ate it all the way through
an apple on monday
rating: g
characters: Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, Pepper Potts, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Betty Ross, Sif, Tony Stark, Thor, Sam Wilson
warnings: none
summary: The potential for devastation is huge. The staff of the Library's North American branch risk their lives every second they search for the monster hiding on the shelves, knowing they must kill it when they find it. And find it they must; the entire continent's collected knowledge, literature, and histories are at stake. So... just another Monday, then.
author's note: This was tangentially inspired by, but is completely unrelated to, the Library from The Librarians. The title refers to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle. And finally, many thanks to cybermathwitch, who made this so much better. <3 All remaining mistakes are mine!
000 Generalities
“And the long lost travelers return!” Steve’s cheerful greeting welcomed the pair as Clint opened the door to the office’s common room, letting Natasha step in before him. She entered soundlessly in stocking feet, damp boots dangling from one gloved hand and a blank ledger held in the other. Clint followed close behind with the equipment duffel slung over one shoulder as he took in and grinned at the other Library staff.
“In one piece no less,” Rogers added as he smiled at them over his lunch. “Isn’t that a first for you two?”
“For him, maybe,” Natasha replied, flicking her fingers at her partner after she set the ledger on the table.
“They didn’t completely outline the dangers of this job when I signed up,” he agreed amiably and slung his bag onto the table as well. Its thump drew Tony out of his reverie where he sat hunched over a tablet, half a meatball sub forgotten on the counter next to him.
“So?” Betty watched them from her armchair in the corner, her dark eyes dancing over the latest volume of a scientific journal. The crinkled lines around the corners of her eyes caught her quiet laughter. “Did you find it?”
A faint smile crossed Natasha’s face before the other woman inclined her head, stripping her gloves off.
“Oh, that’s fantastic!” Betty congratulated them as Steve relaxed in his chair with a broad smile. “Was the book in bad shape?”
“Let’s just say Melville consigned it to the sea.” Clint shuddered, more at their unexpected soaking than the exploratory dive that followed it. Despite the long drive back his socks were still squishing inside in his boots. “Coulson thinks he can have it fully restored in a couple of years, though, so it’s not too bad.”
“Fine, fine, great, how did the Mod 3 perform?” Tony flapped a hand at the details of the recovery and rose from his bar stool, advancing eagerly towards Clint. “As much as you two look like drowned cats, please tell me you didn’t get it wet. Barton, I know that face, that is not a good face, what have you done now?”
In response Clint extracted a mangled piece of wires and LEDs from the duffel and held it out to Stark. The engineer took it gingerly and turned it over as salt water dripped onto the floor, making distressed noises at the wreckage.
“I leave you with prototypes for two weeks and this is what happens? How did you even - forget it, I don’t want to know. What in the world did the bad archer do to you?” He asked the sad remains.
“The good news is it died after leading us to The Isle of the Cross.”
“You couldn't be more wrong. ’Good news’ would be, ‘Hey, Tony, the Mod 3 worked perfectly and we’re returning it in the exact same condition that we took it out in, thanks for all your hard work.’ This is not good news.” Tony began untangling the twisted wires, picking out shards of plastic from what had, at one point, been the device’s interior electronics.
“Maybe they should invite you to edit the dictionary next time around,” Clint began before pausing, diverted by Betty’s odd stillness. The brunette Reader had exchanged her journal for the ledger Natasha had brought in with a murmured, “I’ll take care of this for you.” Rather than turning to leave, though, she hesitated. A tiny crease formed between her eyebrows.
“Is this from the acquisition stacks?” Her fingertips still brushing the cover, she looked to Natasha.
“The Isle of the Cross went in an available preservation room on the side, so I thought I’d clear it.”
“Steve?” Betty glanced at the Reader sitting across the table and at her invitation he left his lunch to likewise touch the ledger. For a moment he merely concentrated, head tipped as though to catch faint strains of music. Abruptly the easy smile slid from his face and was replaced by a faint suspicion.
Natasha, her hands now bare, laid her own fingers on the edge of the binding. Again that beat of stillness, of focus, before she met the gazes of the other two Readers.
“We have a problem.”
“Worse than that,” said Betty quietly, the one most sensitive to the minute variations caught and held by the blank pages. “I think we’ve got a wyrm.”
400 Language
“What kind of bait do you use to fish in a library?” Clint tucked his hands into his pockets and cheerfully ignored the fact that the other librarians were in turn ignoring him. Natasha, already surveying the rows of hardbound books they needed to canvas, didn’t appear to hear. “A bookworm!”
Rhodey’s voice drifted over from the 000s stacks. “As much as you complain, Tony, remember that you could have Clint and his terrible sense of humor guarding your six.”
“I’m touched, Rhodes,” the Watcher in question called back, grinning.
“Do you think a Delta-4 situation is funny, Barton?”
“No sir.” Clint straightened, shoulders rising from their habitual slouch into a soldier’s parade rest. The head of the Library’s North American branch stopped in the corridor to regard him with a severe eye, apparently not appreciating his jokes. “But if we’re hunting a construct in our own library and we have to go through every single new arrival from the last century to do it, seems to me we could use a little humor.”
“Save it for after we’ve found the damn thing. Romanoff, you ready?”
The Reader turned from studying the monumental task to meet Fury’s gaze and answered with a simple nod.
“Good. We need to destroy this thing before it destroys us.” They didn’t need any further elaborate on the consequences of failure. Everyone in the room knew exactly what letting the wyrm slip into the main Library would mean, and under Clint’s humor ran the same thread of tension that drew Sam’s smiling mouth into a frown, turned Betty’s calm demeanor into suppressed anxiety.
“Let’s get going, folks.”
And as simple as that, they did.
Natasha looked to her Watcher, her fingers light on the spine of the first book, and pulled it off the shelf at his nod.
423 English Dictionaries
“Maybe I’m wrong, but it looks like we get a new dictionary every time someone invents a word for chatspeak.”
“If you want to take a look at every economic analyst’s opinion on the 2008 recession, be my guess,” Pepper’s dry voice carried through the 300s stacks.
“Look on the bright side,” Coulson replied, the Watcher’s quiet amusement unchecked by the hunt at hand. “You’ve still got the American commentaries on the EU crisis to get through.”
She very noticeably did not reply. From the 500s, Clint heard Betty smother her quiet chuckle.
475 Classical Latin Grammar
Clint eyed the seeming endless line of books still awaiting a Reader’s inspection, some held there for decades.
“Can anyone explain to me why we have all these books we haven’t cataloged yet? Seems like it would save an awful lot of trouble if someone, you know, took a look at these once in a while.”
“You’ll be glad to know that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Steve called from the 700s. A wry twist to the Reader’s words lent his own agreement to Barton’s statement. “Think of it as spring cleaning.”
Natasha’s lips kicked up a fraction, but her hand still trembled when she reached for the next heavy tome.
824 English Essays
“Let it out,” Clint murmured, fingers rubbing circles on the back of Natasha’s neck as she struggled to breathe, head bent between her knees. When the last of the nausea had subsided to leave only an acrid taste in her mouth and tears in her eyes, she turned her head to rest it on her arm.
“Where do the words go?” She asked hoarsely, voice ragged. He studied her, surprise in the furrow between his brows, the hand stilled on her shoulder. “When we’ve let them out,” she repeated, exhausted, “where does they go?”
Clint didn’t answer. But then, there was no answer he could give.
Around them, waiting patiently on the shelves with the weight of history, the presence of centuries, the books bided their time.
891.7 Slavic and Baltic Literatures
“Any luck in the 800s?” Wilson’s question echoed strangely down the hallway, sounding more distant than it should when the 900s were right beside them. Clint took a moment from monitoring Natasha to call back across the rows, his jaw achingly tight.
“Almost finished here. Still no sign of it.”
“It is not hiding in the 100s, nor the 200s.” Thor’s normally ebullient voice had been reduced to an exhausted whisper that barely carried beyond where the broad-shouldered Reader swayed in the corridor. He left slick handprints on the whitewashed wall where he braced himself to remain upright, sweat dripping from the curls scraped back from his face. Sif had an arm tucked under his shoulder and was taking as much weight as she could, but it was clear Thor was very nearly beyond her help. Pulling double-duty to cover two sections had taken a heavier toll on him than either Tony or Pepper had suffered, searching one apiece. For a moment she and Clint exchanged tight-lipped glances, each one’s impotent anger reflected in the other Watcher’s gaze.
This part of the fight was not theirs, not yet. And yet -
They broke their silent conversation to look down the hallway when the tread of heavy boots heralded Fury’s return.
“Thor, Sif. Good work.” To anyone else the simple words might have held scant praise. None of them would have made it here, though, if they couldn’t hear the deep gratitude underneath. Thor opened his eyes to offer a weak nod of acknowledgment before he flinched and his color ebbed further. “Go get some rest. Sif, put the rest of the Watchers on stand-by. If it’s here, it’s running out of places to hide.”
Thus dismissed the pair continued their long journey towards the offices, an agonizingly slow progress as Thor fought to put one foot in front of the other.
“If we don’t find it in this sweep, we’re going to be in all kinds of trouble.” Fury watched the retreating pair with a mask that could have been carved from granite, his hands clasped behind his back.
“With all due respect, sir, we’re already in all kinds of trouble.” When the head librarian shot him a glance, eyebrow raised, Clint held his ground but dropped his eyes. “We’re doing our best.” He rocked on his heels, still stationed between Natasha and anyone who could enter the tightly-packed acquisition stacks. Behind him his Reader shifted with an audible swallow and roused enough to drag herself up against the metal shelving.
“Four more categories left.” If Natasha’s ghost-like complexion hadn’t been testament enough to her labors, the fading edges of her words would have banished any doubts. She was clinging to the last dredges of her strength with her fingertips. It was barely enough to keep her conscious - and they still had those four categories left.
Fury nodded, the deep lines around his mouth seemingly unchanged by her state. Clint hadn’t become a Watcher by missing much, however, and he saw Fury’s good eye soften with something akin to regret.
“Then that’s four more to go. It doesn’t matter what it takes; we can’t allow that wyrm to get into the Library.”
“Understood,” Natasha murmured from behind him. Fury watched her for a moment more before turned on a boot heel to head back to the 600s, where Betty continued hunting the monster through a pyramid of textbooks. With an effort Clint dismissed thoughts of the other Readers and turned back to his own, slumped almost boneless by the early 880s.
“We’re close,” she whispered, her eyes closed. He studied her for a long moment, judging her remaining reserves with a sense of helplessness he found absolutely infuriating. There was no question that they could not stop, but -
“It has to be done.” If Natasha couldn’t read his thoughts, she still knew him better than he knew himself. Her eyes cracked open, green glass even in the fluorescent lighting, and she stared at the books opposite her. “Clint…”
If it escaped, every word that had ever been preserved here would be at stake. Part of humanity’s past, present, and future - maybe even the entirety of it, if it got into the main Library system - lost, only ashes on an uncaring wind.
But if tracking the damn thing down killed Natasha, he wasn’t sure he would care about the rest of the world.
He pulled down the next book that the Library was duty-bound to preserve and offered it to her.
899 Other Literatures
Her muscles shuddered with fatigue, shaking even when she wrapped a hand around her forearm and squeezed. Clint drew a breath in through his teeth, letting it out slowly through his nose; repeated the pattern, counting under each breath as she groped for control.
“Last one, Tasha,” he told her when his voice wouldn’t crack, wouldn’t betray him. She gave no indication of having heard him as her fingernails dug bloody crescents into her skin and her head bowed down towards her chest. Clint found it too close an echo to how Betty had looked as Bruce had carried her out, blood trickling from her nose and lips after finally clearing the 600s too.
Against reason, against the consequences of a mistake and the bloody war that would ravage the Library if they were wrong, if the monster they sought truly did lurk in the slim volume at his feet and made an escape through words and spines and footnotes to the vast collection beyond locked glass doors, Clint held out a hope that she would relent. That she would save herself. It was a vain wish, and every Watcher supporting a Reader knew it.
It didn’t stop him from hoping.
Natasha relaxed her white knuckles, red nails hesitating for a fraction of a moment before she lifted up her hands.
There was nothing that they had not already said. There was nothing that would change this now. She waited - and Clint tucked the book into her blood-stained fingers.
Words scroll by at lightning speeds, her abilities still holding up under pressure even if her body has long since begun to betray her. She sees each new dash of ink in her mind’s eye and instantly comprehends its litany of meanings, traces its connections to other concepts she has already read. Circles. Lines. Information. Understanding.
Each word becomes its own world, full of self-importance and gravity, before the next pushes it aside and the process starts anew.
To cope with the streaming flow of data Natasha allows memories of the texts preceding this one to fade, trusting her previous efforts to make sure the wyrm is not hiding in those she is letting go of. There are only so many places left for it to hide now, aren’t there?
Part of her knows the exact answer to this question, has a name to give the other Reader left in the acquisition stacks, but extraneous knowledge is an unnecessary distraction. Even her own identity and purpose are present only because the dangers of losing one’s Self in the onslaught are great enough to mandate precautions.
All she has in the ever-present now is her Self - and the text.
There is a flicker in the corner of the words, in the black lines marching along pages with symbols her waking mind would not be able to comprehend.
For the briefest moment in the physical world, the glowing lines arcing across the paper shiver.
For her, it is an eternity.
Clint knew the moment Natasha’s mind caught the shadow of a creature hiding among curling pages. In a heartbeat she ripped it from its shelter and flung it outward, upward, towards the psychic space where the malice and endless hunger could at last manifest as a threat to be confronted. That release sung on the mental planes, echoing down his body, and Clint abandoned it. Between one thought and another he shifted his focus from the physical world into the psychic one where the imagined construct of his bow hummed, the shafts of his arrows whispered as he drew them.
The monster finally found itself exposed - and turned on him.
One arrow burst the jumbled alliteration of a deep-set eye, another the tangled knot of poetry sprouting hard-edged words and claws. But it was an old construct, armed with the tomes and texts of centuries, and a slash of ancient sea-faring hymns nearly knocked Clint to his knees. He drew another arrow, aimed for the pulsing cluster of smeared words and abandoned works that was its heart; dodged another attack, fired.
It roared, a soundless shaking of ink and rage that pressed Clint against the floors of this mental battlefield and threatened to break the concentration that formed his weapons, his defenses -
And a guttural bellow answered back. The wyrm flew half its length across the ground when the ghostly green outline projected around Banner slammed into it. Gunfire erupted to score deep wounds across the newly exposed equation-littered plates of its belly, and gauntlet blasts caved in the Old Norse texts of its chest.
“Took you guys long enough!”
“And here we were, thinking you wanted all the glory for yourself. Whoa, okay, anyone else shaking in their boots?” Wilson cut a tight spiral to avoid the monster’s gaping and ink-stained teeth, his wings close to clipping the elongating snout as he shot off another round to tear holes in its rippling outline. More bullet holes appeared when Coulson calmly fired at the creature’s stained joints, leaving the scent of burned paper and gunpowder in the air.
“Speak for yourself. I’ve got a score to settle with Godzilla here,” Rhodey gritted out as he aimed a massive machine gun barrel at its oozing spine and fired, rocketing upward immediately afterward to avoid a bladed scrawl of mythological treatises. “Yeah, did you like that? I didn’t think you would.”
Clint willed another quiver of arrows into existence and rose to his feet, not at all surprised to find Sif stepping neatly onto the planes beside him. A lance gleamed in her hand instead of her customary sword, the three-foot-long blade forming its head crowned with unearthly fire. She had come to kill a monster, to destroy the threat to what she called her own: the Library, the librarians, the vast, ancient resources of mankind - and those she cared for.
Sif caught his eye and nodded incrementally. In unison, flanked overhead by Wilson and Rhodes and on either side by Coulson and Banner, they readied their weapons and plunged back into the battle.
000 Generalities
“Hilarious, Barton,” Fury deadpanned as Clint spun a swizzle stick idly between his fingers.
“What, you don’t think we deserve a shindig after beating up the big bad wyrm?” he asked innocently, grinning.
“Oh, I’m all for using departmental funds for appropriate occasions. A paper-mache piñata made out of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, on the other hand, is not only unnecessary, it’s also in what most people would consider to be poor taste.”
“We’re not most people, sir,” the Watcher replied, watching the recuperated Library staff celebrate in the Library’s central hall. Betty had a cocktail umbrella threaded behind an ear and Steve was fencing with Sam using the tiny plastic swords from their sandwiches. Tony had taken control of the sound system and was, surprisingly, proving adept at putting together party mixes. Clint had long since learned not to question that kind of thing. It made his life a hell of a lot simpler.
“You’re right; we’re not like most people. As it happens that’s a damn good thing.”
They watched over the party-goers for a time, enjoying the hard-earned respite. Eventually Natasha circled up the stairs and leaned against the oak railing beside them, her healing arms folded across her chest.
“You know caterpillars aren’t actually worms, don’t you?”
“Inchworms.”
“Inaccurate colloquial name.”
“Artistic license?”
She snorted. “Do I want to ask what’s inside the piñata?”
Clint nodded towards an umbrella stand down below by the Help desk, conveniently filled with plastic baseball bats.
“The Watchers decided it’s the Readers’ turn to defeat the ugly, ravenous word-monster. Give it a try.”
Later, while the confetti drifted down and the librarians laughed at the revealed prizes, Clint realized he was more relaxed than he had been in a long time. Hidden wyrms deftly slipped through their extensive security protocols wouldn't even be the worst of what was headed for them. Their jobs were to curate the history of a continent, to hunt for texts lost to time and preserve all that they could. It seemed that not everyone was happy about that, though. Someone, somewhere, had started making it clear he or she wanted the North American branch burned down to the ground. He and the rest of the Library staff would have to deal with that threat soon, and permanently.
Yeah, trouble was coming. But in this moment, right here and now, the people he cared about were doing just fine.
That wasn’t a storybook ending. It was something better: it was real.
rating: g
characters: Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, Pepper Potts, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Betty Ross, Sif, Tony Stark, Thor, Sam Wilson
warnings: none
summary: The potential for devastation is huge. The staff of the Library's North American branch risk their lives every second they search for the monster hiding on the shelves, knowing they must kill it when they find it. And find it they must; the entire continent's collected knowledge, literature, and histories are at stake. So... just another Monday, then.
author's note: This was tangentially inspired by, but is completely unrelated to, the Library from The Librarians. The title refers to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle. And finally, many thanks to cybermathwitch, who made this so much better. <3 All remaining mistakes are mine!
000 Generalities
“And the long lost travelers return!” Steve’s cheerful greeting welcomed the pair as Clint opened the door to the office’s common room, letting Natasha step in before him. She entered soundlessly in stocking feet, damp boots dangling from one gloved hand and a blank ledger held in the other. Clint followed close behind with the equipment duffel slung over one shoulder as he took in and grinned at the other Library staff.
“In one piece no less,” Rogers added as he smiled at them over his lunch. “Isn’t that a first for you two?”
“For him, maybe,” Natasha replied, flicking her fingers at her partner after she set the ledger on the table.
“They didn’t completely outline the dangers of this job when I signed up,” he agreed amiably and slung his bag onto the table as well. Its thump drew Tony out of his reverie where he sat hunched over a tablet, half a meatball sub forgotten on the counter next to him.
“So?” Betty watched them from her armchair in the corner, her dark eyes dancing over the latest volume of a scientific journal. The crinkled lines around the corners of her eyes caught her quiet laughter. “Did you find it?”
A faint smile crossed Natasha’s face before the other woman inclined her head, stripping her gloves off.
“Oh, that’s fantastic!” Betty congratulated them as Steve relaxed in his chair with a broad smile. “Was the book in bad shape?”
“Let’s just say Melville consigned it to the sea.” Clint shuddered, more at their unexpected soaking than the exploratory dive that followed it. Despite the long drive back his socks were still squishing inside in his boots. “Coulson thinks he can have it fully restored in a couple of years, though, so it’s not too bad.”
“Fine, fine, great, how did the Mod 3 perform?” Tony flapped a hand at the details of the recovery and rose from his bar stool, advancing eagerly towards Clint. “As much as you two look like drowned cats, please tell me you didn’t get it wet. Barton, I know that face, that is not a good face, what have you done now?”
In response Clint extracted a mangled piece of wires and LEDs from the duffel and held it out to Stark. The engineer took it gingerly and turned it over as salt water dripped onto the floor, making distressed noises at the wreckage.
“I leave you with prototypes for two weeks and this is what happens? How did you even - forget it, I don’t want to know. What in the world did the bad archer do to you?” He asked the sad remains.
“The good news is it died after leading us to The Isle of the Cross.”
“You couldn't be more wrong. ’Good news’ would be, ‘Hey, Tony, the Mod 3 worked perfectly and we’re returning it in the exact same condition that we took it out in, thanks for all your hard work.’ This is not good news.” Tony began untangling the twisted wires, picking out shards of plastic from what had, at one point, been the device’s interior electronics.
“Maybe they should invite you to edit the dictionary next time around,” Clint began before pausing, diverted by Betty’s odd stillness. The brunette Reader had exchanged her journal for the ledger Natasha had brought in with a murmured, “I’ll take care of this for you.” Rather than turning to leave, though, she hesitated. A tiny crease formed between her eyebrows.
“Is this from the acquisition stacks?” Her fingertips still brushing the cover, she looked to Natasha.
“The Isle of the Cross went in an available preservation room on the side, so I thought I’d clear it.”
“Steve?” Betty glanced at the Reader sitting across the table and at her invitation he left his lunch to likewise touch the ledger. For a moment he merely concentrated, head tipped as though to catch faint strains of music. Abruptly the easy smile slid from his face and was replaced by a faint suspicion.
Natasha, her hands now bare, laid her own fingers on the edge of the binding. Again that beat of stillness, of focus, before she met the gazes of the other two Readers.
“We have a problem.”
“Worse than that,” said Betty quietly, the one most sensitive to the minute variations caught and held by the blank pages. “I think we’ve got a wyrm.”
400 Language
“What kind of bait do you use to fish in a library?” Clint tucked his hands into his pockets and cheerfully ignored the fact that the other librarians were in turn ignoring him. Natasha, already surveying the rows of hardbound books they needed to canvas, didn’t appear to hear. “A bookworm!”
Rhodey’s voice drifted over from the 000s stacks. “As much as you complain, Tony, remember that you could have Clint and his terrible sense of humor guarding your six.”
“I’m touched, Rhodes,” the Watcher in question called back, grinning.
“Do you think a Delta-4 situation is funny, Barton?”
“No sir.” Clint straightened, shoulders rising from their habitual slouch into a soldier’s parade rest. The head of the Library’s North American branch stopped in the corridor to regard him with a severe eye, apparently not appreciating his jokes. “But if we’re hunting a construct in our own library and we have to go through every single new arrival from the last century to do it, seems to me we could use a little humor.”
“Save it for after we’ve found the damn thing. Romanoff, you ready?”
The Reader turned from studying the monumental task to meet Fury’s gaze and answered with a simple nod.
“Good. We need to destroy this thing before it destroys us.” They didn’t need any further elaborate on the consequences of failure. Everyone in the room knew exactly what letting the wyrm slip into the main Library would mean, and under Clint’s humor ran the same thread of tension that drew Sam’s smiling mouth into a frown, turned Betty’s calm demeanor into suppressed anxiety.
“Let’s get going, folks.”
And as simple as that, they did.
Natasha looked to her Watcher, her fingers light on the spine of the first book, and pulled it off the shelf at his nod.
423 English Dictionaries
“Maybe I’m wrong, but it looks like we get a new dictionary every time someone invents a word for chatspeak.”
“If you want to take a look at every economic analyst’s opinion on the 2008 recession, be my guess,” Pepper’s dry voice carried through the 300s stacks.
“Look on the bright side,” Coulson replied, the Watcher’s quiet amusement unchecked by the hunt at hand. “You’ve still got the American commentaries on the EU crisis to get through.”
She very noticeably did not reply. From the 500s, Clint heard Betty smother her quiet chuckle.
475 Classical Latin Grammar
Clint eyed the seeming endless line of books still awaiting a Reader’s inspection, some held there for decades.
“Can anyone explain to me why we have all these books we haven’t cataloged yet? Seems like it would save an awful lot of trouble if someone, you know, took a look at these once in a while.”
“You’ll be glad to know that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Steve called from the 700s. A wry twist to the Reader’s words lent his own agreement to Barton’s statement. “Think of it as spring cleaning.”
Natasha’s lips kicked up a fraction, but her hand still trembled when she reached for the next heavy tome.
824 English Essays
“Let it out,” Clint murmured, fingers rubbing circles on the back of Natasha’s neck as she struggled to breathe, head bent between her knees. When the last of the nausea had subsided to leave only an acrid taste in her mouth and tears in her eyes, she turned her head to rest it on her arm.
“Where do the words go?” She asked hoarsely, voice ragged. He studied her, surprise in the furrow between his brows, the hand stilled on her shoulder. “When we’ve let them out,” she repeated, exhausted, “where does they go?”
Clint didn’t answer. But then, there was no answer he could give.
Around them, waiting patiently on the shelves with the weight of history, the presence of centuries, the books bided their time.
891.7 Slavic and Baltic Literatures
“Any luck in the 800s?” Wilson’s question echoed strangely down the hallway, sounding more distant than it should when the 900s were right beside them. Clint took a moment from monitoring Natasha to call back across the rows, his jaw achingly tight.
“Almost finished here. Still no sign of it.”
“It is not hiding in the 100s, nor the 200s.” Thor’s normally ebullient voice had been reduced to an exhausted whisper that barely carried beyond where the broad-shouldered Reader swayed in the corridor. He left slick handprints on the whitewashed wall where he braced himself to remain upright, sweat dripping from the curls scraped back from his face. Sif had an arm tucked under his shoulder and was taking as much weight as she could, but it was clear Thor was very nearly beyond her help. Pulling double-duty to cover two sections had taken a heavier toll on him than either Tony or Pepper had suffered, searching one apiece. For a moment she and Clint exchanged tight-lipped glances, each one’s impotent anger reflected in the other Watcher’s gaze.
This part of the fight was not theirs, not yet. And yet -
They broke their silent conversation to look down the hallway when the tread of heavy boots heralded Fury’s return.
“Thor, Sif. Good work.” To anyone else the simple words might have held scant praise. None of them would have made it here, though, if they couldn’t hear the deep gratitude underneath. Thor opened his eyes to offer a weak nod of acknowledgment before he flinched and his color ebbed further. “Go get some rest. Sif, put the rest of the Watchers on stand-by. If it’s here, it’s running out of places to hide.”
Thus dismissed the pair continued their long journey towards the offices, an agonizingly slow progress as Thor fought to put one foot in front of the other.
“If we don’t find it in this sweep, we’re going to be in all kinds of trouble.” Fury watched the retreating pair with a mask that could have been carved from granite, his hands clasped behind his back.
“With all due respect, sir, we’re already in all kinds of trouble.” When the head librarian shot him a glance, eyebrow raised, Clint held his ground but dropped his eyes. “We’re doing our best.” He rocked on his heels, still stationed between Natasha and anyone who could enter the tightly-packed acquisition stacks. Behind him his Reader shifted with an audible swallow and roused enough to drag herself up against the metal shelving.
“Four more categories left.” If Natasha’s ghost-like complexion hadn’t been testament enough to her labors, the fading edges of her words would have banished any doubts. She was clinging to the last dredges of her strength with her fingertips. It was barely enough to keep her conscious - and they still had those four categories left.
Fury nodded, the deep lines around his mouth seemingly unchanged by her state. Clint hadn’t become a Watcher by missing much, however, and he saw Fury’s good eye soften with something akin to regret.
“Then that’s four more to go. It doesn’t matter what it takes; we can’t allow that wyrm to get into the Library.”
“Understood,” Natasha murmured from behind him. Fury watched her for a moment more before turned on a boot heel to head back to the 600s, where Betty continued hunting the monster through a pyramid of textbooks. With an effort Clint dismissed thoughts of the other Readers and turned back to his own, slumped almost boneless by the early 880s.
“We’re close,” she whispered, her eyes closed. He studied her for a long moment, judging her remaining reserves with a sense of helplessness he found absolutely infuriating. There was no question that they could not stop, but -
“It has to be done.” If Natasha couldn’t read his thoughts, she still knew him better than he knew himself. Her eyes cracked open, green glass even in the fluorescent lighting, and she stared at the books opposite her. “Clint…”
If it escaped, every word that had ever been preserved here would be at stake. Part of humanity’s past, present, and future - maybe even the entirety of it, if it got into the main Library system - lost, only ashes on an uncaring wind.
But if tracking the damn thing down killed Natasha, he wasn’t sure he would care about the rest of the world.
He pulled down the next book that the Library was duty-bound to preserve and offered it to her.
899 Other Literatures
Her muscles shuddered with fatigue, shaking even when she wrapped a hand around her forearm and squeezed. Clint drew a breath in through his teeth, letting it out slowly through his nose; repeated the pattern, counting under each breath as she groped for control.
“Last one, Tasha,” he told her when his voice wouldn’t crack, wouldn’t betray him. She gave no indication of having heard him as her fingernails dug bloody crescents into her skin and her head bowed down towards her chest. Clint found it too close an echo to how Betty had looked as Bruce had carried her out, blood trickling from her nose and lips after finally clearing the 600s too.
Against reason, against the consequences of a mistake and the bloody war that would ravage the Library if they were wrong, if the monster they sought truly did lurk in the slim volume at his feet and made an escape through words and spines and footnotes to the vast collection beyond locked glass doors, Clint held out a hope that she would relent. That she would save herself. It was a vain wish, and every Watcher supporting a Reader knew it.
It didn’t stop him from hoping.
Natasha relaxed her white knuckles, red nails hesitating for a fraction of a moment before she lifted up her hands.
There was nothing that they had not already said. There was nothing that would change this now. She waited - and Clint tucked the book into her blood-stained fingers.
Words scroll by at lightning speeds, her abilities still holding up under pressure even if her body has long since begun to betray her. She sees each new dash of ink in her mind’s eye and instantly comprehends its litany of meanings, traces its connections to other concepts she has already read. Circles. Lines. Information. Understanding.
Each word becomes its own world, full of self-importance and gravity, before the next pushes it aside and the process starts anew.
To cope with the streaming flow of data Natasha allows memories of the texts preceding this one to fade, trusting her previous efforts to make sure the wyrm is not hiding in those she is letting go of. There are only so many places left for it to hide now, aren’t there?
Part of her knows the exact answer to this question, has a name to give the other Reader left in the acquisition stacks, but extraneous knowledge is an unnecessary distraction. Even her own identity and purpose are present only because the dangers of losing one’s Self in the onslaught are great enough to mandate precautions.
All she has in the ever-present now is her Self - and the text.
There is a flicker in the corner of the words, in the black lines marching along pages with symbols her waking mind would not be able to comprehend.
For the briefest moment in the physical world, the glowing lines arcing across the paper shiver.
For her, it is an eternity.
Clint knew the moment Natasha’s mind caught the shadow of a creature hiding among curling pages. In a heartbeat she ripped it from its shelter and flung it outward, upward, towards the psychic space where the malice and endless hunger could at last manifest as a threat to be confronted. That release sung on the mental planes, echoing down his body, and Clint abandoned it. Between one thought and another he shifted his focus from the physical world into the psychic one where the imagined construct of his bow hummed, the shafts of his arrows whispered as he drew them.
The monster finally found itself exposed - and turned on him.
One arrow burst the jumbled alliteration of a deep-set eye, another the tangled knot of poetry sprouting hard-edged words and claws. But it was an old construct, armed with the tomes and texts of centuries, and a slash of ancient sea-faring hymns nearly knocked Clint to his knees. He drew another arrow, aimed for the pulsing cluster of smeared words and abandoned works that was its heart; dodged another attack, fired.
It roared, a soundless shaking of ink and rage that pressed Clint against the floors of this mental battlefield and threatened to break the concentration that formed his weapons, his defenses -
And a guttural bellow answered back. The wyrm flew half its length across the ground when the ghostly green outline projected around Banner slammed into it. Gunfire erupted to score deep wounds across the newly exposed equation-littered plates of its belly, and gauntlet blasts caved in the Old Norse texts of its chest.
“Took you guys long enough!”
“And here we were, thinking you wanted all the glory for yourself. Whoa, okay, anyone else shaking in their boots?” Wilson cut a tight spiral to avoid the monster’s gaping and ink-stained teeth, his wings close to clipping the elongating snout as he shot off another round to tear holes in its rippling outline. More bullet holes appeared when Coulson calmly fired at the creature’s stained joints, leaving the scent of burned paper and gunpowder in the air.
“Speak for yourself. I’ve got a score to settle with Godzilla here,” Rhodey gritted out as he aimed a massive machine gun barrel at its oozing spine and fired, rocketing upward immediately afterward to avoid a bladed scrawl of mythological treatises. “Yeah, did you like that? I didn’t think you would.”
Clint willed another quiver of arrows into existence and rose to his feet, not at all surprised to find Sif stepping neatly onto the planes beside him. A lance gleamed in her hand instead of her customary sword, the three-foot-long blade forming its head crowned with unearthly fire. She had come to kill a monster, to destroy the threat to what she called her own: the Library, the librarians, the vast, ancient resources of mankind - and those she cared for.
Sif caught his eye and nodded incrementally. In unison, flanked overhead by Wilson and Rhodes and on either side by Coulson and Banner, they readied their weapons and plunged back into the battle.
000 Generalities
“Hilarious, Barton,” Fury deadpanned as Clint spun a swizzle stick idly between his fingers.
“What, you don’t think we deserve a shindig after beating up the big bad wyrm?” he asked innocently, grinning.
“Oh, I’m all for using departmental funds for appropriate occasions. A paper-mache piñata made out of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, on the other hand, is not only unnecessary, it’s also in what most people would consider to be poor taste.”
“We’re not most people, sir,” the Watcher replied, watching the recuperated Library staff celebrate in the Library’s central hall. Betty had a cocktail umbrella threaded behind an ear and Steve was fencing with Sam using the tiny plastic swords from their sandwiches. Tony had taken control of the sound system and was, surprisingly, proving adept at putting together party mixes. Clint had long since learned not to question that kind of thing. It made his life a hell of a lot simpler.
“You’re right; we’re not like most people. As it happens that’s a damn good thing.”
They watched over the party-goers for a time, enjoying the hard-earned respite. Eventually Natasha circled up the stairs and leaned against the oak railing beside them, her healing arms folded across her chest.
“You know caterpillars aren’t actually worms, don’t you?”
“Inchworms.”
“Inaccurate colloquial name.”
“Artistic license?”
She snorted. “Do I want to ask what’s inside the piñata?”
Clint nodded towards an umbrella stand down below by the Help desk, conveniently filled with plastic baseball bats.
“The Watchers decided it’s the Readers’ turn to defeat the ugly, ravenous word-monster. Give it a try.”
Later, while the confetti drifted down and the librarians laughed at the revealed prizes, Clint realized he was more relaxed than he had been in a long time. Hidden wyrms deftly slipped through their extensive security protocols wouldn't even be the worst of what was headed for them. Their jobs were to curate the history of a continent, to hunt for texts lost to time and preserve all that they could. It seemed that not everyone was happy about that, though. Someone, somewhere, had started making it clear he or she wanted the North American branch burned down to the ground. He and the rest of the Library staff would have to deal with that threat soon, and permanently.
Yeah, trouble was coming. But in this moment, right here and now, the people he cared about were doing just fine.
That wasn’t a storybook ending. It was something better: it was real.