A/N: Well I just saw Age of Ultron and I have major Pietro angst. So here's a crappy, short one shot I wrote at eleven o'clock at night.

child's play
A Lily By Any Other Name

It was then, after the hail of bullets, that Clint maybe regretted contemplating to shoot the cocky bastard.

The speedster lay in a halo of dust and debris. Growing splotches of rich, red blood seeped through his clothes like a marker bleeding off a sheet of paper. There would be no amount of modern medicine—no hope, no prayer—that would save the bleeding, dying boy agonizing on the ground.

Clint let the child he had been shielding run back to his mother. The poor woman was waiting for her son on one of the packed boats. Maybe Clint ran to get the boy because he was a father, because it reminded him of his own children. Maybe he did it because it was his duty as an Avenger. He'd had every reason—every excuse, every pretext—to rescue that kid from the rubble that damn robot had caused.

But Pietro didn't have any.

He was a kid, he was a punk; an all-too-naïve adult that had been forced to grow up too soon, but hadn't yet found the maturity to make good choices. He'd given off quite the nasty first impression of an arrogant fuck that didn't know his own limitations. That ambiguity, the flightiness…Clint knew he was no one to speak of morality, but the only thing he saw in Quicksilver was a kid who didn't know what he was getting himself into. He was a child desperately trying to be an adult both for himself and for his sister, but his efforts were falling short.

If Pietro wasn't dead by then, he certainly should have been by the time Clint dragged himself over to him. Pietro's chest rose and fell almost minutely as he struggled to gasp for air. His eyes were rapidly closing as if his eyelids were too heavy for him. He didn't have much time left.

And for once, words failed Clint.

Quicksilver looked small and frail in his state of dying. He was a skinny thing—not exactly scrawny, but the lean, rippling muscles that powered his running betrayed him now. The sardonic lines of indifference that had made him look years older had faded into soft, subtle edges upon his face. There were no laugh lines around his lips, but there was only so much to be had from a perpetual shit-eating grin. He looked like what he was: a boy.

But that was the thing. Pietro Maximoff had been nothing short of a kid, of a boy playing soldier. He didn't deserve to die a man's death. But he had, and he did; he, Pietro Maximoff, the arrogant, cocky, S.O.B, had sacrificed himself for a stranger and a guy who wanted to kill him just two hours prior. He'd let himself die so Clint could live to see another day, so that kid could go back to his family, so that Clint could return to his own.

Perhaps that was why Clint Barton no longer considered Pietro Maximoff a child at play, but instead a man who had just gone out as a hero.

A/N: Bring Back Pietro Maximoff 2k15.