playing the hero again

"I was supposed to be retired!"

Iowa Suburbs - January 2nd, 2016

"Awe, shit."

Clint Barton hadn't planned on walking by a house that was going to blow up. All he had decided to do was take a simple stroll by a park across the street from a neighborhood in a town nearby his home with his three kids. What could he say? The suburbs were calming. Also, his wife had wanted him to take the kids to the park and give her some time to clean the house. A thirteen-year-old, eight-year-old, and six-month-old took some wear on a woman.

Now, despite his experiences (including, but not limited to, an alien invasion in New York, a robot invasion in Sokovia, and a particularly difficult mission with Natasha Romanoff in Budapest), he hadn't expected anything like this to happen on his stroll. But it happened anyway.

Clint saw the bomb a split second before it hit the roof of a small house across the street, his acute reflexes always one step ahead of him. That was when he made his muttered swear. And then the bomb met the house, blowing up instantaneously and leaving a burning, gaping hole in the roof and a now crumbling and burning building.

"I was supposed to be retired!"

Giving an annoyed and somewhat exhausted sigh, Clint quickly knelt down and placed a hand on his ten-year-old son's shoulders. "Hey, Cooper, Dad's gotta go take a look at that. Watch over your brother and sister and take them to the sandwich place we just left--" the boy nodded and he started running across the street towards the house "--and call nine-one-one!"

Being the guy he was... Clint Barton was not going to let anyone die in that building if he could help it.

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Christa didn't know what was going on.

All she knew was a sound louder than she'd ever heard, pain fiercer than she'd ever felt, and a then a horrible ringing sound that dominated her left ear and exploded out throughout the rest of her head.

Christa opened her dark eyes without realizing she had closed them. She uncovered her heavily shaking hands from the back of her head and barely noticed the bloody gashes and slivers of shrapnel that covered them. Turning her head and breathing harder than even when she'd sprinted the mile within six minutes for her seventh grade P.E. evaluation, her eyes fell on the gaping hole that used to be the roof of her house and a large part of the upstairs. Then she looked down and realized she had flown what might have been ten feet from her original spot and now was partially buried beneath a large and heavy cabinet. And before her, part of the room was on fire.

Panic was starting to course through her. She wanted to scream but she couldn't. Why couldn't she scream? Pain seared her back and her arms and the rest of her body. She had no idea the human body could hurt this badly.

"H-help!" she tried to get out, but it was hard, stuttering, difficult to speak at all. "HELP!" Then the ringing in her head got ten times worse and she yelped and clutched at it, messy brown hair falling over her face almost like a shield.

Christa tried shoving the cabinet off of herself--it was the lower half of her torso and her legs that were covered--but she couldn't. She couldn't move. She was trapped and bleeding and dying and the room was on fire and she couldn't move.

And she couldn't hear anything.

And, as she realized that, the panic that was once a small fire on the beach in comparison had now become a wild fire.

Was anyone down there? Could anyone help her? Hear the moans that she couldn't even hear herself?

But wait--what about Angus? Wait, was he still here? She couldn't think, she couldn't move--why would he still be here?

But wait--no--yes! He could help her! He could get the cabinet off of her!

"ANGUS!" she tried to yell, but it was like a cat making its first mewl--or at least that's what it felt like. It couldn't penetrate even close to where Angus must be, she was sure. But he must be coming, right? He had to be. He wasn't an idiot--right?

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Clint was a careful man. He tried not to take too great of risks, eyes and ears open for anything that ever seemed like a bomb, gun, or robot/alien attempting to kill him. So he was extremely shocked when he saw a teenage boy pull his arm back in front of a window as though he was about to punch the glass in it apart.

He darted over to the boy and yelled, "Hey, stop!"

The kid turned around, a thin layer of dust over him and a bent key in his hands, and his brown eyes widened as he took the older man in.

"You're--you're--" he stuttered.

"Hawkeye, I know. Famous Avenger," he said sarcastically. "Now why were you trying to break that glass with your hands, kid? Do you realize how much glass cuts hurt?" Clint was tired, annoyed, and, above all, he was supposed to be retired, not involved with all this superhero stuff again. All he wanted was to spend some time with his kids--that was all! And here he was with this idiot teenager who--

"I was trying to get inside through the door and she said it was locked and it isn't and I have an old key but it won't work!" the boy ranted. He held up the bent key in his hand. His face was twisted with anxiety.

"Is there someone in there?" Clint asked seriously.

"Yes! My friend, Christa!" The boy gestured towards the door.

Before he had even finished speaking, Clint grabbed the key out of the boy's hand, ran over to the door, and stuffed it into the lock. He'd rather not have to break anything if he didn't have to. He twisted it, but like the boy said, it wouldn't work.

"Wait! I've got an idea!" The kid ran around the house for a brief moment before coming back with a huge shovel in his hands. "Get out of the way!" And before Clint could do anything, he had smashed the large window at the front of the house to pieces. Then he disappeared inside.

Clint wanted to swear really badly, but he knew he should probably refrain himself in front of a kid (yeah, he was a teenager, but Clint was an adult and examples were examples). So he just grumbled incoherently under his breath instead. He slipped through the open space where most of a window had just been. A sharp pain stabbed him as he scraped his right arm on a shard of glass poking out still. He sucked in a breath but followed after the kid.

Goshdangit, that kid was heroic, but if Clint didn't get to him soon enough, he might bring the whole house on top of them with that shovel.

He ran through the house, wanting looking around carefully for anything that might fall on him or make the house even more damaged than it already was but still hurrying to catch up to the boy. There wasn't much destruction from down here--it was the second floor of the small house that had been hit--but as he went to the staircase Clint saw the beginnings of a broken house.

He stopped when he found the boy standing, shaking slightly, at the top of the narrow staircase he had just climbed. In front of them stood a large wooden bookshelf, blocking their path.

The boy was trying to push it out of the way, but it was barely moving.

"Help me!" he yelled.

"Is anyone up there?" Clint yelled as he started going carefully up the narrow staircase.The sound of coughing came to his ears.

"P-please... help...." The voice was faint, as though the speaker was having a heck of a hard time talking.

Clint quickly shoved all of his weight into the bookshelf. He knew they should probably be more careful with the house falling down around them, but the kid was anxious and there was somebody up there.

Gritting his teeth, Clint and the boy, with their combined strength, managed to push the bookshelf to the side. They rounded the corner in the little hallway of the upstairs. He coughed a little at the dust that still hung in the air like spiderwebs in an old abandoned building, also increasing as a fire blazed in the room. Before his eyes lay what was left of a small upstairs room, an office, perhaps. Part of the roof and an entire wall had been blown to bits, and the few desks, chairs, and cabinets that made their home in the room were everywhere. And everything on the open side of the room was on fire.

As he scanned the room, Clint finally came across the figure of a girl hidden on the far side of the room. Short, dark hair framed her paper-white face, and blood was a dominant feature on the backside of her arms and hands. She was partially buried beneath a very heavy-looking cabinet.

The girl's eyes met his and they widened. She gave a cough, letting out a small, "Help," before clutching her head in agony, and while that happened Clint and the boy raced over to her.

"Christa!" the boy cried, anguish on his face as he saw her trapped beneath the cabinet.

Clint gave him a quick warning look. "Don't make her anxious!" The boy stopped, shovel still in his hands, waiting, tapping his foot on the floor anxiously--probably because he figured the Avenger knew what he was doing but, of course, felt like he needed to do something more. Which Clint completely understood, but he needed to keep the girl calm, otherwise, based on how she looked right now, she was going to go into shock.

Kneeling down, the man looked at her gently. "Hey, there. I'm gonna get you out of this, okay? I just need to to listen." He said the words softly and calmly in just his way.

The girl winced as he spoke anyway, still breathing heavily. He could see the panic on her face.

"You're gonna be okay. I'm gonna get you out of here."

She finally responded, giving a small nod.

At this, Clint took a brief look at the cabinet, examining it and its surroundings, trying to figure out the best way to get it off of the girl without bringing what was left of the shattered rooftop down on them. Then he started lifting the cabinet off of the girl's legs, arms straining against the weight of the heavy thing and the stuff that was on top of it. Then he stopped, nodding a little to himself, before training his eyes back on the girl.

"Hey, what's your name?" he asked.

The girl just stared at him, wincing again. Then she shook her head before clutching it as though the shaking had brought down pounds of pain.

"It's Christa!" the boy, who had been standing respectfully away for those several moments, finally burst out.

The girl's eyes, darting between Clint and the boy, widened after a moment of contemplation. Then she said in the softest, weakest of voices, "Christa."

Clint nodded to himself. He considered the girl's reaction to him--her unresponsiveness, her confusion at his voice.

"Okay... okay." Clint adjusted his stance. Crouching for this long tended to give him cramps. Then he started speaking again, this time very slowly and carefully. "I want you to do something for me, okay, Christa?"

The girl's pleading gaze was enough of a response.

"When I say 'three'--" Clint held up three fingers to show "--I'm gonna want you to roll--" he mimed rolling "--from beneath that cabinet. I'm gonna lift it from you but it's too heavy for me to hold for long, and once it falls it might bring part of the roof down with it. Okay?" All of the words and actions he did his best to mine, but he was getting anxious. The house around them was crumbling.

"Here, I'll help!" The boy stumbled over to them, tossing the shovel to the side, evidently done with letting Clint calm Christa down.

Clint's mind whirred.

"Okay." Clint got a better grip on the cabinet, grunting. "What's your name, kid?" he asked the boy.

"Angus."

"Angus, I need you to help pull Christa out from under that cabinet. I'm gonna lift it on three, but it has a lot of weight on it so I'm not gonna be able to hold it for very long. Can you pull Christa out?"

Angus's eyes were wide and he seemed to be sweating slightly in the heat of the flames growing nearby, sudden fear seemingly coming to him. This must be his first experience like this; but then, this type of thing didn't happen to most people, did it? Just quite often to people Clint. But he nodded and tentatively went to wrap his arms around Christa's waist as best he could with her partially beneath an enormous cabinet. Christa, despite her obvious pain, gave him a look that said, "If you do anything more, I will kill you."

Clint saw the brief exchange between the two but didn't say anything about it. He just adjusted his stance, grabbing the cabinet a little more firmly, and began to count. "One--" he lifted it up a little higher "two--" a little higher "--THREE!"

In one lightning-fast moment, Clint lifted up the insanely heavy cabinet, Angus pulled Christa out of the way, and the cabinet fell to the ground with a terribly loud bang! The broken roof started falling, crumbling, and Clint grabbed Angus's arm and started half carrying Christa with him through the room. Christa was stumbling as they went closer to the staircase. Her eyes started closing and she became limper and limper.

"No... can't... never... passed out... keep up... damn... streak...." she muttered as she went.

Clint caught her before she fell to the floor, and at the exact same time, a beam from the roof fell onto the floor in front of them.

Clint and Angus both let out yells as the flames burst in front of them. They exchanged looks.

"What are we--"

"Here!" Angus interrupted Clint, darted over to where he had tossed his shovel onto the ground, and started shoving the beam aside with it, a poker to the fireplace that was this house.

"No, stop, you'll bring the whole place dow--!"

But Angus had made the final blow and now the shovel was on fire, the beam was being held out of the way by Angus and the path was clear, and the boy himself was screaming as his right hand caught on fire.

"Just--just get her out! This stuff is heavy, man!" he yelled.

"But--" Clint spluttered.

"Now!"

He only spared a second--because Angus, this kid who must only be fifteen or sixteen, was sacrificing his energy and strength and hand and skin to save his friend and a man who was, despite being a well-known superhero, in reality practically a stranger to him. And then, slinging Christa securely over his right shoulder, Clint began to run through the archway that Angus had provided, raced down the narrow staircase that was beginning to turn to flames and ash, and practically flying out the broken window.

It was just as the sirens began to wail that the house behind him started to crumble.