Chapter Text
The motorcycle broke down just as he passed over the bridge leading into town, the quick rhythmic thump of the wheels as they passed over the metal slats turning into one irregular beat at a time.
It was just as well; the light was lowering and Clint's ass was sore. It was a long ride from where he'd bailed out of the Helicarrier somewhere over Minnesota, a long couple days from where he'd picked up the chopper off a private owner on Craigslist for cash and no questions. Somehow he'd wound up in this quiet little town next to Toluca Lake, where he'd spent a summer as a foster before being packed off to a group home. He hadn't thought of this place in years, but the idea of coming here had popped into his head as he was driving aimlessly across the Midwest, almost as if he'd been called.
Maybe the bike was out of gas. Maybe it'd broken down. It wasn't as if he'd checked the bike's history before buying it, sight unseen. He pushed it off the road far enough to avoid attention by any bored highway patrol passing by, and emptied the panniers.
There wasn't much; he'd left behind very little and his worldly possessions filled one army duffel: a couple of photos, a few changes of clothes, his SHIELD comm, his phone. The latter two were turned off, the batteries removed so he couldn't be tracked. His service pistol was tucked into the small of his back, his backup knife strapped to his ankle. The bow, collapsed, went into the duffel along with his quiver. Cash and IDs went into an inner pocket.
He slung the duffel over his shoulder and started the trek into town.
The first thing that intruded into his awareness was the quiet, a silence so profound it was almost threatening. No birds chirped, no sound of other vehicles shattered the air. In a remote place like this, known mostly for its beautiful lake and excellent camping, even in early fall, Clint should have heard something. Even a late boater on the water.
The second thing that he became aware of was the fog. A thick, roiling, opaque gray fog. Not the delicate mist of early morning or early dusk, not the kind of fog that poets waxed lyrical about – just a solid wall of gray, visibility zero. Clint could see the tips of his boots and maybe five feet in front of him of the poorly kept, cracked asphalt road.
It was almost as if he'd been sucked into an alien world where he was the sole occupant, all senses deadened to nothing.
Gooseflesh prickled up and down his arms and neck. Quit psyching yourself out, he told himself sternly.
He was vaguely familiar with the street he was pacing up; Midway Avenue. Now he could see buildings on either side of him, washed out hulks with faded signs that said Sagan's Auto Repair and Mollywood Beauty. Judging from the soaped-up windows and boarded up doors, Silent Hill had seen better days.
What was he even doing here? Clint wondered. Toluca Lake was supposed to be beautiful, but had he really been thinking of coming to a resort town of his childhood to what, fish? Boat? Lounge around and drink martinis?
He stopped short. There was something lying on the ground a few feet ahead of him, next to a dusty car that rested on four flat tires.
It looked almost like a body.
Clint looked around. Gray mist and total silence held. No help was to be had. He took a step forward, cautious after too many years spent in warzones where anything could be an IED, wincing inwardly as his steps seemed to echo overloud in the dead air. If it hadn't been for the sound of his own breathing and his boots on the dusty pavement, he'd been more than half convinced that he'd gone all the way deaf. This was probably dumb. It was probably just an unfortunately shaped heap of leaves and sticks on the ground and his eyes were playing tricks on him in the unreliable light, but he stepped closer anyway. Silent Hill was no warzone after all; someone might genuinely need help.
The hearing aid in his right ear suddenly spat static, spearing his head with pain as he slapped at it until he could turn the gain down.
The thing twitched.
Clint froze. Not a pile of leaves, then. The hearing aid spat more white noise, then began warbling in a high pitched whine without any input from the volume control. Clint cursed and raised his hand to his ear again, but before he could do anything about it the thing on the ground twitched again, then rushed at him.
At first he almost thought it was an optical illusion of some kind. It came at him in a jerky, spidery crawl, growing more visible through the fog as it neared with spooky speed, all – Clint's mind supplied – legs, legs, more legs, at least six of them, that looked totally human except they were attached to each other like the radiating spokes on a bicycle wheel and it – the thing was coming at him, was –
Before he was aware what he was doing, he'd pulled out his gun and shot it. It flopped backwards, legs flailing in the air, and Clint shot it once more, just to be sure.
What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.
He went up to inspect it, making sure to stay just far enough away in case it decided to get up to more mischief. And that's when he noticed that there were more of them, multiple legs drumming in their eagerness to greet him, a swarm of them appearing out of nowhere out of the fog.
He backed up, considered how many bullets he had versus how many there were of them (not enough and too many), and then the one nearest to him sprayed something at him. He ducked away. The liquid splashed on the asphalt besides him, where it bubbled and hissed and the asphalt took on a soft, plasticky look.
"What the fuck," Clint shouted, and ran.
+
He ran back the way he came, all the way back to his motorcycle. It started obligingly enough now, whatever had been wrong with it forgotten, and he gunned it back down the road.
Where he skidded to a halt so suddenly that he lost control and nearly wiped out.
The bridge was gone.
The bridge was gone, and the road ended abruptly twelve yards of twisted, rusted metal over a gaping chasm that seemed to stretch down into eternity.
+
Clint sat in a tree and thought over his options. Whatever those…leggy things had been, they hadn't looked like they were designed with climbing trees in mind, so he perched as high up an ash tree as he could get before the branches began bending under his weight.
He had no idea what was going on here.
There were several possibilities. Some scientist or mad organization had taken over the town and had begun putting out monsters. Or, these were from an alien world. Or, Clint had just gone completely around the bend.
He'd seen the former before when he'd worked for SHIELD; it seemed almost mandatory that every expert in genetic theory went through a mad scientist phase (or was tricked into one by carefully worded grants and fellowships), and it'd become almost a running joke in SHIELD. As for the alien theory – it'd only been three months since Puente Antiguo and then the Chitauri, after all. There was very little Clint wouldn't believe at this point.
The latter, however – Clint shied away from the idea as from a painfully bright light. Not this, not after Loki had stuck his spear into him and stirred his brains like a martini. Not after Clint had played the good little soldier to Loki's every whim, had gone above and beyond for him because it had been his pleasure to do so in a way that it never had before, not even for Phil. Not after the months of psych evals and the court martial, the hostile stares and the whispers in the corridors that only stopped - temporarily - when he'd whipped around and caught them at it.
Clint knew he was damaged; shit, had been damaged way before Loki, and no. Please no. He refused to entertain even the possibility that he'd lost his mind.
So that left aliens, or weird experiments.
Which meant someone should know. He pulled out his cell, and after only a short hesitation, put the battery back in. When it started up again, he dialed Natasha. Stark had personally given him the phone. Looked at him with serious eyes, dark circles underlining each like plum-purple bruises, and had made him take it. He'd known, Clint thought. Known that Clint had been hovering on the edge of everything, hanging onto himself and what was left of his life with the barest of grips. Had probably even known that Clint had been on the verge of just….leaving.
Stark hadn't looked like he'd been dealing with things all that well, himself.
Silence answered him, not even a ring tone, that kind of dead silence that meant that the device was offline, not like when the transmission was live and you were being ignored. He tried again, and this time got a weird clicking noise and then a faint murmur that wavered in and out, sounding vaguely like Natasha's voicemail greeting.
It was better than nothing. At the weak beep, he said, "Hey. Nat. It's me. Don't know if you can hear this, but – " he paused. What the hell was he doing? He hadn't told Nat where or when he was going, had in fact made sure to leave when she'd been dispatched to Uruguay so she couldn't stop him. She was probably furious with him, and here he was, calling her up as if he were checking what she was up to on a quiet Sunday night. "I'm in Silent Hill in Illinois. I – there's something weird going on here. Don't know what. I'm going to –" He swallowed past a sudden lump in his throat. "I'm going to try to see what I can find out, but if you get this –" Send the cavalry, he thought but didn't say. "Call me back, if you can." He paused and thought of adding, love you, but didn't because he did but not like that, and ended the call.
He hadn't realized he was going to go anywhere until he was in the middle of that call, and once he clicked off, the phone's full bars belying the spotty connection and his uncertainty if he'd even gotten through at all, he realized that he didn’t have a choice. He'd had no food beyond half a burger his stomach had been too upset to finish two towns away, and had only a bottle of water and some Clif bars with him. His motorcycle was on the fritz, the road was inexplicably out, and Clint had no intention of hiding out in a tree indefinitely, waiting for a rescue that might or might not come.
He hesitated some more, looking at the sleek phone in his hand.
He didn't want to call SHIELD. He was done with that part of his life. But he couldn't stop that part of himself, that small childish, frightened self that cried out at the thought of entering that town. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on – only the looming sense of foreboding.
He laughed bitterly to himself. That was rich. He'd left SHIELD after three months of resentful silences and stares and here he was, seriously contemplating running back to the fold the first instant something weird happened, like a child running away from home in a pique of temper then turning back at the end of the street.
He didn't bother questioning when things had changed, when he'd gotten used to having people at his back. He knew.
He shoved down thoughts of blue eyes and laughter lines and a thin rill of blood, crimson against shocky pale skin that had run down to soak into the previously pristine ivory white collar, locked it back down into that tightly kept part of himself.
It got easier each time he did it.
+
The interstate looped around the lake and the town, Clint knew, and eventually reconnected on the other side of Silent Hill. That was where he'd go.
As he eased back up Midway, Clint wished for the first time that he'd bought one of the Japanese motorcycles with their little sewing machine engines that were a damn sight quieter than his Harley. He'd always wanted a Harley, but they were unashamedly loud, all horsepower on the open road and wind in his face, power and freedom between his legs. But on this grey deserted street, dented mailboxes looming up at him out of the fog, every parked car a threat, every throb of the engine echoing off crumbling walls, the noise wound his nerves tighter and tighter until his neck and shoulders were one giant glass ball of tension.
The street was entirely deserted. The creatures had disappeared, including the one he'd killed, leaving no trace behind. This unnerved Clint more than the battle he'd been anticipating would have.
He passed a park on his left, the swings swaying arrhythmically in a nonexistent breeze, their rusty hinges screeching, a slide a hulking silhouette that stuck into the sky like a jagged thumb.
He'd played in that park. Alone, of course; even if Barney hadn't been sent to a reform school by then in an attempt to keep him out of juvie, he'd had been too cool for his little brother despite all his big talk about family and sticking together, anyway. Clint had learned early on that sticking together generally only meant when it was convenient for Barney. All that hazy summer Clint played alone, having arrived in town just after school let out, too late to make friends but not too late to get the attention of the bigger, older kids.
Clint had first learned to hide here in Silent Hill, to become invisible even when in plain sight. It turned out a superlative asset for someone in SHIELD to have.
There was movement. Far off, behind the park.
Clint sucked in his breath, remembering the prone figures that had crawled after him like groping spiders. But these – these looked almost normal. They were humanoid from what he could tell in the uncertain light, lean dark shadows in the solid bank of cloud. He could hear the shuffle of their feet now, coming closer, and the white noise, before just faint hoarse background noise, growing louder. It was doubled because he was now wearing his comm in the other ear, linked with his phone in case Nat called back. The hiss grew louder and louder as the figures moved with eerie ease, steadily, arms held out as if for help, reaching –
A deafening blast of static of harsh, meaningless noise, that rose and rose and in it Clint thought he could hear laughter, high and insane, interspersed with meaningless words –
Two things happened then.
The motorcycle stalled abruptly. A hand grasped his wrist. Heart freezing in his chest, Clint twisted around to find one of the creatures only inches from his face and an involuntary cry of revulsion burst out of his throat. Up close he could see the horror that the thing was, its skin blackened and cracked as if badly burned, multiple green eyes clustered like obscene jewels around one large eye centered in the middle of the thing's face staring at him avidly, two horns like long alien tusks curling out from its forehead back over its sloped skull.
The thing screamed back, a hellish scream. It wasn't the scream of a human; it was demonic, deep and ear-splitting. The hand on his arm clenched and through the leather of his jacket he could feel the searing heat of its flesh and he could smell leather burning, accompanying a pain so sharp that it felt almost ice-cold.
He tore himself away, screaming, knocking over the motorcycle in the process, then ripped out his gun and shot it point-blank. The central eye winked out, replaced by a black hole and squirting ichor, and the creature squealed and reeled backwards. He was surrounded then, he realized – when had that happened? One moment, he'd been squinting at distant figures in the fog, and now they were all around him, inhumanly slender and tall, horned creatures grasping for him with searing fingers that seemed to leave contrails of heat in the damp mist, all staring at him with those lid-less, accusatory clustered eyes that saw too much.
Still screaming, he worked his way through the crowd, dodging them where he could, shooting them when he couldn't. He used his bow at first to minimize noise until he saw that the arrows incinerated on contact and opted for bullets instead. Best to conserve them for other monsters, where he could possibly retrieve the arrows. As it was, he was going to run out of ammo; soon he'd be resorting to beating them with a stick if he couldn't get away.
He retained enough of a grip on his panic to retreat in the direction of town. Even as he began to leave the little mob behind, more came at him out of the fog, but these were scattered and more easily avoided. The insane hiss of white noise slowly faded as he went, the staccato clack of his boots and the tearing of his breath keeping him company as the town swallowed him up.