Reed Richards

Clint had carefully aimed the shot with hopes of it being a clean and quick kill, to put… whatever it was out of its misery while keeping himself safe in turn. But when the beast stopped bleeding its eyes locked on him in a way that had Clint’s instincts scream to run.

Bravado didn’t win against instinct when a wolf-bear-monstrosity was hurtling toward you at full pelt sounding like something from hell itself.

Clint was quick on his feet, stealth no longer required meant his footfalls were heavy and raucous as he fled into his cabin to put some measure of barrier between himself and the beast. Every reinforced joint of the cabin seemed to groan in protest when its body slammed into it, a limb ripping through the glass faster than he could anticipate.

Claws latched onto his right arm, biting through his layered clothes into skin while forcefully snapping him back toward the now-open window as he yelped in pain. Adrenaline and stress made his chest heave, his bow forgotten as he grasped at the hand — paw? — in desperation to get it out of him. He was too close and there were way too many teeth involved, the creature’s maw gnashing as its twisted sounds became more defined.

A cry for help.

Clint balled up his left fist and punched down on the joints of its fingers,  dropping like a sack as the claws pulled free of his arm. Glass be damned, he scrabbled across the floor, hissing in pain as he grappled for a specialised arrow in his quiver.

“C’mon man can’t help you if you’re tryin’ to eat me,” he mused aloud, his internal logic chastising him for attempting to engage in conversation with a would-be killer.  

“Get out of my house.”

There it was. Clint grasped the textured fletch of an infrasonic arrow; his hearing was already damaged but this still wouldn’t do much good for it — but it might be enough to stun the creature.

Launching himself to his feet fluidly, the archer jammed the arrowhead into the windowsill, wincing as it activated with an awful cacophony.

Reed would have laughed at the flippant command to get out of the half mangled cabin, if he possessed both the wits and vocal chords to do so. The harsh jab between the scarred knuckles of his left ‘paw’ made him let go immediately. The skin underneath, crackling as the tough, chitin like surface bent under the pressure. It stung, more so than the softer, more elastic parts of his body; the toxic, viral cocktail that had been pumped into him over the years caused scar tissue to thicken and darken like ink spilled over a canvas. His skin creaked like old floorboards. He hated it.

In truth, Reed did not know what to expect when the archer scrambled for a weapon, but a high pitched and reverberating frequency was not it. The sound tore at him, elastic muscles shivering under the audial assault. It forced him back, rearing up and twisting away from his target, before he staggered back and sank to the ground with all the grace of a sack of potatoes. It hurt, in a way that felt like pins and needles were running up and down his limbs and inside his head.

 More interestingly, it seemed to render the virus helpless. For the first time in years, he heard nothing but the sound of his own thoughts. He...he was himself; at least what parts had endured his body being torn apart and fused together again.

It was enough. He could ‘feel’ the virus still bubbling, but it no longer boiled and burned his mind, merely simmered, its howls and cries now nothing but whispers.

He’d take the pain over the relentless chanting of old blood. He would endure it, for as long as he could, if it meant he could think and feel again, to block out the horrendous, burning red rage that had consumed him for years. The cacophony dwindled down and the virus remained silent.

The relief was so great, he nearly forgot he was also in danger. There was little for it, his body was prone on the slushy ground mix that characterised Alaska’s summer climate. He did not have his claws or teeth.

But he did have his voice. His mind, back after so long, trapped in the dark and the heat. 

Drawing in crisp, cool air with deep, shuddering breaths, he looked over at the other man, wondering if he knew his luck of the draw had helped him, in ways Reed could not begin to repay. Unfortunately, his still trembling muscles and the arrow lodged in his chest prevented him from stretching into a less horrid form. Reed snapped his jaws, clicking his teeth together as he painfully stretched what he could to form a vocal range that was more expressive than growls and snarls.

“R..ggg..gr..thhh...thank you strrrranger.”

Ugh, his voice sounded awful, throat sticking dryly to his r’s and h’s. Little more than a whisper.

Reed held up his right hand, as if to ask for a moment, before continuing. He had a lot to explain and little time to do so, before the other man decided to riddle his body with more projectiles. He was still slumped on his side, after struggling to roll upright before flopping back down. That infrasonic projectile had done a number on him.

“It...I...ghhhrr...I they. They! WSC! Skulls. Hydra....and pinwheels. Sent me here, to.to...hunt. To hunt you... hhrrhr. Had me...in dark, in thrall. Left me here with...supplies. No orders but to hunt.”

Each word stripped his throat raw, each word clipped and stuttered out. His mind raced ahead but his tongue could not follow.

“The sound...it....ghrrr. Made the toxin...that they fed me quiet. Can think now. Don’t. Want.”

“To hurt! Want ...to..Help! Stop!...they took me years ago. So long ago. Took everything! Only kept my name, I hid it from them.”

It was all he had to offer. His life, once again, was in the hands of another. One could only hope they would be kinder than before.

He was shit at baking, let alone milling for his flours, so fresh leavened bread was a luxury. Milk doubled up for a few things – a well shaken warmed bottle gave him butter and buttermilk, and fresh bread with fresh butter bulked out his options from his parlour considerably. 

He was no less than two bites in when the monitor flickered. 

The sensor reading; something had crossed his perimeter. 

Clint’s entire body coiled and tensed, the immediate hit of adrenaline bringing a sucker punch of cortisol along with it. 

Sure, it was probably a bear, and Moira had said Lucas over at the general store had seen a huge supposed-bear eat a buckshot like it was nothing a day prior, but the tick of his heart under his jaw and the roiling mess that was his gut said otherwise. 

His motions that followed were well practiced and silent. His first weapon within reach was his bow and its quiver, and the weight of the recurve helped abate the anxious tinge he otherwise felt. He dared to glance out the window as he slunk towards his back door and found himself pausing mid-routine:

— the fuck was that thing? 

Muscles that rippled as if coated in oil, a thick hide and back, a snout more akin to a horrible combination of a crocodile with a wild cat. 

Not a bear. 

Something way, way worse. 

Hungry animals didn’t obsessively sniff around snowmobiles and his shed expecting a meal when the pantry was just a few metres to the right. Every part of his instincts screamed that it was not just dangerous, but very much after him.

Clint slung his quiver and willed his chest to loosen so he could keep his breaths quiet, his weight easing his back door open as he nocked an arrow and crept to the edge of his cabin to get a visual once again. 

Drawing his arm back the fletch kissed the edge of his lip as he carefully calculated the distance and wind resistance, before letting the titanium-tipped shaft loose.

He must have tripped a sensor, for as soon as he made it to the shed to confirm he’d followed the scent trail correctly, he could hear movement from the cabin adjacent to where he was.

Seemed his hunch had been correct, that the one he’d been hunting for would live away from a population. The scent matched the scrap of cloth given to him when he was at the drop zone; this was the one. Reed had his jaws open, attempting to get a clearer bead on the smells of the homestead when he was shot; this time with a projectile moving at a significantly faster speed than buckshot from a short barrelled shot-gun.

The arrow tip was clearly not made of scrap or milled steel, as it tore though his elastic flesh like a focused laser scalpel. Reed howled in pain, ivory teeth flashing brightly in the dim light of dusk.

The arrow had penetrated deeply into his side, just under the crux of his shoulder and ripped through his right lung before lodging firmly into his floating clavicle. Reed swayed briefly, ichor-like blood dripping from his lower jaw before steadying himself, hands flexing in barely contained violence.

Already his mutated body was knitting itself back together, the torrent of blood pouring from his shredded lung slowing to a trickle, while the arrow itself remained lodged in position, the fletching and a portion of the shaft the only thing visible.

A deep, rattling gurgle rumbled out of Reed’s throat, hot and angry.

Muscles coiling in anticipation, Reed leaped the short distance from the shed to the railing surrounding the front deck of the house, claws biting into the timber and scattering wood chips everywhere. The movement jarred the arrow lodged into him, slicing freshly healed sinew and viscera. With a roar, Reed swiped at the window, glass shattering into a thousand pieces, some burying deep into the purple black flesh of his hands. The blood that ran between his clawed fingers seemed to burn white-hot in comparison to the cold, bitter air.

The heat boiling inside him, that same burning ache he’d had since he’d lost everything but his name, reached its critical point. Pain blurred everything into a red haze, the entirely of his self, his very being balancing on a precipice that heralded change. He rushed towards that edge, towards the unknown, seizing on the thin chance his nightmare, the one that started all those years ago, might end. 

Through the broken fragments of the window, Reed thrust one arm though, claws hooking into cloth and flesh before pulling back, jaws tensing, a pained hiss slipping past glittering teeth. He choked on his words, his body too twisted and knotted to form anything but inhuman gurgles and snarls.

The growing part of him that was slowly clawing its way through the dense tangle of anger, pain and mutagens wanted to reason, to ask what the other man knew about the ones that held both of them in bondage, if he knew why he was being hunted.

But he was held back, yoked by the terrible experiments that had twisted him into this walking, nightmarish apparition of teeth and claws. The words would not come, no matter how hard he tried to force them out.

“Ss..top. Caaant. Ssstop.”

Time had been hard to ignore for Clint Barton, his every movement carefully planned around it in the months leading up to and thereafter escaping a high-security compound under the control of the World Security Council. S.H.I.E.L.D. had a bit more than just puppets amidst them from the council – what memories he’d scarcely held on to during his incarceration were of a wholly different engine powering the agency ahead into the future, driven by a need for knowledge of Loki’s sceptre from his time under its influence, and it’s relation to device they called the ‘Tesseract.’

It was supposedly for advanced warfare, but not to deal with the threat of knowing there were indeed advanced alien lifeforms beyond their own stars. Oh no, that would be too pure and good. Instead their targets were the very people on Earth; not even other countries – just the genocide of Americans who wouldn’t bend to their newfound power.

Clint had enough blood on his hands, he was not adding to that tally with civilians.

His guard of the last few months though? Fair game.

In his escape he’d ensured he grabbed his augmented bow but he didn’t like his chances of keeping  a low profile by touting it loud and proud. A handful of munitions for self defence – a Beretta 9M frisked from his former guard, a combat knife, and enough clips and bullets to give him more incognito security as he touted the uniform and passes of his keeper to make his break for it.

Evading the Hunters after leaving the compound however had taken weeks, with Clint operating on very little sleep. Spec-ops, faces unfamiliar to him even though they wore S.H.I.E.L.D.’s uniforms, who kept on his heels at every turn. Clint mostly stuck to rural areas where it was easier to be out of sight and mind of security surveillance, and either hopped state-lines as stowed cargo or by buying his way with private pilots.

He purposefully avoided Iowa, though he itched to get his hands on some things in storage he had there as his home state was too big of a danger zone; someone at the WSC would pin-point it as a potential go-to.

So he instead worked northwest, his goal set on the remote seclusion that only one of two places the North American continent could provide: Alaska. Setting foot in Anchorage caused him relief for the first time in months; the hunt was still on, but he was getting the advantage – the deeper into the wilderness he went the harder it was to follow.

Clint kept on the move until he hit the remote town of Tonsina, population of 78. He kept his head low and bartered for goods with services for weeks under the moniker of Ethan Hunt, forever watching and waiting for something – for someone – to be nipping at his heels once more.

It didn’t come.

As the months of darkness lifted from a harsh winter with still no signs of his former would-be hunters showing up, Clint felt less inclined to keep on the move. He used his connections in the town to gather goods to build his own subsistence property just over the lake still in Tonsina territory, rather than holing up and relying on others to provide shelter. He scouted prospective spots closer to town but instead opted for a small defensible glade that was about two day’s trek from the township itself.

In a matter of days his homestead was built and rigged with essentials, and as days bloomed into weeks in the wake of the Alaskan summer, he stockpiled his property with anything he needed: a well, a fully wired enclosure for chickens and other fowl, polytunnels to grow much needed food, a trapping line, and a drying shack and smoker.

Fortification came afterward – he still had the pistol he’d stolen months prior, but the wilds themselves called for heavier duty weaponry as a Beretta was more likely just going to piss a bear off rather than kill it. His bow was essential in his self defence and now doubled for hunting, but a trek up to Willow Creek had seen him get his hands on a couple of rifles and even a Derringer 22-calibre pistol that was small enough to keep on him concealed at all times.

It would put a rather sizeable hole in anyone stupid enough to cross paths with him.

Cameras or anything relying on digital signals were 100% a no-go; the last thing he needed was a GPS signal being hacked to reveal where he was. Good old-fashioned junkpole fencing helped him set a stable boundary in his glade out to the tree-line. Sound traps were of little use when his hearing was sub-par at best, and would more often than not simply startle game that was brazen enough to come near his homestead, but a photoelectric sensor system MacGuyver’ed to run off of solar and visually alert him of something breaching his barrier was more up his alley. It took him time to rack up the cash to get his supplier in Willow Creek to order some in, but when they arrived he quickly integrated them and camouflaged them.

The first time it tripped the adrenaline rush momentarily bled into panic until he visually confirmed it was just a scraggly, sickly lone-wolf attempting to get into his chicken coop. An arrow through its eye-socket saw it quickly and quietly taken down.

The paranoia of being hunted down never truly left him after the scare, keeping him on his toes, but for the first time in forever he otherwise felt free.

It was still light, despite instinct suggesting it was late into the evening. While Reed has not found the target he was looking for, the faint scent had led him to a small settlement of Tonsina. There, the scent was muddied by overlapping trails of smells, the light crust of snow and ice compacted down by constant use.

Reed glanced down at his elongated hands, claws sheathed so as to pad softly though the town. Strange, that the chilled soil was not causing him any trouble, the oily warm black tips of his fingers still flush with warm blood. That wasn’t the kind of thing he noticed anymore, but that little observation stuck in his mind. Had it always been like that? 

The pale light did little to hide his inky form, as he followed a trail of oily residue, base reasoning planting the idea that his target, his prey would not be within the township itself. His prey was not just prey, but a hunter himself. He would be wary. And wise to the idea he would be hunted as well.

“What the fuck is that?”

 Reed snapped his head around to the frightened shout, head twisting as if on a swivel. A man stood by the steps of the Tonsina general store, shotgun in hand, the sawn off barrel wavering in the air.

A echoing crack split the air, and steaming blood splattered to the ground, oily and dark.

Reeds hands flexed and clawed at the ground, before roaring, jaws splayed out and teeth jutting outward. Heat boiled in him, making him twist and shiver; he wanted to bite, to rend, to gnaw and devour. But he also didn’t. That urge was strongest, it stayed his need to satiate himself. Fortunately for the man, he took heed of that single warning, running for his life, away from the monstrosity that Reed was.

How strange, it hadn’t been that strong before, that desire to fight his baser instincts. Normally the heat, the light, sound, everything drove him to madness. Normally he would only awake when the world was painted red.

This time...was different. Reed snarled to himself quietly, hot breath fogging in the crisp evening air, the bleeding pockmarks made by the buckshot sealing closed within minutes. He had to stay focused. He had clawed back some measure of awareness, he would not surrender to anger or hunger. With a rattling hiss, Reed lunged forward, long, galloping strides eating up the distance until he approached a knot of valleys and hills that lay beyond the lake, a thin crust of permafrost still clinging to the shore. The smells of civilisation were sparse here, thin enough for him to pick up the scent of gasoline.

Reed slowed his pace, elongated nose and jaws pressed close to the ground, not stopping to rest as the sun arced across the pale sky and set low again. The scent led him to a glade, old trees curled together in a thick, clustered knot. Yet his keen eyes spotted signs of activity, human activity. Growling, Reed slunk closer, nose picking up the faint tang of sweat, steel and combustible powder. 

The sudden appearance of the archer had not been expected, and as a result the Soldier was taken completely by surprise. After falling about two stories onto winter-hardened ground, snow did little to provide any cushioning. He could feel a few of his ribs grinding painfully together under his thick kevlar and leather body armor. Where the fuck had that guy even come from?

His handlers had assumed the Archer had been killed by his Target before he had gone rogue, but that was clearly not the case. It was outside parameters for him to engage marks not approved by the Secretary, but as he staggered back to his feet and retrieved the rifle the Archer and the Mark appeared to be conversing. Or, the Archer was punching his Target. Close enough. He’d been seen and physically compromised by the sudden arrival of the other man, and therefore it was within his digression whether or not to terminate him.

He raised the rifle and fired of another round, but the damned creature had lighting reflexes and knocked the Archer down and away from the bullet’s path. It slapped harmlessly against his Mark’s flank, propelling him forward like a horse smacked with a crop. He barely had enough time to bring his arm up to catch the snarling jaws before they clamped down on his throat.

The Target was deceptively strong and easily knocked him back down onto his back, a vulnerable and less than ideal situation. He could feel razored teeth gnawing angrily at his prosthetic but thankfully it was holding, giving him enough time to piece together a haphazard counter.

His free hand produced a knife and he jammed it solidly into the Mark’s eye, twisting it with a loud squelch of wet flesh rending. He brought his knees up and kicked at the rapidly-bruising mark blossoming across the Target’s chest, digging the steel crampons he’d used to climb the tree as hard into the tough, rubbery hide as he could. A breath hissed out from behind his muzzle-mask, eyes narrowing as he shoved the knife in deeper and tried to reposition his arm. Maybe if he could get his hand in those jaws he could do some serious damage, or at least enough to get him to stop chewing on him.

He was well aware of the Archer but he could do little about him. There were teeth a scant three inches from his face and claws in his side pressing on his broken ribs; his focus was somewhat occupied at the moment. The odds weren’t in his favor, but as with every mission he knew that if he failed he would be reset and put back into cryo, or worse.

Had there not been a prosthetic wedged in his jaws, Reed probably would have screamed. Or bellowed. Or produced some blood curdling cry at the metal spikes pressing forcefully into his chest.

The knife buried in his eye socket; while its edge wasn’t enough to cut through mutated, elastic tissue, it was however painful. Agonising, even. The metal blade slid across rubber bone and pressed against the ocular nerve, causing his vision to blur, twist and distort. The white snow grew all that more stark and white, rendering the world into a landscape of grey, with bright splashes of red.

A wheeze like a torn bellows stuttered out of Reed’s throat as he was kicked squarely in the chest, his own razor sharp claws scrabbling and flailing against armour and cloth. It wasn’t enough to make Reed let go; between jaw strength and serrated teeth his grip couldn’t be shaken but it could be loosened.

Enough for the assassin to twist the metal prosthesis in an inhuman manner, fingers blindly grasping for anything to grip or tear.

Reeds long tongue curled over the masked man’s hand, currently wedged in his maw.

That was enough.

Those same fingers, cold and unflinching snared his tongue and pulled hard.

Perhaps if Reeds mind wasn’t so addled or stepped in brutal instinct, he would have fought against the urge to pull back.

But he didn’t.

Instead his dug his legs in, back rippling with liquid power and pulled back.

In a match between organic and metal, one would have to give way.

A sharp pain, PAIN and a sound of wet rending flesh before Reed slammed to the ground, gasping and shrieking, blood pooling in his toothed maw as his severed tongue writhed in the assassin’s steely grip, dark blue blood splattering on the ground, and running down the length of the artificial arm. Thin nerves and blood vessels dangled in the air, pulled out his throat like a stubborn weed.

Reed snarled, jaws stretched wide open, in rage and pain, bleeding profusely from his mouth as he staggered to his feet, front ‘paws’ scrambling for purchase on ground slippery with gore and emesis. One eye blinked, the other immobilised by the hunting knife jammed into his skull.

He staggered towards the hunter, a murderous gleam in his eyes, blood dripping from teeth stretched into fangs.

He liked to imagine the leap he took was graceful, but instead Reed crumpled like a leaf, blood leaking out of nostrils, a garbled expletive hissed out his throat in unison with Clint swearing.

Then again, the Soldier had done more with far, far less against more violent marks.

He took a steadying breath, slowing his heart-rate as he leveled the rifle again, aiming for a clean, quick kill. The thick black muzzle-mask kept his breath from fogging and disrupting his eyesight, the thick white winter gear from letting him be spotted, melting him into the woven backdrop of snowy branches of the canopy. The way his mark continued to scent the air made something like apprehension wisp through his thoughts. There was no way he could have been detected so soon, but, this wasn’t an ordinary target he was dealing with. He had only dim memories of the last time a mark had been so cautious and expecting; he remembered sand and heat and desert wind, a woman with hair as red as the blood that poured down her abdomen from a bullet-wound of his own dealing.

The Soldier had heard reports of the carnage that had befallen the prior retrieval team but he was not going to fail. He had never failed a mission, and he was not going to start now. Metal fingers softly brushed the trigger-guard as he once again leveled the heavy rifle, the prosthetic impervious to the cold. Even with his outward body language heavily restrained the cold that swirled around him settled in his core with unease; the whistling wind and softly falling snow conjured fragmented, fractured glimpses of a deep ravine and a bright flash of blue and falling, falling, falling from his hindbrain.

His gaze had gone unfocused, his body tense from the alien flashes of dream– memory?– before they dissipated. By the time he brought his eye to the scope again his mark had had ample time to survey his surroundings and had moved, putting a tree in the Soldier’s eyeline. He didn’t know if his cover had been compromised but he didn’t move, remaining as still as death on his perch, watching his target’s every move through the scope.

The snowfall was growing heavier, the brief icy touch of each flake stinging the Soldier’s exposed skin as it melted but he didn’t so much as dare to breathe too loud. His patience was endless; he had waited in his tree for hours before the mark had shown himself, and he would wait hours more if need be to wait for the perfect opportunity to take the shot. Time dragged on, and as it did he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. He was unsure if it was from his mark or possibly from some other animal, but he refused to let it distract him. He was a weapon, and weapons did not get distracted.

When his mark finally did move the scant inches he needed to attempt the shot did the Soldier finally move. Silvered fingers slid the bolt as silently as possible, chambering the round with a soft clink of metal. It sounded deafening to his own ears but he hoped it wasn’t enough to betray his position.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

The crosshairs of the scope leveled over the mark’s chest. Quick and painless.

Heart slowed, he waited for the lull in the beat before he took the shot.

Clint had outright said so in distraught misplaced anger when he’d arisen days earlier. In fact he’d yelled it, despite knowing it were futile and dumb and just broadcasted his location so nicely should any enterprising SHIELD bag n’ tag team be loitering, and proceeded to ragingly kick and scrape at the message in the dirt. 

Okay, so he was a little more than upset, but he was fucking stressed to the max. They’d been doing well after the last attack; the barn had provided a great shelter while they recouped from their collective injuries, and Clint had been making plans to go and scope out further east to make for the yukon border to get the out of Alaska.

Keyword: had. His new plans changed to go collect his had-been killer turned fellow fugitive, which meant he’d had very little time to waste. 

Logic told him that heading east was smart. East meant the yukon. Wilderness that was just as hazardous but just as prosperous. That had legal issues when it came to a militarised US unit just casually dropping teams in to go on a little manhunt. Clint knew, whether instinctually or just because it seemed very Reed-like, that his companion would’ve done anything but go in that direction because of that, which meant he began to retrace the hazardous path they’d taken to end up at the barn.

Something a little easier said than done when said asshole cat-man wasn’t making the trail nearly impossible to keep. 

So instead of directly following any trail, Clint fell back on his own logic: if Reed was indeed heading west, he’d be making toward their nearest populous landmark – maybe to turn himself in for some reason or find his own way out – which happened to be Palmer. A day trip out from his former wilderness residence, which meant a few days out from the progress they’d made overall to get away from there. 

And it had been a long, long trek solo. 

He’d began to keep a constant sideline with the Matanuska River, it’s water a vital resource along with it being the very same river that would eventually lead him directly to Palmer, and it eventually paid off. For how crap his hearing was, Clint’s sight made up for it tenfold, and he picked up a very distinctive shape slinking through the wilderness after searching for far too long.

Reed.

Sometimes gut instincts paid off in spades. 

But Clint’s gut was also telling him that things weren’t exactly right – that he wasn’t the only one who had an eye on Reed. He was hardly going to just run up to the guy and risk being disembowelled for the surprise, so Clint took to higher ground to ascertain any dangers. Took to living up to his once-loved moniker of being the Hawk. 

That was when he saw it. 

There was zero hesitation on the archer’s behalf. Clint had a weighted arrow drawn as soon as he saw the glint of metal in his high-contrast vision, the fletch drawn back firm against his cheek as he tracked the trajectory mentally. 

The wind was low. Barely even a breeze. He’d hit the glinting metal dead on.

The arrow loosed. Clint didn’t even need to hear if he’d made his mark (not like he could anyway), the jerk of his target as the rifle he was shouldering fired came back to him in feedback, letting him know the grapple had well and truly anchored. 

“Get over here, you son’ova bitch,” Clint roared.

Both arms rippled with exertion despite injury as he yanked the reinforced chaining cord his bow was linked to. Hard. 

He’d never deny the satisfaction in seeing a look of sheer shock and awe cross the assassin’s face in the split second between the line tensing and then kinetic force doing it’s job to rip the other man right out of the goddamn tree. 

Because it was pretty goddamn satisfying. 

A press of a button on the specially modified riser and grip saw the chaining cord release from his bow (because being jerked into the permafrost himself wasn’t in the agenda today) before Clint hastily descended from his vantage, picking up the pace despite the slippery terrain to try and make it toward Reed, praying to whatever damn God would listen that his goddamn stupid runaway man-cat-friend was okay.

….and bounced off, flattened.

The round clearly was a standard high caliber round but not armour piercing or explosive, so sheer kinetic force wasn’t enough to tear through Reed’s kevlar-like hide. It did however, hurt like hell and no doubt would swell and discolour into a truly impressive bruise.

It was certainly painful enough to make him roar in frustration, lips and flanges curling back to reveal his teeth, razor sharp and glinting in the weak winter sun. And now he knew where the hunter was, he could turn the tables.

Well, he would have, if his target hadn’t just fallen out of the tree. No- been pulled out. By a grappling arrow. Shot by Clint.

Reed’s ears flattened in submission because Clint looked pissed. At the assassin and at him. He really, really wished he could talk, maybe try to explain why he’d run off but in the time he’d been mentally processing what had just happened, Clint was right in his face and punched him square in the long snout.

It was enough to knock him off his feet, snow scattering as Reed rolled back into his feet, growling a warning tone that was more than half assed. In truth, he was glad Clint was here, even if he was not so glad he’d hit in the face.

Not that either of them had time to hug it out or punch it out as the assassin Reed had been [poorly] tracking rose to his feet, rifle pointed at Clint. The second shot missed; if only because Reed formed a long, sweeping, whip-like tail and knocked the archer right on his ass.

The bullet hit his flank; the blunt, stinging pain irritating Reed more than anything.

Enough playing.

Reed sprang forward, closing the distance between himself and the masked assassin, jaws ready to snap down and kill.

Seemed he wasn’t the only one with super-human reflexes; the assassin brought the metal arm [armour?] above his face, Reed’s jaws clamping down hard.

Hard enough that any armour should have bowed or buckled, but instead his teeth slipped and failed to get any purchase on the metal arm. An arm that was strong enough to pull Reed off the ground with little signs of strain.