Fly True

By: Cheryl W.

Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own the Avengers or Hawkeye or any of the other superheroes gracing this work of fiction nor am I making any profit from this tale.

Author's Note: Ok, so I LOVED the Avenger movie and can't get enough of Hawkeye stories. So I decided to write one too.

Summary: Plagued by guilt, Hawkeye begins taking foolish risks but soon finds out that he's not so much joined a superhero league but a family. A family that always takes care of their own. No Slash.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Chapter 1: Velocity

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

In the Avengers eclectic group, it wasn't all that unusual to see someone in the middle of the air sans a parachute. Course that someone usually had the good sense of knowing they could fly before leaping off a beam of an unfinished high rise building.

Tony Stark aka Iron Man felt his heart drop right down to his iron boots at the sight of their not-gifted-with-flying-ability Archer, Clint Barton aka Hawkeye, falling fast. He didn't wait to see where the idiot thought his flying arrow with attached cable could embed itself in a steel structure and miraculously save him from pancaking on the cordoned-off street below. Instead Tony hit his thruster and prayed that he was going to be fast enough to get in the narrowing margin between Barton and the pavement.

Doing a one handed scoop, Stark snagged onto his teammate. Holding Clint against the cold metal of his suit, he descended, waited until he was ten feet off the ground before he unceremoniously dropped the team's archer to land on his back in the dirt of the construction site.

The breath whooshed out of Clint at the impact and it took him a moment before he could drawl, "Gotta work on the landings, Tin Man."

Deactivating his helmet, Tony landed on the ground a few inches from his teammate's prone position, his expression thunderous. "You're lucky I didn't decide to drop you on your head!" he furiously bit out, pointing one of Iron Man's red fingers at Barton. "You think I don't know what that was all about," a lethal edge to his words.

Far from being intimidated by his teammate's rantings, Clint railed back as he climbed to his feet, "It was what it's always about, getting the mission done!" As if to punctuate his declaration, the in-process building shook with an explosion…on the level that Barton had left with such haste. "And now we're done," Clint magnanimously stated, beginning to walk by Tony, mind already on the cleanup procedures that needed to be completed.

Moving into Barton's path, Tony stared down at the archer from his slightly superior height. "No, no that wasn't about the mission. I'm practically an expert at what that was, so don't try and sell me some lie," he warned, eyes boring into Clint's, hoping to detect an acknowledgment to his words.

But the SHEILD agent kept his emotions as close to the vest as he did his arrows. "Ok, I have no idea what you're talking about," and he made to side step Iron Man but a hydraulically enhanced hand reached out, hovered over his shoulder.

Refusing to let Clint blow him off, Tony's tone turned challenging, "Pushing the edge so far in the hopes that there's no coming back from it."

Steely meeting Tony's eyes, watching the other man's anticipation of his reply grow, Barton said nothing, simply used his cat-like litheness to slip around his opponent…and nearly collided with Steve Rogers AKA Captain America, or more specifically, the star on Steve's chest. Luckily, he was able to bring himself up just short of that catastrophe.

"You alright?" Steve worriedly questioned, grasping onto Clint's arm, glad that the man felt solid, whole under his touch. Because that outcome hadn't seemed likely a few moments ago, not when he had helplessly watched as the archer fell from the sky.

Extracting his arm from the Captain's hold, Clint bitterly snapped, "The mere human is fine. My hero rescued me." And then he shoved by Steve and headed for the rendezvous point.

Turning to Tony, Steven accused, "What did you do?"

"You mean besides save his life…." Tony bragged as he fired up the jets on his boots and left a scowling Captain America in the circle of dust. But it was Clint Barton that he searched out from his higher elevation, saw the man conferring with the SHEILD agents on the scene. The picture of the perfect soldier…. 'who has a death wish,' Tony grimly deduced, could now see that so clearly that it hurt.

Cursing Loki, his mind control abilities and the cruelly of fate, Tony Stark vowed to keep an eye on Clint, because if anyone knew how soul decimating it was to unintentionally play a part in taking innocent lives, he did. His weapons had taken hundreds of lives…and Clint's arrows they had the blood of fellow SHEILD members on them. And that kind of stain, it stayed with you, didn't leave, had to be beat down into something malleable that either killed you….or saved you.

And Tony swore right then and there that he wasn't going to let Clint Barton take the easy way out. The archer was part of the crazy team they had formed and, whether Barton knew it or not, that meant no refunds, no do-overs and no renegotiations. He was stuck with them for the long haul.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

TBC?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Thanks for reading! And please let me know if you would be interested in more of the story.

Have a great day!

Cheryl W.