![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Avengers - Please Stand By
Title: Please Stand By
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~5,050 words
Spoilers: None, we’re pretending everyone gets along.
Synopsis: Maybe it was just the marathon of bad sci-fi movies from last weekend, but he had a feeling something was a little off here.
Author’s Notes: For the “isolation” entry at hc_bingo.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no profit from this.
Also available at AO3.
The first day was the hardest, really. He neither knew nor wanted to know what truly had happened. One minute, they were battling gigantic robot beast things in the middle of Sleepy Seaside Shantytown Number Four Hundred and Sixty-three, and the next the beasts were in a heap around him, with not a single person or whiff of smoke in sight.
He had poked at them because that was the type of person he was. He had also tried his comm at least seventeen times because, really, the first sixteen weren't enough. He wasn't even rewarded with the background static that had plagued him since the mission had began. If it hadn't been for the metal carcasses strewn about, he really would have thought he had been transported elsewhere. Even the remnants of Banner's once decent button down still lay crumpled where he had first shed it though, so Clint had a feeling something was definitely off.
Three hours in, he realized there were no working means of communication, not even at the abandoned businesses, and there was also absolutely no power to anything. More importantly, he realized that there was no running water anywhere to be found.
It had been about 1400 when he had last checked the time, but his chronometer had gone the way of everything else, which was to say into uselessness. The sky remained the odd sort of overcast that made telling time less than accurate, especially since the slight haze of light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, which was less than helpful in verifying his estimates of how long he had been wherever the hell it was he currently resided.
He was not a proud man, not when it came down to survival at least, and so he had no qualms about eventually breaking into a random shopfront to scrounge for food. The bread he found was somehow both soggy and stale at the same time, but there was no obvious mold and it filled his belly so he called it a win. He wet his whistle with a bottle of soda so flat that it hadn't even hissed when he opened it. Again, it served its designated purpose, so he wasn't going to complain.
Okay, that was a lie. He was going to complain, but it wasn't going to make any sort of discernible difference, so it proved to have no point. Also, there was no one around to listen to him bitch, which took half the fun away.
He was torn between fully exploring the area and staying put so that his team could find him, and the fact he had been up far too late the night before and then had battled giant metal creations for a couple of hours chose the winner for him. He laid down on a bench at the front of the shop that was really too short for him but provided decent sightlines, and drifted into a slightly restful sleep.
He awoke an entirely indeterminate time later to find the sky stayed pretty much exactly the same. The hue had taken on the slightest of grays, but that was about it. This time, he did choose to explore, and he didn't exactly like what he found.
He managed about a two kilo radius from where he first found himself, and then ran into absolute nothingness. The light bent and shifted and he pressed up against a dizzying mess of colors to find not only did it not want to budge, but he also kinda wanted to hurl. A step back, and everything looked fine again, like the world extended just the way it should, with absolutely no sign of the barrier. He tore down a small branch from a nearby tree and marked six steps out from the limit as a warning to himself, and went back to exploring what he could. He took comfort in the knowledge that he wasn't going nuts, that things really were off in a tangible way, even if he had no idea how to fix the underlying problem.
He had known returning to the Tower was out of the question, what with it residing in an entirely different state to start with, but the knowledge that he was in a contained area was less than reassuring. He couldn't help remembering an old Star Trek Next Gen episode where a character found themselves in a similar quandary and boldly made the announcement, "If there's nothing wrong with me, something must be wrong with the universe." He had found it ridiculous and funny at the time, but his life had become ridiculous enough without the new breaking of the laws of physics, and he really wasn't finding the humor right now. In the show, the rest of the characters had found a way to save the day. He might not have a starship or anything like that, but he had a couple of geniuses that were damned persistent, so that at least gave him hope for a chance.
Unless they thought he was dead, of course.
There were plenty of shows that had that in them too. Big boom, someone disappears, the rest of the team thinks they died a horrific death. He figured at least one or two people would morn, Natasha for sure, maybe Steve. They'd sit and drink and be stoic and Steve would stay sober and Nat would get shitfaced and no one would know.
Unless he really was dead. In which case the afterlife kind of sucked. This wasn't heaven, but also wasn't the hell he had already gone through on earth, so purgatory was an option that was looking likely. He'd done some bad shit in his time, but he'd also worked to make amends, so maybe it evened out to not be full hell, but this odd sort of pseudo-hell instead. Given that he knew some less than decent people who had approached decency at the end of their days, he was kind of surprised he was alone. Then again, he kept catching the edge of movement in the obvious stillness out of the corner of his eye, so maybe there were others here as well, just out of phase with him to create his own, private purgatory.
Or he was being far too maudlin and he wasn't dead, wasn't close to it, and really shouldn't have agreed to the Sci-Fi classics marathon last weekend because now all that nonsense was overlapping with the inherent weirdness of his life.
He leaned towards that one as being the truth of the matter.
He had no appetite, not after his last less than stellar meal, but food was necessary if he was going to survive to break free or be rescued like the damsel in distress that he was, so he looked for a possible source. Power was still out everywhere he went, and both his flint and his explosive arrowhead did absolutely nothing, so he opted for something palatable at room temperature. Some bottled water instead of soda because it may be stale but at least it was supposed to be flat, and he called it a meal.
He tried his comm again because he was a glutton for punishment. It wasn't like he was wasting the battery because the thing was beyond dead. He had tried fiddling with some of his gear, rewiring pieces using supplies from the nearby hardware store and robot bits, but with no success. He decided to build himself a new radio, one that wasn't reliant on batteries and could be wound by hand, and was happy to at least have a task to keep him somewhat occupied.
At what he assumed was the appropriate amount of time, he made the rounds again and found nothing save for his little stick marking the edge of his prison. The boundary still made him dizzy and disorientated, with no tangible benefit to the effort. With a sigh, he settled in, choosing for a place far more comfortable than a bench. If he was the only one around, which it looked like might be the case, then no one was going to mind if he borrowed an actual bed for a night.
The next few days followed the precedent of the first. He fiddled with his radio and thought he almost caught a signal once, but it was just his bow sliding down the wall he had propped it up against. The food hadn't gotten any worse, but it hadn't gotten any better either, not even when he tried a private residence instead of one of the shops. In short, things sucked. The only thing that tasted close to right were the lollipops from a place called Frank's, and so he stuffed his pockets with them, cavities be damned.
It was on the sixth night that he noticed something during his rounds: his stick was gone. Okay, not gone, not completely, but mostly. Like the thing looked fine from a distance but was cut in half up close and the distortion was clearly and annoyingly palpable on the other side.
So he did what any logical person would do and stole some markers from the hardware store and started marking off lines around the circumference of where he was trapped. Different colors for different distances, random arcs and angles from the center. Anywhere solid enough to take a mark got one, like a giant Spirograph of suck.
He only wished he was surprised then the marks started to disappear.
He only wished he wasn't surprised when the speed at which they disappeared increased.
Apparently his little bubble of purgatory was collapsing in on itself and wasn't that just awesome? A few simple calculations led him to the focal point of it all, right next to the clutter of dead robots where he had first found himself upon waking/regaining consciousness/being shifted to wherever the hell he was.
He wasn't a dumb man, despite how he occasionally liked to be perceived. He figured out about how long he had and grabbed anything and everything he could that might possibly be edible or useful and piled it where he'd still have access after the stores, shops, and more comfortable sleeping locales went away. The air mattress and compressor might have been overkill, but he might have something decent in what might very well be his final hours.
He also did something that probably wouldn't convince anyone of his intelligence and built a second little radio/transmitter of the crank variety and left it at the edge of his ever-shrinking confines. It was dangerous, and he'd be the first one to admit this, but the waste of supplies might be warranted if there was something or someone else on the other side of his little bubble that might eventually try to communicate with him. If he didn't get popped into oblivion first.
He might be notifying an enemy as to his whereabouts, but he also might be notifying a friend. He might also be notifying the great and powerful nothing, so, whatever. If a big bad did come through, at least it would spice things up a bit, maybe even let him cross to the real great beyond with something other than absolute boredom for his end of days. Alternatively, it might also let him cross back into his reality, the defeat breaking the curse or some such thing. Choose your weapon and choose your champion: his weapon never wavered but his champion may be ridiculously misplaced hope.
One day after the radio disappeared, he dared to try his own. For the first time since this whole debacle began, he finally heard sounds other than those of his own making. It was static and scrambled and completely indiscernible and completely awesome, for real this time. It was short bursts of random chaos, no pattern, rhyme or reason to them at all. Someone, or something, was trying to communicate with him though, so it was a start.
Either that or he had picked up the Celestial Cable Service, but it was still better than nothing.
He flipped his switches and pushed his buttons and turned his little crank in a non-euphemistic way and said, in a voice far rougher than he would have first expected, "Signal has been received, please identify yourselves."
He waited then, radio at his hip and bow in hand, for a response. Unfortunately, what he got was as short lived and nonsensical as the last few bursts. It was less than helpful.
"Could you please repeat? Message was not received," he tried.
His mind kept telling him that this was stupid and wasteful and dangerous and who knew who was on the other end of the line? It could be someone plotting to kill him. It could be someone plotting to save him. It could all just be his damned imagination as he slowly crossed that fine line into insanity. The fact he had keyed both transmitters to a frequency standardly used by SHIELD was the only thing that kept him trying.
There was a pause, a really fucking long one, and he was starting to lean towards the insanity route before there was anything new. A few more quick pops followed by a voice that was either somewhat human or Alvin and his friends figured out how to work some tech. Fast and high pitched and vaguely recognizable as Tony sped up a few RPMs, he heard, "Is that you, Barton?"
And he didn't laugh, he didn't shout, he didn't swear profusely in relief or anything like that save for the fact he totally did. He relaxed the grip on his bow ever so slightly and replied, "No, it's a fairy fucking princess, who the fuck do you think it is? Proper ID procedures now or I turn this sucker off."
It was a lie, of course. He could recognize Tony's voice, skewed as it was, and could recognize some of the rabble in the background as those he knew and loved most. Plus there was no way he was letting any possible lead on how to get out of this place go.
There were a few call and response song and dances to wade through - made more annoying by the apparent time lag between anything anyone said and anything anyone heard - but, in the end, it seemed as legit as could be that he had actually managed to contact his team. "But why do you sound so funny?" he asked after rewarding himself with a bottle of stagnant water.
"I sound funny? I-" came the eventual response. Then, slightly slower but still in the Simon and Theodore range, he heard, "Is this any better, your highness?" It was technically fair since he had referred to himself as princess, so he went with it.
"Whatever, Chip. Where are you and the other Rescue Rangers and how do we get me to you?" he asked, cutting to the point. At least three-fourths of the only store that was actually worthwhile was already gone, and several of the concentric lines he had drawn were fizzing out.
"We're working on it," Tony promised through the static.
"Wanna work a little faster? I estimate only about eighteen hours - twenty tops - before this little bubble of safety here goes away completely."
The pause that followed was worrisome, especially when it was Natasha's Gadget-like tones that asked, "Clint, how long have you been there?" It was slow and drawn out, at least in comparison to everything else and he knew her far too well to glean anything but concern from her words.
He refused to believe that they had forgotten about him for days. He refused to believe they hadn't been searching for him. He refused to believe they had gone home, had some take out, and enjoyed the lack of trashy movie he usually insisted upon after a decent fight.
Which meant something else was horribly wrong.
Skewed voices, long pauses as though needing to be translated or configured, questions about timelines... He glanced at his chronometer, the one that had been dead as a doornail since he got there so he hadn't bothered with it for about a week. There had been no power to it, but SHIELD had been around long enough to insist on non-electrical backups to survive EMP pulses. He lifted the standard face to reveal the second, old time version that was usually wound by the first up until it was needed and could run for weeks on end on its own with or without the wearer remembering to wind it.
Four hours and twenty-seven minutes had passed.
"I'm guessing I didn't miss Saturday's Outer Limits marathon then? Which is fine because I'm living it enough right now that the dramatization will pale in comparison," he said as glibly as he could manage.
"Please stand by," Tony intoned with all the seriousness the situation called for, which was to say not a lot at all.
Clint couldn't help it, he broke down and laughed because it was either that or cry which he was kind of doing anyway but he could at least cover for it a little bit by claiming to find humor in the hell he currently resided in. On the up side, he apparently had what would feel like a few hours to erase any sign of either, so he at least had that going for him.
He didn't want to seem needy or clingy or anything pathetic like that, but he also really did not want to go back to the silence that had haunted him for the days of the minutes he'd been there. Thankfully, his team seemed to glean onto the fact that their few hours had been far more than that for him, and decided to fill the possibly literal void with beautiful nuisance. Every ten to fifteen minutes or so on his end, he would get a thirty-second burst of randomness. Tony would ask him about the Tommyknockers, Steve would offer words of encouragement or possibly a dirty joke, Thor would tell jokes in which there was no way to question their cleanliness, Bruce would request heart rate and other health updates, and Natasha would make thinly veiled references to shit missions that were probably a test of his memory skills and insanity levels.
It had been around eight hours of his time when he noticed a change. He had began to drift a little, exhaustion a palpable thing, but kept being snapped back to surreality by Natasha's less than dulcet tones anytime he started to close his eyes. After a burst of some truly colorful and profane insults, he realized she sounded far more like herself and actually responded somewhat timely to his sad attempts at countering.
He did the logical thing and mentioned it, and then followed up the observation by asking, "Are you getting closer to me, or am I getting closer to you?"
"We think we found a lock on your bubble," Tony replied, only slightly rushed. "Now it's just a matter of trying to pop it without killing you in the process."
Not killing would be nice, he couldn't deny that. However, it appeared the final collapse had sped up at an equation far more exponential than he originally had figured. He had probably forgotten a variable - like a mad and determined scientist fucking with the whole thing - or possibly he really had fallen asleep for longer than he had first thought. Regardless, the barrier had now passed all but his final circle, and the edges of his cache of supplies had begun to fade into nothingness.
He reached out to touch the edge again, but wasn't stupid enough to tell his teammates he was doing so. Vertigo and nausea threatened to overwhelm him, and his fingers tingled like he had touched a live wire. Unfortunately, his efforts seemed to trigger some sort of final countdown, as though he had weakened the field that had keeping the bubble somewhat stable. He watched it shimmer and shimmy, and then make a quite noticeable reduction in circumference.
"Uh, guys?" he asked, trying not to sound as concerned as he felt.
There was no immediate response, at least no clear one. The line was clearly still live though, and he heard bits and pieces of the discussions about him that were in no way directed at him. It was a jumble of words, really, a combination of syllables that should have made sense but didn't. Finally, with a voice that almost sounded normal, he heard Stark demand, "What the hell did you do, princess?"
He was going to answer, really he was. He had words formed, some of them even coherent, mouth shaped to produce them. But the bubble/reality/whatever the hell he was trapped in made its final constriction and apparently decided to go out with a bang. His arms and fingers and shoulders were first, every nerve ending on fire, a voltage far higher than he was personally comfortable with coursing through him, consuming him. His body jerked in painful spasms, muscles contracting only to flail and contract again, making him wish for something as kind as balance, or at least a soft surface to land on as there was no way he was going to remain standing for long.
His knees hit the pavement with a reverberation he felt in his skull, impact and still twitching body sending him careening hard to the right. His elbow hit first, then his shoulder, dirt and gravel grating against his exposed skin even as his head bounced off of something oddly hand-shaped. It was warm and far softer than concrete or asphalt and doing its best to try to prop him up but his body just was having none of that.
It apparently gave up and tried to lower the rest of him gently to the ground instead. He twisted what little he could and, though blurred and increasingly shadowed vision, he made out the shape of Steve, still bedecked in his Cap uniform and a look of worry about his features. That look paled in comparison to that of a certain familiar redhead that hovered just behind one massive shoulder, but was notably different than the one of obvious surprise of the man in the shiny metal suit.
"Hey, guys," he managed, and then promptly passed the fuck out.
When he next awoke, there were all sorts of lines and needles connected to him. His first instinct was to get rid of them all, but he felt the familiar weight of a small hand on his wrist right around the time he heard Natasha’s familiar tones kindly tell him, “Don't be an idiot, they are there for a reason.”
“Wouldn't be me if I didn't do something stupid,” he argued back. His own voice sounded off but, then again, his throat hurt like fuck, so there was that.
“He's got a point,” Tony said from somewhere off to the side. “Why would he do something smart, like stay in place or not touch the nebulous bubble of hate around him?”
“Gonna assume I made it out to the other side and didn't drag y’all with me given that you have actual supplies to treat me versus the crap I managed,” he groaned. Everything hurt. Everything. If possible, his hair hurt. Even the skin under his fingernails ached. It beyond sucked.
“You mean the mattress, stash of candy bars, and random tools stolen from the Ace Hardware store?” Tony confirmed.
“Yeah, essentials,” he shot back. Finally, someone seemed to realize his voice sounded like shit and let him have a little sippy cup of water. It tasted like the paper cup and was too cold and pretty much perfect after everything he had tasted over the last however long it had been. He wanted more, but had it taken away far too soon and his hand lightly slapped when he reached for it again.
Every nerve ignited with that little action, which earned him a slightly apologetic, “We don't know how your system will handle anything yet,” from Nat.
“Your blood pressure is too high except when it's too low, your brainwaves are all over the board, and I'm fairly certain your nerves are dialed up a little higher than usual given your response,” Bruce explained. He at least seemed actually sorry versus Natasha’s shrug of indifference. He knew her too well though, saw the little lines around her eyes and the way the cup curved inward in her grasp. Her worry was as palpable as the damned flat pillow he lay on.
“How'd you find me anyway?” he asked, changing tracks.
“You literally made a target,” Tony scoffed. He didn't wait to be asked and instead simply explained, “About an hour or so after you stopped answering your comm, lines started appearing on buildings and crap showed up in the middle of the street. One minute, nothing, another, bam. We assumed it was either you or someone who really wanted to be hit so, same thing really.”
He flipped him off because he could, and then offered the admittedly weak explanation of, “The bubble was closing in and I wasn't sure what was on the other side. Figured my options were to avoid the edges or get killed; if I had known all I needed to do was pass through the sucker, I would have done that days ago.”
Stark had that pensive frown thing going on, like he was blaming himself over something no one else noticed but would never actually admit it, so Clint was in no way surprised when the next question was, “How long were you there anyway? It was less than half a day on our side, but you keep mentioning far longer than that.”
He scratched his chin, the rough growth there reminding him it hadn't all been a dream, and guessed, “Nine days? Maybe ten? Sky didn't really change and the chronometer was shot to hell, so it was hard to tell how long I slept. My gut is telling me about two hundred and twenty, maybe two hundred and twenty three hours?”
“And this is why you spy types are frightening,” Tony mumbled. He pulled out his phone and started typing away though, so it must have been semi-useful information.
“I thought it was the penchant for hidden weaponry,” he pretended to muse.
“I thought it was how we could kill you forty-six ways with just what’s in this room, not including the drugs,” Natasha joined in with a smirk.
Clint pretended to think about that for a moment before he asked, “Forty-six? Well, I guess you do get creative at times. Like in Chiapas when…”
Natasha shushed him with two fingers against his lips. He licked them because he knew it would make her pull them back and roll her eyes. “You are such a child,” she chided.
“A child who figured out how to build a transdimensional transmitter out of spare parts from a hardware store and the remains of the killer robots left in the street - they're to blame for like ninety percent of this by the way, the rest was all you,” Tony snorted. He pocketed his phone again, which either meant he had his answer or his fancy system was running a more detailed query for him. “By the way, it totally ruins your birdbrain image when you pull smart shit like this.”
Clint simply shrugged. He never said he was stupid, he just never corrected other people's assumptions. It had worked out well for him for years so it wasn't like he was going to fight it. “Should probably reimburse them for the stuff, before they call ownership rights or propriety or something,” was all he said instead.
“Already done, as well as a Stark cleaning crew scrubbing fruit-scented markers off of the city walls,” Tony assured him.
“Can you get me a pack of those? Maybe a few extra of the grape ones because, really, fly high and fly often with those suckers,” he commented mainly to get a response. Over a week of no one but himself to entertain himself had gotten old quickly and reminded him to make the most of it now. He had been on stakeout missions before, hidden away in a tree with a scope, but at least he had been aiming at something or usually someone at the time, had something to keep his brain occupied aside from mentally rewatching old science fiction shows and hoping that wouldn't become his new reality.
“Am I going to have to check for brain damage?” Bruce asked with a sigh. His lips were curled though, so Clint was fairly certain he was only kidding.
“Too late,” three voices said at once because of course Cap chose that moment to check in on them. Hell, for all Clint knew, he had been nearby the whole time. Maybe there were others hanging out as well, who knew? It wasn't like he was granted much of a view aside from the area immediately around the bed he was in given the way the first three hovered.
That, of all things, made him yawn. He was still kind of tingly and still kind of starving, but the exhaustion had a fighting chance now that he knew he was all safe and sound and all that cliche stuff.
As if on cue, Natasha tugged the blankets back up and into place. “Go to sleep,” she told him, and he had a feeling he might well follow that command with little complaint.
“We’ll wake you in a few hours, or maybe days, whatever works for you,” Tony added.
He would have flipped him off again, but it wasn't worth the effort. Instead, he drifted off to the knowledge his team would figure out what had actually happened, and let him in on the important parts if and when he wanted to know. He just kind of hoped the epilogue for this particular episode involved the good popcorn and maybe a beer.
End.
Feedback is always welcomed.
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~5,050 words
Spoilers: None, we’re pretending everyone gets along.
Synopsis: Maybe it was just the marathon of bad sci-fi movies from last weekend, but he had a feeling something was a little off here.
Author’s Notes: For the “isolation” entry at hc_bingo.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no profit from this.
Also available at AO3.
The first day was the hardest, really. He neither knew nor wanted to know what truly had happened. One minute, they were battling gigantic robot beast things in the middle of Sleepy Seaside Shantytown Number Four Hundred and Sixty-three, and the next the beasts were in a heap around him, with not a single person or whiff of smoke in sight.
He had poked at them because that was the type of person he was. He had also tried his comm at least seventeen times because, really, the first sixteen weren't enough. He wasn't even rewarded with the background static that had plagued him since the mission had began. If it hadn't been for the metal carcasses strewn about, he really would have thought he had been transported elsewhere. Even the remnants of Banner's once decent button down still lay crumpled where he had first shed it though, so Clint had a feeling something was definitely off.
Three hours in, he realized there were no working means of communication, not even at the abandoned businesses, and there was also absolutely no power to anything. More importantly, he realized that there was no running water anywhere to be found.
It had been about 1400 when he had last checked the time, but his chronometer had gone the way of everything else, which was to say into uselessness. The sky remained the odd sort of overcast that made telling time less than accurate, especially since the slight haze of light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, which was less than helpful in verifying his estimates of how long he had been wherever the hell it was he currently resided.
He was not a proud man, not when it came down to survival at least, and so he had no qualms about eventually breaking into a random shopfront to scrounge for food. The bread he found was somehow both soggy and stale at the same time, but there was no obvious mold and it filled his belly so he called it a win. He wet his whistle with a bottle of soda so flat that it hadn't even hissed when he opened it. Again, it served its designated purpose, so he wasn't going to complain.
Okay, that was a lie. He was going to complain, but it wasn't going to make any sort of discernible difference, so it proved to have no point. Also, there was no one around to listen to him bitch, which took half the fun away.
He was torn between fully exploring the area and staying put so that his team could find him, and the fact he had been up far too late the night before and then had battled giant metal creations for a couple of hours chose the winner for him. He laid down on a bench at the front of the shop that was really too short for him but provided decent sightlines, and drifted into a slightly restful sleep.
He awoke an entirely indeterminate time later to find the sky stayed pretty much exactly the same. The hue had taken on the slightest of grays, but that was about it. This time, he did choose to explore, and he didn't exactly like what he found.
He managed about a two kilo radius from where he first found himself, and then ran into absolute nothingness. The light bent and shifted and he pressed up against a dizzying mess of colors to find not only did it not want to budge, but he also kinda wanted to hurl. A step back, and everything looked fine again, like the world extended just the way it should, with absolutely no sign of the barrier. He tore down a small branch from a nearby tree and marked six steps out from the limit as a warning to himself, and went back to exploring what he could. He took comfort in the knowledge that he wasn't going nuts, that things really were off in a tangible way, even if he had no idea how to fix the underlying problem.
He had known returning to the Tower was out of the question, what with it residing in an entirely different state to start with, but the knowledge that he was in a contained area was less than reassuring. He couldn't help remembering an old Star Trek Next Gen episode where a character found themselves in a similar quandary and boldly made the announcement, "If there's nothing wrong with me, something must be wrong with the universe." He had found it ridiculous and funny at the time, but his life had become ridiculous enough without the new breaking of the laws of physics, and he really wasn't finding the humor right now. In the show, the rest of the characters had found a way to save the day. He might not have a starship or anything like that, but he had a couple of geniuses that were damned persistent, so that at least gave him hope for a chance.
Unless they thought he was dead, of course.
There were plenty of shows that had that in them too. Big boom, someone disappears, the rest of the team thinks they died a horrific death. He figured at least one or two people would morn, Natasha for sure, maybe Steve. They'd sit and drink and be stoic and Steve would stay sober and Nat would get shitfaced and no one would know.
Unless he really was dead. In which case the afterlife kind of sucked. This wasn't heaven, but also wasn't the hell he had already gone through on earth, so purgatory was an option that was looking likely. He'd done some bad shit in his time, but he'd also worked to make amends, so maybe it evened out to not be full hell, but this odd sort of pseudo-hell instead. Given that he knew some less than decent people who had approached decency at the end of their days, he was kind of surprised he was alone. Then again, he kept catching the edge of movement in the obvious stillness out of the corner of his eye, so maybe there were others here as well, just out of phase with him to create his own, private purgatory.
Or he was being far too maudlin and he wasn't dead, wasn't close to it, and really shouldn't have agreed to the Sci-Fi classics marathon last weekend because now all that nonsense was overlapping with the inherent weirdness of his life.
He leaned towards that one as being the truth of the matter.
He had no appetite, not after his last less than stellar meal, but food was necessary if he was going to survive to break free or be rescued like the damsel in distress that he was, so he looked for a possible source. Power was still out everywhere he went, and both his flint and his explosive arrowhead did absolutely nothing, so he opted for something palatable at room temperature. Some bottled water instead of soda because it may be stale but at least it was supposed to be flat, and he called it a meal.
He tried his comm again because he was a glutton for punishment. It wasn't like he was wasting the battery because the thing was beyond dead. He had tried fiddling with some of his gear, rewiring pieces using supplies from the nearby hardware store and robot bits, but with no success. He decided to build himself a new radio, one that wasn't reliant on batteries and could be wound by hand, and was happy to at least have a task to keep him somewhat occupied.
At what he assumed was the appropriate amount of time, he made the rounds again and found nothing save for his little stick marking the edge of his prison. The boundary still made him dizzy and disorientated, with no tangible benefit to the effort. With a sigh, he settled in, choosing for a place far more comfortable than a bench. If he was the only one around, which it looked like might be the case, then no one was going to mind if he borrowed an actual bed for a night.
The next few days followed the precedent of the first. He fiddled with his radio and thought he almost caught a signal once, but it was just his bow sliding down the wall he had propped it up against. The food hadn't gotten any worse, but it hadn't gotten any better either, not even when he tried a private residence instead of one of the shops. In short, things sucked. The only thing that tasted close to right were the lollipops from a place called Frank's, and so he stuffed his pockets with them, cavities be damned.
It was on the sixth night that he noticed something during his rounds: his stick was gone. Okay, not gone, not completely, but mostly. Like the thing looked fine from a distance but was cut in half up close and the distortion was clearly and annoyingly palpable on the other side.
So he did what any logical person would do and stole some markers from the hardware store and started marking off lines around the circumference of where he was trapped. Different colors for different distances, random arcs and angles from the center. Anywhere solid enough to take a mark got one, like a giant Spirograph of suck.
He only wished he was surprised then the marks started to disappear.
He only wished he wasn't surprised when the speed at which they disappeared increased.
Apparently his little bubble of purgatory was collapsing in on itself and wasn't that just awesome? A few simple calculations led him to the focal point of it all, right next to the clutter of dead robots where he had first found himself upon waking/regaining consciousness/being shifted to wherever the hell he was.
He wasn't a dumb man, despite how he occasionally liked to be perceived. He figured out about how long he had and grabbed anything and everything he could that might possibly be edible or useful and piled it where he'd still have access after the stores, shops, and more comfortable sleeping locales went away. The air mattress and compressor might have been overkill, but he might have something decent in what might very well be his final hours.
He also did something that probably wouldn't convince anyone of his intelligence and built a second little radio/transmitter of the crank variety and left it at the edge of his ever-shrinking confines. It was dangerous, and he'd be the first one to admit this, but the waste of supplies might be warranted if there was something or someone else on the other side of his little bubble that might eventually try to communicate with him. If he didn't get popped into oblivion first.
He might be notifying an enemy as to his whereabouts, but he also might be notifying a friend. He might also be notifying the great and powerful nothing, so, whatever. If a big bad did come through, at least it would spice things up a bit, maybe even let him cross to the real great beyond with something other than absolute boredom for his end of days. Alternatively, it might also let him cross back into his reality, the defeat breaking the curse or some such thing. Choose your weapon and choose your champion: his weapon never wavered but his champion may be ridiculously misplaced hope.
One day after the radio disappeared, he dared to try his own. For the first time since this whole debacle began, he finally heard sounds other than those of his own making. It was static and scrambled and completely indiscernible and completely awesome, for real this time. It was short bursts of random chaos, no pattern, rhyme or reason to them at all. Someone, or something, was trying to communicate with him though, so it was a start.
Either that or he had picked up the Celestial Cable Service, but it was still better than nothing.
He flipped his switches and pushed his buttons and turned his little crank in a non-euphemistic way and said, in a voice far rougher than he would have first expected, "Signal has been received, please identify yourselves."
He waited then, radio at his hip and bow in hand, for a response. Unfortunately, what he got was as short lived and nonsensical as the last few bursts. It was less than helpful.
"Could you please repeat? Message was not received," he tried.
His mind kept telling him that this was stupid and wasteful and dangerous and who knew who was on the other end of the line? It could be someone plotting to kill him. It could be someone plotting to save him. It could all just be his damned imagination as he slowly crossed that fine line into insanity. The fact he had keyed both transmitters to a frequency standardly used by SHIELD was the only thing that kept him trying.
There was a pause, a really fucking long one, and he was starting to lean towards the insanity route before there was anything new. A few more quick pops followed by a voice that was either somewhat human or Alvin and his friends figured out how to work some tech. Fast and high pitched and vaguely recognizable as Tony sped up a few RPMs, he heard, "Is that you, Barton?"
And he didn't laugh, he didn't shout, he didn't swear profusely in relief or anything like that save for the fact he totally did. He relaxed the grip on his bow ever so slightly and replied, "No, it's a fairy fucking princess, who the fuck do you think it is? Proper ID procedures now or I turn this sucker off."
It was a lie, of course. He could recognize Tony's voice, skewed as it was, and could recognize some of the rabble in the background as those he knew and loved most. Plus there was no way he was letting any possible lead on how to get out of this place go.
There were a few call and response song and dances to wade through - made more annoying by the apparent time lag between anything anyone said and anything anyone heard - but, in the end, it seemed as legit as could be that he had actually managed to contact his team. "But why do you sound so funny?" he asked after rewarding himself with a bottle of stagnant water.
"I sound funny? I-" came the eventual response. Then, slightly slower but still in the Simon and Theodore range, he heard, "Is this any better, your highness?" It was technically fair since he had referred to himself as princess, so he went with it.
"Whatever, Chip. Where are you and the other Rescue Rangers and how do we get me to you?" he asked, cutting to the point. At least three-fourths of the only store that was actually worthwhile was already gone, and several of the concentric lines he had drawn were fizzing out.
"We're working on it," Tony promised through the static.
"Wanna work a little faster? I estimate only about eighteen hours - twenty tops - before this little bubble of safety here goes away completely."
The pause that followed was worrisome, especially when it was Natasha's Gadget-like tones that asked, "Clint, how long have you been there?" It was slow and drawn out, at least in comparison to everything else and he knew her far too well to glean anything but concern from her words.
He refused to believe that they had forgotten about him for days. He refused to believe they hadn't been searching for him. He refused to believe they had gone home, had some take out, and enjoyed the lack of trashy movie he usually insisted upon after a decent fight.
Which meant something else was horribly wrong.
Skewed voices, long pauses as though needing to be translated or configured, questions about timelines... He glanced at his chronometer, the one that had been dead as a doornail since he got there so he hadn't bothered with it for about a week. There had been no power to it, but SHIELD had been around long enough to insist on non-electrical backups to survive EMP pulses. He lifted the standard face to reveal the second, old time version that was usually wound by the first up until it was needed and could run for weeks on end on its own with or without the wearer remembering to wind it.
Four hours and twenty-seven minutes had passed.
"I'm guessing I didn't miss Saturday's Outer Limits marathon then? Which is fine because I'm living it enough right now that the dramatization will pale in comparison," he said as glibly as he could manage.
"Please stand by," Tony intoned with all the seriousness the situation called for, which was to say not a lot at all.
Clint couldn't help it, he broke down and laughed because it was either that or cry which he was kind of doing anyway but he could at least cover for it a little bit by claiming to find humor in the hell he currently resided in. On the up side, he apparently had what would feel like a few hours to erase any sign of either, so he at least had that going for him.
He didn't want to seem needy or clingy or anything pathetic like that, but he also really did not want to go back to the silence that had haunted him for the days of the minutes he'd been there. Thankfully, his team seemed to glean onto the fact that their few hours had been far more than that for him, and decided to fill the possibly literal void with beautiful nuisance. Every ten to fifteen minutes or so on his end, he would get a thirty-second burst of randomness. Tony would ask him about the Tommyknockers, Steve would offer words of encouragement or possibly a dirty joke, Thor would tell jokes in which there was no way to question their cleanliness, Bruce would request heart rate and other health updates, and Natasha would make thinly veiled references to shit missions that were probably a test of his memory skills and insanity levels.
It had been around eight hours of his time when he noticed a change. He had began to drift a little, exhaustion a palpable thing, but kept being snapped back to surreality by Natasha's less than dulcet tones anytime he started to close his eyes. After a burst of some truly colorful and profane insults, he realized she sounded far more like herself and actually responded somewhat timely to his sad attempts at countering.
He did the logical thing and mentioned it, and then followed up the observation by asking, "Are you getting closer to me, or am I getting closer to you?"
"We think we found a lock on your bubble," Tony replied, only slightly rushed. "Now it's just a matter of trying to pop it without killing you in the process."
Not killing would be nice, he couldn't deny that. However, it appeared the final collapse had sped up at an equation far more exponential than he originally had figured. He had probably forgotten a variable - like a mad and determined scientist fucking with the whole thing - or possibly he really had fallen asleep for longer than he had first thought. Regardless, the barrier had now passed all but his final circle, and the edges of his cache of supplies had begun to fade into nothingness.
He reached out to touch the edge again, but wasn't stupid enough to tell his teammates he was doing so. Vertigo and nausea threatened to overwhelm him, and his fingers tingled like he had touched a live wire. Unfortunately, his efforts seemed to trigger some sort of final countdown, as though he had weakened the field that had keeping the bubble somewhat stable. He watched it shimmer and shimmy, and then make a quite noticeable reduction in circumference.
"Uh, guys?" he asked, trying not to sound as concerned as he felt.
There was no immediate response, at least no clear one. The line was clearly still live though, and he heard bits and pieces of the discussions about him that were in no way directed at him. It was a jumble of words, really, a combination of syllables that should have made sense but didn't. Finally, with a voice that almost sounded normal, he heard Stark demand, "What the hell did you do, princess?"
He was going to answer, really he was. He had words formed, some of them even coherent, mouth shaped to produce them. But the bubble/reality/whatever the hell he was trapped in made its final constriction and apparently decided to go out with a bang. His arms and fingers and shoulders were first, every nerve ending on fire, a voltage far higher than he was personally comfortable with coursing through him, consuming him. His body jerked in painful spasms, muscles contracting only to flail and contract again, making him wish for something as kind as balance, or at least a soft surface to land on as there was no way he was going to remain standing for long.
His knees hit the pavement with a reverberation he felt in his skull, impact and still twitching body sending him careening hard to the right. His elbow hit first, then his shoulder, dirt and gravel grating against his exposed skin even as his head bounced off of something oddly hand-shaped. It was warm and far softer than concrete or asphalt and doing its best to try to prop him up but his body just was having none of that.
It apparently gave up and tried to lower the rest of him gently to the ground instead. He twisted what little he could and, though blurred and increasingly shadowed vision, he made out the shape of Steve, still bedecked in his Cap uniform and a look of worry about his features. That look paled in comparison to that of a certain familiar redhead that hovered just behind one massive shoulder, but was notably different than the one of obvious surprise of the man in the shiny metal suit.
"Hey, guys," he managed, and then promptly passed the fuck out.
When he next awoke, there were all sorts of lines and needles connected to him. His first instinct was to get rid of them all, but he felt the familiar weight of a small hand on his wrist right around the time he heard Natasha’s familiar tones kindly tell him, “Don't be an idiot, they are there for a reason.”
“Wouldn't be me if I didn't do something stupid,” he argued back. His own voice sounded off but, then again, his throat hurt like fuck, so there was that.
“He's got a point,” Tony said from somewhere off to the side. “Why would he do something smart, like stay in place or not touch the nebulous bubble of hate around him?”
“Gonna assume I made it out to the other side and didn't drag y’all with me given that you have actual supplies to treat me versus the crap I managed,” he groaned. Everything hurt. Everything. If possible, his hair hurt. Even the skin under his fingernails ached. It beyond sucked.
“You mean the mattress, stash of candy bars, and random tools stolen from the Ace Hardware store?” Tony confirmed.
“Yeah, essentials,” he shot back. Finally, someone seemed to realize his voice sounded like shit and let him have a little sippy cup of water. It tasted like the paper cup and was too cold and pretty much perfect after everything he had tasted over the last however long it had been. He wanted more, but had it taken away far too soon and his hand lightly slapped when he reached for it again.
Every nerve ignited with that little action, which earned him a slightly apologetic, “We don't know how your system will handle anything yet,” from Nat.
“Your blood pressure is too high except when it's too low, your brainwaves are all over the board, and I'm fairly certain your nerves are dialed up a little higher than usual given your response,” Bruce explained. He at least seemed actually sorry versus Natasha’s shrug of indifference. He knew her too well though, saw the little lines around her eyes and the way the cup curved inward in her grasp. Her worry was as palpable as the damned flat pillow he lay on.
“How'd you find me anyway?” he asked, changing tracks.
“You literally made a target,” Tony scoffed. He didn't wait to be asked and instead simply explained, “About an hour or so after you stopped answering your comm, lines started appearing on buildings and crap showed up in the middle of the street. One minute, nothing, another, bam. We assumed it was either you or someone who really wanted to be hit so, same thing really.”
He flipped him off because he could, and then offered the admittedly weak explanation of, “The bubble was closing in and I wasn't sure what was on the other side. Figured my options were to avoid the edges or get killed; if I had known all I needed to do was pass through the sucker, I would have done that days ago.”
Stark had that pensive frown thing going on, like he was blaming himself over something no one else noticed but would never actually admit it, so Clint was in no way surprised when the next question was, “How long were you there anyway? It was less than half a day on our side, but you keep mentioning far longer than that.”
He scratched his chin, the rough growth there reminding him it hadn't all been a dream, and guessed, “Nine days? Maybe ten? Sky didn't really change and the chronometer was shot to hell, so it was hard to tell how long I slept. My gut is telling me about two hundred and twenty, maybe two hundred and twenty three hours?”
“And this is why you spy types are frightening,” Tony mumbled. He pulled out his phone and started typing away though, so it must have been semi-useful information.
“I thought it was the penchant for hidden weaponry,” he pretended to muse.
“I thought it was how we could kill you forty-six ways with just what’s in this room, not including the drugs,” Natasha joined in with a smirk.
Clint pretended to think about that for a moment before he asked, “Forty-six? Well, I guess you do get creative at times. Like in Chiapas when…”
Natasha shushed him with two fingers against his lips. He licked them because he knew it would make her pull them back and roll her eyes. “You are such a child,” she chided.
“A child who figured out how to build a transdimensional transmitter out of spare parts from a hardware store and the remains of the killer robots left in the street - they're to blame for like ninety percent of this by the way, the rest was all you,” Tony snorted. He pocketed his phone again, which either meant he had his answer or his fancy system was running a more detailed query for him. “By the way, it totally ruins your birdbrain image when you pull smart shit like this.”
Clint simply shrugged. He never said he was stupid, he just never corrected other people's assumptions. It had worked out well for him for years so it wasn't like he was going to fight it. “Should probably reimburse them for the stuff, before they call ownership rights or propriety or something,” was all he said instead.
“Already done, as well as a Stark cleaning crew scrubbing fruit-scented markers off of the city walls,” Tony assured him.
“Can you get me a pack of those? Maybe a few extra of the grape ones because, really, fly high and fly often with those suckers,” he commented mainly to get a response. Over a week of no one but himself to entertain himself had gotten old quickly and reminded him to make the most of it now. He had been on stakeout missions before, hidden away in a tree with a scope, but at least he had been aiming at something or usually someone at the time, had something to keep his brain occupied aside from mentally rewatching old science fiction shows and hoping that wouldn't become his new reality.
“Am I going to have to check for brain damage?” Bruce asked with a sigh. His lips were curled though, so Clint was fairly certain he was only kidding.
“Too late,” three voices said at once because of course Cap chose that moment to check in on them. Hell, for all Clint knew, he had been nearby the whole time. Maybe there were others hanging out as well, who knew? It wasn't like he was granted much of a view aside from the area immediately around the bed he was in given the way the first three hovered.
That, of all things, made him yawn. He was still kind of tingly and still kind of starving, but the exhaustion had a fighting chance now that he knew he was all safe and sound and all that cliche stuff.
As if on cue, Natasha tugged the blankets back up and into place. “Go to sleep,” she told him, and he had a feeling he might well follow that command with little complaint.
“We’ll wake you in a few hours, or maybe days, whatever works for you,” Tony added.
He would have flipped him off again, but it wasn't worth the effort. Instead, he drifted off to the knowledge his team would figure out what had actually happened, and let him in on the important parts if and when he wanted to know. He just kind of hoped the epilogue for this particular episode involved the good popcorn and maybe a beer.
End.
Feedback is always welcomed.