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Winterhawk Wonderland - 2021 edition!, Excellent Clint Barton centric fiction, FinishedAndAwesome
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Published:
2021-12-30
Completed:
2021-12-30
Words:
17,748
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10/10
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378
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Freefall

Summary:

It’s a small hunting cabin. It’s unlikely to have heat or electricity, and it looks uninhabited, but it’s shelter, and Clint is beyond relieved to have managed to make it within striking distance. Just a little longer … a little farther …

It takes him long enough that he would be ashamed under any other circumstances, but eventually he gets the lock open and swings the door wide.

“Fuck me.”

It’s a small one-room cabin, dark and dusty, and notable primarily for the fact that the fucking Winter Soldier is inside, straightening up from where he was hunched by the fireplace, drawing his knife.

Notes:

Apologies to the Hawkeye comic also named Freefall, this has nothing to do with that (I haven't even read it yet) but I kind of forgot it existed and then once I remembered I couldn't think of another title. :-)

Happy holidays to the amazing 1000_directions! Hope you enjoy this fic, which was supposed to be a cute little bit of bedsharing / huddling for warmth / smut but then turned into a 17k word behemoth because I never met a Slow Burn I didn't like!

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: Chapter One

Chapter Text

Clint is starting to feel a certain empathy for sardines in tin cans, stuffed as he is into the very compact overhead luggage compartment.

Maybe now you’ll stop bragging about how *flexible* you are, Nat had said unsympathetically when he complained at the mission briefing, and okay, maybe he does do that, but it’s just so fun to see Coulson blush …

Well, karma is a bitch, and karma in the form of Phil Coulson has resulted in 6 feet 4 inches of broad-shouldered archer twisted practically into a pretzel and slowly smothering in his own carbon dioxide, just waiting for the private plane to reach cruising altitude before he makes his move.

Finally the plane levels off, and Clint starts slowly easing into position, trying to get full feeling back in his limbs before he creeps his way out of the compartment.

He’s found it useful sometimes to do a visualization in his head before he actually runs the op, so as he flexes his fingers and rolls his ankles he imagines himself silently slipping from the compartment, creeping quiet as a wraith towards the cockpit.  Murodova, the scumbag drug lord flying the plane, should be strapped into the pilot’s seat so his movement will be helpfully restricted. Clint can get one arm around his head to tilt it down while the other one slides a knife right between the cervical vertebrae to sever the spinal cord  — a little messy, but no risk of cabin depressurization — allowing Clint to take his place in the pilot’s seat and then smoothly land the plane at the target location, returning to claps on the back and general applause from everyone at SHIELD HQ.

Okay, maybe that visualization got away from him a little bit and entered daydream territory, but he’ll blame that on the carbon dioxide high.  Nonetheless, he’s feeling pretty confident as he uses a lockpick to spring the lock on the luggage compartment door and eases it open, one leg already stretching outward so he can start his soundless, graceful glide toward the cockpit.

Instead he squawks, startles, conks his head on the roof of the luggage compartment, and tumbles to the ground like a ton of bricks, landing flat on his back, breath knocked out of him entirely.

And yeah, maybe not the most chill response for a Level 7 SHIELD agent, but Clint would dare even Nicholas Fury to keep his cool if he happened to unexpectedly catch sight of the fucking Winter Soldier creeping his own way out of the opposite luggage compartment, metal arm gleaming in the fluorescent lights of the cabin.

There’s a frozen moment and then Clint is rolling, lungs still spasming.  His graceless fall probably saved his life, the Soldier’s first bullet thunking over his head, while the second one hits the ground where his heart was just a millisecond before.  The Winter Soldier doesn’t seem to give a fuck about potential cabin depressurization, and in fact there’s already a telltale hiss coming from both bullet holes.

Clint gets to his knees behind one of the seats, knife in his hand.  It’s not great for throwing, but he didn’t even bring a firearm on this mission, a mistake he won’t repeat if by some miracle he lives through this experience.

He’s about to make his move when something happens.

Clint blinks for a moment, trying to make sense of it.  A blinding spike of pain in his head, a feeling of concussive force, and now the world seems to be spinning around him, his head stuffed with cotton wool.

He grabs on tight to the back of the seat as every one of his internal organs seems to jump and twist inside of him, attempting to climb out of his throat.

Oh.  The world is actually spinning, because the plane is in freefall, nosediving toward the ground in a death spiral.

Clint manages a peek around the seat back.  The Winter Soldier has been tossed into the aisle, and is clinging to the strut of another seat with his real hand.  The metal arm hangs limp and useless at his side.

He sees Clint and lets go of the strut, heedlessly allowing himself to get flung around the cabin like a rag doll so he can get the gun in his working hand, raising it.  Clint has a panicked second to look straight down the barrel, impressed despite himself with how accurate the Soldier’s aim is even as he’s being tossed against the cabin walls, and then the Soldier pulls the trigger.

Nothing happens.  

A scowl crosses the Soldier’s face, and Clint realizes the green light on the Soldier’s gun has gone out.  Biometric trigger lock, currently nonfunctioning.

Finally, belatedly, he puts it all together.  

“Fucking EMP blast,” he growls, realizing now that all the lights in the cabin are out as well, as are his fancy hearing aid comm devices.

Murodova had apparently earned the wrath of SHIELD, the fucking Winter Soldier, and someone with enough tech to fire a high-powered targeted EMP blast at his private plane, and that would be almost impressive if Clint weren’t about to die because of it.

His stomach lurches again, down into his abdomen this time, and he realizes Murodova has managed to get his hands back on the throttle, pulling the plane out of its nosedive and leveling it off at least a little.  One glance out the window tells him that it’s too late.  They are in the fucking mountains, there’s no chance of gliding this thing to a landing, and soon they’ll be too low to even jump.

On that note, Clint is done hanging around.

He staggers toward the compartment where he knows a few parachutes are stored.  Not standard, but Murodova has made some modifications for which Clint is fervently grateful.  

There are two parachutes and Clint grabs one, hopping into the harness mid-stride and strapping it on via muscle memory as he moves aft toward the cabin door.  Clint takes a moment to shove his knife into the cockpit door lock, jamming it shut.  He appreciates every additional second that Murodova can keep the plane leveled out, but that’s no reason to not complete his mission.  Fortunately a fiery crash will be as effective in killing the guy as a knife to the cervical spine.

The cabin is depressurized enough for Clint to get the door open.  To be honest, he has kind of blocked the Winter Soldier from his mind for the moment, filing him under “problems I’ll deal with when and if they come at me,” but just as he gathers himself to jump he chances one look back, and then pauses.

The Winter Soldier has the second parachute harness on his body, but he can’t fasten the straps with only one functioning hand.  As Clint watches he tries again, unable to make the straps meet, let alone snap the buckles.

The Winter Soldier seems to feel him looking.  He looks up — one despairing, wide-eyed, hopeless glance — before setting his jaw and going back to it, fruitlessly trying to make the straps connect with the weight of his useless metal arm dragging against his side.

He doesn’t ask for help.  It doesn’t seem to occur to him that help is even an option, and maybe that’s what decides Clint.

Or maybe Clint is just stupidly soft-hearted and prone to impulsive decisions, as Nat always tells him he is.

Either way, he’s already moving before he consciously decides.

“Shit,” he grumbles aloud, the familiar feeling of a bad decision settling over him even as he goes ahead and makes it.

The Winter Soldier looks up as he approaches, raising his working arm defensively, but Clint just ducks under his guard and grabs the straps, buckling them at the same time as he uses them to haul the Soldier forward toward the open door, pressing the ripcord handle into the Soldier’s good hand.

“Go,” he says, pushing the Soldier to the edge of the door, and the Soldier gives him one last wide-eyed look and then jumps.

Clint gives it two seconds and then he’s jumping himself, a shallow dive to try to clear the wing and the engines, and a fucking miracle that he manages it, before spreading his limbs to slow his fall while he tries to gauge the distance to the ground.

There’s a hazy mist clinging to the mountains that makes it difficult to judge, and either way it’s going to be a rough landing.

A few seconds before he deems himself the right distance from the ground he sees the other parachute canopy bloom open, a few klicks away, before it gets swallowed up by the mist. 

Well, goddamn.  Looks like the Soldier made it after all.

And then Clint is pulling his own ripcord, bracing himself against the jolt of sudden resistance.  

There’s a wave of sound that he feels more than hears, and a fireball in the distance as the private plane meets the side of a mountain.  No matter what happens next, at least he’s here and not there, Clint thinks philosophically.

Still, the ground is coming up faster than he would like, spiky treetops emerging from the mist, and Clint curls into a ball, trying to guard his most vulnerable bits as he plummets down through the branches, battered and whipped on all sides by what seem to be particularly vengeful pine trees.

He comes to a complete stop still bouncing a little, which means he’s snagged somewhere above the ground.  He takes a moment to breathe before trying to uncurl, stopping with a pained hiss.

There’s a tree branch sticking through the meat of his right thigh, the pain only seeming to catch up with him fully once he catches sight of it.

“Fucking hell,” Clint grumbles, taking a moment to think it through.  If he pulls it the bleeding is going to start.  His comms are dead, which means his trackers are dead.  He’s got no way to communicate his position, and the odds of an exhaustive search turning him up a good distance from the crash site before he dies of hypothermia or blood loss seem to be pretty slim.

He takes a few moments to curse his luck, both good and bad, before unsheathing his backup knife and sawing away at the branch.  The angle is awkward and the way the branch jostles as he saws at it hurts like hell, but he manages to get it cut short enough so that he can let his leg hang, gauging the damage to his body otherwise.

He squints down.  He’s only about twelve feet from the ground.  He’ll have to climb it.

He clings to the tree as best as he can with one hand while he saws at the parachute risers that are keeping him dangling.

With a sudden snap the last one breaks, and he feels his grip on the tree slipping.

“Oh, fuck,” he has time to say, sheathing the knife and trying to grab the tree with his other hand just a little too late.  His fist grips around nothing but pine needles as he falls through the branches, hitting every single one on the way, before thumping to his back in the midst of scrubby vegetation and what are probably the pointiest rocks in the area.

“Sonuva bitch,” he wheezes.