Ev & Clint | Friday Afternoon (backdated)

[x-hawkeye.livejournal.com]

Ev wants to escape the confines of the mansion, so he drags Clint out of the lab.


Ev's hermit game was strong, but even he had to leave his room some time. He had hit a wall in his research so the fresh winter air would do him some good. He considered continuing his solitude, but the same voice calling for the outdoors also demanded company. After ensuring the door to his room was locked (as if that could keep out everyone, he thought ruefully), he took the elevator down to the basement level where he knew without even being told that Clint would be. As if he could turn down the allure of the state-of-the-art laboratory facilities.

A tiny soldering tool in one hand, an itty bitty tracker in the other, Clint narrowed his eyes. He needed a glove to do this safely, but the tracker was at the perfect angle — he wasn't sure he'd be able to get it back at just that tilt if he put it down now. But Natasha — and everyone else — would give him shit if he wound up burning a hole through his own finger while soldering a tracker together. Also, Darcy would probably take away at least three gold stars and he really didn't want to lose any more. Puffing out his cheeks, he sat the tracker down and turned off the soldering tool.

"Good move," Ev said after the automatic door opened with its trademark hush. "It'll be hard to hold a bow if you're missing parts of your hands." He nodded at the door. "Come on, get your coat. It's too stuffy in here."

"It's not stuffy," Clint said, feeling the need to defend the air quality of his lab. Then he blinked and asked, "Where're we going?"

"Just outside. I've been stuck inside by myself for too long. Come on, I'll show you all the landmarks, like the plot where nothing can grow anymore because I had an accident when I synched with Scott one time."

Letting an expression of shock wash over his face, Clint gasped, "You had a powers related accident? No." He grinned, though, turning off his soldering tool and picking up the tracker to place it in a plastic dish so he wouldn't lose it.

Ev snorted and led the way out of the lab. "We were all 16 once. We can't all be masters from day one." He buttoned his wool coat when they stepped outside. Even now in the dull gray of winter, between the blizzards and the spring thaw, the grounds were a thing of beauty. His eyes darted around like a nervous shrew evading its predators, but it was straight-up sedate compared to his behavior in New York City itself.

"Go on, synch up if you wanna see things better," Clint said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. "No use walking around with me and being more paranoid than you have to be."

It had become automatic, examining every inch of his surroundings to ensure a complete layout of the land. Maybe useful for active SHIELD agents, but now it made Ev look almost deranged. He grinned wryly at Clint and shook his head. "Never mind. Bad habits and all."

"Nah, not bad," Clint said, shaking his head. "After everything with Tasha — and now your team. Nothing's wrong with careful." Sighing, he shook his head. "But you didn't pull me outta the lab to rehash things we've already rehashed. What're some of these landmarks you were telling me about? And what's up with you and Wanda?"

"What's up with you and Wanda?" Ev countered, his grin widening. "She says you owe her breakfast. Breakfasts, plural."

"I do," Clint said, grinning. His expression sobered a little. "She helped me — basically no questions asked — when I was like, 'I need you to go with me to this European country, invade a corporate thingie, and save my best friend.' And said she'd only give her group of spies the info that was necessary for them to not get worried. So Tasha's intel is Tasha's, up to and until she wants X-Force to have it." He shrugged. "Not much I wouldn't have done, at that point, to get the help I needed. So a few breakfasts didn't seem like too steep a price."

"That's downright cheap. What sort of crack do you put into your meals that makes them acceptable compensation?" Ev's posture relaxed, as if the little bit of humor there was dispelling his nerves. "Before Professor Lehnsherr... Magneto" — he corrected himself, even a lifetime later it was still a hard habit to break, and he was showing himself to be a creature of habit — "left the school, Wanda visited often. She never actually enrolled here as a full-time student, but we became friends nonetheless."

"I think it has something to do with my sexy pans," Clint offered, somehow managing to keep a straight face. "But yeah, I figured it was something like that, y'know. Related to the school. And I figure I'll pretty much owe Wanda and Fe a favor of equal size, outside the breakfast considerations."

"Favors trade cheaply here." The pair passed a small pond, only a couple of feet in diameter, that abutted some bare bushes. In the spring and summer, the bushes would surely be blooming with brilliantly colored flowers, and a motor would be pumping water into the pond, clearing that winter-stagnated mess that was in there now. "Ah, and there's where I blew a hole in the ground with the punches from the punch dimension," he said, pointing to the pond. "Got to commend the groundskeeper. Filling that pit with water is a good way to hide it."

"Punches," Clint deadpanned. "From the punch dimension." The question was implicit.

Ev smirked and shook his head dismissively. "Inside joke. Scott's optic blasts make no sense from a thermodynamics point of view. Energy blasts with heat are one thing. Red beams of concussive force that don't generate heat? The only reasonable hypothesis is that he's actually the nexus of this reality and one with a different kind of physics, and energy from that universe pours into this one through his eyes."

Snorting softly, Clint shook his head. "I haven't had a chance to get into everybody's powers here, figure out the scientific parts. Seems like it'd be a touchy subject, regardless. The spy folks were already pretty wary of me when I first got here. Don't wanna alienate anybody. So I'm digging into Tasha's venom at the moment. That's interesting enough for the time being."

"Curiosity, cats, et cetera." Ev sat on a stone bench in the garden they were passing through. "What have you discovered so far?"

"No necrotic properties," Clint said immediately. "Neurotoxin that's actually ridiculously similar to what actual spider black widows produce, which... opens up a whole different category of questioning about the people who trained Tasha — their capabilities when it comes to manipulating mutations and all that. I mean, she didn't manifest until last November, so. Did they plan that, or was it something else entirely? I dunno."

"Precognition or preternaturally good luck? Or the more obvious possibility." Genetic manipulation. Not something either of them would put past any well-equipped agency. "She never once pinged for me the whole time we were both agents. It's very unusual to manifest so late in life. Not without some intervention."

"Right," Clint said, nodding. "And if it was a partial manifestation, what kept her from pinging for your before the full thing? Is that a your-powers related quirk or a her-powers related quirk? Or was this a complete manifestation at the age of twenty-whatever she is now?" Shrugging, he said, "Whatever the answer to any of those questions, she's got some seriously lethal venom going for her now."

Ev nodded thoughtfully. "Have you and her found out anything new about the circumstances that led her here? It's not been a fecund search on my part, I'll admit. Almost enough to make you believe it was just a shit mission." Not that Ev believe that for a second.

Snorting Clint shook his head. "Nothing concrete. We've mostly been running our security checks on our various resources, seeing what's been compromised, and taking precautions with the things that haven't been. Personally, I'm going with her being too good for it to've just been a shit mission. And the labs where they were holding her were prepped for her specifically. The mansion's spies seem to have some intel on the company she infiltrated, but we haven't had a chance to look into too much. No hits on our end for your stuff. Not that we've been poking at that much, either."

"I haven't heard of any other disasters like what we went through," Ev said. "Not like that kind of intel would get out easily, but there aren't even any rumors. That leaves a lot of possibilities. They've accomplished their elimination goals for now, they've been discovered and quietly routed out and no one has told us, they're biding their time until the next opportune target..."

"Whatever it winds up being..." Clint shook his head. "We're in a good position here to figure it out, at least. Better than we'd be at SHIELD, anyway. Nobody knows Tasha's alive, everybody assumes I've fucked off to wherever, and you're... what? On sabbatical? Taking an LOA? Extended LOA?"

"Disability. And I didn't even have to get myself to 300 pounds to earn it. Just needed the shrink's approval."

Clint snorted softly. "Strong work, Thomas," he said. "You remember Malta? I practically had to have my liver fall out in front of the doc to get leave after that."

"Maybe Hill just likes me more. If by 'maybe' I mean 'yes, she does.'"

"She liiiikes you," Clint half-sang. He waggled his eyebrows. "Whichever, Hill liked me well enough. I kinda miss her glower, can't lie. You seen her lately?"

Ev playfully nudged Clint, returning childish response for childish teasing. "Haven't seen her, no. Emails and phone calls, though, so she can 'check up' per leave guidelines. Because she's nothing if not an effective bureaucrat and politician." And expert spy, as these conversation were also useful for secretly sharing information.

"Mm..." Clint trailed off even though he was half-grinning. It was a meditative sound. As they kept walking, he asked, "You think you'll go back? I mean, after everything's finished with figuring out what happened to the Warriors?"

They walked in silence for a few moments as Ev considered the question. "Truth be told, I haven't gotten that far. I want to, of course. Don't want to pass up that pension. But I don't know if it will be possible, if this is as deep as I suspect." And, of course, assuming he would even survive to see this through to the end.

"True," Clint said, nodding slowly. "You lookin' to join the X-Men here, then? They've got some impressive resources, from what little I've seen. Or do you get access to all that without actually having to join up?"

"I've given Professor Xavier and Scott what I have." Some of it, at least. What would be most relevant to them. "So we can inform one another if either of us finds something. But no, I don't think the X-Men would be a good fit for me. They tried to recruit me as a student and no. Although, now that you bring it up, what about you? Your long-term plans can't be to wile away in one of the laboratories-on-loan here."

"Nah," Clint said, shaking his head. "It's cool for now, but I'll go stir crazy eventually." He frowned a little, then continued, "J — Jennie — and I have been talking on and off about putting our heads together, forming up a group to deal with things that... I dunno, that I guess the other teams don't really deal with. Mostly in relation to the mess that came down on our heads in Copenhagen this past fall, but I think we could make it into something useful — something relevant. Maybe take some of the pressure off the other teams to be all things, if that makes sense. Free them up to go do the fighting or whatever while we poke at the strange and bizarre and possibly scientifically violent stuff."

Ev did not try to hide his curiosity. "Clint Barton's Superfriends? Huh. Tell me more."