When Clint Met Laura update

Laura’s father had been one of those books and newspaper types. Didn’t like TV, no matter who shot J.R. or was hosting SNL. Laura’s mother insisted on something to watch her stories on while she kept the house, Father at work and Laura at school, but still, her daddy wasn’t shy about calling it the idiot box. Turn your brain off and watch.

Ten years dead, he was being proven wrong. Laura had her TV on full blast—it wasn’t much bigger than her mother’s had been, though it was far thinner—but her brain was not turning off. She was thinking, so aggressively her brainwaves felt weighted, about the man sitting a respectful distance from her on the other side of her couch. Clint had washed the dried blood from his face and smoothed his hair, leaving only some stitches and a day’s growth of beard.

It was a leading thought. Laura kept thinking about how long it’d been since she’d had such a handsome man over, other than her boyfriend, who was now striking her as more pretty than handsome. And Clint was spending a lot of time with her. It’d really been a while since she’d held an attractive man’s attention like this. Just talking, looking, being in each other’s company and waiting for it to get awkward and it stubbornly not getting awkward.

Laura didn’t suffer from false modesty. She might not be on Tony Stark’s speed-dial, but she hadn’t been a cheerleader in high school for nothing, and the uniform still fit. It was actually unusual for her to spend this much time with a man and not have the topic of sex come up, one way or another. But the man would just not make a pass at her. Obviously, if he had, that would be threatening and inappropriate and awful.

So Laura didn’t think of how to respond to the hypothetical pass. Even during muted commercials. And if she did, they could chalk that up to Stockholm Syndrome.

“So wait,” Clint said, troublesomely focusing on the TV set. Usually, Laura would think the intensity with which he regarded it was him trying to keep his mind off other things, but in his case, she thought he might honestly look at everything like that. Banana peels. Small dogs. Typewriters. “It’s a singing competition—but you watch it for people who aren’t any good at singing?”

“Yes! Seriously, you’ve never watched American Idol?”

“I kinda keep busy. And the British guy, he makes fun of amateur singers for not being good at singing? Seems kinda mean.”

“Don’t you kill people for the government?”

Clint was all of a sudden boyishly defensive, like he’d broken a window playing fastball. “Yeah, but I don’t criticize people while I’m doing it. I don’t shoot people and call their sisters sluts…”

Laura laughed. It felt good to just laugh with a guy. Uncomplicated. Breaking up with David suddenly felt like clearing a minefield. “You know something? You’re pretty nice.”

“If you say so.”

“Nicest person who’s ever kidnapped me.”

“Nicest person I’ve ever kidnapped.”

Laura touched her heart. “Awwww.”

“Seriously, you’re handling this great.”

“Is that a good review on Hostage Takers Monthly I hear?”

Clint cocked his head, listening. He muted the TV. Then immediately unmuted it. “They’ve found us. Six guys, they have the place surrounded. Do you have any weapons?”

“…if this is a joke, it’s nowhere near as good as my Hostage Takers Monthly gag.

“Any chance you’ve got a bow and arrow? I’ll settle for a crossbow.”

“Yeah, I used to draw in high school. I still have my set somewhere in the closet.”

Clint stared at her like he was a kid and she was a Disney movie. ”You may be the second perfect woman I’ve met in my life.”

“You’ve met Gillian Anderson?”

The front door of Laura’s apartment shook, battered by fists that sounded like they could be the size of country hams. Clint moved fast, stripping off his vest and—did he need all those muscles or were some of them spares?

He threw the vest around Laura, still while being bare-chested. “Bulletproof. Keep your head down, no sudden movements. And here.” He handed her his pistol. “Don’t use that unless you absolutely have to; otherwise you’ll probably hit me.”

“How do you know I don’t want to hit you?”

Clint paused a moment. “I didn’t think of that.” He shrugged. “Please don’t.” The door shook harder, now with added jabs in their own language that Laura was too afraid to translate. “And don’t get that.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “Obviously.” Though the thought occurred to her that she was now wielding a firearm on behalf of someone who was kidnapping her, a potentially dangerous psychopath, and there could be very nice men at the door, trying to help her. With Kazakh obscenities and grievous damage against her door.

Laura’s apartment was basically one large cross. There was a long hallway with the front door at one end and the backdoor at the other. On the left side of the hallway, midway between either door, was the bedroom suite and bathroom. Opposite it on the right side was the living room and kitchenette where Laura was somewhat imprisoned. It occurred to Laura that they could go out the back—or at least, she could, if she could find a way to break the knot around her ankles—but then she figured the bad guys would have to have that covered.

Clint tossed her bedroom with some kind of land speed record, finding her bow in back of her closet, stringing it, and throwing the quiver over his shoulder. He took up a position in the doorway joining the hallway to her bedroom, arrow nocked, bowstring drawn back. Laura had been an archer all through high school and into college, until it got lost in the malaise of post-grad life. She knew how hard it was to hold a bowstring at full tautness, but Clint gave no indication of strain. He made it look effortless to hold a thirty pound draw as the minutes dragged on, the banging at the door growing more frantic, the shouted words louder, the unquantifiable feeling of blood in the air growing and burgeoning and pushing out all peace.

Laura felt herself gripped by a humid sweat, her clothes growing drenched, then pulling suffocatingly to her body, pushing in on her lungs so every breath delivered less and less air. She was hyperventilating. She was drowning in oxygen, and the only thing that seemed to keep her sane was how calm Clint was, almost bored, the muscles thrumming in his arms and shoulders like struck piano wires, beads of sweat clouding in and darkening his hair, but the exertion, the tension never reached his eyes. He was aimed at the backdoor, statue-still, only moving once, with the economy of movement you’d see in a samurai’s sword slash. When the pounding stopped, Clint’s head turned to Laura like clipped wire. He mouthed stay down. Then the backdoor exploded.

Clint was already loosing his bow before the smoke had even cleared, but apparently whoever was breaching was right on the heels of the blast, because Laura heard an almost disgusted grunt from the smoke. Laura knew he was dead. She just knew.

At the same moment, a shower of bullets ventilated the front door, passing right through it to whiz angrily down the hallway, a swarm of hornets that mostly nested in the archway Clint was sheltered behind. He had another arrow nocked, just like that. It was like magic.

“That was a good move, guys,” Clint called over the roar of the gunfire. “Great timing.” He faced Laura again. She didn’t know how she noticed him, with a hail of gunfire feeding her front door into a woodchipper, but she felt his eyes on her and looked and apparently he’d been trying to get her attention.

He mouthed something she didn’t get. She shook her head. He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pointed it upward. She shook her head again. He cupped his hand behind his ear and—honestly, what was finger gun at the ceiling supposed to—oh.

Laura pointed the pistol at the ceiling and fired a few rounds. Assuming Clint was returning fire, the gunfire at the front door paused. Clint swooped out into the hallway, arrow aimed at the front door. When the machine gunner broke cover again, Clint loosed an arrow. Nocked another, loosed it too, just as fast. This time, someone screamed. Clint nocked another but didn’t fire. Just held it, eyes scanning rapidly over the shreds of the front door.

“Three?” Laura asked. He nodded. “You said four.”

Clint was suddenly in motion; it was a bit like a nature program, when the lion got tired of the nearly motionless stalking crap and just ran full-on for a gazelle. He flew past her, into the kitchenette, the window over the sink, jumped, punched—his fist crashed through the glass and Laura heard someone gasp as they went down.

“Four,” Clint said, pulling back inside. “You okay?”

He’d taken off his bulletproof vest and she was wearing it and it smelled like sweat and gunpowder and she felt like she was the head cheerleader wearing the star quarterback’s letterman.

“I’m fine.”

And here she’d never made it past the first floor on the pyramid.

“I don’t suppose that’s all the big scary men with guns in Chechnya?” Laura asked.

“Nope.”

“So we’re not staying?”

“We’re not staying.”

“What now then? We kidnap someone else and hope their apartment has three beds?”

Clint checked his watch. “Exfil’s inbound. If we leave now, we won’t have to wait long at the rendezvous point.”

“Won’t we be… exposed?”

Clint looked down at his chest and, somewhat chagrinned, picked up his jacket from where he’d draped it over her easy chair. He zipped it up over his bare skin. “Yeah, well, at least we’ll be moving. And you’ll get to see what a SHIELD chapterhouse looks like.”

Oh, God, he was already asking her to move in with him.