A/N: Enjoy this, my crowning achievement.

"I can hear the drums

They pound o'er my soul

Its crescendo singing

To a

Thrum thrum thrum

I can hear the drums

The beating, waiting, willing

Cannot escape or run

the crevice

low low low

Can you hear their song?

A warring, howling tune

In the din of night

an eternal

Pound pound pound

The drum beat like a heart

As a soul is torn apart

Rending in the dark

O'er it goes

on, on, on.

I can hear them call

A ransom about to come

The leap into the

Empty air and

done, done done.

I can hear the drums.

I can hear the drums.

I can hear the drums"

I Can Hear The Drums

Prologue: G-Day

It all happened as the Sarhorn predicted so long ago. It seemed like ages since they'd been standing in that hospital room, surrounding the dying Clint Barton, wondering how the world was all meant to end around them. But here it was. That day, seven years into the future when everything the universe knew was threatened to die in a vortex that nothing but the knowledge of Tony Stark could contain.

They'd been told. They'd been warned. Why were they still so . . . Unprepared?

Clint stood on the edge of the darkness itself on the Nova Luna surface. Here the landscape was little more than dunes of bluish sand swept over outcrops of jagged cliff spears. This desolation marked the epicenter of everything they had prepared for so long. Clint thought he had been removed from it all. The team swore that the archer would never see the heart of. The battle, the evacuations, or anything Galactus related if they could at all help it. Destiny had a way of changing those carefully laid plans.

The black hole which swallowed galaxies appeared as the Sarhorn warned, in the place he had predicted. In a single decisive blow everything the fighting force had so carefully set in place shattered. They could have never predicted the sheer power Galactus returned with. Standing on that bluff, with the gray hues of a dying sky swirling around him in dust devils, Clint could see first-hand the mistake they had all made.

"We're not going to make it." He whispered.

Behind him Natasha shook her head furiously. "I . . . I can't believe it."

Above them the glow of stars blotted out in masses, as if a fist wrapped it's hand around them and squeezed. Before it had been the distant lights, now that swirling mass of cosmic energy hovered above Nova Luna. The air became thinner as the oxygen ripped away from the surface. The people, rushing for ships like rats escaping a fire at sea, weren't going to get out fast enough. Nova Luna was never a predicted target. They never even considered the battle reaching this side of the universe. They were all wrong.

"T'Challa will be here any minute. He's getting us, Steve, everyone else off. We can't fight Galactus here, we have to leave." Natasha grabbed Clint's arm and tugged him back from the ledge. Still, though, he stood firm.

"I can't leave." He said.

Natasha squinted at him. Her voice piqued in fragility. "What do you mean, you can't leave? Clint, we are going to die if we just stand here! That thing," she pointed up into the sky at the rapidly expanding void of Galactus. "Is going to swallow this planet and everyone on it!"

Clint stopped looking up into the stars that had disappeared behind the mass of black and instead looked down into the equally repressive crevice at his feet. "I hid it there. Natasha, the Infinity Gauntlet is on Nova Luna. It's right beneath my feet. Down in that chasm. I took it from Pym. I had to take it, you don't understand what he planned to do with it." He glanced over his shoulder at her. "Natasha if Galactus gets it, If he swallows this world, that's it for us. For everyone. I have to destroy it."

A cold hand reached into her chest and clamped down on her heart. It was like déjà vu. What had T'Challa called it? The 20 predictions of the Sarhorn? As long as Clint Barton was alive he would always enter that pit of death over Steve Rogers. He would make an impossible shot, save billions, but shatter both legs in the fall and die screaming as he was ripped apart by ravaging creatures. Those beasts that should live miles below the planet surface, but now were driven up from their hot depths as if they too may be spared.

"No!" Natasha said, firm, low, and resolute. "That's not happening, Clint. We planned this. Steve is going, not you. T'Challa is coming. Steve is with him. That was the plan!"

Clint tapped the communicator around his neck and opened a line to the other teams of Avengers. His eyes never left Natasha's and he never stepped away from that ledge.

"This is Clint. Where are you, Panther?" He asked calmly.

Natasha heard her own radio cackle with the echo of his voice in her ear. There was a brief, curt reply with a word too fast to understand. Then nothing. Again the line opened. Steve's voice frantic in the background yelling indistinguishable words. The line cut out a second time and the dread in Natasha's heart filled.

"Again, this is Hawkeye calling Panther. What is your ETA?" Clint said a second time. He looped his thumb under the strap of his quiver and pulled the strap tighter against his chest. Next he took his hand, opened the palm, and felt the familiar weight of his Asgardian bow appear.

"T'CHALLA ARE YOU CRAZY!" Steve's voice screamed through the radio. "Clint! Clint, get Natasha and get the HELL OUT OF THERE!"

Natasha's hand reached up and covered her mouth. Her pupils widened. Was this really happening?

"She is my wife! We are going to save her! Barton can run! She cannot!" Panther cried.

"T'Challa, don't be a fool! This is exactly what the Sarhorn said! Clint? Clint please, can you hear me? Don't do it! Don't go down there, Clint please listen to me!" Steve's desperate cries tried to rise above the Panther's mania, but Clint's mind was already made up. He'd decided the day he woke up in a hospital bed and Peter Quill told him exactly what evil was to come. He'd trained Steve for as long as he could to take his place. To share this horrible fate but all the while Clint knew the truth.

"You don't understand what I have to do." Clint said, evenly and flatly, into the walkie.

"Natasha? Natasha, if you are there, stop him! Don't let him do this! I'm coming! I'll be there in twenty minutes, please give me time. Please! Just get away! Run!" Steve begged.

Natasha couldn't speak. Her eyes fixed on Clint.

"Steve, the Infinity Gauntlet is down there." Barton told him plainly. "That's the shot I have to make. I might not be able to destroy it, but I can scatter the stones. I can do this. I'm meant to do it. If Galactus swallows this world up, then he wins before we've even started. Do you understand?"

On the other side of Nova Luna, Steve collapsed against the console of the transport ship. T'Challa, locked behind the pilot cabin door, refused to acknowledge the archer's words.

"Clint…" Steve whispered.

"You did your best, Cap. I know that. I always knew this is how it was going to end. I'm sorry I lied to you. I lie to everyone, though. Why should you be special?" Clint reached into his quiver and extracted one of his elven arrows with Tony's concussive modification. Everything fell smoothly into place. Like bricks forming a wall. This was the very pinnacle of their achievement. The cornerstone of everything they worked so hard for.

Slumped against the cockpit door, helpless, Steve could only listen to Clint's words in his ear as T'Challa piloted them in the opposite direction. "Clint… I'm not ready for this. Don't. Not for me."

Clint smiled a little. "What? You're hide not worth me saving, Cap? You know that's supposed to be my line. Who knows? I might miss. Then you'll have to come down here yourself and clean up this mess,"

Natasha mouthed the words to him. Her voice flittered away like a terrified sparrow. "You never miss."

"I know I don't." Clint told her. "We gotta let the Cap think he's doing something though."

"Hawk—"

"Steve, I want you to open a communication line to all the other divisions. To the other Avengers. Look, we don't have a lot of time here and I don't have time for you to keep arguing a point I'm never gonna let you win. I'm tenacious like that. I just want the chance to say goodbye to everyone. My way. When I jump, cut the comms. No one needs to hear what happens next."

Natasha, who at once put distance between them, as if somehow Clint might drag her over the side with him, finally overcame that disdain and pressed into his chest. She circled her arms around his back and clasped the archer against herself. She felt the air hitch in his chest as the emotion nearly felled him. Half a world away, Steve opened the comms. Clint leaned into her, speaking into the straight red braid the elves wove her hair into. He spoke to her, to everyone, all at once.

"It's time for me to go. I wish it could happen some other way. I wish that I could stop this. We all had our parts to play. I don't blame anyone. Not Pym, Panther, or anyone else. You shouldn't either. I'm doing this because it's going to save the ones I care about. And I'm doing this because if I don't, we're all just going to die anyway. Goodbye. And Star-Lord, I made you a new mixtape. The Jackson Five sucks."

Natasha didn't want to laugh, or cry, or have any other emotion beside shock and horror, but Clint forced all those to come out in the same brief words. He took her tighter in his arms, and against her back he traced the tiny, sign language, symbols he'd designated for her name. It was an overwhelming intimacy that threatened to unmake her all at once.

Clint tore himself away. He faced the pit, said not a word more and launched himself into the air. He had seconds, if that, to spy out the location of the Infinity Gauntlet on his fall downward. It would be suspended in the air somewhere before he hit the ground. In that darkness he had a hairbreadth of time to find it, fire at it, and continue to propel downward to his inevitable doom. His legs would be broken in seconds from the fall and the concussive force from the exploding arrow thrusting him down, he had to recover from the pain quickly and pull as many arrows as he could to fend off those beasts meant to tear him to pieces.

His free fall came to a sudden, jarring, halt. Clint's body spun in mid air. He twisted, strung up by a thin, tensile force wrapped around his wrist. He threw his head back and looked up.

"Natasha, what are you doing!?" He demanded. She'd slipped a cord around his wrist during their final embrace. The noose went taught the second he pulled up the slack.

"I can't… Clint, I can't let you go. Don't ask me to do this! There has to be another way!"

With one hand Clint held onto the riser of his bow, with the other he held the elven arrow. If he released either, he might have no time to pick them up again before he passed by the Infinity Gauntlet. Already, in the darkness below him he felt the pull of that power like a magnetic energy.

"Natasha, you have to let me go. It's my time to go. You have to take your knife and cut this line. I can't do that and save us at the same time. Do you understand me?"

Two eyes, dilated in disbelief locked with his jasper shards. "I can't do that." She said, shaking her head in a desperate determination.

"You can." Clint encouraged, "You can and you will. I'm sorry, Natasha. I'm sorry we never had the life that we should have. I'm sorry for everything the Black Widow program did to you that kept you from really ever loving me. But if you ever did care about me, then do this. Cut the line and let me save you. If you live, Nat, I live, do you understand? Let me go."

Somewhere in the galaxy, Thor's hammer slowed its arc and came to a halt at his side. The army of attacking Kree warriors cascaded around him, fended off by the blaster fire from the Nova Core. Thor leaned his head to one side, listening to Clint's words as he issued his final pleas.

Pym, locked in a basement drawing room dropped his pencil. He leaned over his radio and slowly collapsed into his chair. The surrounding white boards of quantum information temporarily forgotten.

The Hulk tore through another ship, launched through the blackness, crashed into a second, then a third, tearing out pilots and releasing their bodies into the vastness of space as Clint's words fueled his rage even more.

Star-Lord slowly stepped away from his friends as they ushered more men and women into the cargo hold of the Milano. He pressed one hand against his free ear to drown out their noise and looked into the black, swelling sky. He wanted to live…but was this really their only option?

On the main deck of the Bethlehem Star Tony worked frantically to reroute his energy turbine's power, defining the first through twelfth dimensional analysis in the same algorithm he'd solved only seven years ago. He needed all the energy of the forty-five arc reactors he designed into the ship. Then when the switch was flipped, he had seconds only to escape before ramming the entire flagship right down Galactus's gullet. He paused as Clint's voice arrived in his ear. Was this really the moment? He always thought he would be standing there at the archer's side, trying to stop him the way Natasha now did. But no. Tony was a full system away, throttling through the galaxy at light speed to stop the very apocalypse.

"Clint—"

"Natasha." Barton said, firm and gentle all at once. "Let me go."

She drew her knife, considered the thin line stretching from her wrist to his. She couldn't go over with him. She'd be in his way. He might even miss. He wouldn't want that. Why had she tried to stop him? Only to let this be her decision instead of his? Did she ever think she could really prevent him from taking that leap? Again they locked eyes. Around the universe, the scattered Avengers all scrambled to say something, anything, but their communication was only one way. Steve made sure of that. Maybe they'd hate him for it. For never getting their chance to say even a final word to the archer, but this was for the best. This was to save them all.

The twinkle of playfulness, of love, and camaraderie shone in Clint's dark eyes as he gazed up at her. "Good—"

Natasha sliced the line and fell behind the ledge of grey lunar dust all at once. She felt like a fool who couldn't even watch. She saw the temporary confusion, hurt, and surprise as he released from that line and his arms wind milled in open air. Even in the comms he never finished saying the word he'd begun to get out. Goodbye.

Down the archer fell. Impossibly fast the Infinity Gauntlet rushed up at him and Clint struggled to set his arrow back on the string. When he finally got the shot off he was firing upward at the suspended metal gauntlet. The explosion blasted out in all directions. He was blinded by the striking blue, red, orange, purple, and yellow light. His body slammed sideways against the crevice wall before rebounding again and hurling feet first into the jagged, cold rocks below. His legs shot upward into his bent over chest and all at once he felt the duel SNAP of his femurs cracking in half. He screamed as the pain shot through him. His comm was still on.

Above him Natasha sunk down beside the opening of the crevice. The explosion set off a chain reaction below her. The massive boulders of the crevice walls jumped in their bedrock and slammed together like immovable slabs. Clint's only entrance, only escape, was blocked off instantly. She wanted to tear the radio off her neck but she was frozen in the shock of all she had done. The Infinity Stones fired off around her like six little comets. The time stone, space stone, aether, tesseract and all the rest warring between each other for dominance. They jumbled in a mass of energized cloud , threatening to tear each other apart. One absorbed the other and hurled it through time. A second absorbed a third and shot it through space. One by one Clint's perfectly placed explosion set off the chain reaction that destroyed the foundation of the gauntlet itself and thrust the stones across the stars again. Even as they began to scatter, Clint's screams continued to fill her ears.

He would fall forty feet. Shatter both his legs. He'd be trapped, alone in the dark as all manner of creeping monsters rose and tore him apart. He would not escape. This is where he would always die. The Avengers knew the predictions of the Sarhorn by heart, they never knew, however, that they would be forced to listen to Clint's pain-filled screams as he was ripped into pieces far beyond their reach.

Alone, seeing nothing but Clint's look of fear as he fell away from her and filled only with his screams, Natasha sank into the blue hued soil of Nova Luna and cried bitter, unforgiving tears. The life still forming within her shared the pain of its grieving mother.

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