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The clock ticked in the quiet office; one-two, one-two, letting each second fall like water drops through the still air. Clint fidgeted uncomfortably on the plush, pleasantly-ugly couch in the corner, while the woman with red hair and glasses watched him alertly from her own chair.
Her name was Dr. Morgan, although she'd said he could call her Caroline if it made him feel more comfortable. He didn't. He didn't much like sitting in a dim office and talking about his feelings for an hour, either, but she had a gentle and soft-spoken way of asking questions that made Clint feel bad if he didn't answer them. She must have once been quite the looker, with a spray of curly hair dyed cherry-red and blue-green eyes; even now she was quite pretty, though going soft around the edges from age. It hadn't escaped Clint's notice, either, that she was the therapist that SHIELD kept on call for the sexual assault cases.
She'd been Natasha's doctor a few times before.
"Don't you want me to 'talk about it'?" Clint said, mouth twisting in a sardonic smile as he made air quotes around the words. "Isn't that kind of what we're here for, so I can tell you all about the time a supervillain fucked with my head, and you can write it up in a report and be done with it forever?"
"We're here for your sake, not mine," Dr. Morgan reminded him. "It would be good for you to talk about it eventually, but we're not on a schedule. We'll talk about it when you're ready to talk. Until then, you don't have to do anything you're not comfortable with."
Clint's hands picked restlessly at the seams of his pants near the knees. "And if I don't ever want to talk about it?" he challenged her. Pushing, always pushing at the boundaries, testing to see what was okay and what wasn't.
"Then we never will," she replied.
The clock ticked gently away. Clint shifted uncomfortably, the leather of his clothes dragging on the corduroy upholstery. Post-traumatic counseling on SHIELD's dime, once a week, for the last three months. It wasn't that he hated these sessions, or that he didn't understand why they were necessary -- but that didn't mean he enjoyed himself while he was here.
"How have you been this week, Clint?" Dr. Morgan asked at last, breaking the silence.
"...Kind of tired," Clint said. "I guess it sounds like a stupid thing to complain about, but it's not doing great things for my aim."
"It's not stupid to tell the truth about how you feel," Dr. Morgan said. "You don't need to have a work-related excuse for feeling bad about feeling bad. Is there any particular reason you feel so tired lately?"
Clint grimaced. "I'm not sleeping too great," he admitted. "I get... I get these dreams, sometimes. It's kind of hard to get to sleep afterwards."
"What are they dreams of?" Dr. Morgan said. When Clint stayed silent, she offered, "You don't have to tell me any details if you don't feel comfortable. Just say yes or no. Are they dreams of the Tesseract incident?"
The Tesseract incident. What a mild-sounding name for that mess of blood and magic and dirt and fire it had been, that ended with a hole in reality above New York City and aliens pouring through it, all under the direction of a mad-eyed god. From Clint's perspective, of course, that hadn't been where it began; that had been no more than a coda. "Yeah," he said.
"Nightmares?" Dr. Morgan asked him gently.
A longer pause, this time. "Yeah," Clint said at last. He didn't offer any details.
"How about the pills we prescribed last month?" Dr. Morgan asked. "Are they not working out?"
Clint shrugged uncomfortably. "They work okay," he said. "I just don't like the way they make me feel in the morning."
"We could adjust the dosage if you like," Dr. Morgan suggested, "or try a different formula."
"No... no, that's okay," Clint said awkwardly. "I don't really like the feeling of drugs messing me up. I'd rather just have the dreams."
Dr. Morgan nodded. "If you're sure," she said.
"I'm sure," Clint said.
"Is there any reason you think the dreams are coming again now?" Dr. Morgan asked, when Clint didn't volunteer anything more. "Anything in your daily life that's bringing those memories back?"
"I dunno," Clint said. "...not directly, I don't think."
"Indirectly, then?" Dr. Morgan prompted him.
Clint grimaced, laced his hands together on his knees and leaned forward over them. "It's all getting mixed up in my head," he said. "Things I did when I was under, and things that happened long ago. Other times that a mission went bad, that I ended up killing someone I used to work beside and trust."
"Are you talking about the mission in Vientiane?" Dr. Morgan asked gently. Of course she'd know all about that. She had the clearance; she'd read all his classified files.
"Yeah," Clint said.
The helicarrier raid hadn't been the first time Clint had found himself fighting against his own comrades. The Vientiane mission hadn't been the first either, but it had definitely been one of the messiest. What had started out as a quiet, routine mission -- track the passage of smuggled guns across the Laotian border -- had all gone to shit. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if the old CO had been recalled, not demoted when the new CO was sent to replace him. But personal dislike and professional disagreement between Danbolt and Clark had grown from an office spat into a full-on mutiny, with the agents forced to pick sides between them. And when Danbolt and his cronies had taken it to the next level by revealing they had their hands up to the elbows in the very same smuggling ring they were supposed to be breaking up, the mutiny turned to total war.
It had gotten very ugly for a while. As much so for the innocent people who had gotten caught in the crossfire, as for the people who'd been the crossfire. Like him.
"You know it's not really the same," Dr. Morgan reminded him. "It sounds like you're feeling some guilt over what happened while you were being controlled, but it's important to remember that you weren't in control of your actions. It's okay to feel sad and angry when you remember that time, but you have to remind yourself that it wasn't really you."
"I know that," Clint said, and he looked down at his hands to avoid having to look her in the eye. Folded one thumb on top of the other, then the other. "That's not really... it's not guilt. I didn't feel guilty for killing Danbolt, not then and not now. I made the call, I don't regret it. That's not the issue."
"What is the issue, then?" Dr. Morgan said. From anyone else it would have sound impatient or sarcastic, but she made it sound genuine, like she really wanted to know.
"I always knew," he began at last and had to struggle for the right words to go on. "I always knew that I couldn't trust other people." Other men, was the real truth, but he didn't feel like he could say that yet. Other people like Dr. Morgan, like Natasha, he'd never had any trouble extending his trust -- even when it had been a terrible mistake to do so.
He stared down at his hands, spreading them open in his lap. "But I always thought the one person I could trust was myself."
Of all the things Loki had done to him, that hurt the worst. Not only turning Clint against his comrades; he'd fought his own people before. Not trying to take over Clint's world (admittedly, it was easier to be sanguine about that once the danger had passed and it seemed ridiculous in hindsight to think his mad gamble could have ever succeeded.) It was the crippling seed of doubt that, once planted, could never be excised.
Loki burst in on him from another dimension and just like that, so easily, broke him open. He'd put his thoughts into Clint's mind that seemed more real than the world around him, that made everything he'd ever known and love fade into dull colorless shadows in comparison. He'd served Loki. Worshipped him, and the worst part of all was that it all seemed so natural, seemed like such a perfectly reasonable thing to do. He couldn't tell the difference between his own thoughts and Loki's because they'd been as one, in perfect accord with serving his new master.
Even now, months later, long after Natasha had broken the hold on him and brought him back to his senses, he still found himself doubting every thought, every feeling. Constantly halting, turning about in his head and wondering if this was real, if this was him, or more insidious lies.
It wasn't Loki taking control of his mind that threatened to drive him crazy; it was being free again that did that. Natasha had promised him that so long as he could feel doubts, as long as he could question his own actions he would be all right; and she would know, she had experience with this sort of thing... but that didn't make the twisted mess of pain and rage and guilty fear in his head any less.
Loki. Just thinking his name makes the rage spike in Clint's head, makes him grit his teeth and his hands clench for a weapon. He did this, he took away all Clint's certainty and made his life a living hell. He'd brought hell on the rest of the world, too -- dozens of Clint's comrades, his friends, buried under the rubble in the SHIELD laboratory. That man in Stuttgart, whom Loki had maimed just to provide him with his distraction. Deaths on the Carrier, some at Clint's own hands. Coulson, Clint's sometimes commander and always friend, stabbed in the back. And through all of it Clint hadn't even cared; had felt no more than a little sorry that they'd gotten in the way, that they didn't seem to understand how important a purpose Clint served on behalf of his new master.
Deaths in New York, civilian casualties by the hundreds when Loki brought his monstrous army across the worlds. Clint had been himself again by then, so he'd been able to feel the true horror of his safe human world crumbling around him; by then he'd needed feel no guilt except his own crushing failure for not being able to stop this sooner.
Lucky Clint. He'd wondered more than once if Natasha had really done him a favor by freeing him, and hated himself for the weakness, the selfishness.
He has every reason under the sun to hate Loki, and oh, how he does. He hates him with every fiber of his being, with every breath in his body, with his every waking moment. He hates him every moment of the day.
At night, however...
Oh, what dreams.
In the dreams he relives that moment again and again, the moment where the tip of the scepter pierced his skin and the blue light washed over him to flood his world. He dropped into it like he'd fallen through the world into an ocean below, a seething vortex of brilliant blue light.
At the center of the whirlpool had been Loki, and he felt again as he'd felt then the tenor of Loki's mind. All his rage and pride and hurt and now fierce joy, covetousness tempered by a sort of fondness. Mine, he'd whispered, as his hands caught Clint out of the frothing backwater of energy, cupped him in an embrace of unbreakable control and exquisite tenderness. You're mine.
And Clint feels again as he'd felt in that moment, the yearning loneliness that Loki had carried in his heart for so long, how painfully glad he was to finally have someone to fill it. And he wonders now at how terribly sad it was to be so alone, so wary and fearful and mad with mistrust that the only people you could let into your heart were those you utterly controlled. If that was the only way you could be sure they wouldn't hurt you, wouldn't betray you.
At the time he'd thought nothing of the sort; he'd known only the absolute certainty and rightness of being Loki's, of finding the one place in the universe that he truly belonged. Of finding after a lifetime of restless searching the one cause to fight for, the one being for whom he'd give his service and his life without hesitation. It wasn't that he'd forgotten his other loyalties -- to Fury, to SHIELD, to America, to Earth -- it was simply that those concerns were shoved into the background, forgotten. All that mattered now was serving Loki.
Welcome, Hawk, Loki's voice had murmured into his ear -- into his mind -- to my little family. There'd been a thread of ironic deprecation even then, but underneath it a fierce urgent truth. He'd sensed Erik Selvig also, somewhere in the cocooning blue threads of magic, and known that the professor was just as helplessly enthralled as himself. Loki too was a part of that web, but Clint had sensed even then that it was different for him. He'd surrendered himself knowingly to this magic, and thus retained a part of his awareness and autonomy away from it, even as the blue threads wormed into his brain and plucked at his limbs. They were all yoked together now -- Clint and Loki and the old man -- but Loki held the reins.
Knowing well the full horror of being controlled by that blinding blue power, Clint had to wonder what kind of courage or madness it would take to submit oneself willingly to such a role, in exchange for being allowed to retain some fragile thread of control. He'd never know, for Loki had never offered him, nor Erik, such a choice.
Loki snared him now, wrapped him in threads of compulsion from the depths to the top of his soul, his touch as delicate as it was invasive and inescapable. It was incredibly intimate, this direct touch of mind-on-mind and soul-on-soul in a way that was like nothing Clint had ever experienced before. Not even when fighting side-by-side with the comrades he knew best, their bodies moving in harmony and their thoughts so in tune that the few laconic words spoken over the radio seemed redundant. Even sex hardly began to approach it -- all the sweaty frantic graspings of the body could only hope in the most fleeting moments to approach such intimacy.
It was glorious and terrifying and mind-blowing, in every sense of the word. And every night that Clint relived it in his dreams he woke in the darkness abrupt and gasping, his blood thundering hot in his veins and his body humming urgency with arousal, his cock thick and heavy against his stomach. He stared wide-eyed into the darkness and shook with the leftover intensity of the dream, the hunger -- the craving for something he was never supposed to want, let alone ever have again.
Every night.
The hell of it is, he wants to be able to tell someone about this, to get the thoughts out of his head and in the open air where he could untangle them. He thinks that maybe, frustratingly enough, it would help. But he can't; he doesn't dare. He knows that the sessions with Dr. Morgan are meant to help him, he knows that she's sworn to protect his confidentiality.
He also knows that won't mean spit if Fury and SHIELD got it in their heads to wiretap her office, or hack into her files. Their professional paranoia far outweighs any considerations of patient privacy; he should know, since he shares in it. They wouldn't hesitate to do it if they thought there was any danger, any possibility of a security threat or any hint that one of their top agents was compromised. Compromised, say, brainwashed; say, still compulsively driven to worship and fight for their greatest enemy even months after he'd been packed off Earth and gone.
So he says nothing about the dreams, lets Dr. Morgan go on thinking they're nightmares, because at least that's something they all will understand. Something they can accept. All those other thoughts, the ones they don't want to hear, he keeps his mouth shut and his head down and just lets them seethe and sizzle inside his brain.
He still remembers the surety he'd gotten in that first moment of connection, that Loki had let himself be put under the scepter, lain down willingly under the yoke in exchange for some measure of control. Was that real, or more of his lies? And if it was real, so what? What difference did it make? People had still gotten hurt; people had still died. Was it worse to want evil things and not do them, or do evil things but not want them?
If you willingly allowed yourself to be put under the control of a mind-control device, were you still responsible for the things you did under its influence? Yes? Sort of? Maybe.
Maybe you were just as responsible as any soldier who signed up for an outfit all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed only to find yourself later wading hip-deep in horror and blood, far from home in a world gone mad around you and with no clear path back to the light. Maybe there was no get-out-of-guilt-free card just because you were following orders, no matter from whom those orders came. Maybe he and Loki have more in common than Clint ever wanted to think.
Clint had his hands full re-wrapping the bindings on his arrow cases -- that was the down side of using such specialized weapons; you couldn't just go to the store to buy more ammo when you ran low, especially not when you were on complete blackout -- when his god returned. After the escape from the SHIELD lab and the abrupt rearrangement of Clint's priorities, he'd found them all a suitable safehouse and begun planning for their next move, whatever it would be: supplies, weapons, men. Loki had left the details to him; almost as soon as they'd arrived at their destination he'd left them to disappear into one of the sparsely furnished upstairs bedrooms.
When Clint had checked on his god he'd found him face-down on the bare mattress, curled around a hand pressed to his abdomen, and dead to the world. Clint didn't know where his new master had come from before he'd burst in on them in a flurry of light and magic, but it obviously had been no vacation. He'd been consumed by anxiety for his god's wellbeing, but not being a medic of any significant degree and not even knowing where to begin with a physiology as alien as Loki's, in the end he'd just left him to rest and heal himself up the best as he could.
That seemed to have been the right tactic. Loki still moved stiffly, but some of the exhaustion had cleared from his face and he no longer favored his ribs. He spotted Clint and smiled, holding his staff in the crook of one elbow as he pulled on his gloves. The shard embedded in the end of the sceptre glowed brightly, echoing the pale film of blue that washed and receded over his god's eyes.
"Are we moving out, sir?" Clint asked.
"I am," his god replied. "You will remain here. You must protect Erik while he does his work, and guard him when the time comes to move into endgame."
"Me, sir?" Clint said. "Where will you be?"
Loki tapped his fingers against the shaft in a restless rhythm. He flashed Clint a quicksilver smile. "I go to meet those who would think themselves hunters," he said. "To provide your distraction, and do what I can to sow dissent in the ranks of these would-be heroes."
Clint's eyebrows rose. "You're going to let them take you," he said, understanding coming to him along the threads of blue that bound them. It was not in his thoughts to disobey -- he was not even capable of such a notion -- but he didn't like the thought of his god walking alone into danger, opening himself wide to the likes of men such as Fury and Steve Rogers and that crazy diva Stark. And Tasha... Neither part of him, neither the half that served Loki without reservation nor the smothered part of him that remembered otherwise, liked the thought of such a meeting. "Sir, let me go instead. You shouldn't go unprotected."
Loki turned to him, eyebrows rising. "Why not, Hawk?" he asked.
"I know these men," Clint answered. "I know Fury. He's ruthless, and after what happened last night he'll be desperate. In a ticking-bomb scenario like this one, he won't hesitate to hurt you as much as it takes to get the location of the Tesseract out of you."
"Is that so?" Loki said. His smile thinned, turned cold. "He is welcome to try. I doubt there's anything these mortals can think to do to me that I have not survived already."
"Let me go instead," Clint repeated stubbornly. "Or at least bring me along so that I can cover you. There's more than one way to make a distraction. We can keep up a hit-and-run campaign, keep them hunting all over Europe while Erik works his magic."
"Ah, no," Loki said. His god reached out and placed his hands on Clint's shoulders; even through the thick gloves and through Clint's leather vest, they burned fever-hot. "Our enemies will be more complacent when they think they are winning the game. From what you tell me their alliance is uncertain yet; it should be easy enough to break them apart at the seams. It will not be the first time an angler finds that the fish he thinks he hooked is instead a kraken.
"And you I need you where your talents are most useful, at a distance. I need you to watch over Erik, protect him. What use is it to tame a falcon only to keep him jessed upon your arm? When his work is done, when you are ready to open the portal to welcome our allies from beyond --" his voice was level, but fear and contempt and fury boiled so suddenly in his mind that Clint instantly hated them, too, whoever they were. "Then come to me, and break me free of whatever bonds they have placed upon me. Your knowledge of their ways is sure, your hands swift; I have every faith in you."
"All right," Clint yielded, grudgingly. He would have thrown himself in front of a bullet for Loki without hesitation; would have gladly endured beatings or torture at a word from his lips. Letting Loki take them in his place, however, did not sit well.
With his hands still on Clint's shoulders he leaned forward, and pressed his lips briefly to Clint's forehead. A benediction. "Fight fiercely, my hawk," he murmured. "I will return soon enough."
He asked Dr. Morgan, during one session when he was feeling particularly bold; she'd looked at him in that grave, gentle way of hers and said, "I don't know, Clint. That's not an easy question to answer. But, if you don't mind my asking this question, why are you wondering about something that doesn't really apply to your situation at all? You didn't willingly allow yourself to be controlled, and I think that dwelling on things that didn't happen isn't really healthy for you."
She'd paused then, inviting him to speak; for a long moment he'd hemmed and hawed before finally muttering "I know it didn't happen to me." It wasn't himself he was asking for, but he didn't dare to say so.
She watched him for a long moment, before finally she smiled and said, "I'll tell you what I think. I think maybe it bothers you to think that there was nothing you could have done to change what happened to you. Sometimes it's easier to bear the guilt than it is to accept that you're out of control. But I'd ask you to be careful about that, because coming up with a lot of what-ifs that didn't happen is a good way to tie yourself up in knots about it."
"I guess so," Clint said. Dr. Morgan waited a few more minutes to see if he wanted to say anything else about it, but then let the subject drop.
The rest of the hour wasn't very productive, with Clint giving short, clipped half-answers to the doctor's questions; her last words still chased themselves around and around in his mind.
Sometimes it's easier to bear the guilt than it is to accept that you're out of control.
He wonders if Loki'd thought the same thing.
And he remembers the grayish sweat on Loki's face when he'd come out of the portal, the way he'd hunched over his ribs and walked with one hand on Clint's shoulder for support until they got out of there, and he has to wonder just how willing Loki's cooperation had been.
Time passed. He went back on duty, on a limited schedule: three months on, one month off. A few missions came his way: some bodyguard duty, some surveillance, one classified pickup in rural Alberta. All light stuff, fit for a recovering convalescent. Clint couldn't say he minded.
Erik Selvig had stayed in New York City afterwards; he hadn't gone back to New Mexico, nor home to Reykjavik. He kept in contact with Jane Foster on the personal side, and SHIELD on a more professional basis, but otherwise kept quietly to himself. He occasionally wrote a paper or two on harmless subjects -- and also, more surprisingly, music.
"It's all math," he'd explained to Clint once, haltingly. "What I saw -- what the Tesseract showed me -- it's all real, but it's not the same kind of math as what we... Our words and symbols, they don't work for it, they don't really catch it. The music, well, it's the closest I can get."
Clint dropped by to visit him whenever he was in the neighborhood, a few times a week and then not for a month when a mission took him away. They spent long afternoons in each other's company, hanging around Erik's brownstone apartment or out in the parks in good weather. They didn't have much in common, the young soldier and the old scientist, but there were some experiences that once shared could never be forgotten.
When night fell the two of them went drinking, at one or another of the European-style pubs Erik had discovered. And sometimes, if they were both drunk enough, they'd talk about the Tesseract: that scintillating blue abyss that had sucked them both in, pulled them under and then in the end spat them back out blinking into the dusty world. They spoke in halting, fragmented sentences, often trailing off into silence midphrase; snatches of allegory or remembrance that wouldn't make sense to anyone but the two of them.
Once, on a night when they'd both got especially drunk, Clint asked the question they'd both been avoiding for six months.
"What d'you suppose they're doing with him?" he said. Although the question came out of the blue, without context, they both knew immediately who he meant. And why he'd asked.
Erik grimaced, took another long drink of his bitter before he spoke. "I guess it all depends," he said at last. "On how accurate the old legends are."
Of the pair of them he was the more knowledgeable about the subject, old fairy tales and half-forgotten legends suddenly taking on a new, unexpected importance. Clint could have looked it up in a library, he supposed, but he didn't want that. He trusted Erik in a way he didn't trust distorted half-truths filtered through a thousand years of poetic license. Erik knew more than anyone in this world (save perhaps Jane Foster) what the enigmatic Asgardians were really like. Erik had, after all, once looked into the mind of a God.
So had Clint, of course. But he still wanted to know Erik's take.
"The Aesir could be pretty brutal, in the tales," Erik said at last, after a long moment of silence had passed between them with the muted hum of the bar in the background. "Of course they were a warrior culture, and tough as nails -- even the weakest among them were stronger than most humans. And they were proud, and stubborn, and lived much longer than humans too, so they could hold grudges for centuries. It took a pretty fierce punishment to stick with them."
"Such as?" Clint prompted, nursing his own drink. He'd pretty much hit the wall of how drunk his professional paranoia would let him get in public an hour ago, but the dark promise of oblivion still called to him.
Of course if it was forgetfulness he wanted, he might do better not to keep poking at the subject, like prying the edges on a scab.
"Well," Erik sighed. "They all got their share of knocks over the years, but Loki probably has the most impressive list. He once got his mouth sewn shut by dwarves, for weaseling out of payment for something. Another time he got locked in a box for three months without food when he ticked off a giant. And then there was that one time, when he changed into the form of a horse, and --"
A grin cracked Clint's face. "I think I've heard that one about the horse," he said.
"I think everyone has," Erik said with a chuckle. It didn't last. "But probably the best known story of the punishment of Loki is the story of the snake. After killing Baldur -- one of the other gods -- he's sentenced to imprisonment under the earth. There's a snake that hangs over him and drips venom in his eyes. When he writhes in pain the earth shakes, but he's bound in place by the entrails of his son --"
"Wait, his son?" Clint didn't usually interrupt, but that was an unpleasant jolt. "That's -- that's fucking sick. Loki had kids?"
"In the legends, quite a few," Erik replied. "He lost most of them, one way or another. This was Narfi, his son by his wife, Sigyn; Odin had him killed, and used his intestines to bind Loki in the cave. In some versions of the legend she stays with him, and holds a bowl to protect him from the snake's poison."
"Wow." It was a myth, a legend, just a story, but it sent an uneasy chill over Clint's back all the same. It made him feel very weird inside to imagine Loki with a wife -- with children, grieving over children he'd lost. Made him feel very weird to think of Loki as commanding that much loyalty, that much love, from the woman who'd lost so much because of his evil deeds.
Clint shook his head. "You're right, that's pretty brutal," he agreed. "I mean, the whole snake thing would be bad enough, but his own son?"
"Well, they were," Erik said. "In the stories. How much of that is true to life, how much those stories actually describe the Aesir and how much was the product of drunken Nordic imaginations -- nobody knows for sure, really."
Clint considered it. It made him feel pretty queasy to imagine it, if they weren't just talking about myths and stories any more, if they were actually talking about real people and real things that happened. Killing someone's kid because of something they'd done wrong was a pretty dick move, even without the part about using the guts of someone beloved to you to tie you down to be tortured.
It was hard to imagine Thor, friendly goofy genial Thor, who fought supervillains and watched TV and sang along to all of the theme songs, being a party to something like that. But how much did they actually know about him, anyway? How much did they know about any of them?
"Probably exaggerated," Clint said. "The way Thor talks about his dad, he can be pretty imposing, but he's not evil. I mean, they're our allies, aren't they?" The Asgardians were their allies. But Clint had been a soldier for enough years to know that SHIELD -- and his country, in general -- had gone through a lot of unsavory allies.
Clint shook himself. "The whole thing sounds more like some guy's idea of a 'just-so' story to explain how earthquakes happen."
"Probably," Erik agreed. But he didn't sound like he was convinced; and neither, if he let himself think it, was Clint.
They drank in silence for the rest of the night.
There is more to SHIELD than spies and assassins and brightly-colored spandex suits. They also have an army of data crunches, encryption wizards, and tactical analysts and they've spent the last six months going over every detail of the Tesseract incident with a fine-tooth comb. The weaknesses in the SHIELD base that had allowed Loki to bring it down on their heads. Where he'd disappeared to after that, how he'd dropped off the map so thoroughly that they hadn't picked him up again until he'd practically dressed himself in feathers and done a mating dance under their noses to get their attention. The weaknesses in the security on the iridium stash. Why Loki had chosen New York and not some secluded desert locale. Why he'd only opened the portal a few dozen meters across, instead of cracking open a hole in the sky that would let the entire army through at once. They had criminal profilers working around the clock, coming up with theories as to why Loki would botch his own operation so badly.
But there are some things that Clint can't help but wonder that don't seem to occur to anyone else. They hadn't had the perspective Clint had, to see into Loki's mind and hear the whispering of his madness. They hadn't seen Loki's plans from the inside.
Clint hates that Loki had taken him over, forced him to serve the renegade's mad delusions of power and aid him on his destructive rampage. He hates that Loki had been able to overpower him, to twist his reasoning and loyalties so thoroughly. But he also knows -- better than anyone -- that that was all Loki had done. He'd reached inside Clint and changed that one thing, that one thing and nothing else.
No one at SHIELD -- no one in the world, as far as Clint knew -- has behavioral modification techniques at that level of precision. Even with the most sophisticated cocktail of drugs, the most skillful of handlers, it is impossible to change someone's mind that completely without two-thirds destroying them in the process. Loki had switched his loyalties but left everything else intact, his memories and his skills and his personality and his habits of thinking. He'd gone into Clint's mind with the precision of a surgeon, opening him up with a razor-sharp touch that cut only where he needed it to, that had healed quickly and without scar afterwards. Had taken exquisite care to preserve the rest of him.
Clint saw the power of the Tesseract in ways that no one else did, so maybe that's why they don't understand. They don't know just how easy it would have been, in the moment where Loki held Clint's heart balanced on the point of a spear, to utterly destroy him. With that level of power, it would have been effortless to crush his personality and his mind into a screaming pulp, wipe it all out and start over with a blank slate, install a smooth and mechanical automaton in its place that would move and speak and obey and do absolutely nothing else.
Loki could have done that to him. And he hadn't. And no one else, in all their sympathy for him and their secondhand horror, seems to get that.
He doesn't know what he would have told them, if they asked. Doesn't know how he would even begin to frame such a thing. Hey guys, maybe we should cut Loki a break, because he could have hollowed me out like a blown egg and he didn't. Hey guys, he was sort-of being mind controlled too, except that he wasn't really. Hey guys, did it ever occur to you that maybe Loki botched his plans on purpose, that maybe he wanted to lose?
He can already hear Fury's deep and measured voice, full of frank and hostile skepticism. What have you got for proof? He hasn't. How do you know he isn't playing you, making you think whatever suits him? He doesn't. He doesn't have a damn thing to offer except the warped, distorted view he'd gotten of the inside of a crazy Asgardian's mind, one who by definition can't be trusted because he twists the truth under the weight of his steps wherever he goes.
But it didn't matter what he would or wouldn't have said, because he was never asked. Loki'd been gone before Clint was even released from medical, whisked off back to Asgard with his brother and the Tesseract. Clint gets the sense, hanging palpably around the office like a thundercloud, that Fury just wanted them gone before an interplanetary diplomatic incident erupted and buried them all.
For weeks afterwards Clint had kept waiting -- for what, he wasn't sure. The Asgardian equivalent of a jury duty summons, maybe, someone from Up There calling him in to testify. No one ever did, not from Asgard nor from Earth. Whatever decisions had been made, they weren't being made on his level. Whatever intel they were basing them on, they weren't getting it from him.
Maybe they kept him out of the loop because they thought he was still compromised, still with bits of Loki floating around in his brain. Maybe they were right; he doesn't know.
That's really the sticker. He doesn't know.
Three months on, one month off. Do that a couple of times and before you knew it, a year had passed. Amazing how easy it was to fall back into a routine, almost a rut. He was technically still part of the Avengers roster, but nothing had happened in the last year that required them all to assemble at once -- nothing that couldn't be taken care of in a few hours of an afternoon while he and Natasha were halfway around the world.
Nothing like an alien invasion over New York.
Clint stepped off the elevator of his apartment building, tired and dusty. It wasn't exactly a penthouse suite -- there were two other apartments on this floor, although he rarely saw his neighbors -- but being on the 15th floor meant even Clint would eschew the stairs when possible. He liked it, though; liked the height, liked the view. Also liked the special measures he'd put in place on the fire escape, the ziplines and rappeling hooks and equipment stashes on the roof which was easily accessible with a quick jump, grab and haul.
His apartment building wasn't exactly SHIELD class secure but it did have fences and cameras and card-locks on the elevators and stairwells, so Clint wasn't exactly expecting to find trouble here. He'd gotten as far as his front door before something sent a tingle up his spine and he froze, keys in the lock and one hand resting on the doorframe.
He turned his head -- not back towards the stairs, but further along the hallway before it ran into maintenance closets and dead-ends. That part of the hall was shadowed, the overhead lights flickering only sporadically, and even grubbier than the rest of the apartment. "Whoever's there," he called out in a deliberately calm voice, "I'd really like to know how you got past the cameras in the lobby and elevators. Did you drop out of the sky, or what?"
"My apologies," a hoarse cracking voice came from the shadow. It was too rough and distorted for him to immediately identify, but just the tone and timbre of that voice sent a bolt of alarm down Clint's back, like someone had just dropped an ice cube straight into his vertebral column. He stepped away from the door and into a solid, wide-footed defensive stance, reaching carefully up his arm to slide one of the electrified arrowheads down from his wrist-holster. Many of his customized tips could be used as makeshift weapons in close combat if absolutely necessary; the one he'd selected would be a more-than-effective taser. "I could not know until my arrival where this path would take me."
Clint swallowed. "Yeah? Well, maybe you should have picked your route a little more carefully," he said. "You aren't even supposed to be out of your cell, let alone back on Earth. Let alone in my apartment building."
"It was not intentional," that cracked voice whispered again, and a shape moved in the dimness. It unfolded from an untidy heap on the floor -- crouched, curled, it was hard to tell -- and rose slowly to full height, still tilted unsteadily against the wall. The dragging scuff of a footfall, a slight hitch and stumble as the shadowy figure moved. "This pathway was the brightest, the only one I could safely navigate through the dark. I should have guessed it was the Tesseract's echo that lit this path so brightly, should have guessed it would lead me to you."
"Your mistake," Clint said through stiff lips, almost numb with a dizzying cocktail of fury and elation and fear. "'Cause I can't imagine one damn reason why you would think I wouldn't just kick your ass."
Part of him roared in anger, his vision tinted red that Loki had the audacity to come back here, to Earth, to Clint, after everything he'd done. Longing to hurt him, to kill him, to silence that voice in his ears forever. Part of him exalted that Loki had returned, blue-washed and unashamed in his presence again. Longing to feel that closeness, that intimacy again. Which part of him was real? Which was right?
Loki stepped forward, one hand still pressed against the peeling wallpaper, and he lifted his head as he shuffle-stepped forward. Clint inhaled sharply as the light played over his face for the first time.
Venom, Erik had said and at the time Clint had largely let the word roll off him, more distracted by the alleged murder of his hypothetical son. Venom was for frogs and toads, spiders and garden snakes; small creatures, easily overcome and brushed aside. Not dangerous unless you were already allergic, and easily treated by a medic on hand. Whatever manner of creature had been visited on Loki during his captivity, it was clearly no harmless Earth beast.
Those eyes which had glowed once with all the secrets of the universe, which had glittered so brightly when they looked upon Clint and smiled, had been blasted. They were a milky white from lid to lid, having been burned and healed and burned and healed again so often that cataracts had grown across the whole eye. They did not shift or focus as he stepped forward again with one hand on the wall to guide him, quite obviously blind.
Around his eyes the damage radiated outwards in a starburst pattern, streaks of white scar tissue overlapping lurid red burns running back along his forehead, his temples, the bridge of his nose and his cheeks. His clothing was in tatters, so shredded and stained with grime that Clint couldn't even tell if it was the same green-and-black ensemble he'd been wearing on his last sojourn on earth, or something entirely different. What little was visible of him underneath the rags looked wasted, almost emaciated with the way the bones pressed against his skin.
This was not Loki. This was no more than a hollow shell of the man who had once been Clint Barton's master and enemy; yet he could still see the echoes of his god in the way he moved, the way he lifted his chin and the way he stood, even swaying on his feet with one hand holding onto the wall for dear life. "I would not have chosen to intrude upon you again, Agent Barton," he said, and his voice was like the rest of him, a raw and broken ruin. "But it seems I have nowhere else to go."
Clint had no idea how in hell had this man, in this condition, escaped whatever torture chamber they'd locked him in and jumped halfway across the universe -- blind, relying only on his own magic -- but it was clear he was at the end of his rope. He didn't look like he could win a fight with a toddler right now, let alone Clint Barton. There would be nothing Loki could do to stop him, whatever he chose to do, whether it was to put an arrow through that ruined eye right now or to tase him to the floor and tie him up and make a call to Fury.
It was his call. Right here, right now, it was his call.
The last time judgment had been passed on Loki, it hadn't been. There'd been no one with an ear for Clint's half-formed suspicions, his unvoiced arguments for leniency and consideration. He'd not spoken; he hadn't been asked. Did that relieve him of responsibility for the consequences, wash his hands free of guilt? He didn't really think it did. What had been done to Loki, this mutilation, this torture -- this wasn't okay. This wasn't how the good guys did things, not on Earth, not on America; not on his watch.
He wanted to think of himself as a good guy, nowadays. For a change.
Clint drummed his fingers nervously on the lintel of his doorway, keys still hanging unused in the lock. He knew that he should do his duty. He knew that he should do what was right. What he didn't know was whether or not, in this case, those were one and the same. He should call in SHIELD... who would promptly turn him back over to Asgard to continue where they'd left off, burn his eyes right out of his head and melt the flesh off his bones. Or maybe they wouldn't. They might want to keep him, take him apart in their labs for study or devise some other, even crueler method of captivity. There was still a lot of anger left among SHIELD personnel towards Loki, there was still a lot of hate.
As Clint hated him, when he wasn't busy loving him.
Clint took in a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh; he thought he could almost see red and blue flowing out with his exhalation, draining his vision clear again. He didn't know what was the right thing to do, what was more wrong. He didn't know if Loki had earned this punishment, if the Asgardians had been justified in passing their sentence. Those questions were for someone else, some other time.
What he did know was that one time, a year ago now, Loki had held his heart on the point of a spear, held his mind in the palm of his hand. He could have destroyed Clint in that moment, and he hadn't. He'd shown mercy.
Now their positions were reversed; today Clint had Loki held on the point of a knife, and today it was his turn to show mercy.
It was time to trust himself again.
"Okay," he said, and slid the arrowhead back into its socket. He reached down and turned his keys in the lock with a hollow clunk; the door swung open slightly on its hinges. "I guess you can crash on my couch for a while. Get some rest, get healed up from whatever those butchers did to you."
Loki's posture had been rigid, held stiff with uncertainty; now he sagged, almost falling if not for the arm braced against the wall to hold him up. He swallowed, the motion clearly visible on his wasted throat; his eyes were the same white-blind and his face still wracked with lines, but Clint got the feeling that if he could, the guy would have cried.
"It is as I thought, Hawk," Loki said, his voice broken glass and gravel and an emotion that Clint wasn't quite ready to hear yet. "You have heart."
He took a step, pushing himself up and away from the wall. He stumbled and would have fallen, hands flashing out uselessly to stop himself, had not Clint taken a swift stride forward to catch him by the arms. Loki sagged bonelessly in his grip, feeling so light and fragile that a light breeze might blow him away.
Words caught in Clint's throat, clogged and thickened and failed him; the worshipful submission he'd once felt for this man had drained away almost entirely, and what was left in its place was strangely... tender. Protective. He wanted to say something, but no words came to him.
He tightened his grip on Loki's arms, pulling him back to his feet; and then, with Loki's face so close to his, Clint lowered his head far enough to place a kiss on his seared and scarred brow. A perfect mirror of the kiss Loki had placed on him, the day that he'd gone out to be hunted and left Clint behind.
"Come on," he said, and brought Loki inside.