Archive of Our Own ^beta

Second Life
**

“I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to show you a world that moves on without you. And I'm going to give you the choice of making it stop.”

They all hear the words spoken over Hawkeye's comm but it's not Hawkeye.

Backup. I need backup! Jesus...

That's Hawkeye.

Hawkeye. Report. Hawkeye?

Steve is the one to find Clint first.

There's blood pooled at the corners of his mouth, in the pocket of his right ear. His body is driven into the rubble of a collapsed building. His eyes are sightless.

He's still five blocks from the rendevouz and evac point. Steve scoops him up. Something in Clint's chest shifts, the pool of blood breaks and trickles down his cheek, and Steve starts walking towards the others.

I found him.

They're all waiting for him. There's a stretcher and a med team. They can all tell from a distance that neither of these things are going to be needed. Steve didn't have the heart to say it over the comms. Maybe he should have. Maybe it would have been kinder because Natasha wouldn't have to raise her hand to her mouth to hide her gasp. Maybe it would have been less of a blow somehow, if they'd all been able to hear it before seeing it.

Hawkeye is down.

Hawkeye is down. The eyes of the rest of the team seem suddenly as dull.

**

There's a funeral. A small thing. The team is there. Natasha cries. Bruce holds her hand. Thor and Tony both stand stoic and a little distant, not knowing how to act or react. Later Thor will insist that they celebrate.

“A fine warrior, a fine life, and fine memories. What is not to be celebrated?”

Natasha agrees and they drink. Tony drinks with them and they laugh. Steve tries to think how often Clint laughed and the occasions were few and far between. There's a vacant chair in the corner and Steve looks over to it. He can picture Clint there, easily. He can picture Clint smile, indulgent and patient and softly happy while the rest of them joke and laugh. But Clint didn't join in. Social didn't describe Clint.

**

Maybe his presence isn't missed as much as it should be in their regular lives. Not the ones where they're 'normal' people because none of them will ever be that, it doesn't matter if they drop the uniforms and the code names, but in their day to day lives. Not many of them consider Clint as a missing space. Natasha, maybe, but she knows loss. She knows she'll be okay because she has been before. The rest of them? Well, the world goes on, right?

Steve doesn't really notice the loss until it comes to battle. When he finds himself waiting for a moment on intel that isn't going to come because there is no one stationed on the tall buildings. There is one less person to watch his back. He'd gotten used to working in conjunction with the arrows. Now the skies are a little quieter and a little more empty.

**

“What I miss,” Tony says after a month, “Is feeling that little fucker's eyes on me. I mean, I get it, crappy upbringing leads to crappy social skills, worse than mine.”

“You don't have social skills,” Natasha puts in.

Tony concedes to this in his usual way where it doesn't sound like he's agreeing at all. “Fine but not as bad as that. I put forth effort-” Natasha snorts.

“You put forth alcohol.”

“Really not helping with my crippling social skills.”

“Oh shut up, Stark. I know what you're doing, we all know.” They do and he knows it too. Tony's mask slipped months ago, it wasn't that thick to begin with. There was no great wall to knock down. Tony's self-depreciation comes out in every action and reaction. “Cut the sarcasm.”

But without sarcasm, without the front of narcissism, what is Tony? No one has put that together yet.

A long pause follows before Natasha shrugs it all off. “He liked to watch. It was in his name.”

“Sure. But that's all he ever did. If he wanted attention, why not just ask?”

“Because some people can't just pile-drive over their insecurities. Or he just didn't want anything.” Natasha would know. If Clint were staring in a silent plea for attention or because he was just that creepy. Tony doesn't look satisfied with the response or with the entire conversation.

“But then why can't I stop thinking about it?”

**

Steve catches Tony staring at Thor intently. Thor doesn't notice, he's taken with a conversation with Jane, the sound of her laughter coming thinly through the phone in his hand. Move in, he keeps saying to her and she's going to break soon and then there will be one more person. Which is fine because they have the room. They have that vacant slot.

“Tony,” Steve says when five minutes have passed and Tony's gaze hasn't faltered once. It's unnerving, Tony is focused and gone at once, and Steve is glad when he blinks his attention from Thor and over to Steve. Steve raises an eyebrow and Tony catches on immediately.

“Someone needed to replace the creepy staring wonder,” Tony says quickly, gaze flicking back over to Thor. Or, Steve suddenly gets it, where Thor is sitting. Where Clint would sit.

“I didn't know you were close to him.”

Tony laughs and shakes his head. “I wasn't. None of us were. This tower is so damn big I could avoid you all for a year if I wanted to. And trust me, I want to sometimes.” Anti-social. The descriptive for Tony still feels foreign to Steve but more and more he sees the fit.

“What is it then?”

Tony doesn't answer. Instead he says, “We need to clean out his floor.”

**

It takes another few weeks before they do it. It's not avoidance so much as absentmindedness. There's always a list of things to do. This keeps getting pushed to the bottom and, in the end, the duty is somehow relegated to Tony. Maybe because it's all his house, technically. He's the landlord, therefore, he gets to deal with this sort of shit.

There's not a whole lot to deal with. The rooms don't hold much of a mark on them. There is no leftover impression of the man that used to be there.

“You look spooked,” Steve says when he sees Tony in the communal kitchen. It's saying something when Tony stares at him and doesn't try to hide it. Tony's walls are always coming down and more and more, Steve sees what's under it. Something unexpected, if he's being honest.

“Have you been up there?” Steve frowns and Tony looks irritated that he doesn't know. “Clint's rooms. Have you been up there?”

“No.” Not once in all the months that they've been here, has Steve been to that floor of the Tower.

“There's nothing. Next to nothing. It's empty. Hollow, you know? How can anyone live like that? I mean, Christ, didn't this guy even have a favorite cup or something around here? There's just nothing. No wonder everyone forgot him so easily.” Tony is properly worked up. He tries to hide it when he wraps a hand around a mug of tea but his fingers are shaking.

“We didn't forget him,” Steve protests but they did. Near enough, anyway, and Steve feels shameful. “Do you want me to go back up and help you?”

“No. Leave it. No one needs to use that floor.” Strained silence falls and Steve waits, knowing that Tony will break it. “How can he do that? Leave nothing behind? Who wants to be forgotten?”

**

Tony is right. Clint's rooms have this sense of not abandonment but hollowness. Like the person didn't just move on but that they never really moved in.

Steve walks through the shadows – it feels like maybe he shouldn't turn the lights on, like he might disturb the minute impressions that are here if he did and he thinks Clint might have liked the dark better. There's a layer of dust on everything already, a testament to the fact that none of the others come up here maybe. Except there's a voice drifting down the hall to him. Tony's. Drunk into a slur.

“Dunno what you expect me to do. I mean...you're dead. How am I supposed to fix that? Why not pick on someone like...like Thor. With the magic.”

Steve takes a few hesitant steps forward, listening to Tony talk as though Clint were in the room, and he holds his breath. He berates himself in the same moment that Tony does, as if both of them had been expecting any verbal answer.

“You're dead,” Tony says again. “You can't answer me.”

“Tony?”

Tony jolts and his gaze snaps to the doorway that Steve just stepped into. There's a bottle of dark alcohol clutched in his fist. Some of it splashes onto the bed he's perched on. “This whole thing just...it reeks,” Tony says without being prompted and Steve steps over to him.

“You certainly do. Come on. You shouldn't be up here.”

“Why the hell not?” Tony challenges, gaining his feet but he actually sways. Steve guesses the bottle in his hand isn't the first one he's had tonight. “It's my house. Someone has to use these rooms and he was never gonna do it anyway. It's insulting, that's what it is, it's fucking insulting. I tried. And now I gotta keep doing that even though he's dead?”

That's it though. When push come to shove and the chips are down, Tony tries. Maybe that's what he is in the end.

**

“You have to do something about him.”

Steve stares at Natasha but nothing at all comes to mind. “What?”

“Who. Tony. Do something about him,” Natasha demands again and she's either pissed off or worried. Both emotions look about the same on her because they usually go hand in hand. Anger and fear, Steve gets that, maybe that's why he can get a read on her at all.

“What did Tony do?”

“He won't stop going on about Clint and I can't...” She pauses, raises her hands in defeat. “I just can't.” She turns and walks away without another word and Steve raises his fingers to the bridge of his nose to press away the frustration and worry.

Out of all of them who might suffer the loss of their teammate worse, Steve hadn't thought it would be Tony. He hadn't thought it would be any of them and there's that well of guilt again.

When he finds Tony, it's in Clint's room again, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a recording filtering from the walls. The lights are out and it's late evening so there's only grainy dusk light to see by.

I need backup.

Clint's voice. The final phrase any of them had ever heard from him.

“Rewind. To 24.10,” Tony says and the recording starts again.

Static filters through the room. These are the minutes when they were on comm silence, the minutes before stealth was lost to all out battle.

“I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to show you a world that moves on without you. And I'm going to give you the choice of making it stop.”

“I think we missed something.”

Steve is curious despite himself and he moves closer, until he can sit on the edge of the bed (it feels oddly like he's invading Clint's space and he's not sure how Tony can do this so carelessly). “Something to help us track down who did this?”

Because they hadn't. They'd won the fight but it hadn't been because they'd captured the enemy. Just that the enemy had turned tail and ran, so deep into hiding that SHIELD couldn't ferret them out. Was that what was bothering Tony? They were the Avengers and they couldn't avenge their own teammate? But Tony shakes his head.

“No. They'll come out of the woodwork again eventually. Mount some other attack that we'll beat back.” Tony shrugs. “This time without letting someone get so far out of sight. Why was Barton so far from the rest of us?”

Steve feels discomfort rise in his chest and has to swallow it back. “He gathers intel-”

“No. He fights alone. We didn't need intel at that point, we needed all the team fighting back to back-”

“You know he was better from a distance. He had our backs.” And Steve doesn't like that Tony might be saying Clint didn't. But Tony is shaking his head again.

“Fine but who exactly has his through all this?”

No one, Steve answers silently.

“I do now,” Tony says.

**

It's too late. What is supposed to happen next? Steve feels his tenuous grip on this team slipping. Clint was not the tie that held the Avengers together. But it could be that Tony is and Steve is losing him. Tony is losing himself.

“Clint wasn't an idiot.”

It's been months. Steve almost wishes that Tony would let this drop. Stop talking about it. It's selfish and it's horrible but Steve is tired of hearing about it. He's tired of finding Tony sleeping on Clint's floors and he's tired of the fact that every other sentence out of Tony's mouth is about Clint. Natasha won't stay in the same room as him anymore. Bruce no longer goes to the labs. They want to forget and Tony won't let them.

Steve sighs and shakes his head. “Tony, stop.”

“Stop?”

“Stop talking about him. No one wants to hear it.”

Tony laughs. “But you can't argue with me. He wasn't.”

“I'm not arguing with you. I'm not listening.” Steve gets up, starts walking out of the room but Tony's words give him pause.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

Steve has to fight not to look back. Tony is so serious and so eager. Steve walks out of the room.

**

They've seen weirder things in their lives. The idea of a ghost should be an easy one to swallow. They've seen aliens. They know there are uncounted other worlds and other realities. Magic is very real. Superheroes are real and the incredible technology that makes them.

“You didn't answer me earlier,” Tony says, following Steve's thoughts.

“Tony-” Steve starts, wanting to protest, to shut this new line of thought down before it can get started. But Tony shakes his head and cuts his fork sharply through the air to stop him.

“No. Answer me. Do you believe in ghosts?”

It's not a question with a straightforward answer. Once it would have been. Once Steve would be able to say no. That people didn't stick around, that they moved on. Wherever they went... They went somewhere, it wasn't here. It all goes back to what Steve had just been thinking and he has to answer truthfully. “I don't know.”

“So you admit that there's a possibility Clint could be hanging around?” Steve doesn't want to admit to anything and says nothing but Tony just takes that as agreement and pushes on. “So you also have to admit to the idea that he's not dead at all. That we just take a body at face value and assume the person is dead? Seems a little presumptuous on our parts.”

“Coulson is dead,” Steve points out. “You think he's really dead.”

Tony shrugs. “He is. Clint isn't.”

The arc reactor in Tony's chest flares so bright that Steve's vision whites out and he thinks he must be blinded. Something gets thrown to the ground and when Steve can make out shapes again, he realizes it's Tony. He's on the floor and instead of bright, the reactor is dark. Steve thinks that this is it, this is it, he's losing a second team member and this one will actually hurt. This one will rip a hole into all of them, the way Clint ripped a hole in Tony.

Then the light flickers, gutters, comes back strong and Tony's eyes are snapping open. Haunted hurting eyes that freeze Steve to the spot.

“He's screaming,” Tony whispers.

Steve closes his eyes. There's an afterimage of a man burned there.

**

Tony's hands are gouging great furrows into the ground. He's frantic, Steve has never seen him so frantic, and he rips the ground up in front of him. No shovels, no time. The Iron Man suit is covered with dirt and mud and Tony just keeps shoveling with his hands. He uses his repulsers, blasts the dirt away, drives straight down into the earth to the coffin where Steve can hear it. The desperate beating against the wood, the screaming.

Steve flinches when Tony breaks through to the wood, the coffin splintering under his metal hands and he turns away. He just can't take what he might see but when he dares to look again, it's just Clint, limp in Iron Man's arms. Clint as if he had only been gone an hour. Tony is holding him so tightly Steve wants to tell him to stop. He'll break Clint. Then he realizes that Clint is smiling and Tony lifts the faceplate on his suit.

“I knew you'd do it,” Clint says like he's saying an exhausted prayer. “I knew you'd do it.”

Steve gets the idea that Clint has said this to Tony more than even those two times and that this is the only time Tony believes it because he laughs, they both laugh.

**

“I got you this,” Tony says.

Steve looks up from where he's making breakfast for the team but Tony is talking to Clint who's just walked in from a morning training routine with Natasha. He's been home months now. Most of them have gotten over the guilt of letting Clint go and not questioning that.

Clint frowns but he's smiling and he reaches out and takes what is obviously a store wrapped present from Tony's hand to rip into it like a kid at Christmas. Natasha takes a seat, watching Clint curiously. Bruce and Thor will both stumble in soon.

Maybe it was never up to them to question Clint being gone or the space he left.

Inside the gift wrapping is a tacky mug with a heart pierced by an arrow and the word 'Love'. Like some kid might give a crush or their mother. Clint couldn't possibly look more pleased.

It's up to Tony to question the spaces in their team because he is – somehow – the heart and glue of all of them.