10. Rescued 10

Clint was finally 100% cleared for duty at the end of the third month after the Chitauri attack. New York had not quite recovered, and there were still memorials to the dead on street corners and in front of razed buildings, but on the whole most of the world had gone back to politics and reality TV shows. Being okayed for work as an Avenger meant that for Clint, nothing much changed. He was useless undercover, and the publicity departments (the Avengers had their own Stark-provided PR team, while SHIELD had two harried and overworked agents who knew they had no authority to do anything anyway) agreed that keeping either Clint or Natasha as assassins would come back and bite the team on the ass. The Avengers were the "good guys" and good guys, by definition, were not ruthless assassins. At least, not anymore.

To break up their monotony of sitting around doing nothing (because in reality, the world only needed saving once or twice a month), Clint and Natasha volunteered for the much-loathed and generally avoided chore of asset training. It meant that Clint got to spend a lot of time at the firing range babysitting newly recruited agents and holding seminars on mission field tactics among other subjects. Natasha trained people on how to go deep undercover and one-on-one sparring. As ruthless as Natasha could be as a teacher, it was ironic that Clint was the one who quickly developed a reputation for breaking people. But his mantra was always "What would Phil Coulson do?" and that usually meant being an utterly ruthless bastard at stamping out incompetence. Clint did not really care what any of them thought of him anyway; he was an Avenger, he had the Cor-mmandos and Donut, and he lived in a high-rise tower with an endlessly, magically restocking pantry.

It was even more ironic that his history of having staged the only successful commando raid on the helicarrier while compromised by Loki was viewed with awe and respect by most agents. Many were still mad about it and pointedly ignored him in the hallways at headquarters, but that did not stop anyone from believing that it made Agent Clint Barton the most badass of all SHIELD bad asses to ever have bad assed. Natasha pointedly commented that if that was all it took, she would have staged a coup years ago. Clint always fired back that at least she didn't get Phil killed, and that often ended with them bloody and drunk on vodka in the SHIELD training room where alcohol was expressly forbidden. Since no one was willing to get near them in that condition, it was often left to Captain America to come guilt them into sobriety with his disappointed hang-dog expression and polite censure. (Sometimes he brought Bruce along, which was even worse because Natasha's drunk flirting with him always made Clint cringe. For a woman trained in the art of seduction, she reverted to being 14 years old when it came to men she was actually interested in. Not that Clint could claim the high road there, given his complete failure to have ever made a pass at Phil.)

After a while, when things had settled into a routine, Clint decided it was time to reinstate Pet Friday.

Clint had never really watched how people reacted to the Cor-mmandos. He had always been busy keeping his eyes on Phil, and so never understood just how popular the dogs were. From the time he walked through the lobby until he got to his office took nearly twenty minutes because people kept stopping him in order to pet the dogs and ask how they had been. Clint was beginning to understand why Phil did not keep them on leashes inside the building, because he would never have gotten anywhere on time.

Unfortunately, Clint did not have the iron control over the Cor-mmandos that Phil had possessed, and so kept them on tight leashes. Not that they were too interested in going anywhere anyway, with Donut securely held next to Clint's chest in her sling. They kept looking up to make sure that Clint hadn't ditched her somewhere, and when Clint was at his desk, Bucky often stretched up with his front paws on Clint's leg to sniff carefully around Donut, as if checking for damage. Clint would have been insulted if it weren't so damn endearing, because honestly Clint felt the same way about the cat. Donut took it all in stride, although she smacked Dum Dum on the nose when he tried to lick her. Clint realized belatedly that he would need to set up a water bowl in his office, but on the whole, everything went smoothly the whole morning.

Then Clint went to the ninth floor for his first training seminar of the day, and it all went to hell in a hand basket.

The elevator door opened on Deputy Director Hill, who took one horrified look at the corgis and stepped backwards. It struck Clint as odd, given how much she had doted on them previously, but he had no time to dwell on that as the Cor-mmandos lunged for her, ripping their leashes out of his hand. He yelled, she yelled, Donut kind-of-hissed, and the dogs swarmed over Hill, jumping up to sniff all up and down her legs. She pushed them back, but after a moment she didn't need to because the dogs were off and running like the Devil was on their heels.

Clint charged after them, shouting, holding Donut safely in her sling with one hand so she wouldn't bounce around too much. He heard Hill yelling at Fury through her comm, but that quickly faded out as he tore after the dogs who were hell bent to somewhere.

A couple of agents tried to stop him, but Clint easily dispatched them one-handed, trying to keep up with the Cor-mmandos. They sped through main hallways, noses to the ground, until they veered off through a swinging door into the research division. Everyone stood to the side to let them pass, and a few even held open top-secret doorways for them out of habit. The agents then always tried to slam the doors shut on Clint but he wasn't going to be stopped. Those were his dogs and damned if they got locked into some bizarre, dangerous lab just because he didn't have clearance to be there.

Everything came to a screeching halt somewhere so deep inside SHIELD that Clint did not even know where they were. It looked like a hospital room, and the dogs were barking at the bed while a doctor with some hand-to-hand combat experience tried to haul Clint out. But Clint wasn't going without the dogs, so he slammed the guy's head into an expensive-looking machine and lunged for the leashes. He stood up, winded and angry and wrapping the leashes five times around his hand, to look right into the eyes of Phil Coulson.