hammer clattering against the fencepost. His breath locked in his chest as his body reacted faster than his mind could. His free hand snapped to his hip, reaching for a quiver that wasn't there, a bow that hadn't hung from his shoulders in months. His fingers brushed nothing but the worn leather of his tool belt, the empty pouches clinking with screws instead of arrowheads.

His pulse pounded in his ears, blood rushing hot and fast, his stance instinctively shifting into a defensive crouch. The sound replayed in his mind - gunshot, explosion, ambush. Every muscle tensed, braced for the next strike, the next scream.

But the fields stayed quiet.

A moment later, another pop - less violent now, more hollow. A distant tractor in the neighbour's field rattled, coughed, and backfired again.

Not a shot.

Not a threat.

Just a machine sputtering.

Still, Clint's body didn't believe it. His scars, the pale white lines that crisscrossed his hands, the gnarled knuckles from fists and blades, still remembered too much. They pulsed with phantom ache, with the memory of every weapon he had ever drawn, every battlefield he had ever braced himself against. He flexed his hand once, trying to ground himself in the present. In dirt. In nails. In fences. Not blood.

From the porch, Laura's voice cut through the hum.

"Everything okay out there?"

Clint looked up, forcing his shoulders to ease. Laura stood on the porch rail, her hip resting against the wood, one hand curled around a sweating glass of iced tea. Her hair caught the sunlight, haloed gold, but her eyes were steady on him, sharp with quiet knowing.

"Yeah," Clint called back, his voice carrying too casually. He gestured toward the leaning post. "Just a very stubborn fence."

Laura narrowed her eyes just slightly. She knew better. She always did. But she didn't press, not yet. She took a sip of her tea, her gaze lingering, the unspoken sitting heavy between them. She knew when to give him space. She also knew when to step in before the space became a chasm.

Clint looked down at the fence again, jaw tight. Grateful and guilty. Always both.

The cicadas droned on, steady, relentless.

By sundown, the fence stood upright and whole again, the nails sunk deep, the wood reinforced with care. Clint ran his hand along the length of it once more, testing for any give, and found none. It wasn't perfect, but it would hold. That was enough.

The yard had shifted with the day. The kite lay abandoned in the grass, its paper wings bent from too many crash landings, the string tangled in weeds. The children had traded it for fireflies, darting across the field with mason jars clutched in their hands. Their laughter cut through the thick summer air, bright and wild, rising like sparks in the twilight.

The house glowed golden against the darkening horizon, porch lights flickering on one by one as Laura moved inside. From the open kitchen window drifted the smell of roasted chicken, garlic, and herbs, the kind of scent that clung to the walls long after dinner and made the house feel fuller, lived in.

Clint stood at the edge of the yard, hands braced on his hips, sweat cooling on his skin. His gaze swept across the horizon with the same precision it had on rooftops in foreign cities, scanning treelines, measuring distances to the barn, listening for breaks in rhythm.

Nothing stirred but shadows. Nothing pressed in but the night itself. Still, his ears strained for the scrape of boots, the crack of a twig under weight, the low hum of an engine rolling too slow down the road.

He found only the steady thrum of cicadas. The faint chorus of frogs by the creek. The far-off whistle of a faraway train cutting through the stillness.

The true quiet of summer.

Peace.

He repeated the word in his head like a mantra, as if saying it often enough would make it true.

Laura's voice carried from the porch. "Guys! Dinner!"

He turned. She stood framed in the doorway, her smile small but warm, her hair brushed back from her face, an apron tied loosely at her waist. She held the door open like an invitation.

The kids thundered past him, Nathaniel clutching his jar triumphantly, fireflies blinking inside like tiny stars trapped in glass. Cooper teased him about cheating, Lila defended him with a roll of her eyes, and Clint followed, his steps slower, reluctant to leave the horizon unguarded. But Laura's gaze pulled him in like gravity.

The porch groaned under their weight as the family gathered around the table Laura had set with mismatched plates and glasses. The food was simple - roast chicken, sweet corn, green beans slick with butter, bread warm from the oven - but to Clint it looked like a feast. It was colour and smell and comfort in ways battle rations never were.

They ate in the thick, golden glow of dusk, fireflies drifting lazily beyond the railing. Laura poured iced tea into his glass without asking. Nathaniel argued passionately about who caught the most bugs. Lila lectured them both on how they had to release the fireflies before bed or they'd suffocate. Cooper just smiled, sneaking extra bread rolls until Laura swatted his hand.

Clint watched it all, chewing slowly, letting their voices wash over him like waves. He answered when asked, smiled when nudged, even laughed once when Nathaniel's jar tipped over and a dozen fireflies blinked free across the table. The children's hands shot up in chaos, Laura laughed into her hand, and Clint's smile cracked wider than he'd realised it could.

But still, his eyes flicked to the edge of the yard, to the treeline darkening into a black wall, to the open stretch of gravel road leading away from the farm. His shoulders never quite settled, his hand never quite stilled on his fork.

Peace, he thought again.

Peace, here.

But in the back of his mind, the word never stopped carrying the weight of for now.

Later, Laura tucked the kids into bed, lingering at each doorway the way she always did, brushing hair from foreheads, kissing temples, whispering promises of tomorrow. Clint listened from the hallway, leaning against the wall, watching her move through the small rituals that kept the house soft and whole. She caught his eye once, gave him a tired smile that meant we're okay, we're safe, go sit down.

So he did.

The porch boards were cool beneath his bare feet, smooth from years of use, creaking under his weight in familiar protest. He lowered himself into the chair, beer in hand, the metal cap rolling between his fingers, clicking softly against the wood of the armrest. The air was thick with the scent of honeysuckle and soil, crickets taking up the night's chorus, fireflies blinking slow constellations across the yard. The fields stretched wide and endless, golden even under moonlight.

It should have been enough to quiet him. It wasn't.

By midnight, Clint was awake. He always was. Sleep never lasted. The quiet pressed in too close, too absolute, too much space for memory to echo. He slipped from the bed without disturbing Laura, his steps practiced and soundless. He avoided the one creaking stair out of pure muscle memory, as if still moving through safe houses and compromised floors.

The farmhouse lay in shadow, black but for the faint green digits of the stove clock: 12:07. The hum of the refrigerator, the faint tick of cooling pipes, the occasional groan of old wood - every sound catalogued and dismissed as harmless. He opened the back door, the hinges whispering, and stepped into the night.

The sky opened up above him, sharp with stars, the Milky Way a pale smear across the darkness. The air was cool now, carrying the dry scent of dust, hay, cut grass. Clint inhaled slowly, letting the smell of earth ground him.

And then he began.

The perimeter. Every night, without fail.

Barn doors - latched. He tugged them once to be sure. Toolshed - locked. The padlock cold against his fingers. Vehicles - accounted for. His hand brushed the hood of the truck, cool metal beneath his palm, as if checking for tampering. Kids' bikes - still leaned against the porch rail, wheels crooked, ready for morning.

His eyes swept the tree line next, sharp and deliberate, tracing each gap between branches, each pocket of shadow. He stood still, every sense extended outward, waiting for what wasn't there. His heartbeat was steady but insistent, a low thrum against his ribs, a rhythm that matched a lifetime of vigilance.

Minutes passed. Nothing stirred. Only the night pressed close. Only the silence answered. And still, he lingered.

When he finally came back inside, shutting the door with the quiet care of a man too used to being hunted, he paused in the kitchen. The stove clock blinked 12:34. He let his hand rest against the counter, fingers tapping once, twice, before he moved on.

Laura shifted in her sleep when he returned to bed, rolling toward him, her hand finding his even in dreams. He stilled, staring at her profile in the faint spill of moonlight, the ease on her face he could never seem to mirror.

He lay awake for hours, eyes fixed on the ceiling, his body still wired, still waiting. The ceiling fan turned slow above, blades whispering against the dark.

Sleep doesn't come easy to men who have lived too long on borrowed time.

When morning came, as it always did, the farm looked the same. Golden fields stretching wide, the sky washed in soft blue, the hum of cicadas and the clatter of Nathaniel's laughter spilling through the open windows. The house smelled of coffee and toast, the sound of Laura's humming drifting from the stove as if nothing in the world could possibly disturb them.

But Laura noticed. She always noticed.

"You didn't sleep," she said softly as she passed Clint in the kitchen, pressing a mug of coffee into his hands. Her fingers brushed his briefly, warm and steady, an anchor he almost didn't take. It wasn't a question.

"I'm okay," Clint replied. The words came too fast, too polished - an automatic reflex like drawing an arrow to string. He didn't meet her eyes.

Laura lingered, watching him sip. The sunlight through the window caught his face, and for a moment she saw him not as her husband, but as Hawkeye - the man who had carried wars home in his shoulders, who bore scars no one could see unless they knew where to look. There were new lines etched across his brow, at the corners of his eyes, worry carved deep and permanent.

He kissed her cheek before she could say any more, his lips quick, his movement brisk, as if affection might distract her from pressing further. Then he stepped past her, mug in hand, out toward the yard.

The silence he left behind wasn't empty. It was heavy.

The day unfolded quietly. Too quietly.

Clint mended tools that didn't need mending, his hands busy just for the sake of motion. He walked the fenceline twice, three times, his eyes always drifting to the horizon. He lingered by the barn with an intensity that made Nathaniel tug at his sleeve and ask, "Dad? Is something out there?" Clint smiled, tousled his son's hair, and said no. But his gaze returned to the tree line the moment Nathaniel turned away.

At lunch, Laura watched him pick at his plate, distracted. His fork tapped against the wood of the table in a restless rhythm. Lila chattered about a book she was reading, Cooper about fixing his bike chain, and Clint nodded, responded where he should, but his eyes kept sliding back to the window, tracking the movement of clouds, of shadows, of nothing at all.

Later, the weight of quiet pressed even tighter. The fields rippled in the breeze, the dogs barked at birds in the distance, and the world carried on unchanged. But Clint's shoulders never relaxed. His jaw stayed tight. The hammer blows when he returned to the fence rang sharper than before, as though each nail he drove was meant to silence something clawing inside him.

Laura stepped onto the porch at one point, arms folded, her gaze steady on him. He felt it - her eyes, her patience, her worry - like a tether pulling against his spine. He didn't look back.

The farm looked the same. But Clint knew better. Peace never stayed. Not for long.

Late afternoon, the farmhouse phone rang.

Clint was in the living room, bent over the coffee table, repairing one of Nathaniel's toy cars with a small screwdriver. The sudden shrillness startled him more than it should have. The landline almost never rang anymore - most calls went to cell phones, not the old rotary relic mounted in the hallway.

But the sound cut through the house, sharp and alien.

Clint froze, screwdriver poised mid-turn. His breath stalled.

Laura called from the kitchen, her voice casual, unaware of the weight already pressing into his chest. "You gonna get that?"

The phone rang again. He rose slowly, wiping his palms against his jeans, his stomach tightening. The caller ID glowed a pale green against the dim hallway light: Unknown Caller.

The ring sliced through the silence, insistent. Precise. Like an arrow loosed directly at him.

Clint stared at it, jaw tight, body still.

"Clint?" Laura's voice again, faintly questioning now.

He didn't move. Didn't answer. He let the ringing go on until, at last, it cut out.

The silence that followed was worse.

That evening, the cicadas sang their endless drone as the sky melted into shades of copper and violet. Fireflies continued to blink in the hedges. Laura walked down the drive to fetch the mail from the rusted box, tugging free the small, uneven stack: bills, a seed catalogue, a postcard in a neighbour's familiar hand.

And one envelope, heavier, stamped in bold black ink.

S.W.O.R.D.

The letters stood stark against the paper, final and cold.

Laura frowned, turning it over in her hands. Before she could call for Clint, he was already there. She hadn't even heard him approach. His gaze locked on the envelope instantly, his whole body tightening in a way she hadn't seen all summer.

He took it from her with a muttered, "I'll deal with it." His tone clipped, final.

She opened her mouth, but the edge in his voice stilled her. She watched him retreat inside, the screen door snapping shut behind him.

In the kitchen, Clint stood over the sink, the envelope heavy and hot in his hands. His thumb traced the seal once, twice, as if hesitation might change what waited inside. Then he tore it open.

The words leapt up at him - summons, request, duty. The same language that had haunted every chapter of his other life. The life that never stayed buried.

His jaw tightened, the muscles working.

He didn't let himself think. He struck a match. The flame flared, sharp and hungry. He touched it to the corner of the letter and watched fire bloom across the page.

The edges blackened and curled. The words dissolved into nothing. Ash fell into the porcelain sink, embers fading fast. Clint turned on the tap, water hissing and steaming as it drowned the remnants, until nothing remained but grey fragments and the sour, acrid smell of smoke.

Laura's reflection appeared in the window before her voice followed. "Clint."

He didn't look at her. His knuckles whitened against the counter. "See?" He said, too quickly. "I've got it handled."

Her eyes, steady and unyielding, stayed on him. "Do you?"

He looked away. Couldn't answer.

The sink hissed softly as the last ember died, smoke coiling faint in the air. His scars - thin white lines across his knuckles, the marks of battles that refused to fade - caught the dim light as his hands trembled against the counter.

Outside, the fields swayed in the twilight wind, endless and golden, but the peace felt brittle now.

Brittle, and breakable. Thin as glass.

And Clint Barton knew how easily glass could shatter.

Chapter Text

The days rolled by in a haze of sameness.

The Barton farm remained a portrait of peace: children running barefoot through the yard, their laughter carrying like bells across the fields; Laura moving through the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, humming under her breath as she stirred something fragrant on the stove; golden fields bowing in the summer wind, bending and straightening like waves caught in some eternal tide. From the outside, it could have been any other farm, any other family, any other quiet summer.

But Clint Barton knew better.

He filled his hours with work, as if constant motion could blunt the edge of unease lodged in his chest. Fence posts, loose shingles, a squeaky hinge on the barn door - it didn't matter. His hands were always busy. Hammering, patching, tightening bolts, polishing tools until they shone. But work never erased anything. It only gave his mind fewer places to wander.

And still, in the quiet moments - when cicadas droned in the high grass, when the air cooled into late afternoon stillness, when Laura's hand lingered too long on his arm - he felt the weight pressing down.

The silence had only grown heavier since the letter.

Laura hadn't pressed him, not openly. That wasn't her way. But she was watching more closely. Her eyes lingered a beat longer when he said I'm fine. Her pauses after dinner stretched, as if waiting for him to fill them with something, anything. Clint avoided her gaze when he could, hating himself for it.

He told himself it was nothing. Just another loose end from the past. Just another ghost clawing at the edges of the life he had built. He had burned the letter; it was ash now, washed down the drain.

But the silence didn't let go.

Until the gravel crunched.

It was early afternoon. The sun was high, brutal and white. The air hummed with heat, the cicadas relentless. Clint was out back once again, hammer in hand, mending the barn door where the wood had warped from too many wet winters. The steady rhythm of his work echoed in his ears, a pattern he'd forced himself into.

And then came a sound.

Gravel. Tires rolling slow across the long dirt drive.

Clint froze mid-swing. The hammer hung in the air. His breath caught.

That sound didn't belong. Not the mail truck - it had come hours ago. Not neighbours - they didn't drive this far down unless they had reason. Not delivery - too far out for that. Nobody came down the Barton's road without purpose.

He straightened slowly, the sun pressing hot against the back of his neck. His eyes shifted toward the house.

And there it was.

A black car, sleek even under a film of dust from the country roads. It looked wrong against the backdrop of the sagging porch and weathered clapboard siding. Wrong in a way that set Clint's stomach on edge before he even saw who step out.

The driver's door opened.

And there he was.

Nick Fury.

Sitting like he owned the place, one hand resting on a cane, the other adjusting those ever-present sunglasses. His posture was deceptively relaxed, but Clint knew better. Fury never did casual.

Clint's jaw tightened.

Of course it had to be Fury.

The walk back to the house felt longer than it should. Each step weighted, deliberate, like marching toward a fight he didn't want but couldn't avoid. His pulse was steady but too hard, thudding in his ears as he crossed the yard. By the time he reached the porch, Fury was already leaned back in a chair like he'd been there all morning.

"You gonna offer me a drink, Barton?" Fury's voice was dry, gravelly, cutting through the hum of the countryside. "Or we just gonna stand here and pretend this is a social call?"

Clint didn't answer. He brushed past, tugging open the screen door. The slam as it banged shut behind him was deliberate.

Inside, the kitchen was dim and cool, shaded against the afternoon glare. The faint scent of coffee still clung to the air from the morning pot. Clint moved automatically, filling the kettle at the sink, setting it on the burner. The hiss of water filled the silence, masking the sound of his breath.

The screen door creaked again, then closed softer this time. Fury's footsteps followed - unhurried, steady, that measured cadence Clint remembered too well. By the time Clint turned, Fury was lowering himself into a chair at the table, leaning his cane against it like it belonged there.

Clint reached for two mugs, hesitated, then set only one on the counter. He poured coffee black, no sugar. He didn't offer Fury any.

Of course, Fury noticed. But he said nothing. His fingers tapped the table once, then stilled.

"So," Clint muttered finally, blowing across the steaming surface of his mug. "What is it this time? World's ending again? Another invite to the apocalypse party?"

Fury's face didn't shift. His one good eye fixed on Clint, steady, unblinking. "Europe," he said. "Something's stirring. A new threat."

Clint snorted. "I've got déjà vu. You sure I didn't wake up in 2005?"

The corners of Fury's mouth twitched, though it wasn't quite a smile. "Not quite. Different year, same mess. You know how it goes."

Clint leaned back against the counter, arms crossed, the mug warm in his hand. "Let me guess - another ghost story? A rogue A.I.? An alien invasion? Pick your poison. I don't care, Fury. You've come to the wrong man. I'm retired, remember?"

Fury let the silence stretch until it hurt. Then, with deliberate weight: "A rogue assassin. Her codename is Echo."

Clint's grip tightened on the mug until the ceramic creaked faintly. His jaw flexed. "Never heard of her."

"You wouldn't have," Fury said evenly. "That's the point."

Clint said nothing.

Fury leaned forward, elbows on the table, his voice clipped. "She's not freelance. She's a product of SALT."

Clint frowned. "SALT?"

"Think of it as... a sister program to the Red Room," Fury explained, clinical, detached, as if describing weather patterns. "Same principles, different theatre. While Romanoff and her kind were shaped in Moscow, SALT was brewing under our noses. Everywhere and nowhere all at once. Covert. Buried. Everyone upstairs thought it collapsed three years ago. No follow-ups. No questions."

Clint's chest went tight at the casual mention of Natasha. The name caught in his throat like iron. "Convenient."

"Efficient," Fury corrected softly. But his eye betrayed more than his tone. He knew the cost of efficiency.

Clint looked away, out the window at the fields, at peace that already felt thinner than glass. "And now?"

"Now one of them's loose. Echo isn't just running." Fury's voice was steady. "She's targeting."

"And you want me to eliminate her."

Fury shook his head. "No. We want you to find out why."

Clint barked out a short, humourless laugh. He dragged a hand down his face. "Find out why?"

"You're the only one who can."

"Oh, bullshit."

"You've got the history," Fury pressed, leaning in. "The skill set. And-"

"Don't." Clint's voice snapped like a bowstring pulled too tight.

But Fury didn't stop. He never stopped. "-you managed to get Romanoff. If anyone can reach Echo, it's you. It's only you."

The name hit like a sucker punch.

Natasha.

Nat.

Clint's breath faltered. His hands braced against the counter, scars catching the light. He couldn't speak. Wouldn't. The silence swelled, suffocating.

Finally, he turned, eyes blazing. "Get out."

Fury stayed seated. "She'd want you to do this. She brought down the Red Room. SALT is an extension of that. You could finish the job. Finish what she can't."

"I said get the hell out of my house!" Clint's voice cracked like thunder, loud enough to carry through the farmhouse. His chest heaved, face flushed. "You don't get to walk in here and use her name like leverage. You don't get to drag me back into your war because you think I'm suddenly convenient."

Fury's jaw tightened. Still, he didn't move.

Clint slammed his hand down on the table, rattling the salt shaker, sloshing coffee across the wood. "Don't you dare tell me to pick up where she left off."

The words rang through the silence, final and raw.

At last, Fury rose, slow, deliberate. He adjusted his coat, straightened his sunglasses. His face gave nothing away. "You think you're done, Barton. But the world doesn't care what you think. This kind of work finds men like you whether you open the door to it or not."

Clint stood rigid, fists trembling at his sides.

Fury lingered only a heartbeat longer, then turned and left. His cane clicked once against the floor before the screen door shut behind him.

Clint didn't move. He stood there, chest heaving, staring at the empty chair.

Through the window, he watched the black car roll down the drive. Dust rose in its wake, curling into the hot summer air, until both the car and Fury disappeared into the horizon.

He was left with the silence again. But now it was heavier. Darker. A silence that promised the past was no longer content to stay buried.

Clint stayed at the counter long after the car disappeared, staring at the sink as if the faint smell of smoke from that burned letter still lingered. His hands flexed restlessly against the wood, trembling with adrenaline he couldn't shake.

The screen door creaked again, softer this time. He turned his head, but it wasn't Fury.

Laura.

She stood in the doorway, her brow drawn tight. She'd seen the car. She always noticed.

"Who was that?" Her voice was calm, but the undercurrent ran sharp.

Clint opened his mouth, then closed it. He reached for his mug, though the coffee inside had gone cold. He swallowed anyway, if only to buy himself a second.

"Wrong address," he muttered. "Lost."

Laura's gaze didn't waver. She knew a lie when she heard one. She crossed the kitchen slowly, her steps soundless against the floorboards, until she was close enough to touch him. But she didn't.

"That didn't look like 'lost.'"

He set the mug down too hard, ceramic clicking against wood. "Doesn't matter."

"Clint-"

"Drop it." His voice came out harsher than he meant, sharp enough that it made her pause. He squeezed his eyes shut, exhaling through his nose. The silence swelled again between them, heavy and choking.

Laura stood very still. Then, finally, her hand brushed his arm- gentle but firm - before she turned back toward the doorway.

"If you're going to lie to me," she said softly, without looking over her shoulder, "at least make it a good one."

Her footsteps receded down the hall. A moment later he heard the screen door swing open again, her voice drifting outside, light and warm. As if nothing had shifted at all.

But Clint stayed rooted where he was, staring at the doorway she'd left through, feeling the fracture line spreading wider between the two worlds he could never seem to keep apart.

From outside came Laura's voice - calling to the kids, laughter trailing her words. A warm, golden sound, like sunlight through storm clouds. It shouldn't have been possible for laughter to exist in the same space that Fury's shadow had just occupied. It was almost jarring, the contrast.

Eventually, Clint sank into the chair Fury had vacated. His body felt heavy, every muscle wound tight, his chest constricted like he'd been holding his breath for hours.

The mug sat abandoned on the table. Cold coffee, ringed with oil at the top, faintly bitter in the air. Clint's hand trembled as he reached for it anyway, needing something to hold. The ceramic was cool now, lifeless. He raised it to his lips and swallowed the last of it, grimacing at the taste. It grounded him - sharp, stale, unforgiving.

Echo. SALT. And Natasha's name - still lodged in his skull like shrapnel. The way Fury had said it, like a tool, like leverage. Clint had bitten it back in the moment, but now it echoed, relentless, rattling the cage of every memory he'd spent years trying to bury.

The sound of her laugh. The cut of her words. The fall - the way her hand had slipped from his.

He pressed his fingers hard into his eyes until stars burst across the dark. Anything to shut it out. Anything to stop replaying what could never be undone.

But the silence pressed closer. The cicadas outside carried on, as they always did, their song unbroken, eternal, a reminder of a world that didn't pause for grief. The refrigerator hummed faintly in the corner. A floorboard creaked as the house settled. All ordinary sounds, all proof that life went on.

And yet, inside him, it felt like everything had stopped.

The farm around him was whole. The fences he'd spent weeks mending stood tall again, clean lines cutting against the golden horizon. The barn door was patched. The house was safe, full of warmth and voices he loved.

But Clint knew - down in the marrow of his bones - that something had shifted.

The illusion of peace had cracked.

He sat there long enough for the sky to change, the light slanting across the fields, pouring molten gold into long shadows. Dust drifted lazily in the beams coming through the kitchen window.

And still, Clint couldn't move.

His hand flexed against the mug, tendons tight, scars pale and ridged under the skin. Old wounds flared - not the kind anyone could see, but the kind that throbbed whenever the past crept too close.

Because that was the truth. The past wasn't gone. It never was. It waited. It circled. It bided its time until it found the crack in the door, and then it stepped through, uninvited and merciless.

He thought of Laura, with the kids, her laughter still drifting faintly. She'd built this life with him, piece by piece, through war and aftermath, through exile and return. She deserved peace. His kids deserved peace.

And yet...

He closed his eyes, breathing slow, the bitterness of the coffee still burning his tongue.

No matter how hard he tried, no matter how many fences he mended or barns he patched or fields he walked in circles at midnight, the truth was the same:

The past had found him again.

It was walking back through his front door, and this time, Clint Barton wasn't sure he'd be able to keep it out.

When the house finally quieted, when the kids were asleep and the night settled deep around the farm, Clint found himself sitting on the edge of his bed, elbows braced on his knees, head in his hands. He didn't even hear Laura until she slid in beside him.

Her hand came to rest on his back, slow and steady. "You don't have to tell me everything," she whispered. "But don't shut me out."

He turned his head, meeting her gaze in the low light. There was no anger there, no accusation - just that same steady strength that had kept him tethered more times than he could count.

"I don't want it touching you," Clint said, voice raw. "Any of you."

Laura leaned in, pressing her forehead lightly to his temple. "It already touches us," she said. "Because it touches you." Her thumb traced absent circles along his shoulder. "But you don't have to carry it by yourself."

For a moment, Clint couldn't speak. The words jammed in his throat, the weight of all the things he couldn't give her, couldn't protect her from. He let out a long, uneven breath and leaned into her touch instead.

She shifted, curling against him, drawing his arm around her until they sat in the hush of their room, folded into each other like the only answer that made sense. Outside, the cicadas sang, the fields swayed. But in here, Clint Barton finally let himself close his eyes.

And for the first time in days, he felt something almost like rest.

The farmhouse fell quiet again. Too quiet.

The kind of quiet that wasn't peace, but aftermath. The kind that lingered in the air after something sharp had sliced through and left its trace behind.

Chapter Text

The house was finally still again. Safe.

After supper, after dishes clinked and laughter rose and died down, after bedtime stories and protestations and footsteps across the upstairs floor, the Barton farmhouse sank back into quiet. The warm kind of quiet, layered in the small familiar sounds of a lived-in home - the tick of the clock in the hallway, the hum of the refrigerator, the creak of wood stretching under the weight of time.

Outside, the steady drone of night swelled and faded like the ocean tide, the occasional bark of a dog echoing across the fields. The summer air was thick and still, caught between daylight heat and night's slow cool.

Clint lay in bed with a book open in his hands. The lamp on the nightstand threw a warm circle across the quilt and the pages, a glow that made the whole room look softer. But the words didn't reach him. His eyes skimmed across lines he didn't see, his thumb resting on the corner of the page without turning it for half an hour.

Beside him, Laura sat propped up against pillows, her own book balanced comfortably in her lap. She read with that calm focus he envied, as if she could slip entirely into the world between the lines and stay there, untouched. Every so often she shifted, adjusting the quilt, tucking her feet closer, her hair spilling loose over her shoulders. The dip and shift of the mattress with her movements was a rhythm he knew as well as his own heartbeat.

For a while, they were quiet.

Safe and still and content.

But Laura noticed, as she always did. She always saw the stillness in him that wasn't rest, the way his jaw flexed when he thought too long about something he didn't want to say. She always knew.

She closed her book softly, slipping a ribbon between the pages before setting it on the nightstand. The small sound seemed louder in the hush of the room. She turned toward him, her gaze steady.

"I know it was Nick," she said quietly, slowly. "What did he want?"

The words cut through his haze. Clint blinked, dragging his eyes up from the blur of the page. His jaw worked once, slow, as if he could chew the question down and swallow it before it reached his throat. He shrugged, too casual. "Old work stuff."

Laura arched a brow, her silence speaking more than any words. She didn't buy it. She never did.

Clint sighed, letting the book fall shut with a dull thump. It slid onto the quilt beside him. He rubbed a hand down his face, dragging at the stubble on his jaw, before leaning back against the headboard.

"There's some girl in Europe," he said finally. "An assassin."

Laura tilted her head slightly, her voice careful. "That sounds familiar."

"She's not my problem."

The words came out clipped. Too rehearsed. He'd already been saying them in his head since Fury had left. They were easy, neat, sharp enough to cut off anything deeper.

Laura didn't push. She just watched him, patient, waiting for the rest to shake loose.

Clint shifted restlessly, the quilt creasing under his fists. "He spun the whole thing out - Europe this, covert that. Some Red Room knock-off no one cared about until now. Wants me to 'find out why she's appeared' all of a sudden." His fingers flicked air quotes, bitter. "Like it's that simple. Like I can just pack up and walk into someone else's war."

The edge in his tone wasn't for her. It never was. But the sharpness in it filled the room anyway, the same sharpness that had filled him since the second Fury's car rolled up the drive.

Laura reached for her water glass, took a sip, and set it back down. Her eyes never left him. She didn't fill the silence. She let it work.

Clint blew out a breath through his nose. "I told him he's got the wrong guy. Reminded him I'm retired." He pressed his palms flat against his thighs, words rushing out too fast. "I gave it all up for a reason. For us. For the kids. I'm not-" His voice caught. He shook his head hard. "I'm not that guy anymore."

The silence stretched.

Laura's gaze softened, but it didn't waver. "What else did he say?"

Clint's throat worked. He didn't want to answer. He wanted to shove the words into a box and bury them so deep they never saw daylight. But silence wouldn't erase them. They were already carved into him.

"He brought up Nat," he said finally, his voice low.

Laura's breath caught, just barely.

Clint's jaw tightened until it ached. His hands flexed against the quilt, fingers curling into fists. "He said if anyone could reach this assassin - Echo - it would be me. Because of her. Because I reached her." His voice broke on the words. "He said she'd want me to go."

The bitterness flooded back, hot and raw. "Like she's just... leverage. Like she's some bargaining chip to throw on the table. Like her name isn't-" His chest hitched, words falling apart. "Like her name isn't everything."

The ache in his chest pulsed old and new, like touching a scar that was still bleeding underneath. He dragged his hand through his hair, pulling at the roots, grounding himself in the sting.

Laura stayed quiet, giving him the space to let it burn. Then, slowly, she reached across the quilt. Her hand brushed against his, warm and steady. Not gripping. Not pulling. Just there.

He exhaled, shaky, his gaze falling to their hands. The silence stretched long.

Then Laura said, softly but sure, "You're going to go."

Clint's head snapped toward her. His eyes were sharp, defensive. "I don't know-"

"You are," she interrupted, her voice calm, certain.

He opened his mouth to argue, but her gaze pinned him. She shifted closer, nudging his book aside, ignoring his protests before they formed. She leaned against his shoulder, her hand sliding across his chest, grounding him.

"You are," she repeated, quieter this time, her head resting against him. "Because as much as we hate it - it's true, what he said. She would want you to."

The words landed like stones in water, heavy, sinking straight through him.

Clint's breath hitched. Slowly, his arms came up, folding around her, holding her tight. His chin rested against her hair. His heart pounded, uneven.

She was right. He knew she was right. He'd known it the moment Fury had said Natasha's name, even under the heat of his anger.

Nat would want him to go.

Not because Fury asked. Not because of duty. But because once, a long time ago, she'd been the assassin who needed saving. Because no one else would try. Because Clint had been given the chance to pull her back from the edge - and it had changed everything.

He held Laura tighter.

The farmhouse was quiet around them. The steady breathing of their children carried faintly from down the hall, soft and even.

Clint closed his eyes, aching. He wished - more than anything - that rightness and peace could exist in the same place. That knowing what Natasha would want didn't have to mean tearing apart the fragile, beautiful life he and Laura had built.

But deep down, he knew.

Laura was right. Fury was right.

And that was the part he hated the most.

Laura didn't fall back into her book after Clint's voice went quiet. She stayed tucked against him, listening to the uneven rise and fall of his chest, feeling the weight of the silence between them.

She had long since learned that silence from Clint meant more than words ever could. Words were too slippery, too sharp. But his silences spoke - sometimes of guilt, sometimes of grief, sometimes of that strange tenderness she had come to know so well in him.

Her fingers moved slowly, tracing the lines of his hand where it rested over hers. Scar tissue broke the smoothness of skin, ridges of an old life carved deep into him. Every mark told a story she would never fully know, though she had pieced together enough. A fight here, a mission there, some accident never meant to be repeated.

She thought, not for the first time, about how Clint had always been drawn to the broken edges of the world. Natasha most of all - two weapons pointing at each other, until one had chosen mercy. But there were others too. Wanda, with her grief and anger simmering under her skin. Kate, so determined to fill shoes too big for her, too stubborn to back down. Even the strays he brought home that weren't people - an injured dog who had limped into their lives and never left, now snoring downstairs.

It was who he was. Clint Barton saw the cracks in people and stepped toward them instead of away. He put himself in the blast radius and stayed until the pieces came together, or until he was left holding the shrapnel.

It terrified her sometimes. How much of him belonged to everyone else. How much of him could still be claimed by the shadows of his past, no matter how far he tried to run. But it was also what she loved about him. That stubborn, impossible loyalty. That refusal to let someone go just because they were already half gone.

She pressed her cheek against his shoulder, eyes slipping shut. She knew what this meant. She knew that when Fury showed up with his shadow games and assassins, Clint would go - not because he wanted to, not because he belonged in that world anymore, but because the part of him that saved Natasha Romanoff had never retired.

And she loved him for it. Even when it scared her.

Hours later, Clint eased himself out of bed, careful not to wake her. Laura murmured something in her sleep and rolled onto her side, quilt pulled higher, her hair fanned across the pillow. He stood there for a moment, watching her, letting the sight of her sink in - his anchor, his proof that a different life was possible. Then he slipped quietly down the stairs.

He knew every board that creaked in the farmhouse, every hinge that caught, every step that needed a lighter tread. He moved through the dark without sound, barefoot, shoulders hunched as though even the walls might overhear him.

The digital clock on the stove glowed faint green in the kitchen. Midnight.

He opened the back door and stepped outside.

The night met him with cool air and the heavy drone of cicadas, layered over the distant call of an owl. The fields rolled dark and endless under a sky spiked with stars. The smell of the earth clung to the breeze. He stood still for a long moment, just breathing it in, letting the quiet of the land fold around him.

Then the old habits stirred. His eyes swept the tree line first, tracing the shadows between trunks, the dips where someone could hide. He scanned the road, the barn, the shed. His gaze lingered on the gaps - the places where stillness could mean danger.

He walked the perimeter, slow, steady. The barn doors were latched. The toolshed locked. Vehicles accounted for. Everything in its place. Everything safe.

And yet.

The tension in his chest didn't ease. It never did. He waited in the dark, heartbeat steady but insistent, listening for what wasn't there. Footsteps. Breathing. A threat waiting to reveal itself.

But nothing stirred. Nothing threatened. Just the cicadas, just the rustle of the fields.

When he finally went back inside, closing the door quietly behind him, the house seemed to breathe again. The silence within was deep and whole, punctuated only by the soft sighs of sleeping children and the groan of beams settling into the night.

Clint stood in the kitchen for a long while, staring at the sink where ash had washed away hours ago. His reflection looked back at him in the darkened window - lined, tired, haunted.

No matter how many fences he fixed, no matter how many locks he checked, he couldn't keep the past from finding its way back to him.

He turned off the lamp, padded back upstairs, and slid into bed beside Laura. She shifted in her sleep, instinctively curling toward him, her hand brushing against his chest.

Clint lay awake, staring at the ceiling.

And he knew, as surely as he knew every scar on his skin, that he couldn't hold onto this peace much longer.

Chapter Text

The morning sun rose slow and patient, spilling across the Barton fields in long, forgiving strokes of gold. Dew clung to the grass, each drop scattering light like glass beads. The horizon was brushed in pink and pale orange, the kind of sky that belonged to paintings more than to real life.

For a brief, impossible hour, the farm seemed wrapped in a hush so deep it felt sacred. Even the birds had not yet cleared their throats. The world held its breath.

Clint was already awake. He always was.

He hadn't slept properly since before dawn. The dream had come and gone like they always did - hard, sharp, and fleeting, dissolving as soon as he sat up. Natasha's face lingered in flashes he could barely catch, fragments slipping back into shadow the moment his eyes opened. He didn't tell Laura. He never did. What good would it do, making her carry ghosts she couldn't fight?

So he'd risen quietly, easing out of bed before she stirred. He'd padded barefoot down the hall, avoiding the familiar creak of the third step, and slipped out onto the porch just as the horizon was catching fire. He'd stood there a long while, shoulders hunched, arms braced against the railing, letting the cool air sting his lungs. Watching the light climb.

As the farm roused itself slowly, he moved through the chores with practiced rhythm. The rhythm was all he had. Feed the chickens - Lila's chickens, stubborn little things she'd begged for until he caved. Mend the fence rail that had come loose again. Small jobs, but endless. His hands kept busy while his mind drifted somewhere he didn't want it to.

The tools in his grip felt wrong. Too light, or maybe he was holding it too tight. He couldn't tell anymore. The wood beneath his fingers seemed brittle, ready to split if he struck too hard. The silence pressed on him too thickly, heavier than it had any right to be. Every creak of timber, every snap of twine carried a sharpness that made him twitch. He scanned the yard more than once, gaze flicking across the tree line, the barn, the long stretch of dirt road.

It was nothing.

It had to be nothing.

The farm was safe.

His family was safe.

But Clint Barton knew better than anyone how fragile safe really was.

By mid-morning, the sun was high and hot enough to make the fields shimmer, the kind of summer heat that clung to the skin. The Barton kids had spilled out into the yard, barefoot in the grass, baseball bats clutched in their hands. Nathaniel tottered under the weight of his mitt - one of Clint's old ones, the leather worn soft with years, too big for his hands but stubbornly claimed as his own.

"Dad! Catch!" Cooper called, voice cracking with excitement. He was already winding his arm back, face flushed pink, eyes bright.

For half a heartbeat, Clint froze.

It was instinct, sharp and unyielding - the same split-second tension that had lived in him since the first arrow he ever loosed. His son's grin faltered, confusion flickering like a shadow across his features.

Clint forced it away with a practiced smile, lifting his hand. "Yeah, buddy. Toss it here."

Relief broke across Cooper's face, wide and bright. He let the ball fly. The throw was a little high, a little wild, but Clint's body moved before he could think. Catching was muscle memory, bone-deep - his fingers closing around the ball as though it belonged there.

The leather was warm against his palm, familiar in a way that made his chest tighten. He lobbed it back with ease, the motion smooth and precise. The ball arced through the summer air, landing perfectly in Cooper's mitt. His boy's laughter cracked open the tension like sunlight through a storm cloud.

The game carried on, back and forth, the sharp slap of leather punctuating bursts of laughter. Lila joined in too, teasing her brothers when they fumbled a catch, her braid whipping over her shoulder as she swung the bat with exaggerated flair. Nathaniel chased every ball like it was a treasure hunt, tripping over his own feet, giggling when he landed in the grass.

It should have felt perfect.

But it didn't.

Each time Clint wound his arm, the motion felt wrong - like drawing a bow without a string, miming something that had once mattered but didn't anymore. His body still remembered, but his heart... his heart wasn't there. The rhythm of the game should have been grounding, should have been joy. Instead, each throw tugged at something hollow inside him.

The kids didn't see it. They were wrapped up in the game, in their own small victories and failures, their laughter loud enough to fill the yard. But Clint noticed. He noticed everything - the tremor in his hand as he gripped the ball, the way his muscles clenched too tightly, the beat of his pulse that shouldn't have been so loud.

He noticed too much.

When their attention finally shifted - when Cooper dropped his mitt to chase Nathaniel, when Lila declared herself "champion batter of the world" and collapsed in the grass - Clint let the game end. He tucked the ball into Cooper's glove, gave Cooper's shoulder a gentle pat, ruffled Nathaniel's hair until he squealed, and pressed a kiss to Lila's temple.

They beamed up at him, faces open and trusting, flushed with heat and happiness. And Clint smiled back, because that's what good fathers did.

Then he excused himself, retreating to the shed under the guise of chores.

The smile slid from his face the second he turned his back.

The guilt sat heavy, a lead weight in his stomach. It was the same gnawing truth he couldn't outrun: that even here, in the middle of golden fields and laughter, part of him was somewhere else. Caught in the shadows of the past. Caught in the echo of names he could never bury.

Later, he drove into town for supplies.

The road stretched out in a long, empty ribbon, bordered by endless waves of gold and green. The truck's tires hummed against the asphalt, the sound steady, hypnotic. Clint kept one hand loose on the wheel, the other tapping absently against the door in rhythm with some half-remembered tune that wasn't really a tune at all.

The air smelled of cut grass and diesel, the horizon a blur of heat. On any other day, it would've been peaceful. But now, the quiet felt wrong. The kind of wrong that came from habit - the kind that told him silence could hide danger just as easily as comfort.

By the time he pulled into town, the unease had settled deep into his bones.

The general store was the same as it had been for years: bell over the door, aisles stacked unevenly with seed packets and nails and canned goods, everything tinted with the faint, sweet scent of fertilizer and dust. Mrs. Darrow was at the counter, chatting with a farmer Clint half-recognised from down the road. Both greeted him warmly, and he nodded back, polite but distant.

He moved through the aisles on autopilot - nails, screws, twine. The same list as always. His hands moved with mechanical precision, but his mind was elsewhere, flickering between images of Fury at his kitchen table and the name that had lodged itself in his head.

Echo.

He didn't know a face, but the name alone was enough to unsettle him.

When he stepped out of the store, the sun was high overhead, washing the street in heat. His reflection in the truck's window looked older than he remembered. Lines that hadn't been there before, shadows under his eyes that no amount of sleep would fix. He ignored it. He'd been ignoring it for years.

He stopped by the diner on the way home, more out of habit than hunger. The place hadn't changed since the first time he'd wandered in years ago - checkered linoleum, chrome stools, the faint crackle of a radio playing something soft and twangy. Locals filled a few booths, farmers with caps pulled low, boots caked in mud. The air smelled of coffee and bacon grease and the faint tang of bleach.

Clint slid onto a stool at the counter, nodded to the waitress, and ordered black coffee. He didn't bother looking at the menu, though he unfolded it anyway - something to keep his hands busy.

That was when it happened.

That old familiar tightening between his shoulder blades.

Someone watching.

He didn't move at first. He'd learned, over the years, that predators reacted to motion. Instead, he let his gaze drift casually across the diner.

Then he saw him.

A man sitting alone in a corner booth. Broad shoulders, work clothes that didn't quite fit right, a baseball cap pulled low. He wasn't eating. Wasn't even pretending to. His hands were flat on the table, no drink, no plate, no reason to be there. His gaze flicked up once, brief and assessing. The kind of look that wasn't curious - it was cataloguing.

When Clint met his eyes, the man looked away. Too fast.

The hair on the back of Clint's neck stood on end. His pulse picked up, not racing, just steady and sharp, the way it used to before a mission. He shifted slightly, enough to glance at his jacket on the stool beside him. No bow. No quiver. No gun.

Nothing but instinct.

The waitress set his coffee down. The ceramic clink of the cup hitting the counter was too loud. Clint forced a smile, muttered a thank-you, and took a sip. It was bitter, scalding. The heat grounded him, but only just.

He told himself it was nothing. Small town. People stared. Maybe the guy just recognised him - an Avenger, a celebrity, whatever that still meant. But the unease didn't fade. It clung, coiled tight in his chest.

When he finally stood to leave, he didn't look back. But as the bell above the door jingled, he caught the faint reflection in the glass - the man in the cap, still watching.

The drive home felt longer than it should have. Every passing car made his fingers tighten on the steering wheel. He scanned the mirrors too often, checking for headlights that didn't belong.

By the time he turned onto the gravel road leading up to the farmhouse, the paranoia was a living thing inside him. The truck tires crunched loud in the silence. The fields swayed in the breeze, whispering like a warning.

He parked, killed the engine, and sat there for a long minute, staring at the treeline. The shadows didn't move. Nothing out of place.

Still, his eyes lingered on the spaces between the branches, on the dark slivers where someone could hide.

That night, something new inside him broke.

The nightmare came without warning, dragging him under like a riptide.

It began the way it always did: on Vormir.

The sky bled red and violet, the wind cutting thin and cold. The air was full of static, a hum that lived under the skin.

And then he saw her again.

Natasha.

The cliff loomed ahead, cruel and unending. Clint's boots slid on loose gravel as he ran towards the edge, heart hammering.

But as he fell, so did she.

And this time, as he grabbed her hand, the nightmare twisted. It was no longer Natasha looking up at him.

It was Lila.

Her small hand was in his, trembling, her eyes wide and terrified. The world tilted beneath them. The Soul Stone's guardian spoke somewhere behind him, voice warped and distant, like it came from underwater.

Clint's throat closed. He shook his head, attempting to pull her up. "No. No, no - please, not you."

Her fingers twitched against his, small and fragile.

The wind screamed.

And then her voice - soft, certain, heartbreakingly calm - merged with Natasha's.

It's okay.

He screamed, raw and feral, trying to hold on, but her hand was already gone.

The fall was silent this time.

Clint jerked awake, breath ragged, sweat slicking his skin. The sheets were twisted around him, his heart pounding like it was trying to break free of his ribs. Moonlight spilled thinly across the ceiling, silver and still.

Beside him, Laura stirred, mumbling something half-formed, reaching for him instinctively even in her sleep. He froze, then slowly eased her hand back onto the pillow. She didn't wake.

He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes, trying to rub the image away. Lila's face, the wind, the sound of her voice.

It didn't fade.

It never did.

He sat there in the dark until dawn started to creep back through the window, the sound of the cicadas rising again outside. And for the first time in a long while, Clint Barton felt like the walls of his quiet life were closing in.

When he stepped onto the porch the next morning, the air bit cool against his skin. The fields were silvered with dew, mist curling low across the grass. The horizon was pale, softening from gray into the faintest blush of blue. It should have been peaceful.

But something waited on the top step.

A manila folder.

No note. No knock. Just there.

Clint stopped short. His breath fogged in the morning air. The sight of it hit him harder than it should have - that shade of tan paper, the careful square of it against the worn wood. He didn't need to check the seal. He knew where it came from.

He bent, picked it up. The cardboard was cool and a little damp from the air. Light, but heavier than anything had a right to be.

He stood there a while, the world silent around him. The chickens rustled faintly in the coop. A crow called somewhere out in the trees. Everything else was still.

Then he turned, walked back inside, and set the folder down on the kitchen counter.

It sat there - an uninvited guest, humming with presence - while the morning unfurled around it.

Laura came down, hair pulled back, soft smile in the half-light. She greeted him with a kiss, poured coffee, started the day like always. The kids followed, laughter filling the kitchen, chairs scraping against the floor. Pancakes on plates, syrup sticky on fingers, small chaos that usually centered him.

But not today.

Clint kept catching it out of the corner of his eye. The folder. Its clean edges cutting through the mess of breakfast, as if it didn't belong to this world at all.

He didn't touch it. Didn't move it.

When Laura asked if something was wrong, he smiled the kind of smile that had seen too much use. "Just didn't sleep well," he said. It was the truth, if not the whole of it.

By noon, he'd gone about his chores - fixed a different part of the fence, checked the irrigation, mended a window in the barn that Cooper had cracked playing soccer. But every time he passed through the kitchen, the folder was still there.

Waiting.

It followed him in thought like a shadow: when he watered the garden, when he split wood, when he carried feed. It sat through lunch, through dinner, through the kids' bedtimes and the quiet after.

He could burn it.

He thought about it more than once - imagined the match striking, the sulfur sting, the edges curling black. Watching the paper shrivel until it was nothing but ash and smoke and peace.

He even reached for the drawer once. Fingers grazing the box of matches. His hand hovered, suspended.

But he didn't.

Because part of him already knew he wouldn't.

By midnight, he was still awake.

By one, he'd tried to lie down. Stared at the ceiling. Counted the seconds between each creak of the house.

By two, he was pacing the kitchen, barefoot on cool tile, the floorboards whispering under each step. The lamp above the sink was the only light in the house, washing the room in thin amber. The folder glowed faintly in its circle of light, the brass clasp catching it like an eye.

By three, he gave in.

He sat at the table, the world outside utterly still. He unfastened the clasp and pulled the folder open.

The first page was a CCTV still - grainy, low-resolution, but sharp enough to see the motion. A woman mid-fight, body turned, muscles taut, one arm twisting a man's wrist until it snapped. He was twice her size. She dropped him anyway.

No timestamp. No listed location.

He flipped the page. Another image - this one blurred with motion, a blade glinting under bad fluorescent light. The next, the aftermath of a firefight: concrete spattered, shadows where bodies had been dragged.

Photo after photo. Fight after fight.

Her face never clear. Sometimes a mask, sometimes turned away. Always in motion. Always efficient.

Each image felt familiar in its precision. He knew that economy of movement, the way someone trained to survive rather than win fought.

The reports came next. Typed. Clinical. Brutal.

Ex-SALT handlers dead. Former SALT operatives found gutted in alleys, throats slit. Contractors with connections to the program "neutralised." Politicians dying in freak accidents that weren't accidents at all. And fires. So many fires at old SALT bases.

The pattern was too clean. Too deliberate.

It wasn't random. It wasn't chaos. It was retribution written in blood.

At the very back, clipped to the final page, was a photo of a boardroom caught mid-ruin: chairs overturned, glass shattered, sunlight filtering through smoke. The men inside were still in their seats - slumped forward, lifeless.

In the corner of the photo, an arrow was drawn in black ink. Beside it - unmistakeable - was Fury's handwriting, scrawled sharp and impatient:

This isn't elimination. It's vengeance.

Clint stared at the words until they stopped making sense.

Vengeance.

The word felt poisonous in his mouth.

He leaned back, rubbed a hand over his face. His scars caught the light, small silver lines that would never quite fade. His pulse was steady but heavy, like his body was remembering what his mind didn't want to.

He thought of Natasha.

He thought of Laura, sleeping upstairs. He thought of the kids, soft-breathing in their rooms. The peace they'd built together - how fragile it felt.

The farmhouse was silent except for the ticking of the old clock above the fridge. Outside, the summer night hummed, a sound that was supposed to mean safety, routine, life.

But - sat alone at the kitchen table, dossier spread open before him, Clint knew better.

Chapter Text

The farmhouse was still.

Too still.

The kind of stillness that didn't feel earned - the kind that hummed under the skin, waiting to break.

Clint sat at the dining table, the dossier spread wide before him like an autopsy. The lamp above cast its cone of yellow light, a harsh little sun in a world otherwise drowned in shadow. Its glow turned the photographs slick and the typed pages a dull, ashen grey.

The rest of the house had long since gone dark.

The quiet tick of the kitchen clock kept time with his pulse. Every few seconds, the house itself seemed to breathe - a soft creak in the rafters, a sigh in the pipes - but even those familiar sounds couldn't reach him.

His coffee sat cold by his elbow, a thin film forming over the surface. His hands rested on either side of the folder, knuckles pale, scars catching light in faint, uneven ridges - a map of old violence.

He hadn't slept. Of course he hadn't.

He'd told himself he wouldn't look at it again. That once he read it, once he saw what Fury had wanted him to see, that would be enough. No more, no less. But hours later he was still there.

He turned another page - already knowing what waited. Another body. Another wound the rest of the world would pretend not to see.

Echo. SALT's ghost. Fury's problem.

And now, somehow, his.

The word vengeance scrawled in Fury's handwriting glared up at him from the final photo like a curse.

The shadows around him pressed closer, thick with memory.

He blinked once - and the kitchen, the farmhouse, the dossier in his hands - all disappeared.

Moscow. Years ago.

The cold hit first - sharp enough to bite through gloves, to sting at the corners of his eyes. Snow drifted in lazy spirals, muffling the sound of the city below, turning the night into something quiet and predatory.

He crouched on a rooftop, bowstring drawn taut, the arrow steady against his cheek. His breath fogged in small, disciplined bursts.

Through the scope, he saw her.

Natasha Romanoff.

Target. Threat. The Red Room's masterpiece.

She moved across the opposite rooftop with the kind of control that only came from pain - every motion exact, silent, fluid. She didn't dawdle. Didn't rush. The wind caught a strand of her red hair, but she didn't brush it back. Her eyes swept the shadows. Always watching.

The order in his ear was clear.

Take the shot.

His finger twitched on the string. Just one breath, one release - and the threat would be gone.

But something caught.

Not hesitation - he knew what hesitation felt like. No, this was something deeper. Something... unfamiliar.

The way she moved, the way she searched the dark - not with arrogance, but with exhaustion, almost. Like she already knew what waited for her in it. Like she'd seen the monster and decided to meet it anyway. Like she'd already seen the worst of what the darkness could hold.

Clint knew that feeling. He lived it.

The longer he watched her, the more the bowstring burned against his fingers. His arm trembled from the strain, but his heart stayed steady.

And then he saw it - the flicker of something in her expression when she thought no one was looking. Not fear. Not cruelty. Just... a crack. Small. Human.

Something inside him shifted.

The kind of shift that couldn't be undone.

He exhaled slowly. Lowered the bow.

And in that breath - that choice - everything changed.

The comm in his ear hissed with voices he ignored. He watched her disappear into the snow instead.

Watched her live.

The sound of the kitchen clock dragged him back - tick, tick, tick - too loud now, too real.

Clint blinked hard, breath catching in his throat. His chest was tight, his pulse still racing from a ghost of cold air that wasn't really there.

His fist clenched around the photo of the boardroom massacre until the paper wrinkled and tore.

"Nat..."

The name left his mouth as a whisper, half a prayer, half an apology.

He pressed his palms against his eyes, but the images wouldn't stop layering - Natasha's face in Moscow, Echo's blur of motion, the folder glowing like a wound under the lamplight.

The past and the present had never been separate things for him - just different rooms in the same haunted house.

But now all the doors were open again.

He sat there until the lamp's bulb flickered, until dawn began to bleed through the curtains, until exhaustion finally clawed into his bones.

The floor creaked softly behind him.

Clint didn't need to look to know.

Laura.

She stood in the doorway, the faint blue of early dawn spilling around her shoulders. Her hair was pulled back, loose strands falling against her neck, her robe cinched tight against the chill that clung to the farmhouse walls before the sun fully rose.

Her eyes moved across the scene - the scattered photos, the dossiers, the coffee gone cold. She took it in silently, without judgment, without surprise. There was no scolding in her gaze, no demand for explanation. Just quiet knowing.

After a beat, she crossed the room. The floorboards whispered beneath her bare feet, soft against the steady rhythm of the ticking clock. The sound of cupboard doors and clinking mugs filled the heavy air, domestic and familiar, grounding against the chaos strewn across the table.

The smell of fresh coffee soon unfurled through the kitchen - rich, dark, warm.

She set a steaming mug beside his untouched one, the porcelain scraping softly against the wood. Her hand brushed the edge of his as she withdrew, brief but deliberate - a reminder that she was there, that he wasn't completely lost inside the ghosts on the table.

Clint looked up at her then. His eyes were bloodshot, the kind of tired that no amount of sleep could fix. Laura met his gaze evenly, her expression unreadable in the dim light.

She didn't nag. She didn't ask.

She just turned and left the room.

He heard her footsteps fade down the hall - the creak on the third board, the hush of the bedroom door. He stared after her, throat tight, waiting for something - a question, a plea, maybe even frustration. Anything.

But when she returned, she was carrying something.

A travel bag. Old, scuffed leather, the handle worn smooth from years of use. She set it on the table beside the open dossier. It landed with a muted thud, heavy with implication.

Clint's chest constricted.

He hadn't seen that bag in a while. Not since he'd sworn off missions, sworn off Fury's calls, sworn off being anyone other than a husband and a father - a man who fixed fences and ran errands and tucked his kids into bed and kissed his wife in the mornings.

The sight of it was like looking at a photograph of someone he used to be - familiar, but foreign. He stared at it for a long time, every breath slow and measured, as if moving too fast might make it vanish.

Laura left and returned again.

This time, her hands held his bow. And his quiver.

The limbs of it caught the lamplight, a soft metallic gleam that looked both beautiful and lethal. It shouldn't have belonged here - not among the half-finished school projects, the coffee rings on the table, the bowl of fruit, the half-folded laundry waiting on the chair - but somehow, it did. It was part of their story too, no matter how much they'd tried to live beyond it.

Laura placed them gently on the table. Her voice, when she spoke, was quiet but steady. "You'll need this again."

The words hit harder than he expected.

Something broke loose inside him - not anger, not fear, but that deep, hollow ache of inevitability. He swallowed hard, his throat raw. His eyes lingered on the bow, on the curve of it, on the faint scratches that told the story of too many battles.

He wanted to tell her she was wrong. That he didn't need it, didn't want it, that he could just let Fury's problem rot. But the words wouldn't come. They wouldn't even form.

Instead, he just nodded. Once. Small. Final.

Laura turned, as if to leave him to it - to let him gather himself in the wreckage of decisions already made. But Clint reached out before she could take another step.

His hand caught hers.

She stopped. Looked down. Then, without hesitation, her fingers curled around his. Warm. Steady. Present.

They stood there for a long time, the two of them framed in the soft dawn light spilling through the kitchen window - a soldier and a woman who'd built a home out of the ruins he'd brought back with him.

No words passed between them. They didn't need any.

Everything that mattered was already understood.

The silence between them was full - of history, of love, of fear. Of every promise they'd made and every one he was about to break by keeping the others. Clint's grip tightened, his eyes burning. "I don't want to go," he managed, voice low, almost boyish.

Laura's hand lifted, brushing the back of his head, her fingers threading briefly through his hair before she let them fall again.

"I know," she whispered. "But you will."

He closed his eyes, exhaling through the pain in his chest.

It wasn't permission. It wasn't forgiveness.

It was something deeper.

Understanding.

Love shaped by realism - the kind forged through too many nights like this one, through loss and fear and the stubborn faith that he would always find his way back.

Laura kissed him once before heading back to bed.

Outside, the horizon began to lighten even more, painting the fields gold.

The world would wake soon.

And Clint knew, even before he reached for the bow, that he was already in the middle of the store he'd been pretending he could outrun.

He gathered the photos - one by one - sliding them back into the folder as though each image might burn him if he lingered too long. The manila edges were soft from handling, the corners bent. They looked harmless now. They weren't.

He tucked the folder into the travel bag and zipped it shut. The sound was too loud in the stillness.

When he turned, the house was quiet - that deep, early-morning quiet that existed just before the world remembered to breathe again.

He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, watching Laura sleep. The light filtered through the thin curtains, painting her in pale gold and soft shadow. One arm rested over the blanket, her wedding ring catching the first light of day.

Clint wanted to freeze it - that moment, that image. Her face relaxed, her breathing steady, the peace he'd fought so hard to give her. He wanted to carve it into memory, let it live there untouched, something to hold onto when everything else fell apart.

He bent down and kissed her forehead, his lips barely brushing her skin.

She stirred but didn't wake. Her hand moved absently against the sheets, searching for him, finding only air.

Clint lingered a second longer. Then he straightened, jaw set, eyes clouded.

He moved quietly through the house, each step heavier than the last. He checked the locks by habit. Checked the kids' rooms.

Cooper was sprawled across his bed, the blanket half on the floor. Nathaniel was curled tight, clutching a stuffed bear that had seen better days. Lila's hair trailed over her pillow, in a braid Natasha had taught her how to do - her breathing soft and even.

He stood in each doorway longer than he should have, committing every small detail to memory - the way the curtains shifted with the breeze, the faint hum of the old pipes, the smell of the coffee that still lingered from hours ago. The smell of home.

Downstairs, the light of morning spilled through the kitchen window, catching on the half-empty mugs, the faint outline of his bow resting on the table.

He paused there too.

Then he picked it up, cradling it carefully, like it might break if he held it wrong.

Outside, the air was crisp, dew clinging to the grass. The world was finally waking, but it felt like it was holding its breath just for him.

Clint loaded the travel bag into the back of the car. His bow lay beside it, wrapped in canvas, silent and waiting.

He stood there for a moment with his hand on the car door, knuckles white, his reflection staring back in the window - older, harder, eyes shadowed by too many goodbyes. By too many ghosts.

He took one last look at the farmhouse.

At the porch swing swaying gently in the breeze. At the fields rolling out behind it, stretching to the edge of the world. At the home that had once saved him - the life and love he was now leaving behind. Again.

A soft ache bloomed in his chest, sharp as regret, familiar as breath.

Then he got in.

The engine turned over, breaking the stillness. The tires crunched over the gravel drive, the sound stark against the quiet morning.

He didn't look back again.

The sun climbed higher, casting long shadows behind him as the farmhouse faded from view.

And Clint Barton drove away.

Chapter Text

The drive from the airport had been too long.

Too winding, too bright, too damn hot.

By the time Clint rolled the hired car to a stop, the engine coughing against the heat, the sky had already begun to burn down into that peculiar Tuscan gold - all honey and dust and dying light. The hills rolled endlessly in the distance, dotted with olive trees and the occasional vineyard, each one glowing.

It should've been beautiful.

It was beautiful.

And Clint hated that it was wasted on him.

"Too old for this," he muttered, voice rough from hours of silence. He climbed out of the car, stretching until his shoulders cracked, squinting into the sun. His reflection in the side mirror caught his eye - lines deeper than he remembered, hair flecked more with grey than he liked. He grimaced. "Way too old."

The gravel crunched under his boots as he moved toward the house.

The safe house sat at the edge of a dirt path, half-swallowed by a grove of cypress trees that whispered in the dry breeze. Its stone walls were sun-bleached and uneven, vines creeping up the sides like they'd been trying to reclaim it for years. The shutters hung crooked, one swinging lazily with each gust of wind. The roof sagged in the middle where the tiles had long since given up the fight.

To anyone passing by, it looked forgotten - another relic of a country that wore its age with pride. But Clint knew better. He recognised the pattern of reinforced hinges, the faint glint of a security camera hidden in the eaves, the distinct hum of a generator half-buried beneath the porch.

It wasn't abandoned. It was waiting.

And that was almost worse.

He hauled his duffel out of the backseat and slung it over his shoulder, the strap cutting into his palm. His bow followed.

The door stuck before it gave way, scraping open with a tired groan that echoed through the empty house. The air inside was cooler, thick with the smell of dust and disuse. Faded sunlight slipped through narrow windows, painting the walls in fractured amber.

Classic setup.

Bare bones.

A cold bed with a thin mattress and a single flat pillow. A pantry stocked with canned beans, stale crackers, and packets of instant coffee that probably expired sometime during the Blip. A rickety table and two mismatched chairs, one leg shorter than the other. A bathroom sink that coughed and groaned before spitting out brown water that cleared, eventually.

No comforts. No warmth. Nothing meant for living. Only surviving.

It was a kind of silence Clint knew too well - the kind that didn't come from peace but from things left unsaid, unburied.

He dropped the duffel onto the bed, the springs squealing in protest, and sat down beside it. His elbows rested on his knees as he stared at the cracked tile floor, the uneven pattern of light and shadow creeping across it. He scrubbed a hand down his face, rough stubble scratching his palm, and let out a breath that felt like it came from somewhere years deep.

"Home sweet home," he muttered, voice dry.

For a moment, he let himself just sit there - listening to the birds outside, to the rustle of wind through the trees, to the faraway hum of a life that wasn't his anymore.

He thought he might have felt relief, being back in motion again, back in something like purpose. But all he felt was the weight of the bag at his feet and the echo of Laura's soft sleeping breath when he'd left.

He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, the sound of the countryside bleeding in through the cracked shutters - wind, a church bell somewhere in the distance.

The world kept turning.

And Clint Barton sat alone, in another safe house that felt like a tomb, trying to remember why he ever thought he could outrun the ghosts that always, always, found him.

His burner phone rang just after dark.

A sharp, jarring sound that sliced through the silence.

Clint froze where he sat - halfway through unpacking a can opener that didn't quite work right - and stared at the phone vibrating against the scarred table. No number. No name. Just Unknown, pulsing white on black.

He sighed through his nose, wiped his hands on his jeans, and picked it up.

"Yeah."

There was a faint crackle on the other end - a moment of static, then the voice he'd been waiting for.

"Clint."

That low, rough-edged gravel.

Nick Fury.

Clint leaned back in the chair until it creaked, eyes tracking the cracks spidering across the plaster ceiling. "Didn't think you did your own calls anymore," he said, dry. "What, you fire all your assistants?"

"I'm not in the habit of small talk," Fury replied, the faintest hint of amusement buried somewhere in his tone. "This is a courtesy."

Clint snorted. "Courtesy. Right. You got a funny idea of what that word means. Dragging me out of retirement, halfway across the world, into a house that smells like dust and... regret. You know, there's a better way to say hi."

"Save your stand-up routine," Fury said. "Intel says she was here. Echo. Last movements traced to two SALT compounds outside Siena. They've been dead for three years. Now they're lit up like Christmas."

Clint sat up a little straighter. His fingers drummed against the edge of the table. "You sure it's her?"

A pause. Too long.

"Fury."

"I said intel," came the reply - smooth, practiced, evasive. "Don't start asking questions you don't need the answers to. Just keep your eyes open. She's not subtle. You'll find her."

Clint's jaw worked, teeth grinding. He could practically see Fury on the other end - calm, composed, that single good eye narrowing, already two moves ahead on a board he never showed anyone else.

He wanted to push. God, he wanted to. But pushing never got him anywhere with Fury except more silence.

So he swallowed it down.

"Fine," Clint said finally, voice flat. "I'll look."

There was the faint sound of a chair shifting, of a door opening somewhere behind Fury - and then the click of the line going dead.

Just like that.

No goodbye. No plan. Just the old familiar pattern: Fury drops a match, and Clint's left to watch what burns.

He set the phone down slowly, the plastic thunking against the tabletop. For a long moment, he didn't move. The shadows stretched long around him, flickering with the wind that nudged the shutters.

Somewhere outside, a dog barked once, distant and echoing. The birds had gone quiet.

Clint exhaled through his teeth. Suspicion itched beneath his skin like old scar tissue. He'd known Fury too long to mistake silence for ignorance. If Fury wasn't telling him how they knew it was Echo, it was because he didn't want Clint to know.

Which meant whatever this was - it wasn't clean.

It never was.

He leaned back, the chair wobbling slightly beneath him, and looked at the phone again. A simple burner. Cheap, anonymous. Disposable.

Like the people they sent out on errands like this.

He poured himself another cup of instant coffee that had long since gone cold, took a sip anyway, and muttered to the empty room,

"Yeah. Real courteous."

That night, the Tuscan hills glowed faintly under a waning moon. The air was cool and sharp, tasting faintly of olive leaves and dust.

Clint moved through the cypresses like a shadow, careful where he placed his boots, weight distributed low and even. The forest floor was soft with fallen needles. Every now and then, an owl stirred from a branch above him, gliding silent into the dark.

His breath came steady. His heartbeat, quieter still.

It was easy - too easy - to fall back into this rhythm. The stealth, the silence, the solitude. He didn't have to think about it; it just returned, uninvited. His body remembered what his mind tried to make him forget.

He slipped past the skeletal remains of an old vineyard, vines long dead, the trellises twisted and half-collapsed. Beyond it, the ground sloped downward into a shallow valley, and there - half-hidden by distance and shadow - lay the ruins of a SALT compound.

Concrete bunkers, grey and pitted. Fences sagging under the weight of rust. A few poles still jutted into the sky, stripped of wire, the ghosts of floodlights mounted crookedly at their tops.

It looked abandoned. A carcass picked clean by time and weather.

But Clint knew better than to trust stillness.

He crouched at the ridge, brushing a hand against the ground, feeling the grit of dry earth and stone beneath his palm. His bow rested beside him, strung and ready, its curve catching a faint thread of moonlight. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes.

Nothing moved.

The compound was silent. The shadows didn't shift. The night breathed evenly, slow and calm.

He waited anyway.

Hours passed. The sky deepened from navy to ink-black. The hum of cicadas faded, replaced by the rhythmic chirp of crickets. Somewhere far off, a dog barked once, then fell silent again. The air cooled further, wrapping him in its stillness.

And Clint waited.

The waiting was what he'd always been good at. Not the fighting, not the running - anyone could shoot, anyone could chase. The waiting was what people usually struggled with. The stillness. The patience. Becoming invisible.

He slowed his breathing until it matched the rhythm of the night, until his heartbeats were seconds apart, steady as the ticking of a clock. His muscles loosened without slackening, his senses sharpening with the kind of clarity that came only in the quiet between breaths.

The instincts slid back into him like muscle memory waking from a long sleep.

How to melt into the terrain. How to measure distance by sound. How to feel a shift in the air before it made itself known.

He hadn't realised how much he missed this. Or how much he hated that he missed it.

But with the silence came the ghosts.

Budapest.

He could almost smell the gunpowder and smoke, the metallic tang of the Danube in winter. He remembered the rooftops slick with ice, the long nights spent lying prone with his bow drawn, waiting for the signal that never came.

And her.

Natasha.

Her laugh, soft and dry and threaded with danger. Her elbow nudging his ribs when he fidgeted too loud. Her accented whisper cutting through the dark: "You are restless. Again."

He'd grunt something back, pretending irritation, but she'd always know it was affection underneath.

The memory of her sitting cross-legged beside him, boots untied, eyes reflecting the city lights, haunted him still. She'd been the only one who could share the silence with him easily and make it feel like company instead of punishment.

He'd traded a kill order for a friendship that had saved them both.

And then, years later, he'd let her fall.

The ache pressed deep in his chest. He rubbed a hand over his face, willing the memories away, but they clung like smoke.

Below him, the compound remained lifeless. Empty.

But the quiet had changed.

He didn't hear it so much as feel it - the shift, subtle and unmistakable. The kind of silence that listens back.

Clint straightened, scanning the perimeter again, every nerve alight. He counted heartbeats, every instinct awake, old reflexes sharp and ready.

Then - something brushed against his boot.

He went still, hand closing around the bow's grip, muscles tensing. His eyes flicked down -

- and froze.

A pair of yellow eyes blinked up at him from the shadows.

A cat.

Mottled grey, thin and scrappy, its ribs showing faintly under patchy fur. Its left ear was torn clean through, and a streak of mud ran down its side. It blinked once, slow and deliberate, then gave a soft, questioning mrrp.

Clint exhaled, long and low. "You've got to be kidding me."

The cat tilted its head, unimpressed.

He waved a hand, trying to shoo it away. "Go on. Off you go. Wrong company, pal."

The cat ignored him completely, stepping forward, tail flicking lazily. It sniffed his boot, then rubbed against it with the kind of confidence that only strays and soldiers shared - the kind that said I've been through worse, I'm not afraid of you.

Clint huffed out a breath that almost became a laugh. "Persistent thing, aren't you?"

The cat circled once and then, without ceremony, curled up beside him in the grass. It pressed its thin body against his leg, purring low and rough, like an old motor.

"Great," Clint muttered. "First partner I've had in years. And it's a cat."

The purring deepened.

He looked down at it, shaking his head. "At least you don't talk back."

The cat's eyes closed, content.

Clint leaned back against the tree, his bow resting loosely across his knees. The valley below stayed dark and still. The loneliness pressed closer, as heavy as the air. But the small weight of the cat's body against his thigh - warm, steady, alive - made the night feel a little less hollow.

He reached down absently, scratching behind its ear. The cat made a satisfied sound, curling tighter.

"Guess I really am stuck with you then," he murmured.

The cat didn't answer. It just purred louder, unbothered by the ghosts surrounding them.

For the first time since he'd landed in Italy, Clint's lips twitched into something close to a smile.

The moon climbed higher over the ridge, washing the valley in silver. The wind stirred the grass. The ruins waited, silent and patient as the dead.

And for a brief, fragile moment, Clint Barton let himself rest.

The silence didn't feel quite so empty anymore.

Chapter Text

The second night in Tuscany was worse than the first.

The air hung heavy, wet with humidity that Iowa summers could never quite match - a damp, clinging heat that wrapped around Clint's skin long after the sun had sunk behind the distant hills. The earth itself seemed to sweat, carrying the scent of olive leaves, dry grass, and rain that never came.

Insects screamed in the trees until the darkness swallowed them, and even then the night didn't quiet - it only changed. Crickets sawed their legs together in the grass. Frogs croaked somewhere down by the creek bed. A barn owl called low and mournful, its wings slicing silently through the air. Every so often, something small rustled in the underbrush behind him - a hedgehog, maybe, or a fox nosing through the leaves.

Clint sat in a usual perch, a low ridge of rock and brush overlooking the crumbling SALT compound ahead. His knees were drawn up, bow balanced across them, binoculars hanging loose around his neck. He hadn't moved in hours.

His back ached in deep, steady pulses. His left knee - the bad one, the one that still sang old songs from his Avenger days - throbbed every time he shifted his weight. His hands had gone numb twice. His eyes burned from staring too long into a landscape that refused to move.

Another night of nothing. Nothing at all.

He exhaled through his nose, the sound dry and humorless. "Fury, you son of a bitch," he muttered, voice low enough that only the cicadas might've heard. "Dragged me out here for what? To play scarecrow in the middle of nowhere?"

No answer, of course. Just the slow, steady hum of summer night.

He reached for his canteen and took a sip of water gone warm and metallic. The swallow felt like effort. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and sighed.

Maybe the intel was garbage. Wouldn't be the first time.

Maybe S.W.O.R.D. had fed him a breadcrumb trail that led nowhere, just to see how far he'd follow. Maybe Fury - or whoever was really sitting in the big chair these days - wanted him out of the way. Let the old archer go chase ghosts in Europe while the real players handled the real threats.

Or maybe... maybe they just wanted to see what would happen if they dangled the past in front of him. Phycological warfare.

He rubbed a hand over his face, palm dragging down until it met the scratch of stubble on his jaw. His fingers lingered there, thoughtful.

The truth, he knew, was uglier.

Maybe Fury wasn't using him. Maybe Fury was testing him.

Because if Clint Barton was truly done with this life, if he really meant it when he told Laura he was finished, then why the hell was he here?

Why had he left the farm, the soft rhythm of mornings and chores, the warmth of Laura's hand in his - to sit on a hillside with his bow across his knees, like he hadn't aged a day since Budapest?

Because deep down, he knew the answer.

He didn't know how to be anything else.

And Fury knew it too.

He let out a dry laugh, the kind that didn't reach his eyes. "I'm a sucker," he muttered to himself. "Biggest sucker of them all."

The wind shifted, cool and scented faintly of rain. Somewhere behind him, the underbrush rustled again - softer this time, deliberate. Clint's hand went to the bow automatically, body tightening out of habit.

Then came a familiar, unimpressed mew.

He sighed. "Oh, it's you."

The cat had returned - the same scrappy stray from the night before. It padded through the grass like it owned the ridge and sat primly on his boot, yellow eyes unblinking.

"I don't remember inviting you tonight," Clint said.

The cat blinked slowly. You didn't have to.

He arched a brow. "Persistent little bastard. You know this isn't exactly prime real estate, right? You could be down there charming tourists, living off cheese and prosciutto. Instead, you picked the washed-up archer hiding in the bushes."

The cat yawned wide, revealing small sharp teeth.

Clint snorted. "Terrifying. Truly."

He leaned back against the cypress trunk, bow resting on his knees again. His voice softened without meaning to.

"You know, if you're gonna be my partner, you gotta pull your weight. Maybe scare off a pigeon or two. Bring back some intel."

The cat stretched, turned a lazy circle, and then curled up against his shin, its warmth seeping into his jeans. Its purr started as a faint vibration, then deepened into a steady rumble.

Clint looked down, half-smiling despite himself. "Yeah, laugh it up. Nat would've loved this. She'd call it poetic justice. Me, stuck out here alone, talking to a cat because, even here, I can't seem to shut up."

He swallowed hard. The humor caught somewhere in his throat.

"I miss her so much," he said, voice almost a whisper. The words hung in the air like they were waiting for permission to exist. "I miss... having a friend. You spend enough time on rooftops, in the dirt, in grimy safe houses, shoulder to shoulder with someone who gets it, and you forget what it's like to really be alone."

The cat purred louder, pressing closer.

Clint closed his eyes, breathing slow. The night pressed in around him - warm, thick, endless.

The confession drifted into the dark, carried off by the sound of crickets and the faraway sigh of the wind.

Sometime past midnight, the weight of it all - the heat, the ache, the memories, the silence - became too much. His muscles slackened, breath evened out.

He told himself he'd just rest his eyes for a minute. Just a minute. He'd done this a thousand times before.

But the minute stretched, slow and treacherous.

And in that minute - something moved.

Clint's eyes snapped open.

For a second, he didn't know why - only that something shifted in the world around him.

His body moved before his mind caught up. A lifetime of training, instinct, and scars did the thinking for him. He rolled onto one knee, bow already in hand, pulse spiking. His breath came shallow and sharp, like his chest had forgotten how to expand.

Down below, in the valley - movement.

A shadow, thin and deliberate, peeled itself away from the ruins. Too fluid to be wind. Too precise to be an animal.

Clint froze, heart hammering against his ribs. He brought the binoculars to his eyes, fingers steady despite the thrum in his veins.

Through the lenses, the shape resolved.

There.

Her.

Echo.

She moved along the edge of the compound like water sliding through stone - black tactical gear absorbing the moonlight, every muscle working in perfect, silent control. Her mask obscured half her face, but even from this distance Clint could see the poise, the discipline. Every step measured. Every gesture clean. She didn't just move through the dark; she commanded it.

He exhaled slowly, the glass fogging from his breath. "Well, I'll be damned."

Beside him, the cat stirred, lifting its head, ears twitching at the subtle shift in his voice.

Clint lowered the binoculars, slinging them aside, and reached back for an arrow. The motion was automatic - smooth, practiced. The familiar weight in his hand steadied the restless tremor in his chest.

The bow fit his grip like it always had. An old habit that never really left.

"Showtime," he murmured.

He rose, keeping low, and began to descend the slope. Each movement was careful, deliberate. The loose stones underfoot threatened to betray him, but he compensated instinctively, his body recalling every rule of the hunt.

The air tasted electric.

Below, Echo moved closer to the main building of the SALT compound. She didn't hesitate at the gates. Didn't slow to check her corners. She moved with the easy confidence of someone who'd already mapped the place out in her head - who'd walked it before.

Clint's heartbeat found its rhythm with hers.

Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty.

He could almost smell the dust on her boots, the faint tang of oil and metal that clung to all fieldwork. He notched the arrow, drew the string halfway, tracking her through the ruins.

Then the night tore apart.

BOOM.

The explosion split the world open in a bloom of orange and white. The shockwave hit him a second later - a physical punch that drove the breath from his lungs and hurled him backward into the dirt.

Clint hit the ground hard, instinct curling him into a ball. He threw an arm over his head as shards of rock and metal screamed through the air. The blast rolled over him, hot and merciless, setting the grass around him alight in thin, snaking tongues of fire.

For a heartbeat, there was no sound. Just a deafening, high-pitched ring that drowned everything.

Then the chaos came rushing back in - the crackle of flames, the pop of secondary charges, the shattering of glass.

He coughed, choking on smoke, his throat raw. His eyes watered as he pushed himself up onto one elbow, lungs burning. The smell was thick and chemical, singed metal and scorched oil, the kind of stench that clung to your clothes long after you left the battlefield.

He blinked through the haze.

The compound below wasn't a ruin anymore - it was a pyre. Fire licked through broken windows, climbed up the walls, devouring concrete and steel alike. Black smoke curled into the sky like an accusation.

Somewhere in the inferno, something else went up - another blast, smaller but sharper, tossing debris into the night. Clint ducked instinctively, throwing his arm over his head again.

When the roar faded, he forced himself upright. Every joint protested. His ribs ached from where he'd hit the ground. His ears still rang.

But he scanned the valley anyway. Searching.

For her.

Through the flickering light, through the storm of heat and smoke, he searched for any sign of Echo - any glimpse of motion, any shadow that didn't belong.

Nothing.

Just fire.

And silence.

She was gone.

Vanished like smoke into smoke.

Clint staggered to his feet, bow still clutched in his hand, his silhouette cutting a jagged shape against the backdrop of the burning base. His breath came hard, sharp in the dark.

He knew what this meant.

This was her war.

Not Fury's. Not S.W.O.R.D's. Not his.

Hers.

And somewhere deep in his gut, under the ache and the ringing and the exhaustion, he knew he was already caught in it - too far in to turn back, too deep to walk away.

He stared at the flames a long time, the fire painting his face in orange light, before he whispered, almost to himself:

"Damn it."

The wind shifted, carrying the smoke up and away into the black Tuscan sky.

And Clint Barton stood alone, watching the compound burn.

Chapter Text

The line clicked.

Clint didn't bother with a greeting. He didn't have the patience for that tonight. His voice came rough from the smoke still clinging to his lungs. "Well," he rasped into the burner phone, "Your ghost does exist."

There was a pause on the other end - the faint hum of an encrypted line - and then Fury's voice rolled through, low and dry as ever.

"Do tell me more, Barton."

Clint let out a breath that might've been a laugh if it had any humour in it. He shifted his weight, eyes still on the inferno. The ruins of the SALT compound burned slow and ugly, the fire chewing through what little was left.

"She blew up the compound," he said flatly.

That got Fury's attention. The easy tone dropped. "Details."

Clint's jaw flexed. "Details. Right." He rubbed a hand over his face, smearing ash down his cheek. "You want details? Fine. I've got jack. Movement in the dark. Black tactical gear. Masked. Didn't make a sound. I had her in my sights for maybe thirty seconds before she turned the whole damn place into fireworks."

He paused, staring at the smoking ruins. The wind shifted, carrying the smell of burning plastic and oil. Something deep in the compound gave way with a wet, metallic shriek.

Then silence.

"She planned this," Clint said, quieter now. "Not a hit. Not an accident. She wanted this place gone. It's like she just... turned up to make sure it died and then disappeared."

The fire popped, sending a small shower of embers into the air like dying stars.

"And you're sure it was her?" Fury asked, voice clipped, professional. But there was something under it - that old note of tension when he already knew the answer but didn't like hearing it out loud.

Clint's mouth twitched. "Unless there's another mute ninja out here blowing up SALT sites in the Tuscan countryside, yeah. I'm sure."

A low grunt came through the receiver. Fury's version of a curse. "Write me a full report. Everything you saw. Everything."

Clint froze mid-step, lowering the phone. Then he barked out a short, sharp laugh - humourless and biting. "A report? You want a report on a shadow, and an explosion? Sure. I'll fill out the paperwork in crayon. Maybe draw a little stick figure too. That work for you?"

Fury didn't rise to it. He never did, not with Clint. He'd learned a long time ago that Barton's sarcasm was armour - and the harder he bit, the thinner that armour had gotten.

"You're there for a reason, Barton," Fury said finally. His tone was cool, measured, but it hit like an order all the same. "Don't forget it."

Then the line went dead.

Clint stared at the phone for a moment longer, the silence pressing in again.

The glow of the burning base pulsed in the distance, rhythmic and alive. The wind carried a new sound now - faint sirens somewhere far off, crawling through the night toward the wreckage.

He snapped the burner shut, shoved it into his pocket, and muttered to no one, "Don't forget it. Hell, like I could."

The flames threw heat against his face , a low, living pulse that painted his skin in shades of gold and red. The air shimmered, thick with the tang of burning metal and scorched earth. Smoke curled lazily up the valley, blotting out the stars.

Clint squinted through the haze, senses running hot and sharp. Too clean. Too deliberate. The kind of detonation that came from someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

This wasn't just chaos. This was choreography.

Whoever this girl was, she hadn't come to destroy or kill. She'd come to erase.

But why?

He shifted, intending to head back toward the dirt track that wound down to the safe house - his muscles ached for rest, but his nerves wouldn't let him settle. He took one last scan of the ridge, eyes sweeping across the broken line of brush and stone.

Then something stopped him.

A single imperfection in the wild scatter of debris - too precise to be natural. A flat stone set against the slope at just the wrong angle.

Clint's frown deepened. He crouched, boots crunching softly in the dry grass.

There, half-buried under the rock, was a slip of paper.

Folded. Crisp. Untouched by dust or ash.

Every instinct in him went still. His pulse ticked faster, the world narrowing to that one small, impossible thing.

Trap. That was his first thought. Always his first thought.

He scanned the perimeter, eyes flicking through the dark - tree lines, shadows, angles of approach. No heat shimmer. No reflection of glass. No sound but the slow roar of fire and the cicadas screaming themselves hoarse.

Still, the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

He reached out anyway. Slowly. Carefully. He lifted the stone and took the paper.

It was folded once, dead-centre. Military neat. He hesitated, thumb running over the edge before he unfolded it. Four words stared up at him, inked in precise, deliberate strokes.

Stop looking for me.

The air seemed to thin around him.

Clint's breath caught in his throat, shallow and sharp. His fingers curled around the note, crinkling it. He didn't need analysis or guesswork - this wasn't a coincidence.

She knew.

She'd known exactly where he was. How long he'd been there. How close he'd been watching.

And she'd wanted him to find this.

A message not meant to scare. A message meant to tell.

His heart thudded, low and hot, an old rhythm that tasted too much like adrenaline.

He refolded the note carefully, almost reverently, then tucked it deep into his pocket - like it might burn through the fabric if he held it too long.

Below him, the flames roared higher, collapsing the last of the structures into themselves. Steel melted, wood snapped. The base was dying fast - all evidence with it.

Clint pulled the burner from his jacket, thumbed it open, and dialled.

Fury picked up on the first ring. Of course he did.

"She left me a note," Clint said. His voice was quieter than he meant it to be.

A pause - then the low rumble of Fury's voice, that same careful calm that always managed to sound like a threat. "What did it say?"

"Stop looking for me."

Another pause. Longer this time. He could practically hear the gears turning.

"Classic intimidation tactic," Fury said finally. "She's trying to rattle you."

Clint stared down at the fire chewing through the valley. "It doesn't feel like intimidation."

"What does it feel like?"

He hesitated, the words thick in his throat.

Personal. That's what it felt like. Not a warning. Not a threat. A conversation.

But Fury wouldn't want to hear that.

So Clint exhaled, the breath scraping out of him. "Forget it. Doesn't matter. You'll get your damn report by morning."

He hung up before Fury could answer.

The silence that followed was almost worse than the blast.

Then the wail of sirens began to rise. Crawling up the hills, winding through the narrow Tuscan roads. Locals. Firefighters. Maybe police. Maybe press. Too many eyes. Too many questions he couldn't afford to answer.

Clint tugged his hood lower, adjusted the bow on his shoulder, and started back along the ridge.

He moved the way he'd learned to move long ago - low, silent, invisible. The night took him in without a sound.

Below, blue lights flickered against the black, washing the valley in pulses. The wind carried snatches of radio chatter and the metallic clang of trucks arriving too late.

The slip of paper in his pocket felt heavier with every step.

By the time Clint reached the dirt road winding toward the safe house, the sound of sirens had grown into a fractured chorus - distant at first, then rising, echoing off the valley walls. Flashlights bobbed below, cutting through the smoke as fire crews spilled into the ruins. Voices shouted commands in Italian, sharp and frantic, swallowed by the roar of collapsing steel.

He turned once. Just once.

The base was burning like a funeral pyre.

The flames reached high enough to lick the stars, painting the night in violent oranges and deep, trembling reds. Heat shimmered off the valley floor, warping the air. Even from this distance, Clint could feel it pressing against his skin, a living thing breathing out its last breath.

That was when the chill hit him.

It slithered down his spine - not fear, not exactly, but that old, primal sense he'd never been able to unlearn. The one that whispered: you're not alone.

He stopped moving.

The night stretched taut around him.

Slowly, Clint turned his head - bow half-raised, fingers already finding their place on the string by instinct more than thought.

And there she was.

Across the valley.

Standing on the opposite ridge, high against the horizon - a lone, still silhouette carved out of fire and shadow.

For a second, she looked unreal. A phantom pulled from the smoke.

Then the flames surged behind her, and he saw her clearly.

She wasn't masked this time.

Clint's breath caught in his throat. His vision sharpened the way it always did when adrenaline spiked, pulling every detail into focus.

Young - heartbreakingly young. No older than early twenties. Her hair was dirty blonde, catching the light like the edge of a blade. Strands floated in the hot updraft, haloed in orange flame. Her face was all sharp lines and contradictions: high cheekbones, a stubborn jaw, a mouth that had forgotten how to soften.

And her eyes - God, her eyes.

They were dark, glinting, filled with something too old for her face.

Not the emptiness of a killer. Not the cold clarity of someone who enjoyed the hunt. This was something else. Something rawer. Pain wound tight into purpose.

The kind of grief Clint recognised like a mirror.

For a heartbeat - one impossibly long, fragile heartbeat - their gazes locked across the burning valley. The world around them fell away. There were no sirens, no fire, no orders, no mission. Just two ghosts staring each other down across the ashes.

And Clint knew.

This wasn't an accident.

She'd wanted him to see her. To know she'd seen him.

Maybe this was the real warning.

His fingers twitched against the bowstring, muscles tightening in old reflex. A thousand possible outcomes fired in his head - angles, wind, distance, shot placement. All of it instinct, all of it useless.

Because he couldn't move.

He didn't want to.

Before he could blink, before he could breathe - she turned.

A flicker of movement, fluid as smoke. One step, then another, and she was gone. Swallowed whole by the dark.

Clint stood there, frozen in place, the bow heavy in his hand. His heart thundered against his ribs, every beat echoing in his throat.

The valley burned. The sirens wailed. The smoke rose higher, curling into the stars.

But all he could see was her face - burned into his vision, ghosting across the dark.

Young. Sharp. Haunted.

And something in her expression - the grief buried under her defiance, the same defiant ache he'd seen in someone else's eyes once, long ago - hollowed him out completely.

It wasn't just recognition. It was remembrance.

Because it wasn't the girl herself that plagued him now.

It was the echo of the haunted look in her eyes.

Not the echo of a ghost. Or a target. Or a threat.

But the ghost of Natasha's same haunted eyes on the night he met her.

Chapter Text

The voices droned on in Clint's ear.

"...possible movement out of Warsaw, but unconfirmed..." "...intel projections suggest she's targeting high-level assets connected to the remnants of SALT infrastructure..." "...operational patience is our best tool here. We need to avoid escalation before the situation crystallises..."

Clint's eyes glazed over somewhere between Warsaw and operational patience.

He sat hunched at an old table, the burner phone propped up against an empty mug, a tangle of papers, crumpled notes, and half-drained coffee cups scattered like casualties across the wood. The air inside the safe house was stale despite the cracked window - too dry, too warm, thick with the faint smell of rust and dust. Outside, the Tuscan sun was bleeding low behind the hills, its gold spilling through the crooked blinds and striping the walls like bars. The light made the room look alive, but it wasn't.

The voice on the other end was flat and bureaucratic - the kind Clint had learned to despise back in the old days of S.H.I.E.L.D., before everything cracked and fell apart. That practiced, emotionless cadence of someone who'd never once had to pull a trigger or clean blood off their boots.

"...so what we recommend," the man continued, "is that you hold position for another forty-eight hours while we refine the intelligence package. Patience, Barton. This is a long game."

Patience.

That damn word again.

Clint leaned back in the chair, wood creaking under his weight. His arms crossed tight over his chest. His knuckles ached from the grip he didn't even realise he was holding.

Two weeks.

That's how long he'd been here now - in this dead corner of Tuscany, in this box of a safe house that wasn't safe from the ghosts in his own head. Two weeks of staring at the same cracked plaster, watching dust drift through the afternoon light, waiting for the next whisper of movement that never came.

Two weeks of Fury's people telling him to hold steady, to sit tight, to trust the process.

Two weeks of bureaucrats turning human lives into bullet points and code names.

Two weeks of pretending he wasn't rotting.

He dragged a hand over his face, thumb and forefinger pressing hard against the bridge of his nose. His eyes burned from too little sleep and too much smoke. The scent of the burned-out SALT compound still lingered in his memory - that bitter, metallic tang of scorched concrete and something worse.

And underneath it all, Natasha's voice, a memory, echoing somewhere deep in the dark corners of his mind.

You're fidgeting again, Barton.

He exhaled through his nose, long and tired. "Yeah," he muttered under his breath. "I know." He wasn't sure whether he was responding to the S.W.O.R.D. meeting or to the memory of Natasha.

"-so as I was saying," the man droned on, completely unaware that Clint had stopped listening ten minutes ago, "if we maintain surveillance posture, she's bound to resurface. Echo's movements have a pattern. She wants to be seen. We just have to wait for-"

"Wait," Clint said aloud, his tone dry enough to burn. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes narrowing. "You've been saying that since I got here. What more is there to wait for?"

The voice hesitated, then cleared its throat. "Patience-"

Clint snapped. The chair legs scraped harshly against the floor as he slammed both elbows on the table, the sound like a shot in the small room. "I am not some intern running fetch-quests for you," he bit out, every word sharp enough to cut. "Every time you tell me to sit on my ass, she's already gone by the time I blink. This-" he jabbed a finger at the phone, like he could stab straight through the wire. "This isn't working."

Silence.

Then Fury's voice cut in, smooth and measured, the same gravelly calm that had once pulled Clint out of some sticky situations. "Clint-"

But someone else interrupted. Younger, sharper. A man who spoke like he was used to being the smartest one in the room. "Then maybe," he said, each syllable clipped and deliberate, "You're not the right man for this job after all."

The words hit like a sucker punch.

Clint's hand flexed on the table. His jaw locked so tight his teeth ached.

Not the right man.

Not the right man after Budapest. After New York. After Vormir. After dragging himself back from the edge of hell and trying, for once, to be a father instead of a weapon.

He stared at the phone, the muscles in his forearm twitching.

He could almost see their faces - clean offices, cold coffee, neat ties. None of them had been out here, breathing this air, watching her move like a ghost through the ruins. None of them had seen the way she looked back at him through the fire.

"You're right," Clint said finally, his voice low, dangerous. "I'm not the right man for this job." He leaned forward, tone softening into something colder. "Because I'm not running your goddamn playbook. If I'm doing this, I'm doing it my way."

"Barton-" Fury started.

But Clint was already reaching for the phone. His thumb hovered for a second. Just long enough to hear Fury inhale, like he was about to say something important. Something human.

Then Clint pressed the button.

Click.

The line went dead.

The silence that followed was thick, almost solid. He sat there for a long time, elbows on his knees, the faint hum of cicadas seeping through the window. The dying light turned the walls copper, the shadows deepening to blood-red.

Eventually, he leaned back and looked at the empty mug beside the phone. Coffee gone cold.

He gave a short, bitter laugh.

"Patience," he muttered, shaking his head. "Hell of a thing to ask from a guy who's been nothing but patient all his life."

He picked up the bow leaning against the chair beside him, fingers trailing along the wood like it was an old friend he didn't know how to talk to anymore.

Outside, the last light drained from the hills, leaving only the hum of the night - and the steady, familiar rhythm of a man who didn't know how to stop hunting ghosts.

The silence that followed was deafening.

For a long moment Clint just sat there, staring at the cheap burner phone, its black screen reflecting his scowl. His pulse thudded hot in his ears, adrenaline buzzing like static in his veins.

Then, slowly, he picked up the phone. Turned it over in his hand.

And without a word, popped the back casing, pried out the battery, and dropped it into the half-empty glass of water on the table.

It fizzed once,a sharp hiss of bubbles.

Dead.

Just like that, the tether was cut.

Clint exhaled, long and slow, and pushed himself up from the chair. His knees cracked, joints stiff from too many hours of sitting, too many nights spent away when he should have been asleep. He stretched his shoulders, rolled his neck, then crossed the room to where his bow leaned in the corner.

He picked it up. Felt the familiar weight. The quiet comfort of it in his grip. The part of him that had been dormant - the part he'd buried under years of farm chores and bedtime stories - stirred again, awake and restless.

If he was going to hunt a ghost, he would do it alone.

No handlers. No suits. No Fury.

Just him.

He moved through the house with purpose - quiet but quick, every step placed where the boards wouldn't creak.

The duffel sat in the corner where he'd left it, still half-packed, still waiting for the moment he'd known was coming. He crouched and unzipped it, the soft rasp of the teeth loud in the silence. Inside: a spare comm unit, a half-empty box of protein bars, a first-aid kit, and a small stack of folded shirts. Everything smelled faintly of dust and gun oil.

He started adding to it.

From the closet - a change of clothes that weren't his, a plain gray jacket with the tag still attached, a scarf that smelled faintly of lavender and disuse. From the stockroom - two bundles of arrows, the fletching still crisp beneath years of dust.

He moved with mechanical precision, every action deliberate. Check, stow, cinch, tighten. His fingers worked automatically, a rhythm carved into his bones years ago - back when every bag he packed might've been his last.

The house around him creaked softly as the evening wind shifted through the shutters. The light was dying, fading from amber to bruised purple. Long shadows spilled across the cracked floorboards, stretching and merging like ink.

He paused in the bedroom doorway.

The bed was bare except for a folded grey blanket and a single lamp with a crooked shade. The walls were empty, just pale plaster and a few nail holes where someone else's life had once hung. It looked less like a home than a waiting room. A place between one mission and the next, where you were meant to disappear for a while and then move on like you'd never existed at all.

He stood there for a long moment, thumb rubbing the worn fabric of the strap slung over his shoulder.

Maybe that was the point.

You don't get attached. You don't get comfortable. You don't make homes; you make exits.

He left the light on.

It was an old habit - something Natasha had once teased him about. You leave it burning, like you're gonna come back. You never do.

He could almost hear her voice now, low and amused, echoing in the corners of the empty room. He turned to leave, but a faint sound stopped him.

A soft scratch at the window.

He pivoted, hand instinctively brushing the bow at his shoulder, muscles tensing - until he saw it.

The damn cat.

The same stray that had appeared his first night here, thin and wary, shadowing him from the fence post to the porch and then settling by the window like it owned the place.

Now it was perched on the sill, eyes catching the last glimmer of dusk, two small gold coins staring back at him. Its tail flicked once, slow and lazy, like it was judging him for leaving.

Clint huffed a quiet laugh through his nose. "Guess you'll have to find another idiot to keep you company."

The cat blinked. Didn't move.

He stepped closer, crouching by the window. For a man who could split an arrow from eighty meters, his hand looked clumsy as he reached out. The cat sniffed his fingers, brushed its head once against his knuckle, then turned away - dismissive, already done with him.

"Yeah," Clint murmured. "Story of my life."

He rose, slung the duffel over his shoulder, and adjusted the bow. The weight was comforting. Familiar. The kind of burden he knew how to carry.

At the door, he paused one last time and looked back.

The room sat in silence - the lamp's weak light pooling, catching the edges of the dust motes still floating through the air. It looked like a photograph from someone else's life. A memory already fading.

He reached out and touched the doorframe, fingertips brushing the rough wood. It was an unconscious gesture - a small, old superstition. The kind soldiers make before walking into fire.

Then he pulled the door shut.

The lock clicked.

Outside, the night was waiting.

Clint stood there for a moment, eyes adjusting to the dark, the weight of the pack pressing against his shoulder like gravity. He felt the old rhythm of it stir again - the ghost pulse of movement, instinct, survival.

He took one breath, then another.

And then he started walking.

Down the narrow dirt road that led away from the safe house. Past olive trees and the low stone walls. Into the long stretch of night that had always been waiting for him, patient and endless.

Behind him, the house stayed lit, a single square of pale light in the distance. And somewhere in the dark, the cat settled on the windowsill and watched the road until even that light was gone.

Clint Barton disappeared off the grid.

Chapter Text

The countryside roads wound narrow and unmarked, the kind that twisted through old stone walls and rows of olive trees bowed low under their own weight. Roads that didn't exist on any modern map, that led to nowhere unless you already knew what you were looking for.

Clint drove them for days.

The engine of the borrowed car idled low, steady as a heartbeat. He killed the headlights after midnight, relying on the faint silver wash of moonlight and the memory of terrain to guide him. The car smelled of leather, dust, and stale coffee - a capsule of movement that never quite felt like rest.

No burner phone buzzing in his back pocket. No S.W.O.R.D. handlers barking updates through encrypted channels. No bureaucrats telling him to wait.

Silence.

Just the way he liked it.

It reminded him of the old missions - the ones where the only orders came from his own gut. When survival depended on instinct and pattern, not data or directives. The quiet suited him better than the noise ever had.

The SALT compound hadn't come from Fury. Not from the briefings. Not from whispers traded between analysts who'd never set foot outside their offices.

It came from Clint himself.

He'd pieced it together the way field operatives used to - by hand, by hunch, by gut.

It started small: a cluster of reports about old Cold War infrastructure being scavenged by unknown parties. Too obscure for the agencies to bother with. He followed it down rabbit holes of supply manifests that didn't line up, trucking logs with destinations that didn't exist, shipments of industrial-grade fertiliser rerouted through shell companies with names he recognised from old files.

Then came the local stories - the kind of whispers that only surfaced in small towns where everyone knew too much. Farmers talking about lights in the hills, of engines humming after midnight. A hunter claiming he'd seen shadows moving near an old NATO installations, "but no one ever came out." Clint listened, nodded, paid in cash, and moved on.

He filled notebooks. Real paper. Margins lined with coordinates and half-legible shorthand. He'd sit for hours in roadside cafés, tracing patterns on napkins, cross-referencing grids from memory.

And in between, that other thing: the ghosts. Old S.H.I.E.L.D. maps burned into the back of his mind. SALT's European expansion - the paranoia of a different era, the kind that built bunkers into mountains and buried secrets deep enough to outlast governments.

He remembered the smell of those files. Real paper, thick with dust and ink. The way Natasha used to smirk when he'd dig through archives by hand. You're the only guy left who doesn't trust digital, Barton. Even Steve uses the computer.

Maybe she was right. But she'd also taught him: sometimes the truth doesn't want to be found by anyone who hasn't bled for it.

And this one - this site - had been buried deep. Too remote to decommission properly. Too quiet to remember. Too easy to forget.

Except Clint Barton never forgot anything.

He found it alone. He wanted it that way.

By the time he reached it, dusk had fallen, the hills painted in the blue shadows of evening. The facility lay half-buried in the slope, concrete bones jutting from the dirt like a half-exhumed corpse. The perimeter fence sagged, rusted through in places. Signs still clung to the gates - peeling paint, faded warnings in English, Italian, and Russian.

The kind of ruin kids dared each other to break into on a drunken night. Perfect cover.

Clint crouched low on a ridge, the wind tugging at his jacket, bow resting across his knees. He scanned the sprawl below through binoculars. No movement. No lights. No signs of life. But it was too still. Not neglected - scrubbed.

Too clean. Too deliberate.

He trusted that feeling more than any data packet S.W.O.R.D. could send.

He waited until full dark, then ghosted down the slope.

The work came back to him easily - a language his body still knew fluently even if he wished it didn't. Setting trip points. Checking blind corners. Counting steps by feel. His hands moved without hesitation, palms memorising every ridge of concrete, every seam in the steel.

He mapped the structure as he went, floor by floor, corner by corner. The air inside was thick with old dust and rot, the smell of wet earth pressing in through the cracks. His flashlight caught glints of broken glass, a rusted control panel, a shattered clock frozen at 02:13.

He moved like a ghost, silent, methodical.

By dawn, he knew the layout by heart.

And by the next night, it was wired to fall.

The rigging took hours - maybe longer. Time blurred out there, where the only sound was his own breathing and the occasional sigh of wind against the old walls. He set the charges like he was tracing the veins of something still half-alive. Structural weak points. Load-bearing beams. Corridors that would collapse inward rather than outward. Clean. Surgical. Controlled.

By the time he finished, his hands were black with dust, his shirt clinging to his back with sweat. He climbed back up the hill before dawn, detonator cool and familiar in his palm, and settled into the brush to wait.

The first day passed. Then the second.

Nights stretched out, each one the same - a canvas of cicadas and far-off thunder, the world shrinking to the tight circle of his scope.

He barely ate. Barely slept. His body knew the drill. His mind... not so much.

The silence began to gnaw at him.

He'd built a life around stillness - a family, even. Awkward and uncomfortable at times, sure - but life nonetheless. Quiet mornings, coffee on the porch, the sound of his kids laughing somewhere off in the yard. But this kind of silence was different. This was predator's silence. The kind that fills your lungs until you forget what peace is supposed to sound like.

Maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe the pattern he'd followed wasn't hers at all.

Maybe the girl was gone. Or worse - maybe she'd never existed the way he wanted her to. Just another echo. Another ghost to chase.

He shifted, rubbing at the ache in his shoulder, eyes still fixed on the cold, dead ruin below.

Maybe he was chasing a myth because the alternative - going home empty, admitting that he'd failed - hurt worse.

He let the thought settle. Heavy and familiar.

What if I can't do it anymore?

The wind changed direction. Somewhere far off, a crow called once, sharp and lonely. Clint tightened his grip on the bow and kept waiting.

On the fourteenth night, there was movement. A shadow detached itself from the stillness. Sharp and deliberate.

Clint's eyes narrowed, his body tightening before his mind even caught up. That primal pulse in his blood - the one that never really went away - roared to life.

Through the scope, he saw her again.

Echo.

Mask on. Tactical black. The same fluid, predatory grace as before - but this time, there was something different in the way she moved. Less reconnaissance. More purpose. She wasn't looking. She was coming to finish something.

His heartbeat evened out, years of discipline settling over the adrenaline like a steadying hand. He'd already mapped this possibility. Already prepared for it.

Exactly what he'd been waiting for.

Exactly what he'd been waiting to feel.

He waited until she was at just the right distance and then his thumb pressed the detonator.

No hesitation. No second thoughts.

The night ripped open.

The blast hit the valley like thunder, a rolling wall of sound and fire. Concrete split, air turned to shockwave, and the world became light and noise. Clint's teeth rattled, the impact slamming through his ribs. Dust and debris rained down, choking the air.

When it cleared, the compound burned bright against the black - flames clawing skyward, fragments of steel glowing red like bones in a forge.

And through the smoke, she was there.

Still standing.

Caught off-guard, but alive.

For the first time, Echo wasn't the one in control.

Clint didn't think. His body just moved.

Down the slope. Through the ash and the wind and the siren-howl of heat. Every muscle in his legs screamed, lungs burning from the smoke, but he didn't stop.

She pivoted toward the trees, ready to vanish.

Not this time.

Clint cut her off, sliding to a halt in the clearing. Dust and embers swirled between them like snow in a hellstorm.

They faced each other - hunter and hunted, each seeing the other clearly for the first time.

Firelight painted her in jagged gold and red, smoke curling around her frame. Her chest rose and fell in calm, measured rhythm. The mask hid most of her face, but her eyes - they burned, sharp and steady.

"What do you want?" Her voice carried through the smoke. Controlled. Calm. Too calm.

Clint lowered the bow just enough to show his hands. His lungs clawed for air.

"I just wanna talk."

Her head tilted. "I don't do talking."

Then she moved.

Lightning.

The fight hit like a storm breaking.

She was fast - unnaturally so. Red Room fast, he thought. Every strike precise, every angle deadly. Clint had fought operatives like her before - hell, he'd fought with and alongside Natasha often enough - but this girl was smoother. Cleaner. Not emotionless, but focused. Adapted.

The rhythm came back. Blocks, pivots, spins. Clint ducked under a kick, twisted, used her momentum to roll away. She flowed with him, never overcommitting, never breaking tempo.

A knife flashed. He caught her wrist. The impact jarred his arm to the shoulder. She shifted her weight and broke free, used his recoil to drive a knee into his ribs. The breath left his lungs. His bow clattered into the dirt.

She didn't follow through with the kill shot. She waited - testing him.

Clint countered low, sweeping, forcing space. His body knew the dance, even if his bones screamed otherwise.

He could see it now - the way she fought. Not raw brutality, but control. Like someone had trained her not to waste energy. Every move built on the last.

It wasn't chaos. It was discipline.

And something about that - the economy of it - cut through him with the sharp ache of déjà vu.

Natasha.

He saw it properly in the way Echo pivoted on her heels, in how she anticipated his feints. The way she never telegraphed a strike. The way her silence wasn't absence - it was pure focus.

He slipped under another kick, but the follow-up came too fast. A knife glanced across his ribs, hot and shallow. His breath hitched.

She spun him to the ground before he could reset.

In a single heartbeat, she had him pinned to the dirt, her knee pressed into his chest, a blade at his throat.

Clint stared up at her, lungs burning, grit in his teeth.

"I don't wanna hurt you," he rasped from beneath her.

Her eyes narrowed, voice a low scoff. "I don't think that's a problem here."

He coughed, the blade biting just enough to make his pulse race. "I just want to talk."

"I told you. I don't do talking."

His voice steadied, the fighter in him surfacing. "Then listen. I've been sent by S.W.O.R.D. They want to know why you're targeting SALT."

Her eyes flicked - just a flicker - at the word. A tiny break in her mask.

"S.W.O.R.D. knows SALT?"

He coughed again, blood on his lip. "They don't want to bring you in. They just want to know why."

Her weight shifted forward, blade grazing skin. Her eyes searched his. "If they know SALT..." she whispered. "...then they know why I'm doing what I'm doing."

And just like that, the pressure lifted.

The knife slid away.

She rose smoothly, like the moment hadn't even happened, but Clint could still feel the echo of her knee against his ribs, the hum of her focus still radiating in the space between them.

He pulled himself upright, every movement heavy. His bow hung loose at his side.

For a moment, neither of them moved. The fire burned behind her, casting her shadow across the dirt. The wind picked up, carrying sparks between them like drifting stars.

She studied him. Not hostile now - curious. Measuring.

"Who even are you?" she asked.

Clint spat blood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Clint." A beat. "Who are you?"

Silence.

Then her hand rose, slow, deliberate. She pulled the mask free.

For the first time, he saw her face.

Really saw.

That dirty-blonde hair matted with soot and sweat. Sharp features, but not hardened yet. Eyes too old for her youth. They carried the kind of quiet that only comes from watching something burn and knowing you caused it.

"Echo," she said simply.

Clint managed a smirk through the ache. "Oh, we're doing fake names? Fine. I'm Hawkeye."

She blinked, then - unexpectedly - smirked back. A small, dry curve of her lips.

"Ah. Hawkeye. The world's okay-est Avenger."

Clint barked a laugh, short and hollow. "Ex-Avenger. Retired now."

"Retired," she echoed, the word like a dare. "And yet here you are - still running across Europe for someone else's war."

He shrugged. "Actually, I went a bit rogue on this one. They don't even know I'm here."

Her brows lifted slightly. "That supposed to impress me?"

"No," he said. "Just means you don't have to kill me... yet."

The air between them shifted, no longer sharp but searching.

He took a step closer. Careful.

"Forget S.W.O.R.D. for a second," he said, voice low. "I just want to understand why you're doing this. SALT's dead. The world's moved on. What's the point?"

For the first time, he saw it - a crack in her mask that wasn't physical. Something behind her eyes flared: anger, pain, memory.

"The point is-" she started, then bit it off. The wall went back up. Her jaw set. "It doesn't matter what the point is."

"Sure it does," Clint said softly. "Otherwise you wouldn't be here."

Her voice hardened. "Why would I tell you anything? Why would I trust you?"

"Because," he said quietly, "I'm not here to stop you. I'm here to understand."

She stared at him for a long moment. Her breathing slowed.

"You could never understand."

He met her gaze, unflinching. "Try me."

The firelight caught in her eyes, a flicker of something human, something fragile, before she looked away.

"Can you tell me your real name?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper. "Just that."

Silence stretched.

Then, finally, she looked back at him.

"Eira."

The name settled between them - soft, foreign, heavy.

Clint nodded once. "Eira," he repeated, tasting it like a promise.

The wind shifted again, and for a heartbeat, they weren't enemies. Just two ghosts standing in the wreckage of someone else's war, lit by the fires they both had started.

Chapter Text

The night still burned.

Ash drifted down like snowflakes, soft as soot, clinging to Clint's jacket and hair. The air shimmered with heat, waves rising from the wreckage where the SALT base had stood. What was left of it groaned and hissed, molten concrete bleeding light into the dark.

Sirens wailed somewhere far off - distant, distorted by hills and haze. Not close enough to matter. But close enough to remind him that time was running out.

Clint stood with his bow in one hand, shoulders heavy. Every breath made his ribs scream. His left knee pulsed like a warning light. He hadn't moved like this in years. Not that hard, not that desperate. The world tilted faintly around him, smoke and adrenaline twisting the edges of his sight.

Part of him expected Echo - Eira - to have vanished again, swallowed by the smoke and silence like she always did.

But she hadn't.

She stood a few meters away, half-lit by the orange glow, a still figure against the ruin. Her face streaked with soot, eyes bright and alive - even in the chaos. Her pistol was out now, steady in her hand, the muzzle sweeping the dark as if she already knew what was coming.

She wasn't breathing hard. She wasn't rattled.

She'd been through worse - that much was obvious.

Her gaze flicked to him once, impassive, assessing, then slid back toward the road. Clint felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. The silence had changed - it had weight now, pressure. The kind that meant trouble.

"What? You expecting company?" he rasped. His voice came out rough, torn raw by the smoke and dust.

Eira didn't answer. Just tilted her head, listening to something he couldn't hear.

Then, the sound came. Low, mechanical, growing.

Engines.

Clint turned toward the valley road just as headlights bloomed through the smoke - four sets, bright and hard, cutting white paths through the dark. Big vehicles. Armored. Moving in formation.

Not rescue. Not random.

Not good.

Clint's stomach dropped. "Those aren't fire crews."

Eira's voice was flat, unreadable. "No."

"Who the hell are they?"

She didn't look at him when she answered. "You'll see."

The trucks drew closer, rolling with military precision, engines growling like beasts. When the first one hit the edge of the firelight, Clint saw the markings - black paint, Cyrillic stencils on the plates.

Russian.

Of course.

"Shit."

The floodlights snapped on all at once, searing white. Clint flinched, vision bleaching to nothing. The ruins around them exploded in clarity - every edge, every crack, every figure suddenly exposed.

Then the shadows moved.

Dozens of them, pouring out of the trucks like a tide.

Matte armor. Rifles up. Silent efficiency.

Professional.

Flashbangs hit the ground in a cascade of white thunder. The world detonated into light and sound.

Clint's ears went hollow. His vision went white.

Then training took over.

Drop low. Breathe shallow. Move.

He hit the dirt, rolled behind a collapsed beam, and loosed two arrows blind toward the muzzle flashes strobing through the smoke. Screams answered. Weapons clattered. But he kept moving.

The air was a storm of fire and static.

Beside him, Eira was already in motion - sharp, surgical bursts from her pistol, each one finding its mark. No panic. No wasted motion. She ducked behind a slab of concrete, reloaded in a breath, and put two more shots through the smoke.

When a soldier broke through the haze at her flank, she didn't flinch. Two shots: chest, throat. The body fell before it finished turning.

They moved together without speaking.

Back to back.

Instinct and necessity binding them tighter than trust ever could.

Clint could barely see more than two feet ahead, but his body remembered the rhythm - fight, shift, cover, fire. A shape loomed through the smoke; he loosed an arrow on instinct. The man dropped. Another came from behind - Eira took him down with a clean headshot.

The world shrieked around them - the gunfire, the collapsing metal, the endless, ruthless roar of fire.

Then the ground buckled.

At first, Clint thought it was another explosion. But the sound was wrong. Lower. More final.

The base was collapsing.

The foundation - already gutted by his own charges - was giving way under the weight of the armored convoy and the relentless fire.

The earth groaned. The air went taut.

"Move!" Clint shouted, but his voice barely carried over the roar.

He lunged toward Eira, catching her arm just as a section of roof gave out behind her. Steel and stone cascaded down, smashing into the ground where she'd stood. He dragged her with him into the broken shell of a wall, bow arm braced above as debris rained down in hot shards.

Eira twisted, fighting his grip even as the ceiling screamed overhead. "Let me go!"

"You'll be buried!" he barked, coughing through the smoke.

She snarled back, feral. "Then move faster."

The floor heaved beneath them. A support beam cracked, split like bone.

They ran.

Through the blinding smoke, through fire and falling walls, through a world that was literally disintegrating around them.

Clint's lungs were knives. His ribs screamed with every breath. But the old instinct - the one that always kept him alive - drove him forward.

He had rigged that place. He remembered the layout. The map in his head. The escape tunnel.

Always leave a backdoor.

He grabbed Eira's wrist and yanked her toward the east wing - what was left of it. Bullets cut through the air, sparking off stone. A body fell somewhere behind them. The fire sucked oxygen from the air, turning every breath into a fight.

The hatch came into view - half-buried under rubble, half-open.

He shoved her through first, then followed, crawling on hands and knees through the narrow passage. Dirt filled his mouth, the tunnel walls shuddering with each distant collapse.

Then - finally - cold air.

They spilled out into the night.

Collapsed onto wet grass, coughing until the world stopped spinning.

The countryside stretched quiet around them, black and endless. The sky above them burned orange where the fire ate the horizon. The ruins were gone now - reduced to a single roar, a pillar of flame stabbing up from the valley like a wound.

Clint lay on his back, staring up at the stars beyond the smoke. His chest ached. His lungs felt shredded.

Beside him, Eira rolled to her knees, pistol still raised, scanning the dark like a cornered animal. Her breath came fast and shallow, her eyes bright in the flicker of distant flame.

Neither spoke.

And for a long moment, it was just the two of them - two silhouettes in the grass, choking, breathing, the ghosts of a war neither of them wanted to fight still echoing in their bones.

They walked for hours.

Through the endless folds of the countryside, past fields stripped bare and the skeletal remains of old vineyards clawing at the moonlight. The fire behind them faded from an inferno to a bruise on the horizon, then to nothing but the faintest orange glow swallowed by mist.

Neither spoke.

The only sounds were their footsteps crunching dry soil and the wind whispering through the grass. Every step was agony. Clint limped, his ribs grinding like broken gears, shoulder screaming where shrapnel had kissed him. His body was a catalogue of old injuries and new regrets. He gritted his teeth through every mile, too stubborn to stop, too tired to care.

Eira walked ahead most of the way - silent, ghostlike, her profile sharp against the stars. Her gait was steady despite the blood drying dark along her sleeve. She didn't look back once, but Clint could feel her listening. Always listening.

By the time they found shelter, the sky had begun to pale toward dawn.

A farmstead emerged out of the dark, leaning crooked against the hills. Once it might've been beautiful - rows of olive trees, stone walls, the smell of harvest. Now it was just another skeleton. Broken windows, roof half-caved, mildew thick in the air.

Perfect.

Inside, the air was still and sour. Dust hung like cobwebs in the shafts of moonlight that leaked through the broken roof. A few mice scattered as they stepped in, claws skittering across warped floorboards. The world felt so quiet it almost rang.

Clint dropped onto a half-rotted chair that creaked under his weight, every joint in his body protesting. He peeled back his jacket and winced. The shrapnel cut was deep, but not fatal. He'd seen worse. He'd done worse.

He dug into his duffel for gauze and a bottle of antiseptic, the cap trembling in his slick fingers. The smell hit first - sharp, chemical. He bit down a curse and pressed the soaked cloth to the wound. The pain came like electricity.

Across from him, Eira sat cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall. Her clothes were half undone, black tactical fabric slick with soot and blood. She worked on her arm with quick, precise movements - patching a gash with gauze torn from her own shirt, fingers deft and steady.

She didn't flinch. She didn't even wince.

Clint watched her for a moment, the rhythmic, efficient way she moved - like pain was just another instruction she'd been taught to ignore.

The silence between them thickened until every sound felt amplified: the scrape of fabric, the hiss of breath, the distant creak of the house settling on its old foundations.

Finally, Clint broke it.

"So," he said, voice hoarse. "Who the hell were they?"

Her eyes flicked up, cool and unreadable. "SALT."

The word hit him harder than it should have. Clint froze, the bloodied gauze limp in his hand.

"S.W.O.R.D. told me SALT was dissolved."

Eira gave a small, humorless laugh - a breath through her nose, nothing close to mirth. "The organisation that people think they know? That's dead. Buried on paper. But the real one - the dark side - it's still alive. Always has been, always will be. Just hiding in places no one bothers to look."

Clint swore softly, low under his breath. His stomach turned cold. Fury had lied. Or maybe even Fury didn't know. Which might've been worse.

Eira tied off a bandage with her teeth, tugged the fabric tight, and tossed the bloodstained strip aside. She leaned her head back against the wall, eyes half-closed. "Just another day."

The silence stretched again, longer this time. Dust floated between them in the pale light.

Then her voice came, quieter. "Why are you really following me?"

Clint hesitated, thumb tracing a dent in the metal arm of his chair.

"S.W.O.R.D. wanted me to find out why you're targeting people they didn't even know were ex-SALT," he said finally. "The business men, the politicians - the kind of people who move the world from the shadows."

Eira gave a crooked half-smile, sharp but weary. "And what did you find out?"

"Nothing yet," he admitted. "Just that they dragged me out of retirement for this." His gaze flicked toward her. "Guess they thought I was the best man for the job. I've got experience with people like you."

Her expression hardened. "People like me?"

"Assassins. Girls turned into weapons," he paused. "The Red Room."

That hit something. He saw it - the faint twitch at her jaw, the pulse in her throat.

Then she masked it with sarcasm. "And you? What does that make you? Assassin cleanup crew? Babysitter for broken girls?"

Clint forced a thin smile. "Retired babysitter for broken girls."

That earned the faintest laugh. Quick. Reluctant. But real.

Clint leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying her through the gloom. "Why are you hunting them, Eira? What's the endgame?"

Her gaze met his, steady but tired. And for the first time, he saw it - something human behind the armor. Something that hurt. Really, truly hurt.

Her mouth opened, then closed again. She looked away.

He waited.

Then he said, softer, "What did they do to you?"

She didn't answer right away. The silence filled the room until it felt like it could break the air itself. Then, quietly, she said:

"You wouldn't get it."

"Try me." His tone was calm, certain.

Another pause - longer this time. The kind that measured how much of yourself you were willing to risk.

Finally, she spoke.

"I grew up in a SALT training facility," she said, voice low, stripped of all pretense. "Rural Russia. Hidden. Underground, mostly. We were raised to be invisible. They taught us how to kill before we could even write our names."

Clint didn't move. Didn't breathe.

"You mentioned the Red Room," she continued. "SALT is their sister program - their shadow. The Red Room broke you until you obeyed. SALT broke you until you just... stopped existing. It wasn't training. It was disassembly."

Her tone never wavered, but the edges of her words shook. "They tore us down to find what was left. Pain, drugs, sleep deprivation. They stripped away names, faces. Every day was an experiment in how much a person could lose before they stopped being a person at all."

Clint's fists clenched on his knees. He didn't interrupt.

"When I was seventeen," she went on, voice barely audible, "We tried to escape."

She stopped. The silence that followed was unbearable.

When she spoke again, it was barely more than a whisper. "They burned it down. The entire compound. With everyone still inside."

The words hit like a bullet.

Her eyes were distant now - staring at something miles away. The kind of stare Clint knew too well.

"I was the only one who made it out."

Her hands shook just slightly before she folded them into fists, pressing them hard against her knees. "They've been hunting me ever since. Not to kill - never to kill. Always to capture. They want me back, and I don't know why. Sometimes... sometimes I wish they'd just kill me and be done with it."

Clint's chest tightened until it hurt. He thought of Natasha. The same haunted pauses in her voice. The stories she'd never finished telling him.

"That's why they only used stun rounds," he murmured. "Smoke. Flashes. They wanted you breathing."

Eira nodded once, hollow. "They shut a lot of programs down after I escaped. But some survived. They're scared of exposure. And I think..." Her voice caught, faintly. "I think I'm their proof that it all still happened."

The farmstead groaned in the wind. Dust drifted through a crack in the ceiling.

Clint studied her, quiet. "Then you must be important. More than you realise."

That made her flinch. Something in her expression cracked - a flicker of pain, grief, and disbelief, raw and fleeting.

Then she shoved it down. A breath. A blink. The mask returned. "Don't get sentimental, Hawkeye."

Clint leaned back, exhaustion pulling at his bones. "Wouldn't dream of it."

But his eyes said otherwise - soft with something she didn't want to see.

For the first time since he'd met her, Eira didn't force herself look away.

Chapter Text

The faintest grey light slipped through the broken shutters, brushing soft over cracked plaster and peeling wallpaper.

For a long time, Clint didn't move. The house creaked around him, a tired old body settling into its bones. Wind threaded through the gaps in the walls, carrying the smell of ash and moist earth. Somewhere far off, a bird called - thin, uncertain, like it wasn't sure if morning was worth the trouble.

He stirred at last, slow and groggy, muscles stiff from sleeping half-upright against the wall. His bow still lay within arm's reach, fingers curled near it even in rest - a habit too ingrained to break.

For a moment, he didn't know if any of it had been real.

He turned his head toward the corner where Eira had been.

Empty.

Too empty. The dust there was undisturbed, soft and even. No dent in the warped floorboards where her boots had been. No trace of body heat in the stale air. Not a strand of hair, not a sound. As if she'd never existed at all.

Clint stared, his heartbeat slow but heavy in his chest.

He scrubbed his palms over his face, the skin rough and cold against his stubble. His ribs ached with every breath - a deep, bruising ache that throbbed beneath the gauze. His lip was still split from where she'd hit him earlier, clean and sharp. He could still taste the copper.

But she'd been here. That was enough.

Her voice still echoed faintly in his head - quiet, measured, like the memory of a storm that hadn't quite passed. Her confession. Her knife against his throat. The look in her eyes when she said she wished they'd just kill her. And her name. Her real name.

And yet the space where she'd been was as barren as a grave.

He exhaled through his nose, slow. "Figures," he muttered to no one.

The farmhouse felt different without her - emptier, but also clearer. Like the dust had settled after a long fight, leaving only the outline of where she'd stood. Clint had seen that kind of absence before. He'd lived with it. Natasha, Wanda, even Yelena, all those ghosts who never stayed in one place long enough to heal. They always left him in the quiet afterward.

He lingered there a while, letting the silence stretch out until it almost felt like peace.

Old habit took over next - muscle memory, the kind that didn't care about grief.

Wake. Orient. Breathe. Move.

That rhythm had carried him through too many mornings like this, in too many safe houses scattered across too many burned-out countries.

He rose, slow and deliberate, every joint protesting. The floor groaned beneath his boots. He rolled his shoulder once, testing the strain. The ache was bad, but not unmanageable. He'd learned to live inside worse pain.

Sunlight had begun to bleed through the cracks in the shutters now, carving slanted bars across the room. It lit up the dust in the air - floating, drifting, catching like snowflakes suspended in time.

His bow leaned against the chair where he'd left it. His pack sat by the door, half open, its contents neatly arranged the way only an agent or a soldier would pack: efficient, ready for flight.

Clint checked his sidearm, rewrapped his ribs, and ran his fingers down the bowstring - the way a man might touch an old scar.

Then he looked once more toward the empty corner.

There was something on the floor now that he hadn't noticed before.

A scrap of cloth. Torn, faintly stained. The edge of a bandage - hers.

He crouched, picked it up, thumb brushing over the rough fibres. The faintest trace of blood - faded brown, dry. He turned it over once, twice, then folded it neatly and slipped it into his pocket.

No note. No sign of struggle. No farewell.

Just gone.

Clint stood there a while longer, the morning growing brighter, the birds growing louder. The kind of ordinary sounds that made it all feel almost normal. Almost.

Finally, he slung his bag over his shoulder.

He paused at the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other hanging loose at his side.

Outside, dawn spilled pale gold over the hills of Siena. The world looked impossibly calm - vineyards glittered with dew, rows of vines marching in perfect green symmetry. A low mist clung to the hollows, the kind that made the horizon look like it was still half-dreaming.

It was the kind of view people wrote poems about. The kind tourists would stop to photograph, capturing their own proof that the world was still beautiful.

But Clint didn't see beauty.

He saw vantage points. Cover. Angles. Shadows where someone could hide. The soft hum of potential danger in everything still and quiet.

His instincts wouldn't let him look any other way. They hadn't in years.

The stillness after battle always hit him hardest - when his body was exhausted but his mind refused to stop scanning, measuring, cataloguing. He'd been made for this kind of vigilance. It was the only thing that had ever really lasted.

S.W.O.R.D. would still be looking for him. He could feel it - that tightening at the back of his neck, the sense of a net drawing closed, slow and deliberate. Fury would have questions, too. Questions Clint wasn't ready to answer.

He'd gone dark before. He knew the drill.

He moved through the countryside like a ghost, every motion quiet, deliberate. He'd already burned what little trail he'd left behind: the safehouse stripped clean, the phone dunked into a pot of lukewarm tap water until its circuits hissed and died. No electronics, no trackers, no trace.

The only things that remained were analog - his bow, his duffel, and his heartbeat.

He scanned the sky. A faint hum cut through the still morning - barely there. Drone. He tracked it with his eyes until he caught the sun flash off its wings. Civilian model. Recon shell. High altitude, wide sweep.

He ducked beneath a row of olive trees, waited until it drifted on.

"Too easy," he muttered. And that made it worse.

He walked for another hour before finding it: a mud- caked Fiat half-buried at the edge of a dirt road, one tire half- flat, the windshield spidered with cracks. Abandoned long enough that moss had started creeping up the bumper.

Perfect.

Nobody would think to look for a fugitive Avenger in a sun-bleached Fiat.

He popped the door, slipped inside. The smell hit first - damp vinyl, gasoline, old cigarettes. He pried open the dash, twisted wires, and after a few patient seconds, the engine sputtered awake with a tired cough.

"Atta girl," Clint muttered.

He eased onto the road, the car groaning like it resented being resurrected, and rolled north into the rising light.

The hills gave way to valleys, then to winding roads that climbed toward the mountains. The horizon stretched, endless and cold.

Hours passed.

No radio. No music. Just the rattle of the Fiat's loose door and the drone of the road.

And his thoughts - circling like vultures, never quiet for long.

He saw Eira in flashes. The way she had fought - that brutal, efficient grace. She moved like Natasha had once upon a time, but there was something sharper in her rhythm. Less trained, more... instinctive. Like she'd learned to fight not from lessons but from merely surviving.

He remembered the tremor in her voice when she'd talked about SALT. How it had cracked, just once - a fissure in the armor. He'd seen it happen before, with other ghosts of other programs. They all had that moment, that sound.

He'd heard it from Natasha once, after too much vodka and too many quiet hours between missions. That same breaking tone. The sound of someone remembering something they'd never wanted to survive.

And then she'd, like Eira, had disappeared - again.

Clint's grip tightened on the steering wheel.

He thought about Fury's file, spread out across his kitchen table back in Iowa - the one Laura had glanced at before quietly walking away to let him read.

Grainy photos. Blurred surveillance stills.

All conveniently recent, all too clean for the chaos they claimed surrounded her.

Too neat. Too certain.

Files like that felt like lies wrapped in formatting.

If SALT had truly burned the base she escaped from - and if they were still sending strike teams after her - then someone noticed. Someone was keeping her name on a list. Someone wanted her back.

And people like Eira didn't survive long unless someone powerful needed them alive.

The thought sat heavy in his gut.

He shifted gears, the old car grumbling as he took a turn onto a narrow mountain road. Pines thickened on either side, the air sharpening, cooler.

He glanced at the passenger seat, empty except for his pack.

It should've been a relief - no one to protect, no mission parameters, no handler in his ear. But it wasn't.

He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just let something important vanish. Again.

The road curved sharply, and sunlight caught on the horizon - a wide, gold streak breaking through the clouds. For a second, it filled the car with light.

He blinked into it, squinting, jaw set.

"Natasha," he muttered under his breath, not sure why he said her name. Maybe because the ache felt familiar. Maybe because she had always felt like the light in the dark. Or maybe because he could already feel history looping back on itself - another lost girl, another ghost, another promise he didn't make but might end up keeping anyway.

The Fiat rattled on, climbing higher into the mountains. Behind him, Siena faded into haze, and ahead, the world opened into a stretch of uncharted quiet.

But Clint Barton had never been good at staying quiet for long.

And somewhere, far beyond the horizon, he knew she was still moving - she was still running - just out of reach.

By nightfall, Clint had rolled into Villach.

Not too big. Not too small. The kind of town that didn't ask questions, that sat quietly between borders and minded its own business. Just anonymous enough for a man like him to vanish for a night.

The Fiat rattled to a stop near a row of old post-war buildings, chipped paint and sagging balconies overlooking the narrow streets. Neon signs buzzed faintly above shuttered cafés, the light rain turning the cobblestones slick and ghostly.

He killed the engine and sat there a moment, listening to it tick as it cooled. In the rearview mirror, his reflection looked like someone else's - eyes sunken, jaw unshaven, blood still dried at his collar. A ghost of himself.

He rubbed his face, grabbed his bag, and stepped into the damp air.

The library was two streets over - a squat, concrete relic from another era. Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed like dying insects, bathing the room in a sterile, too-pale glow. A handful of locals drifted between shelves, their footsteps muffled on the linoleum.

Perfect.

Clint moved to a corner terminal, the kind of old public computer that still ran on systems with more dust than memory. The monitor flickered, the keyboard stiff under his fingers.

He started slow. No trace, no mistakes. The old ways.

Layers of proxies. Bounced signals through dead endpoints that hadn't existed on official networks in years. He worked with quiet precision, hands steady, heartbeat calm. It was the same rhythm he'd learned from Natasha - and for a second, he could almost hear her voice over his shoulder.

"Never get comfortable. Comfort's where they catch you."

So he didn't.

He tunneled through encrypted channels, scraped corners of the dark web, and found half- rotted archives still hosted on forgotten servers in Moscow and Kyiv.

Russian sites. Obscure forums. Old military records. Anything that might whisper a name - SALT, Eira, or the ghosts of whatever had come before them.

Hours blurred. Coffee from a vending machine. The lights outside dimming into midnight. His eyes burned from the screen's glow.

And then - something.

A half-dead Russian news blog, its header image missing, the article half- broken in translation.

He leaned in. Read line by line.

Fire contained in forests north of Nizhny Tagil. Officials state local wildlife impacted. Cause remains undetermined. Local witnesses report series of small explosions. Authorities have restricted access to site pending further investigation.

That was it. No coordinates. No photos. Just a handful of sentences buried in the noise.

But Clint felt it in his gut.

That was it.

It had to be.

That was her. That was the base. The one she'd escaped. The one that had tried to break her.

The one that raised her.

He stared at the screen, pulse ticking slow. His hand flexed once before he forced it still. He'd been doing this long enough to know what obsession felt like - how it took hold. But he didn't look away.

He saved the article, and a map. Printed them. Folded them into his jacket pocket like they were something sacred.

Outside, Villach slept.

A pay phone leaned against the side of a shuttered café, the receiver scratched, graffiti curling across the metal. Clint scanned the street - once, twice - before lifting it. The dial tone hummed in his ear.

He didn't need to think. The number came to him like muscle memory.

Laura answered on the second ring.

Her voice - that soft steadiness - cut through everything. For a second, Clint's chest loosened, the noise in his head quieted.

"Clint?"

"Hey, honey." His voice came out rougher than he meant.

There was a pause, then a sigh that sounded like relief. "You're still breathing. That's something."

He smiled faintly, leaning his head against the cold glass of the booth. "Barely."

But the warmth faded when she said the next words: "Fury came by."

Clint's shoulders tensed. "When?"

"Two days ago. He wanted to know where you went. What you were chasing."

He exhaled through his nose, slow and quiet. "And what'd you tell him?"

"Nothing," she said. No hesitation. "You know I wouldn't."

"I know."

But it still stung - that Fury had even shown up. That he'd crossed that line, brought the job to his doorstep. To her.

Laura's voice softened. "Clint... what's happening?"

He hesitated. Then told her - not everything, but enough.

About the girl. The explosives. The SALT strike team. How S.W.O.R.D. had lied about the program being dissolved. How Eira had moved like a ghost and vanished the moment he'd started to understand her.

He kept his voice low, measured, but she could hear the weight underneath it.

When he finally stopped talking, Laura was silent for a long time. Then, quietly:

"Where is she now?"

Clint stared through the scratched glass, watching the rain streak down the pane. "Gone," he said. "Slipped out in the middle of the night. Didn't even leave a footprint."

Another pause. Then: "Are you safe?"

He pressed his forehead against the cold window, his breath fogging the glass. "Define safe."

"Clint."

He closed his eyes. "I love you," he whispered.

Her voice softened. "I love you too."

And the line clicked dead.

He stayed there for a while, listening to the empty dial tone, the soft hum of distant traffic, the rain on the roof. Then he hung up, wiped his hand across his face, and exhaled.

Back in the Fiat, he spread the printed article and map across the passenger seat. Nizhny Tagil. Russia.

He traced the route with his finger, doing the math automatically.

Eight hours behind him. Forty-three more to go.

He turned the key. The engine coughed, caught, and hummed.

The road ahead was dark, long, and steep.

But he'd made longer drives for less.

And somewhere, across the black miles of mountain and border and memory, a girl named Eira was still running.

He wasn't sure if he was chasing her to save her - or to save himself.

Either way, he didn't plan on stopping any time soon.