A/N: At LONG last, here's the conclusion to the story. I hope you guys enjoyed it! :) Many thanks all you readers (especially reviewers!), and to the lovely community at the Beta Branch for their support.

Specular Reflection

Chapter 5

This time they were smart enough to wait until Tony was in Malibu. Steve was doing his weekly thing at the USO. Natasha was at headquarters. Clint was on the range, some seventy floors below. It was easy for the two SHIELD agents to corner Bruce Banner in his lab, trapping him against his desk at the focus of the parabolic room.

His chimes hadn't given him enough warning; the agents were inside and between Bruce and the door before he could do anything to prevent it. He was dismayed to see it was two agents he had not yet encountered. The elder introduced himself as Agent Harris; the younger (he was a kid, probably younger than Steve) remained nameless. Banner had ignored his most recent summons to headquarters, so they had come to his lab pester him about containment protocols for the Hulk. Harris had been at him for over an hour now and Bruce was quickly losing what remained of his patience. Thus far he had maintained a grip on his temper by imagining the agent as particularly nasty questioner at a conference.

"With respect, Dr. Banner," Harris drawled, his tone making it clear he meant the exact opposite, "We can't help contain the Hulk problem without fully understanding it." He pretended to study his fingernails with feigned nonchalance, but his eyes never left Bruce. "Let us do some testing; we can work something out together to keep the Hulk under control. Nobody wants a repeat of Harlem."

Bruce's temper flared and he felt the Other Guy stir on the edge of his consciousness. He wanted to smash the stupid agent. Bruce ignored him and forced himself to take a deep breath. "SHIELD's idea of containment was to throw me in a cage and drop me from 30,000 feet," he retorted, unable to keep a hint of bitterness out of his voice. "Forgive me if I don't trust SHIELD."

The agent gave him an oily smile that set his teeth on edge. The man was up to something and Bruce did not like it. "You know, Dr. Banner, there's no reason for you to be physically present for the testing."

The scientist felt his laced fingers unravel and clench into fists without conscious volition. So that was what this whole charade had been about: SHIELD was after blood samples again. The Other Guy stirred more insistently. For once, they were in agreement. "No."

"Dr. Banner-"

"How many times do I have to tell you people?" Bruce snapped. His face felt hot. He could feel the Other Guy pacing restlessly just behind his eyes. "The answer is no."

"Dr. Banner, please be reasonable-"

The man took a step forward. He had something in his hand. With a thrill of fear, Bruce recognized the metallic glimmer of the needle of a syringe. He swallowed hard. "I said no!"

The scientist instinctively stepped backwards. His legs slammed into the edge of his desk. He was trapped. His eyes darted between the needle and the agent. No. No. He could feel his heart starting to race. The voice in his head was deeper now, almost a roar. NO. His eyes narrowed. Bruce was going to grab the agent's leg and slam him into the wall until blood ran down his face-

The crash of chimes as the lab door swung violently open brought Bruce back to himself. Both agents' heads snapped around to look at the door. Horrified by how close he'd come to going green, Bruce used the momentary distraction to force the Other Guy back deep into the recesses of his psyche.

Clint Barton strode through the doorway. The archer's sharp eyes flicked from Bruce to Agent Harris to the syringe in Harris' hand. Cold rage contorted his face before it seemed to harden, and Clint vanished.

"The hell are you doing, Harris?" Agent Barton snapped at the other SHIELD agent, his arms folded across his chest. He fixed Harris with a stare so frigid it sent chills down Bruce's spine.

"Agent Barton," Harris drawled. His voice dripped condescension. "Nice to see you've remembered who you're working for."

An expression of pure malevolence flashed across Barton's face. He lowered his hands slowly with an unmistakable air of menace. His icy eyes flicked to Bruce before settling on Harris again.

"They were just leaving," Bruce managed before Harris could say anything.

Harris' eyes narrowed, but he backed off in the face of this united front. He gestured to the younger agent and swept from the lab, but not without a final parting shot. "We'll be in touch, Dr. Banner. We… know where to find you."

Bruce waited until the door was safely shut behind them before he sagged onto the edge of his desk. "Why can't they just leave me alone?" he cried with frustration. He reached up to remove his glasses with shaking fingers and squeezed the bridge of his nose wearily.

"That as close as I think it was?"

"Yeah," Bruce admitted. It had been appallingly close. He sighed. Something as stupid as Agent Harris' taunts shouldn't have been able to get to him so easily.

"Jesus." Barton's voice was tight with smothered anger. "What'd they want?"

"They said testing on the Other Guy," the physicist replied without looking up. "They were really after blood samples. Again."

The invasion of his lab, which he considered as personal as his apartment and equally inviolate, had shaken Bruce more deeply than he cared to admit. It was one of the very few places he felt safe and they had just…invaded it. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. This was exactly the sort of thing he had been worried about when he had accepted Tony's invitation to live in Stark Tower.

"Hey, don't let that prick get to you, man."

Bruce glanced up. The steely Agent Barton was gone. It was Clint now, just Clint, studying him from his usual perch on the bench and kicking his boots back and forth a little bit.

"He was after my blood," the physicist said bitterly. Just the thought of the needle sent his heart racing again. He squeezed his temples with trembling fingers. "They're after my blood and they know where to find me. They know where to find me, Clint. That always gets to me."

He glanced towards the door. Maybe…maybe it was time to leave. If he moved quickly he could be out of town within the hour. It wouldn't take him long to pack the essentials. Bruce had a forged passport and several hundred dollars in cash stashed in a locked drawer in his desk. That would be more than enough to get him across the Mexican border and set him up for several months, maybe even farther south if he did it right-

"Bruce," Clint said. "You…you don't have to run."

The sound of his name interrupted his panicked thoughts. The physicist looked up. "What?"

The agent had dropped down from the bench onto his feet. His hands were raised slightly; palms open and spread to either side in a non-threatening gesture. Bruce tensed a little, but Clint was not blocking his path to the door.

"You're thinking about running again," the agent said evenly. There was a soothing quality about his voice that couldn't quite hide a note of concern. "I'm saying: don't."

Bruce's eyes narrowed warily. "How do you know?"

"You had the same look on your face last weekend when Stark wanted to do karaoke," Clint quipped, but his eyes were serious. Bruce chuckled hollowly at the thought of the engineer. Tony was going to go up like Bikini Atoll when he found out SHIELD managed to slip tower security again. "Look, they aren't coming back. You don't have to run."

"Why do you keep saying that?" Bruce exclaimed, exasperated by his nonsensical repetition.

Clint raised an eyebrow. "Because you're packing, Bruce."

The scientist blinked. Somehow he had ended up behind his desk. His fake passport was in his hand. Two rolls of currency, one in euros, one in dollars, sat on the desk in front of him. A backpack he'd nearly forgotten he'd owned was sitting open on his chair. A battered laptop computer peeked out from within. The fact that Bruce didn't even remember coming around his desk, let alone beginning to pack, disturbed him greatly. "Oh…"

"Hill should have caught this. I'll talk to her. It won't happen again," Clint told him, and Bruce knew he meant it. The archer was eyeing him with genuine concern. "You okay?"

"Apparently not as okay as I thought," Bruce mumbled sheepishly. He relocated the backpack to the floor and dropped into his chair with a sigh. He leaned his elbows on the desk and hid his face in his hands. His cheeks felt warm with embarrassment. He could feel the archer's eyes boring into him.

Clint paused. "Why did you stick around, Banner?" he asked. There was a sort of weary curiosity about his words that made Bruce wonder if Harris' taunt was symptomatic of larger issues back at headquarters. "SHIELD's treating you like shit. The city stresses you out. Every time you leave the tower you're watching for Ross' minions over your shoulder. Why'd you decide to stay?"

Bruce raised his head from his hands. "Well, it wasn't just because of Tony or this place," he said, gesturing around the lab. "Honestly? I thought I could do more good here with you guys than anywhere else."

Clint shot him a knowing look. "That's not how it works," the archer said in a low voice. "You can't ever make some things right, Bruce."

"Maybe not," Bruce replied. "But I can at least try to make my life a net positive."

The scientist ran a hand through his hair. The archer was looking at him questioningly now, waiting for an explanation. He looked encouragingly intrigued.

"Things got easier with the Other Guy when I focused on helping others instead of trying to help myself. He sort of…let me do it," Bruce explained. He hesitated. He hadn't articulated his plans to anyone yet, not even Tony, even though Tony was directly involved in the process. It all seemed rather stupid now. He took a deep breath and continued. "Now I want to try to bring him in more directly. Make him a force for good. He's a blunt instrument, sure, but if pointed in the right direction, and with a couple of safeguards…"

To his credit, Clint didn't laugh. He didn't even smile at the absurdity of Bruce's idea. He just looked at him and said: "Safeguards?"

"I hate to admit it, but SHIELD has a point. What happens if I go green by accident?" Bruce said seriously. "None of you can stop the Other Guy. Not with Thor gone. You won't even get close."

"You seem like you've got a pretty good handle on it," the agent observed.

Bruce gave him a weary smile. "Do I?"

"C'mon, Banner, you know we'd figure something out if it came down to it-"

"But how many people would die before you guys could figure something out?" Bruce interrupted. He found the archer's confidence heartening, but they had to be realistic. "It's all I worry about, Clint."

Bruce got up from his desk and headed over to the holographic worktable. The archer followed him on noiseless feet. The physicist tapped at the controls and brought up a file. Complex images sprang to life: a ball and stick model of a very complicated organic molecule, tables of numbers, and a set of detailed schematics.

"What is it?" Clint asked, poking curiously at the hologram of the molecule. It spun around his finger.

"A containment system," Bruce said with a half-smile. "I'm hoping if we can demonstrate to Director Fury that I've, we've got this under control, he'll call off SHIELD. Let us handle it."

The agent made an incredulous noise, but he looked interested nonetheless. "What'd you have in mind?"

"Think adamantium-tipped tranquilizer darts with enough sedatives to bring down a very large, very angry green elephant."

Clint's eyebrows rose. "Good thing you're buddies with a billionaire, man."

"The hard part's actually been getting the sedative cocktail right," Bruce shrugged. "The Other Guy is pretty resistant to most of them, like Steve. So am I, to some extent. And testing is, uh, complicated."

The sniper flicked through the holograms, studying the schematics with interest. He stopped on one image in particular. He increased the size of the hologram and decreased it. He allowed it to rotate slowly in midair while he studied it for several silent moments. Finally, he glanced at Bruce through the blue-green wireframe image.

"Banner," Clint said, "This looks a hell of a lot like an arrow."

"Tony based the design on yours'," Bruce admitted, a little nervously.

A mixture of emotions warred across Clint's face before he could retreat behind one of his neutral agent expressions. He couldn't hide the wariness in his eyes, however. "What, Stark didn't have space for another gun in his suit?"

"I trust Tony with a lot of things," Bruce replied quietly. "But I don't trust him to make an objective judgment about the Other Guy. He likes the Hulk too much for that."

"Bruce…"

"I can't trust just anyone with this. It's not just power over him, but over me. There are people out there, not just at SHIELD, who think I should be in a cage or in a lab or even dead. Do you have any idea how much that scares me?"

Bruce jumped when the archer suddenly slammed his hands onto the edge of the table. "Christ, anyone's more trustworthy than me!" Clint shouted, and Bruce knew he was thinking about how easily Loki had overthrown his mind. The sniper looked away with a sigh, embarrassed by the sudden outburst of temper. "I'm just a guy with a bow, Bruce," he added in a quiet, almost pained voice. He ran a hand uncomfortably through his hair. "A pretty fucked up guy at that."

"So why did you decide to stay with the team?" the scientist asked. "You could have taken a leave; nobody would have blamed you after Loki. You could have been reassigned. But you stayed."

If he was offended by the question, Clint didn't show it. He looked down at his hands. "I ask myself that a lot," the archer admitted after a moment of hesitation. He glanced at Bruce and chuckled humorlessly. "Guess everything else seemed kinda small potatoes after saving the world."

"I know the feeling. My whole, uh, career seemed pretty trivial after seeing what the Tesseract could do," Bruce said with a laugh. He sobered again. "You understand, Clint. None of the others know what it's like to have your mind taken away from you, to wake up and see the terrible things you've done, to have to take responsibility for those things later on. I trust that more than a suit or a serum."

"I don't know, man…"

"Hey, I'm just a guy with anger management issues," Bruce quipped. Clint let out a genuine snort of laughter at that and the physicist smiled. "I think I can do a lot of good here, I really do. But there's potential to do a lot of harm as well. If I'm going to try, if I'm going to stay with the Avengers, I need to know there's someone who can bring down the Other Guy if he gets out of hand. And it has to be someone I can trust not to abuse that power over me."

"Aw, hell," Clint muttered, and Bruce was suddenly afraid that he had misjudged everything terribly and that the archer was going to walk out. But Barton didn't move. He appeared lost in thought for several moments. Finally, he spoke. "You got an idea of the volume you'll need yet?"

"If my math is right, yeah," Bruce replied, privately relieved. He tapped on the worktable controls again and highlighted the relevant numbers.

Clint studied them with a frown. "It's not a bad design. Little bulkier than I'm used to...heavier, so the balance will be different," he observed. The agent was all business now. "I need prototypes of the canisters as soon as Stark can build them, plus the final weights."

"Tony's already built a couple," Bruce told him. "I made him finish them before he left. They're down in the workshop."

"You know, SHIELD can still pull the plug on the whole thing. I've still gotta clear psych," the agent mused. He eyed Bruce. "You're pretty confident I'm gonna pass that final eval, huh?"

The physicist shrugged. "Yeah, I guess I am."

The corner of Clint's mouth had quirked into one of his not-quite smiles. "Glad one of us is. I'll handle the assembly myself. I want to get as much practice as I can in with the new weight before we try and test anything."

Bruce grinned. "Wouldn't want you to miss."

"Banner," Clint said. The hint of a spark was back in his pale eyes. "I never miss."

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