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Clint’s first thought: uuugghghghhh.
Clint’s first coherent thought: everything hurts.
He’s on his back, somewhere comfortable. Narrow, puffy. Doesn’t stink of trash. A bed? A couch? Definitely not a dumpster, so that’s an improvement, but it doesn’t smell like dead people so not a hospital, either. Hm. He can hear someone breathing, even and relaxed. Still can’t bring himself to make his eyelids work. Fast, able hands are rustling around, rubbing something into a stinging cut on his shoulder, wrapping something over his abdomen.
Speaking of: holy shit that hurts.
“Uhh," he croaks, and his throat is hoarse as hell. "Where am I?”
The breathing hitches, the hands go still. “Good. At least you don’t have brain damage.”
A woman. She peels back one of the eyelids that are still refusing to obey his commands and runs a pen light over it. It’s bright. It makes him feel ill. Clint blinks and stares blearily at a face he can’t quite see. Black hair. Big eyes. Sharp features. He's 99% sure she's hot. He’s also sure there’s a pick up line here somewhere about angels from heaven but he bites down on it. Not the time. (Is this what maturity feels like? Nat would be proud.)
She clicks the pen light off and now he can’t see a thing, except the solitary light bulb swaying slightly in the kitchen behind her. “I’m Claire,” she says, her face swimming into view. “And you’re damn lucky you’re alive.”
He tries to sit up but she braces a firm, glove-clad hand against his chest. “Don’t even think about it. Whatever you were out doing tonight, you got your ass handed to you. You’re in bad shape.”
Right. Tonight. The warehouse. The roof. The tracksuits. Shit. Shit. He makes to get up again but his head gives a sickening spin and he reluctantly lets her ease him backwards onto the couch. He might puke at any second, but at least he’s sitting up now. Things are looking up.
Then he realizes his left eye is swollen shut.
“Fuck, that hurts.”
“Yeah, no shit. It’s going to bruise like hell, too. Well, don’t poke at it,” she adds, exasperated, grabbing his hand half-way to his face and sticking a blue ice-pack in it. “You're lucky. I don’t think anything's broken, but you might want to get it looked at later.”
She drags the surgical gloves she’s wearing down over her hands and snaps them off, shoves them into a kit along with a wad of bloody bandages on her way into the kitchen.
The apartment is small. Dark. The vase of dead flowers on the table rattles slightly every few minutes so they must be close to the subway. He looks out the window and counts 10 sirens in 4 minutes. Hell’s Kitchen. Also known as Tracksuit HQ. Wonderful. His side seizes up with pain for a second and he groans, wraps his arms around himself and tries to get his breathing under control. That’s when he notices the blood.
It's everywhere. The floor, the couch, red hand-prints all over the glass table. There's a lot of it, too. Slasher-movie kind of a lot; it looks like someone got dragged across the apartment, fingernails raking the ground accompanied by desperate screaming and kicking. And no other walking corpses anywhere, so it's all Clint's, by the looks of it. Yeah, that can't be healthy. He should probably eat a cookie or something. There's more bandages, too, at his feet. Also his shirt, next to a pair of scissors cast off to the side. She had to cut him out of it. Jesus. That was his third favorite shirt. (He only has three shirts). He makes the mistake of looking down then and yeah, his whole body is a fucking bruise. Shit. Two cracked ribs, from what he can tell, and three fresh stitches, one larger than the other two, just to the left of his belly button.
Either he got stabbed, badly, and she stitched him up, or she just stole his organs. He’s not sure which would make him feel better, though he's leaning towards the stabbed option.
She's at the sink, washing something. Clint stares at her back. Watches as she hums quietly to herself like there isn't a strange man behind her bleeding out in her living room. Like she has strange men bleed out in her living room every day.
“Lady, who the hell are you?”
He can’t help it, it slips out. And it's pitchy and tense because he's in pain and his blood is everywhere and he doesn't know this woman and he's bleeding all over her couch and she doesn't seem to mind at all and he's kind of working himself up into hysterics because what he's really trying to say is: why aren't you freaking the hell out?
She shuts the faucet off. Looks up, sighs, before glancing at him over her shoulder. “I’m a nurse,” she says. As if that explains any-fucking-thing.
“You’re a nurse," Clint repeats.
He tries to sound less suspicious, really he does. Except it doesn’t work because he can’t keep the incredulous inflection out of his voice. Taking a deep breath, he channels Natasha, tries to calm down.
Okay. Okay. Them's the facts:
He’s a stranger, bleeding all over her couch. This is not normal. He could be a serial killer. She does not seem fazed. This is also not normal. So. In what universe does this make sense? In none of them, Natasha-logic supplies. In absolutely none of them.
Bam. Stress headache. Or, you know, a concussion. Either way, more pain. Awesome.
His thought process must be evident from the half of his face that’s not covered by ice, because she sighs again, a little long-sufferingly. "Look," she says, turning around and crossing her arms. "I found you half-dead in the dumpster, okay? Thought you might want to - I don't know - live or something.”
Okay. Okay. He remembers that. Well, he doesn't remember his final destination exactly but he kind of remembers getting thrown off a roof, so. Good. He’s not an organ farm, then. But this still doesn’t add up. Not even a little.
“Look, um. Claire, right?” he asks. She nods. “Okay. Don’t take this the wrong way, Claire, but you found a man bleeding to death in the trash and your first instinct wasn't to call 911? The cops? Hell, your first instinct wasn't to run the fuck away?”
She raises a delicate eyebrow. He feels a rush of guilt again. “A simple ‘thank you’ would be enough, you know,” she says pointedly.
“I - I’m.” He stops. He’s being a dick. She's pretty much just saved his life and he’s being a weird, paranoid dick about it. It’s probably the blood loss. He has got to find some chill. “Yes. Thanks. Thank you. Sorry. I’m just - Sorry.”
She almost smiles, and seems to relax a little. “It’s fine,” she says, and turns back around to the sink.
The panic he's feeling notwithstanding, he’s actually more than grateful she didn’t call anyone. Sure, the stitches aren't exactly pretty and he'd probably be happier with a thousand shots of morphine and like ten pudding cups in his system but hospitals and cops mean press. Bad press. (“That one weird useless wannabe Avenger/circus freak found bleeding to death in a dumpster! More on the trash-venger at 10!”) Bad press means Natasha making terrible dumpster puns for the next million years, means Tony whining about all the PR they're going to have to do, means Clint having to endure Cap and his sad-eyes and claps on the shoulder and his all-American sympathy.
It means a fucking nightmare, basically. More guilt Clint can't afford to feel. So he should probably just shut his stupid mouth and be forever in Claire's debt but she must be a good nurse because he’s feeling slightly better and that shutting up plan is becoming harder and harder to follow.
“Look, not to beat a dead horse, but--"
She shuts off the faucet again, braces her hands around the sink and bites back what sounds like a groan of frustration. "What? What is it? I promise I didn't steal your organs, okay?"
Rude. But he owes her his life so he's determined to be less of a dick about his questions this time around.
"That's good to know. Really, it is. And thank you. But why didn't you call someone? Because - if you don't mind me saying - you're way too okay with some random dude almost dying on your couch.”
She pauses for a moment, and turns to stare at him. Definitely deliberates something, given the way she's begins to chew on her bottom lip. Whatever it is, she seems to make up her mind because she pushes herself off the counter a second later and sits in the chair across from him.
Okay, good. Real talk time. Except she hesitates. Looks down at her hands. Clint catches a glimpse of a small but nasty gash cutting across her left eyebrow. Under it, below her eye, there's the outline of a bruise along her cheekbone, peeking through her make-up.
More questions. Too many fucking questions.
“I find that your - kind tends to have an aversion against hospitals," she says, still looking at her hands. She's choosing her words so carefully Clint can practically see her rifling through them in her head. "Also cops. You guys don't like cops. Or proper medical care, really. So, I made an educated guess and thought you'd want to keep the phone-calls to a minimum. But you're welcome to leave an emergency contact number. You know, in case I find you napping in my dumpster again."
For a second Clint imagines Claire calling Natasha in the middle of the night on official dumpster business and a strangled sort of snort comes out of his mouth. On the other hand, his kind? Weird thing to say. Does she think he’s a criminal? Wouldn't be the first time someone made that assumption. Should he be offended? Probably.
He tries to look offended. “My kind?”
She looks up and pins him with a don't-bullshit-me kind of stare that is uncomfortably reminiscent of Kate. He struggles not to wither under it as she leans down to pull something out from underneath the couch. Clint hopes it’s not a gun because at this point all he could do about it would be to sit there and get shot in the face and it's not a gun, thank God, because it’s his bow. Awesome. Kate would have his head if he lost it. Ah, shit. This probably means Claire knows who he is. On the bright side, she doesn't think he's a criminal, and Claire-the-organ-farmer has just been downgraded to some sort of professional superhero nurse. Which is still really weird, but at least he's still got a liver.
Turning his bow over in her hands, Claire looks like she's about to speak but suddenly frowns. Looks straight up.
Confused, Clint looks up, too, blinking at the ceiling with one eye. “Um?”
Now she’s half-smiling. At the ceiling. Okay.
“I heard that,” she mutters.
She turns to the door. Still kind of smiling. Great. This is all very normal.
"You can come in now," she says.
"Claire, what the h-”
The aforementioned door swings open and Clint’s night gets approximately six times weirder.
The guy that staggers in looks like he might be in worse shape than Clint is. Except that he’s upright, at least, and Clint’s not entirely sure he could manage that even if the couch under him was on fire. The newcomer looks like murder; half his black shirt stained darker, his jaw and shoulders set tense as hell. One hand is holding his ribs, blood soaking into his glove and dripping onto the floor. The other is clenched into a tight, smart fist up in front of his chest. His knuckles are caked with red.
Clint has two thoughts in quick succession:
One - okay, so she does have strange men bleed out in her living room every day. Cool.
And two - oh shit, this corpse wants to fight me.
There's a beat, and then a bunch of things happen at the same time.
Clint makes a blind grab for his bow. Pain sparks so sharply in his side as he goes that he almost passes out. Out of the corner of his good eye, he sees the guy step over the threshold like an advancing predator. He kicks the door shut behind him, obviously preparing to lunge straight in Clint's direction. The bow is an inch away from Clint's grasp and he's trying to calculate the terrible odds of surviving a fight with the crazed Zorro lookalike when Claire kicks up onto her feet and steps solidly between them.
She holds the bow out, far away from Clint, which - okay, is a bit rude, but Clint's suddenly so light-headed that he's barely fighting the urge to vomit all over the floor, so. It's whatever, really. Zorro can kill him for all he cares. He leans back, head spinning, and that's when he catches sight of Claire's face.
And the weird just keeps on coming.
She’s not at ease, exactly. It’s just that the air around her has suddenly relaxed. Her smile is gone but she's brighter, somehow. Warmer. The slight tension she was carrying in the lines of her shoulders, completely gone. The difference is palpable. The bleeding masked man being around calms her down. Clint would gape, but he doesn't trust his stomach not to seize the opportunity to ruin Claire's carpet.
“Sorry,” she says, not sounding it at all. She leans back to put Clint’s bow down on the table behind her where he won’t be able to get to it without a miracle of some kind. “But I’d really rather you didn’t shoot him. You’ll only pop your stitches, and you - ” she rounds on the man, frowning as she looks him up and down, “Are already half-dead. You start fighting each other and you'll both be dead-dead in two minutes. So both of you, unclench."
There’s a mildly tense pause. Clint and the man look at Claire. She shrugs. Clint and the man look at each other. For a second Clint actually thinks he sees the guy sniff the air.
It’s definitely the blood loss.
“So. A bow?”
The world speeds up again. The man is smiling. Clint kind of resents his tone. He opens his mouth to make a cutting, witty comeback that he hasn’t exactly thought of yet, probably something about how weird it is to awkwardly sniff things, but Claire cuts him off by pushing him back into the couch.
“Don't. Anyway, your arrows are way over there,” she says, like she's read his mind. Sure enough, Clint's quiver is propped up against the wall by the door, a couple of feet away from the man in the mask. He sags wearily in his seat; he’s not even sure that he’s capable of wiggling his toes yet so there’s no way in hell he could make a witty comeback followed by a daring escape with an unloaded bow. Might as well hang out with the organ farmers.
Obviously appeased by Clint's total inability to move much less fight, Claire gives a curt little nod and disappears into the kitchen. Mr. Masked and Mysterious and Almost Entirely Dead gives an amused sort of snort and starts picking his way carefully through the apartment. Now that he's out of fight-mode, it's obvious the guy's in much worse shape than he's letting on; dragging his left leg behind him and bracing on the furniture for support. Clint would feel bad for him, actually, if the guy hadn't been a dick about Clint's bow.
Now that the tension has all but dissipated, it's kind of awkward. Watching some guy he doesn't know lumbering through the living room of some woman he doesn't know. So, Clint drops his gaze and busies himself with the gauze strapped over his stomach. Speaking of, everything still fucking hurts. There's some blood seeping through the surgical tape; he probably did rip his stitches. Great. God, Nat's gonna kick his ass if there's any permanent damage.
"Not many archers around anymore."
Clint looks up, and the guy's somehow manoeuvred himself into the armchair in the corner without falling over. His voice is light, too light, like they're having a friendly conversation. And just like that, Clint knows he’s been made. Of course he has; helping The Avengers fight a bunch of space-whales was never going to lend him much anonymity. Clint's face was all over the news for weeks, and strangers called him Legolas for much longer than that.
The guy's head cocks to the side, like he's expecting an answer to the question he didn't ask.
“We're a rare breed," Clint snaps. Claire steps out of the kitchen with fresh gauze and a bowl.
The masked man quirks another smile. It's smug as shit at first but fades into a grimace as Claire gets to work on his wounds, cutting him out of his shirt but leaving the mask on. Clint sympathizes: Claire’s good, there’s no denying that, but she’s got the same ruthless kind of tough love that all of Clint’s favorite SHIELD medics used to have. It's clear from the way she moves - quick and efficient but never hasty - that being gentle is not a part of their deal. And true to form, as Clint watches, she unceremoniously dumps a bottle of something that smells terrible over one of the gashes on the man’s stomach and he winces, jerks back in his seat with a sharp hiss. She tightens her hold on his leg, while her other hand grasps his forearm and pins him in place. The man stills immediately. Relaxes. The smirk comes back, warmer this time.
It's clear as day: they've done this a million times before. Clint bites down on about twelve more questions. He's not sure he wants to know.
Claire's stitching up a long cut along the man’s back when he says to her, all calm, like he wasn’t ready to fight Clint to the death three minutes ago, “You know, I’d be surprised if there was more than one archer in all of New York.“
Great. This again. Clint resists the urge to put his head in his hands and groan for four hours straight. Claire hums slightly in agreement, eyes raking over Clint. It seems a little like his identity has only just occurred to her, but Clint's sure that’s an act. She’s way too sharp not to have connected the dots already. On the plus side, maybe he can actually get them to call him Hawkeye instead of Hawkguy.
Probably not.
“He’s the right height and build,” she says, all pretenses at subtlety dropped. The man's chin tips up, like he's listening to her intently. “Blonde hair, too. I’d say the face is a fair match. What’s left of it, anyway.”
Clint blinks. He hadn't expected a lesson in stating the obvious from two people so clearly used to this kind of thing. Hello. Me, avenger. You, probably the masked guy who beat the shit out of those Russians in the parking lot a couple of nights ago. Nice to meet you, dick.
But they're both just looking at him, waiting for him to say something, so fine, Clint thinks, and gestures to the man with his chin.
“Not the best mask if you can’t see through it,” he points out.
So there.
And that amused smile is back on the man’s face, now accompanied by Claire smirking into her shoulder as she works. Clint gets the feeling he’s missed out on a joke. Or ten. But he’s 30 something so he resists the urge to pout.
“It’s not the mask,” the man explains. Clint’s one working eye narrows, but before his brain can come up with anything to say, the man adds, “I’m blind.”
"You're what?"
In the ensuing and decidedly confused silence, the man turns to whisper something to Claire. Clint's not listening. He's just sitting there, repeating blind? and what? and how? and WHAT? over and over again in varying degrees of shock and disbelief, too dumbfounded to pay any actual attention. But, as always, he lipreads without meaning to.
Seriously? The dumpster? The man asks. She nods. After a beat, he follows it up with, So do you just bring home everyone you find in there?
Nah, she says. Just the pretty ones. If they're ugly I leave them to die.
His ensuing smile is all teeth, playful and bright, with an actual chuckle in there somewhere to boot. Claire whacks him on the leg and orders him to be still before looking down at him with a fond grin of her own.
And that’s how Clint Barton meets Matt Murdock. It takes three more coinciding patch-up sessions at Claire's for Clint to learn Matt's name.
Clint calls him Mike for three months after that just to fuck with him.
Matt calls him Hawkguy. Forever.