Chapter Text
“I, personally, became a fan when you sent us Nicholas Guiness wrapped in a bow. I’d been trying to get that asshole for years.” The bland male voice startled Clint out of his involuntary slide into memories and back to present awareness.
Dutson was holding his hands out for Ayers to cut the zip ties free with a pocket knife, and then rubbing the chafed skin thoughtfully as he looked at Clint. “How is Phil doing, these days?”
*****27 Minutes Ago*****
As he stared down the barrel of a Glock 17, Barney couldn’t resist the double-take as several pieces of information occurred to him all at once.
He and Dutson had not been sent on a fool’s errand. This was not a case of a grandstanding Senator wasting the Bureau’s time in order to show off for his friends.
In fact, there was an infamous killer-for-hire on the premises.
It was his brother.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Barney hissed, immediately lowering his weapon and knocking Clint’s aside.
Clint lowered his weapon less than a second later, and Barney got a good look at him without the shock of a weapon in his face.
Clint’s face red and pulpy with new bruising that hadn’t even had time to show yet, there was a bad bruise on the top of one shoulder, visible under his ill-fitting shirt and bullet-proof vest, and he held his limbs oddly, his balance was off, like he was injured in a bunch of ways Barney couldn’t see.
Clint was quick on the uptake, quicker than Barney in a lot of ways, and already had a sneer on his face in response to the dismay that was probably visible on Barney’s. “I’m working - what are you doing here? Don’t you know who called you here?” Clint had already holstered his Glock, and signed his words, fingers and hands moving in a blur.
Barney needed a moment to process the signs, but had his own Glock holstered and his body knew how to respond, the ASL signs rapidly returning to him. “W-A-R-D, he’s an asshole and I think he’s connected to organized crime. D-U-T-S-O-N is a legend when it comes to reeling in big fish. I usually work undercover or vice O-P-E-R-A-T-I-O-N-S but they even kept me in the dark about this. Got to be because he’s a S-E-N-A-T-O-R.”
Clint’s upper lip lifted in contempt, then bared his teeth in anger as Barney signed, and his response was so fast, driven by boiling anger, that Barney missed several.
“That piece of shit senator took a few pages from Crossfire’s book and ________ _______ shit ______ [his?] men. He drugged and framed G-R-A-N-T and admitted he planned to kill his college sister after letting his _______ go at her. He deserves a knife in the stomach _______ like Trick Shot, Crossfire, or Bill Johnson.”
Clint’s expression had collapsed into disgust and sorrow while he signed, but by the time he was signing those last names, his chest heaved with rapid respiration and Barney recognized his little brother ramping himself up for a big response.
“Wait,” Barney signed, needing to interject before Clint did something rash.
The contemptuous look Clint fixed him with could have stripped paint, but Barney ignored the angry response that bubbled up his throat in response. This wasn’t the time to reopen old wounds or point the finger. His little brother was hurting, there was a lot of intel here that Barney was not privy to, but the way forward was clear.
“We’ll get our retaliation in first, ok?” Barney signed quickly, then held out his hands like he was handcuffed, to show Clint that he already had a plan. Plans and thinking, the one thing Barney could actually do to help in a situation like this.
Clint’s shoulders eased a fraction, but Barney didn’t let that reassure him. He sketched out a general plan, and did his best to ignore the injuries Clint clearly suffered as they discussed a few more details.
*****Now*****
Barney was nearly gasping for breath as he glared at Christian Ward, the Senator he had just hit upside the head and knocked unconscious.
He fight response course throughout his body -- trembling hands, rapid respiration, involuntary muscle tension. Every instinct in Barney’s body was telling him to shoot a predator in the head, twice actually, just to be sure. Barney’s stomach churned with acid and his mind with a swirl of unpleasant, conflicting emotions as he struggled to master his body’s automatic response and his instinctive understanding that Clint was right about Senator Ward.
A lifetime of law enforcement training sternly reminded Barney that he could follow no such instinct, and held his body in check. This training piloted Barney’s body, holstering his Glock, drawing the knife in his sock and freeing Dutson without needing to be told what to do.
Barney was glancing towards Clint when Dutson spoke, and watched the shock freeze his little brother in place. Barney had a shock of his own at Dutson’s final comment -- hadn’t the name of Clint’s new handler been Phil Coulson? Dutson knew Coulson? A heaping helping of guilt was added to the emotional turmoil -- Barney had beaten the shit out of Coulson when he’d thought that Coulson was a trafficker named Jaro Olivier.
“He’s doin’ well,” Clint said, fixing Dutson with his full attention, rubbing at an injury in his side as his eyebrows quirked upwards in curiosity.
Barney recognized his brother’s slip into his ‘simple carnie’ persona, an affectation that Clint had kept up while Barney had sprinted as far away from his as fast as possible.
“I’ve worked on several trans-agency details with him,” Dutson said, nodding and rubbing his wrists as if Clint had given a detailed response. For a man as tall and heavy-set as Dutson was, he had a surprisingly soft voice. “He’s an excellent officer; has a real eye for talent.”
Barney was suddenly grateful that Dutson examined Clint so closely and not himself.
For his part, Clint’s shoulders straightened and his lip curled slightly; his carnie facade slipping as he squared up with the senior FBI agent.
A frisson of dread jolted up Barney’s spine. He had to do something before this got any worse. “Agent Dutson led the task force that brought down that real estate scammer in New York, Daniel Travis,” Barney said, filling the air with as much detail as quickly as possible. Long experience told him what happened when his brother decided to bow up against someone he decided needed to be stood up to.
Barney had spent his childhood using his wits to distract all sorts of people, weaponize their attention, comprehension, and logic to get people to look where he wanted to look. His words immediately drew Dutson’s and Clint’s attention to him.
Dutson’s expression crinkled in understanding, a micro-expression that Barney processed without conscious thought.
Clint’s upper body went very still, a sign that he was thinking, Barney recalled. Trick Shot and the Swordsman had beaten all the fidgets out of his little brother.
“You two aren’t enemies,” Barney added, not even realizing that his lip curled in disgust at the memory of Trick Shot and his criminal organization. He nodded at the collapsed heap of Senator on the ground. “You got more in common than you think.” Barney tried to give Clint a meaningful look, to make Clint understand that Hawkeye and Dutson probably would have some good reminiscing to do, about traffickers and other filth they’d stopped, but Clint’s expression had gone completely still.
His hands flashed in movement, and then he had a knife in each hand (where the fuck had he gotten it from?) and his left hand raised when Barney finally realized what Clint was reacting to.
The hair on Barney’s neck was standing up; someone was behind him.
A tongue clicked in disappointment. “Not killing me when you had the chance is very sloppy.”
The male voice behind Barney belonged to someone a little taller than he was based on the body heat he felt behind him, tall, maybe 6’5”, with a rasp in the voice that said the speaker was much older than Barney was.
“Buck would surely not approve, but then again…”
Barney felt his shoulders rise and saw the horror flicker across Clint’s expression before he realized why. Trick Shot’s given name was Buck Chisolm.
Barney felt the distinctive heft of a double-barreled shotgun pressed against his back and raised his hands automatically.
“Declan Ward, I had no idea you were Stateside.” Dutson’s voice rose from the room’s sudden tense silence. Dutson shifted, hands held down by his side, facing whoever held Barney at gunpoint with an assessing look on his face.
The barrel of the gun pressed harder into Barney’s back; he had to shift his stance not to be pushed forward by it.
“Agent Dutson.” The voice behind Barney dripped with disdain. “Haven’t lost a pound since I last saw you.”
Dutson’s smile was completely without mirth. “You are holding an FBI agent at gunpoint, Declan.”
The weight of the gun was removed so quickly Barney nearly staggered backwards, shuffling his feet to keep its balance in the sudden absence. He turned to face a man in late 60s or early 70s with a lean face and nothing in his expression but barely-concealed anger.
“My son lay on the ground bleeding, I was attacked in my own home.” Despite his words, Declan Ward, presumably the Senator’s father, had not yet lowered the shotgun.
He gestured Barney backwards, towards Dutson and Clint, and Barney glanced to see that Dutson had not shifted his gaze from the elder Ward, nor had Clint made any move to lower his knives.
“And yet you did not rush to his aid as soon as your hostages were secure,” Dutson observed, his voice low and thoughtful, as if this were nothing more than an interesting conversation at a dinner party. “I wonder if you have any priorities other than ensuring our silence.”
Declan’s lip curled and raised the shotgun, but Clint moved to stand directly in front of the barrel, shielding Barney and Dutson.
“He wants to know where his other kids are, make sure all the liabilities are in one place.” Clint’s voice was a low growl, even as his hands remained aloft.
Declan’s grip on the weapon was steady, but Barney caught the quickest pull together of his eyebrows before he shifted and smashed the butt of the gun into the side of Clint’s face.
Clint rolled with the blow, barely even moving his feet, but he dropped his knives even as he gave a one-handed version of the ASL sign for “Wait” for Barney could see.
“Assault,” Dutson said, clicking his tongue in false disappointment.
Barney was thinking fast. Clint seemed to have a plan, and Barney was clearly missing crucial information. Dutson, too, knew much more about Declan Ward than Barney would have guessed. Was there some kind of long-term surveillance in place on the Ward family…?
“Where’s Grant? Where’s Thomas?” Declan hissed, shifting to plant the barrel of the gun precisely into the injury Barney had seen in Clint’s shoulder.
Clint said something Barney didn’t catch, and then shoved the barrel of the gun downwards and dived the other way in a flurry of movement nearly too fast for Barney to see.
The shotgun fired into the floor.
Even as his ears still rung, Barney drew his secondary gun from his leg holster, ready to help --
Clint was there in a flash of movement, disarming Barney with a simple arm lock and leg sweep
before darting away again. Unprepared and thrown to the ground, Barney could do nothing but watch as he struggled to get back to his feet, to do something…
Senator Ward heaved himself to his feet and threw himself towards the melee between Declan and Clint; Barney dived forward and grabbed the Senator’s ankle, diverting his attention.
The fight was on, then. Barney had a bloodied and snarling Christian Ward to deal with, and glass wielded like knives to defend against while having to worry with each block or strike -- am I really about to deck a US Senator…?
A silenced pistol fired; all the movement in the room ceased instantly, all four men searching for the source of the sound (and the instinctive pause to see who had been shot).
A tall, stern woman in her mid 50s stood in the doorway, holding a silenced 9mm pistol in her hands. “Enough,” she hissed. “Put that down before I put you down.”
This was directed at Clint, who held Declan’s shotgun by the barrel and had a single shotgun shell in his other hand. Declan was on the ground before him, bruised and bleeding in the face, unable to put any weight on his right arm.
Barney had a nasty gash across his cheek and another across his chest and shoulder that had sliced through all three layers of shirt; Christian had a black eye and two broken fingers.
Clint held up his hands as the woman gestured at him with the pistol, dropping the shotgun and sneering. “Mrs. Ward,” he said, his voice watery and rough. Barney guessed he’d been hit in the stomach or in a chokehold of some kind. “I hear you like to beat the shit outta your kids and let ol’ Declan here do worse to ‘em.”
The pistol fired; Clint turned his face and then fell to his knees, pressing his free hand against the wound in his right bicep.
“Get him, they’re both going in the lake and we’ll blame all the bodies on Hawkeye.” Mrs. Ward said, gesturing towards Barney.
Christian was already on his feet, and lurched towards Barney with a cold smile. Declan was struggling to rise, clutching his left side. Broken ribs, Barney hoped.
“Don’t’cha wanna know where Grant is? He’s close to finishing his mission here, you know.” Clint’s voice was quiet, almost as if he spoke to himself.
Christian turned back towards Clint; Barney watched the Senator’s gaze return to his mother.
“My children were invited here to witness our family’s ascendancy into the upper echelon of this country’s leadership.” Mrs. Ward snapped, moving quickly for a lady in a dress that looked to Barney’s eye to be a ballgown, blue sparkly fabric enveloping her from shoulders to calves. She stood in front of Clint and drew his chin up with the muzzle of the silencer. “You’ve ruined that, but we will make the best of it and we will rise.”
“Hai--” Christian began, but he flinched when his mother gestured impatiently at him with the pistol, cutting his words off and moving towards her obediently.
Declan was on his feet at that point, and shifted to a bar cart at the back of the study, pouring himself a hefty measure of something amber and knocking it back before repeating the process.
“Nobody’ll believe Hawkeye killed FBI,” Clint said, glaring at Mrs. Ward. “Not when the girls are already gone, and have called every news outlet on the East Coast.”
Mrs. Ward hit Clint with the butt of the pistol, and as Clint surged towards her, Christian was there, grabbing Clint's uninjured arm and pulling it back into a hammerlock, limiting Clint's arm movements if he didn't want the elbow of his uninjured arm broken.
In the flurry of movement, Barney dived sideways, scooped up Dutson's revolver, got the round in the cylinder -- and got a glass smashed into the side of his head for the trouble. He felt just a momentary shock of surprise before he hit the ground, out cold.
****************************
Okay, this looks bad.
Clint's breath was coming out in pained gasps as he shifted constantly to keep Christian from snapping his elbow, and he could do nothing but watch as Declan Ward got the drop on his brother.
Barney hit the ground hard, but Declan went back to drinking, and Clint thought, for the first time since he'd aimed a gun at Barney in the bathroom down the hall, that this might all turn out ok.
"No help is coming," Christian Ward breathed in his ear, as if he could hear Clint’s thoughts, twisting Clint's pinned arm up painfully behind Clint's back. "You're lying, and you know what we do to liars in this house?"
Clint huffed a pained breath and shook his head to shake off Christian's words. He was watching the leader, Mrs. Ward. Huh. Not what he'd have guessed. Maybe it's what Dutson had guessed though. For such a big guy, he'd disappeared in the fracas and Clint had lost track of him. In the confusion, Declan and Christian had seemingly forgotten about him as well.
"Really?" Clint told Mrs. Ward, as if he had been told a different plan for the evening's entertainment. "Well, your boy here thought the plan was to drug and rape your kids and then rape Thomas to death," Clint said, looking right at Mrs. Ward. He got a cruel sense of vindication from the contempt and anger that flickered across her face at these words, and nodded at her as if she'd spoken aloud. "That's why I'm here, the murder and the rape." He added, as if his intention all along had been to properly introduce himself. "Doesn't sound like much of an ascendancy to me, but..." He shrugged, as if such things were hopelessly beyond him.
Mrs. Ward's expression lit with anger (at the plan itself, Clint wondered, or that Christian had gone behind her back to set it into motion?) and she gestured with the gun. Christian immediately released Clint, shoving him forward onto his hands and knees and shifting aside to speak with his mother. Declan was there before Clint had time to stand up, smelling of Scotch and wrapping his arms around Clint's neck and shoulder, pulling him to his feet.
"Whatever shall we do while they argue?" Declan asked, his breath in Clint's ear making Clint shudder automatically.
Clint put his good hand up, pulling at Declan's arm to feign inability to break the rear chokehold, taking a breath. Brazillian Jiu Jitsu called this escape osoto gari, and it'd work, but fuck it was going to hurt.
Declan used the opportunity to remove his bracing arm and run that hand across the bite Rhys had left in Clint's shoulder.
Clint's sympathetic nervous system kicked into gear at the remidner that Clint was in danger, and kicked his 'fight' system into gear.
No longer ruminating over the pain and future danger of the movements required, Clint wrapped his weaker leg back around Declan's and pivoted on that foot, turning his body 90 degrees and twisting Declan off balance. After that, it was relatively easy to twist Declan over that hip and toss him.
Declan was completely completely unprepared for the counter and hit the ground with an audible gasp. Clint flinched as he held on to Declan with his injured arm, but completed the move, driving his knee into Declan's ribs and punching Declan three solid times. Clint let the unresponsive limbs drop and bared his teeth at Christian and Mrs. Ward, who had turned, wide-eyed and surprised, to see what the commotion was.
Neither looked alarmed at what fate had befallen Declan, which did not surprise Clint, but both did look irritated at Clint for interrupting.
Clint's vision swam; he was lightheaded and dizzy from blood loss and the sudden, very ill-advised rapid exertion.
"Fuck," Clint said as his legs collapsed beneath him. He scrabbled in the vest for one of the first aid packs he'd snagged from the garden house, found one, peeled it open with his teeth and icy, well-manicured hands were there, taking the bandage and roughly pressing it against his gunshot bicep.
Clint was so dizzy that it was a concerted effort to look to see who had come over. He suddenly barely had the strength to turn his head, much less to protest the assistance, as much as he wanted to.
Something sharp stabbed into his upper arm just above the bandage but soothingly cold darkness was placed over his eyes. "Shhh, you're a brave boy, Hawkeye. Very brave."
Gentle, cold fingers brushed his hair back from his face and smoothed down the fabric of his shirt. Clint didn't realize that his eyes had slid closed at some point, and struggled, trying to pull away.
But he was on his back on the ground, and every bone ached with exhaustion. His arm, shoulder, side, hip, leg flare with pain at every movement or touch, but he was just so, so tired.
Cold hands smoothed over his and a melodic female voice was muttering soothing reassurances and Clint was losing consciousness.
The last thing Clint recognized was the hissing pop of a silenced 9mm being fired.