Time to go

Glass part 2

It turned out that SHIELD could feed Clint oatmeal rations for every meal and it looked like they had no intention of feeding him something else in the forceable future.

So far his two 'meals' breakfast and lunch had been exactly the same, so when he heard the slat on the door open for his supper, he barely lifted his head off the mattress to see the mud brown packet and mug of lukewarm water.

Clint rolled onto his back and shut his eyes, falling into whatever memory could drown out the idea of oatmeal ration packets. Unsurprisingly his brain went home to the circus, to a place where he felt safe and useful.

The memory that he immersed himself in was in the early morning, around breakfast. A time when the circus was still calm enough to be peaceful, but not quiet enough to be idyllic.

He could almost smell the cook fire outside the big top at the circus. He swore he could hear the sausages sizzling as Ester, one the fortune tellers flipped them over in the pan.

The memory was so vivid Clint couldn't help but sink into it, making his cell shift from cold and uncomfortable to his warm canvas tent. All around him he could hear the circus waking up for the day. Performers were chatting with each other as they walked their way to the cook fire. Trick horses were being let out of their trailers and into their makeshift pasture to graze. Laughter and chatter and just simply noise echoed in the circus camp. It made Clint feel at home.

Steps outside his tent he could hear the tap of old converse sneakers as they neared closer, Aries was about to bust into his tent and make him get up for the day.

He could almost hear her voice ricocheting off the tent walls.

"Clinton!" She would say in a sing song voice as she pulled back the tent flaps and let in the piercing morning sunlight. "We've got places to be and people to meet, so get your ass up!" Her voice wouldn't lose it sing song tone until he desperately tried to tug the covers over his head. Then drill marshal Aries came alive.

"Don't you try and hide from me Barton." She would almost shout.

Then what happened next Clint could never be completely sure, Aries always seemed to find new ways to send him high tailing out from under his sheets. Over his two years in the circus she had: poured water on him more times than he could count, dropped ice cubes down his shirt and pants, tickled him till he couldn't breath, put an old gym sock over his nose, taken his tent down with him inside it, dropped a gardner snake on him, put a mouse under the sheets and drug his cot out of the tent with him still asleep on it. Clint still couldn't figure out how she had managed that.

Feeling the sounds of the early morning circus fade away, Clint conjured up another memory of the circus, this one much more thrilling.

He was back on his little perch, stories above the crowd of excited onlookers. The smell of popcorn, dirt and chalk for his hands twisted into his nose. In his ears he could hear the familiar count down. "3...2...1 go!" At go he leaped from his platform and into the air.

For a second he was flying high above the crowds, and for a second everything was silent. Then his hands caught the familiar steel bar and it was like the first time he had put in his hearing aids. The world exploded with sound and colour and light and adrenaline, Clint had never felt so alive. He swung from bar to bar, flipping, summersaulting and twirling like a marionette without strings. This is what freedom felt like, the bright red tent and the hot stage lights, this was where Clint had felt free for the first time in a very long time. And it was probably the last time he would ever feel truly free ever again.

Those words brought his shiny and bright circus memories crumbling down.

Clint forced his eyes open, secretly wishing that his daydreams were reality and when he looked up Aries would be pouring water on his head and telling him to stop sleeping on the job. God,he wished so incredibly hard to open his eyes and see anything but his cold, dead cell. But as Clint had learned early on in his childhood, it didn't matter how hard you wished, because your wishes weren't coming true.

So when he opened his eyes to meet the four white walls that had become his entire life, Clint being the strong, soulless assassin he had been trained to be started to cry.

He cried because he would never see Aries or Zachary or Remi or anyone from the circus ever again. He cried because his brother was alive and looking for him and he was rotting away in a cell that no one knew he was in. He cried for Katie who was probably still waiting for Bucky and himself to come back. He cried for the other Avengers, Bruce, Tony, Steve and Thor, who he had never really gotten to know, but still burdened with his problems. He cried for Bucky who was alone and trapped in a cell down the hall, thinking that Clint had betrayed him. But he cried the most for Natasha, his fiery and absolutely badass Natasha. Because he had left her to face the nightmares, the ghosts and the demons for two years. Because he had loved her ever since before Budapest. And now he knew there was no way that Natasha, after everything Clint had put her through would ever love him again.

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Natasha didn't know how to prepare herself for seeing Clint, so she didn't. She put a single goal into her head: see Clint, and that was it, she forced everything else away.

Natasha just brushed past Fury as he opened the hand scan lock and entered the viewing room.

What she saw broke her into a thousand sharps.

Clint. Her Clint.

His cell was a mirror image of Bucky's, except Clint's cot was still intact.

Natasha steeled herself and navigated her eyes to his face and almost started to all out sob at what she saw.

Clint was crying. Not a silent tear, not a little glistening in the corner of his eye, all out crying. The deep painful kind of crying that left you deflated, exhausted and without any purpose in life.

In all the time they had been partners, in all the times they had been friends, Natasha had only seen Clint cry with that kind of raw emotion once.

The day he found out Coulson had died in the battle of New York.

Natasha remembered the memory so well, she remembered how hopeless Clint had looked and as she looked into Clint's red eyes she relived the memory again.

A/N) Okay so the next chapter is going to be Natasha's memory of Clint leaning of Coulson's death and depending on how long the memory is, some other stuff. I'm sorry for ending it rather abruptly, but I'm trying to update once a week. Thanks to everyone who voted and commented! Please feel free to comment with suggestions and anything you want to say, if you have a favourite chapter or a favourite character tell me! I love to know that you are enjoying the story. Thanks again,

-Brokenrook