A Second [Clint Barton x Reader]

I'll Do It For You

Part 3
***
It'd been about a week since Scott had arrived at the tower. In that time, you, Scott, Natasha and Steve had found Bruce and convinced him to help out, and Steve had arranged to meet up with Tony. You'd seen Bruce since the snap, so seeing his transformed self wasn't horribly shocking. But the last time you'd seen Tony had been roughly 7 years ago when you had fought alongside Steve and Clint during the Accords. Then after that, you'd been locked up at The Raft and Steve had broken you out a little while later. Scott, you and Clint had been offered a deal, which you all had taken. House arrest for two years. No contact with the other Avengers and constant supervision. It was either that, or be on the run for the rest of your life, and Clint had been away from his family long enough.

Despite not seeing Tony for all those years though, after the snap, you'd at least been given an update from Steve about what he'd been up too. You learned from him that Tony had been lost at space for roughly a month and that when he got back, he went down the family path. He married Pepper and they had a little girl now named Morgan. Tony had the life that you could only wish for now, and while you were happy for him, there was that part of you that was envious. So when you learned that Steve wanted to pay him a visit to see if he'd help with Scott's theory, it was understandable that you hadn't been too excited to go. When you learned that it might not even be an option to go though, that feeling dread at the thought of visiting him turned into anger and hopelessness.

Steve had called up Tony five times, and he only picked up once. The first time Steve called, he'd been able to get ahold of the man and tried to tell him about what had happened with Scott. After a few minutes into the conversation, Tony faked going into a tunnel and losing signal, ending with him hanging up on Steve. The other few calls had gone right to voicemail after a few rings, meaning Tony was just ending the call before it even begun. It was frustrating. Tony had everything and here you were with nothing. Well, you had Natasha and Steve, but you also knew what you had lost, and you wanted that back badly.

You were currently sitting in the meeting area with Scott, Steve and Natasha, trying to make a plan for going forward while Bruce was downstairs trying to find a solution and get a prototype time machine ready. Everyone was tired from doing their own research, trying to find something to better the plans for whatever mission you were trying to do. Scott was calling it the time heist, which was beginning to stick with everyone.

"So..." you begin, ready to present whatever it was that you had found out about quantum physics. "I looked into the most recent work on quantum mechanics and I found that in order to survive the pressures of going into different points of time, theoretically speaking of course since we don't even know if it is possible to exit into another point in time, we'd need a specialized kind of suit to keep the body from shutting down. But..."

"But what?" Steve asks, looking up and trying to look strong. He was trying to remain hopeful for the whole team, but it was clear that he was just as lost thinking about this as everyone else was. Even Bruce didn't fully understand what we were dealing with.

"But there's no way to test this theory without risking a test run. Which we aren't even prepared to do. Doing a test run could cause it to blow up. And even if it doesn't blow up, that person might not even come back because we have no way to even know if it's possible to bring someone from the past to the present..." You didn't think you needed to say more. It was clear that you really couldn't take doing anymore research on this. Your head was killing you...

"This is why we need Tony." Steve mumbles, knowing very well how you felt about the man currently. It felt like he had completely abandoned you. "He would know how to run a simulation on this and him and Bruce could have this whole thing up and running." Natasha looks up from her notebook, tapping her pen against the top of the book.