‘cos no winterhawk. It’s a continuation of the steampunk!circus AU, though, which someone definitely asked for, and if I wasn’t so stunted today winterhawk would absolutely happen later!
Tony was doing something intricate with wires and delicate glass when Clint hauled aside the balanced corrugated metal that served just as well as a door. His head snapped up, magnifying goggles turning his eyes into an owl’s, and he turned to flick a glance at the shadowed back of his workshop before turning back to Clint, the intensity of his glare magnified right along with his eyes.
“How many times do I have to tell you to knock, bird brain?” he snapped, sounding not so much angry as like someone who has had a quick fear just as quickly relieved, and has to let the electrical energy of the emotion earth itself somewhere.
“We’ve got trouble,” Clint said, simply. “Someone’s broken the Laws, and whoever it is needs to get the hell out of here. Fast.”
Tony laid the translucent glass carefully on the metal of his table with a gentle click, and the deliberateness of the movement said everything he didn’t. Clint swore, low and fast and vicious and with a certain venomous creativity.
“What did you do?” he said. “‘cos we’ve got the goddamn Winter Soldier, the Red King’s Justice, strolling around in the crowds outside, and I have no plans to die today.”
Tony pushed his goggles onto the top of his head, wiping his forehead with one oil-streaked forearm that didn’t so much clean anything away as redistribute it. He looked scared, sure, but determined with it. Angry. The expression of a man who’d die fighting for something, and Clint had seen that expression enough when he’d fought for the Mad King Loki, back before he’d earned the epithet.
“Goddamn it,” he breathed. “She’d better be worth it.”
Tony’s jaw firmed a little more and he folded his arms across his chest.
“You might as well come out,” he called, without breaking eye contact with Clint. Something moved in the shadows behind him, and Clint watched as a man stepped forward into the light. It took a moment to place him - he’d shaved all the matted hair off his face, cut back his hair - but the steel-jawed defiant look was exactly as it’d been when they’d seen him dragged through the streets of a town a week distant, heavy iron manacles on ankles and wrists.
“They said he was a killer,” Clint said, flat and still deciding on angry, “They said - Tony, there are kids here -”
“They lied,” the man insisted. “They just wanted to make sure nobody’d help me if I escaped again.”
“Again?” Clint looked him up and down, trying to look dismissive while he carefully cataloged his broad shoulders, defined muscles, balanced stance. “How many times has a man gotta be arrested for you to believe maybe he’s guilty, Tony?”
“I wasn’t -” the man started, but Tony cut him off.
“He was a captive, held by a king and experimented on, played with, and I couldn’t leave him there.”
The words were deliberate, and Clint swallowed hard, a flood of saliva accompanying the nausea they brought. Tony watched him, a little sympathetic maybe but certainly not sorry.
“You’re a bastard,” Clint told him, “and I’m gonna save your life so I can take my time kicking your ass.”
“That’s fair,” he said, and even managed a little sideways smile.
