Meanderings of a Fandom Magpie

“I’ll never work for SHIELD again,” Clint answered, picking at a splinter on the table. “Not in the same capacity, not in any situation where someone would have to trust me. There will be an investigation about Loki’s invasion. It’ll conclude that, brainwashed or not, I helped kill SHIELD agents and aided an enemy army. I will be given two alternatives: a quiet retirement, my silence and my pension, or a bullet to the head and a hole in the ground. I’d prefer to keep breathing, thanks, so from here, it’s retirement.”

It took three days for the first hit to come in. Tagged on Instagram as a #celebritylookalike, it was a picture taken by a college student who’d blown a tire on her way to visit her grandmother in the hospital. “This guy who looks just like Steve Rogers helped me change my tire!” she’d captioned. “Thanks, Grant!”

“Grant?” Clint asked.

“His middle name,” Natasha replied. “Look, she got a picture of him standing next to his car’s license plate. There’s enough for a partial plate.”

Clint mulled that one over. “I think he wants to be found. Maybe.”

His apartment, Natasha found, was vacant. Though perhaps it had always looked that way; it certainly lacked any sign, save the lone cup and plate drying on the counter, that anyone lived here. She quickly silenced the bugs (her later report would blame this on a “mechanical malfunction”) and saw the spotless bedroom, the clean, unwrinkled bedding as a sign, and not a good one. Steve Rogers may have lived here, but he hadn’t been alive here. There were no signs of someone who was sleeping well enough or long enough to rumple a pillow. No pictures on the wall, nothing out of order the way a lived-in place would get.