Clinton Francis Barton

PAST | PRESENT | FUTURE

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CLOSER INSPECTION

THE SAMPLE

Note: I'm using one of my solos from the Evolution AU where Clint was a mutant with probability-affecting powers like Domino or Longshot and he was in an odd relationship with Loki...I just like this solo, okay?
This wasn’t just stupid. It was insane.

Frankly, though, Clint operated best under a veil of insanity. Dressed in black, a definite contrast to his normally brighter purple and violet, Clint had managed to get on board the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier without being spotted, the former circus performer running along a grapple line he’d anchored to the Empire State building as the enormous airship passed the spire. Clinging to the outer hull, Clint momentarily began to reconsider this particular little “adventure”, but a minor slip of his boot against the cold metal as the wind around him threatened to rip him from his precarious little perch soon changed his mind; he couldn’t let himself get sidetrack, he had to ignore fear, he couldn’t do this angry. One wrong move coupled with the wrong thought and he was street pizza if the roof and/or side of a high-rise didn’t get him first. It had only taken a few hours to determine that Fury would only keep Cerebro in custody long enough to copy the files from the harddrive and then put the damn thing back where he found it; no need to let the mutants know he’d gotten his hands on their mutant-detecting machine, right?

Right.

Climbing on the outside of the helicarrier was a long and tedious process, Clint being far more careful than he had been in some time to mind his footing and hand placement all the while looking for security cameras and sentries. He wasn’t exactly used to using his probability-altering abilities actively, generally just letting the dim field he could feel surrounding him do the work for him and allowing nature to “take its course”, so to speak. Eyes glowing behind the lenses of his mask, he would turn them toward the slightest hint of movement that was out of place from the basic schematics he’d gone over while he had waited for the airship to make it’s pass. Sometimes there would be a tiny spark of electricity as one of the various systems shorted out, sometimes there was nothing, but he wasn’t paying too much attention so long as he wasn’t being shot at. He couldn’t chance using one of the emergency ladders or getting too close to the hatches near the windows, his best bet being one of the emergency hatches nearest to deck fourteen. One hell of a climb, but he had to stay positive. He was probably the only “super hero” he knew that played showtunes in his head to keep himself upbeat.

Rum Tum Tugger or death.

Ten minutes of slowly climbing along and he finally reached deck fourteen, a snap of his fingers disabling the alarm and locking mechanism attached to the nearest emergency hatch. He almost didn’t manage to keep the door from loudly clanging against the hull as he wrenched the door open and slipped inside, the padded soles of his boots muffling his footfalls as he made his way down to Intel. It was between shifts, a ten minute window between the night shift switching out with the graveyard shift where they would meet in the lounge down the hall and exchange notes before the next group started working so they didn’t step on one another’s toes. A good idea, and usually efficient, but in this case it was one of the worst possible things they could have done. Slipping silently down the hall, Clint paid special attention to the security cameras, winking at each of them as he went by; he was never certain exactly how long they would blip out for, but it always seemed to be just enough time for him to get out of their range. He didn’t know why he was going through so much trouble. It’s not like anyone would honestly appreciate it, or really even know about it unless he told them…or was caught.

The X-Men certainly wouldn’t give a damn, even though it was their asses he was putting himself on the line to protect, along with every other mutant that Cerebro had in its archives. It was almost funny: Mutants were being tagged and categorized by Xavier, mostly without their knowledge, in a similar fashion that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been filing away people like the Hulk for decades. How long had Xavier been doing that, he wondered. Either way, privacy was being compromised and freedoms potentially being forcibly taken away by either party, and Clint wasn’t the type to stand for that.

Intel was empty for the next six minutes; not generally enough time to do a carefully thorough job, but Clint was in too deep to back out. He ducked into the room, bypassing the lock with an Intel agent’s security badge that he’d swiped earlier in the week from Agent Wilkins, the poor dumb schmuck…

The computer system itself wasn’t nearly as complex as the ones in Stark’s personal lab, or even the ones in Stark Tower, but he still had to be careful so as not to leave any digital fingerprints that could be traced back to him. Locating the files, all of them, was the tricky part given how paranoid Fury had gotten after the attacks on the Sentinel compounds, taking four of the six minutes he had just to find everything he needed to get rid of. Files on the mutants, their names, addresses, social security numbers, powers and power ranking on Trask’s threat scale, and the schematics on Cerebro and Xavier’s mansion and lower levels were all vital, and if Clint had been given just a few more minutes he could have located the new Sentinel compounds but…he couldn’t always be lucky. Isolating the files to a single folder, they were rather quick and easy to delete, the stall coming when Clint plugged in a flash drive containing a rather nasty bug that would wipe out the system restore points and backups for the hard-drive and motherboard the Cerebro files had been isolated to should they attempt to retrieve the files.

Less than a minute to get out of a heavily-armed and guarded flying fortress unseen.

No problems.

Pocketing the flash drive and quietly moving back to the door, Clint carefully peered out into the hallway, eyes scanning for the cameras once more and watching for anyone that may have left the meeting early to head to Intel. Nerves piquing, a moment of negativity, doubting himself in wondering if he could really make it out alive…and his hearing aids shorted out. The feedback shrieking in his ears threw him off-balance and he fell onto his side out in the hallway, immediately spotted by an approaching Intel agent who hit the intruder alarm. Were it not for the bright red flashing lights, Clint wouldn’t have known the security detail was on the way until it was too late. Disoriented, ears ringing, and his balance completely thrown, Clint scrambled to his feet just as the security drones rounded the corner and charged toward him.

And, of course, they had to come from the direction he needed to go to escape. Who would have thought one moment of doubt could have screwed the pooch so badly.

Clint hadn’t brought any weapons; he’d honestly not thought he would need them. Get in quiet and get out fast, that had been the plan. Smart, Barton, real fuckin’ smart. The only chance he had was to bum rush the nearest Intel agent and slip by; the security drones would do everything possible to avoid injuring the other agents, so it could buy him a few seconds to get back down the hall and out the hatch.

After that, though, it was pretty much up to Fate.

He felt a little bad for bashing the poor little Intel geeks into the steel wall, but it passed quickly as a drone turned to hit him across the back with it’s heavy titanium-alloy arm, the blow connecting diagonally across his spine and sending him hurtling down the hallway, Clint rolling across the floor only to be kicked in the side by another drone. He just barely managed to roll aside as the drone’s fist sped toward his face, watching it instead sink to the elbow through the steel floor; one more false move, and he was a dead man. Add in that he was already winded from being knocked around, and Clint had himself a problem. He rolled a little further, bracing his feet against the far wall and using that to roll back (just narrowly avoiding yet another blow from the first drone as it joined it’s brother) and regain his footing. He was hurting, that was for certain, and he had no doubt that it would look and feel worse later, but there was no tie to really think about it if he was going to prevent further damage. The drones weren’t equipped with any sort of firearm or laser, the danger of breaching the hull far too great for that, and Clint saw it as a momentary godsend as he kept running down to his initial entry point, constantly glancing over his shoulder to see how close the drones were before rounding another corner sharply. His left shoulder connected with the wall, another bruise he added to his mental tally, and he pushed away from the wall to kick open the hatch he had entered through.

Okay. So the actual escape plan hadn’t been completely formulated before he left to even attempt this insanity.

Taking a deep breath and barely noticing the drones heading for him from either end of the hall, seven in total now, Clint dove headfirst out of the helicarrier for the city below, staring at the narrow line that would quickly become the intersection of 34th Street and 10th Avenue meeting his face if he didn’t think fast. Using the only grapple he still had on him, he managed to catch the edge of a rooftop with the hook, slowing his descent only slightly before the line snapped from the tension, sending him careening off toward the next rooftop just beneath him. Clint hit the tar and gravel covered surface hard, rolling quite a distance before finally coming to a stop. The archer’s black costume snagged and ripped along the back and arms, thin rivulets of blood seeping through from the gashes caused by the gravel, Clint just lay on the roof for a few moments, trembling from the pain and trying to catch his breath.

Trying in vain to swallow the pain, just a little longer, Clint struggled to his feet; he wasn’t in the clear yet. They would be looking for him, at least in that particular outfit, and there was still some distance to close between him and his apartment. Carefully, but quickly, he made his way to the fire escape and began to head down to the alley between the building he’d landed on and the next, stopping about halfway down to catch his breath again and to pull his cowl up just enough to get to his hearing aids; as usual, there was nothing fucking wrong with the damned things, only the fact that his powers decided to fuck him over once again. Reinserting them and making sure they were working again, he pulled his cowl back down and finished his descent to the alley, idly wondering if Loki would be at the apartment…

…and if he was, just how much shit he was going to get for coming home looking like someone hit him with a building?