Author's Note: Okay Out of the Ashes readers! I'm back from vacation and while I'm working on the next chapter I thought I'd give you guys a little bonus scene! (If you are not reading my story Out of the Ashes, this will not make sense to you!) This is a scene from chapter three from Clint's perspective, now that we've revealed several twists in the main story. This was how the scene was originally written before I decided to keep Clint's hearing loss a secret by switching the whole thing to Phil's POV. It starts up just after Phil goes into the cockpit and closes the door behind him, leaving Clint alone in the cargo hold of the jet.

Note: I am still working through exactly how to properly portray this level of hearing loss, where it's not a complete loss but it can be significant in certain situations. From my research, generally lip reading is not an exact science… but with Hawkeye's exceptional eyesight I'm going with the headcanon that when he's concentrating he can catch pretty much every word.

After the door clicked shut, Clint started to count. He made it to sixty before he dared to move, figuring it probably meant Coulson wasn't coming right back.

He turned sideways and propped one foot up on the bench in front of him, digging around in his sock until he came up with a small, flat rectangle of metal. He had managed to pry it off of his bed back in his cell and stow it away, knowing it would probably come in handy at some point. That point was now.

He maneuvered the piece of metal between the locking mechanism and the teeth of the cuff on his right hand. Leveraging it in place, he used his left hand to tighten the cuffs a notch, wincing slightly as pressure was put on his bruised wrist. Then he pushed in on the metal as he pushed the cuff in toward the next notch, feeling relief as the cuff easily unclicked and he was able to slide it open. The entire process took him about twenty seconds. With one hand free, he was able to repeat the process on his other hand in just ten seconds.

It was a skill that he had learned years ago. He never thought it would come in handy as much as it had in the past two years.

He was up off the bench just as he felt the jet starting up. He paced around the small space, letting his hand run along the wall. His fingers were shaking. His heart was pounding in his chest. He had to struggle to take even breaths.

He hated being closed in like this.

Moving around eased the tension that had worked its way into his chest, and he was desperate to get this under control before Coulson came back. No one could see him like this, no one could see the effect this had on him.

He had to be strong and he had to accomplish that on his own. He had learned that the hard way.

And, to top it off, the constant roar of the jet engine as it propelled the jet up into the air was grinding on his nerves. An injury as a child had left Clint with mild to moderate hearing loss, an affliction that most people never even noticed because Clint was so used to dealing with it discreetly. Most of the time he could hear fine, but with background noise he often found himself having to resort to reading lips.

Just another obstacle he would have to overcome in this growing clusterfuck of a situation he had somehow gotten himself into.

He had the sudden urge to lunge at the walls, to pound them and kick at them until he found some sort of opening. But he figured the noise would draw out Coulson sooner than he would like. And he still wasn't completely convinced that this guy wasn't taking him out to some secluded location in order to discreetly put a bullet in his head.

And, if he was being brutally honest with himself, he wasn't completely sure that would be such a terrible thing at this point.

He leaned back against one of the walls and hung his head, putting his hands on the back of his neck. He instinctually widened his stance to compensate for the suddenly tilting floor as he forced himself to take careful and even breaths.

"Head between your knees, Clint. Slow, steady breaths. You're okay."

Clint forcibly pushed that voice from his head. A voice that had once been his biggest comfort and now only turned the blood in his veins to ice. A voice that he was perfectly content with never hearing ever again.

He wasn't exactly sure how much time had passed when the door to the cockpit finally slid open again and Coulson stepped into the back of the jet. But he was relieved that when that did happen, he was standing upright and breathing steadily. He fisted his hands behind him to hide the tremor that was still present, but all in all he was pretty sure he appeared to mostly be composed.

Coulson paused in the doorway, eyeing him before his gaze swept over to where the handcuffs still hung from the bar at the far side of the jet. He honestly couldn't tell if the man was surprised by his escape or not. But what he did know – or thought he knew – was that he was most likely in for some sort of reparation. After all, Coulson had already sited Clint's desire to not follow the rules as a "deal breaker."

Then Clint noticed Coulson's gaze skimming over some of the locked bins that lined the wall that Clint was standing against, apparently making sure they were still locked. If Clint hadn't been preoccupied, he might have been more curious about what was in them.

The tense silence lasted for several long seconds.

Then, the jet jerked suddenly. Without thinking, Clint threw out a hand to stabilize himself, his gaze darting around, instinctually looking for a reason for the sudden movement. As he snapped his gaze back to Coulson, he realized the man had been saying something.

"…turbulence." Clint had completely missed the first part of the sentence, Coulson's voice lost to him amongst the background noise in the jet, forcing him to rely heavily on lip reading. Something in Coulson's expression had shifted. He looked… puzzled. "Kid… you ever been on a plane before?"

He must have seen the flash of fear in his eyes and was interpreting that as a fear of flying. Clint could let that play out for now. No need to tell him that it wasn't the flying part that put him on edge… but the flying blind while in a confining space that did it. Not to mention all the background noise which impeded his hearing also putting him on edge.

"No," he said shortly. Which was the truth. Cars, buses, and trains he was well acquainted with. Planes? Not so much.

"Sorry," Coulson said. "I didn't realize."

Clint merely shrugged in response.

"We're still a couple hours out," Coulson went on, unmoving from the doorway to the cockpit. "Care to sit down at least?"

"I'd rather stand," Clint said stiffly.

"Okay," Coulson said slowly, as if he were thinking something over as he spoke. "I'll make you a deal. We'll forget about the cuffs for now if you go back over there." He tilted his head, indicating the side of the jet that Clint had started out on. "You can even stay standing as long as you don't wander. Deal?"

Clint was taken aback by the offer, so much so that it took him a minute to figure out what to say. He certainly hadn't been expecting to get rewarded for breaking out of the handcuffs. Finally, he gave one curt nod.

"Fine."

Carefully, he moved back across the jet, watching Coulson the whole time. He didn't want to miss it if he spoke again. But Coulson just quietly watched, tracking him with an unreadable expression. Clint reached the bench he had started off on, turned to square his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Happy?" he asked, shortly.

"Overjoyed," Coulson said with a flat expression as he crossed his arms and leaned one shoulder up against the doorway to the cockpit.

Tone was something there was no way for Clint to know in a situation like this; he had to rely on facial expressions in order to guess what a person was probably indicating with the tone of their voice. Judging by the deadpan expression on the man's face, he guessed that Coulson had used a sarcastic tone when he had spoken. It was harder for him to tell with people he didn't know well though. He felt his frustration spike.

"So, you just gonna stare at me for the next couple hours?" Clint snapped with a glare.

Coulson appeared unaffected.

"I'm not leaving you by yourself back here," he said. "So, unless you want to talk…" He shrugged as he let the thought hang.

"Talk about what?" Clint said, honestly confused.

"I was looking over your history," Coulson started. Clint immediately tensed at that. Coulson seemed to notice that with the way his gaze sharpened. "There was quite a bit of unaccounted for time in your records. Looks like you pretty much dropped off the map for a good six years while you were a kid." Coulson paused, as if waiting for a response to that. Clint gave him none. "Any chance you could enlighten me as to where you were all that time?" he finally prompted.

Clint shrugged one shoulder. "We were around," he said vaguely.

"We," Coulson said – Clint couldn't tell whether it was a question or a statement – raising an eyebrow.

Oops…

"I'm not the first kid to run from the foster care system," Clint pointed out quickly, hoping to cover up his mistake.

Unfortunately, it appeared to be a moot point.

"Like you and your brother," Coulson said.

Clint wasn't sure if he imagined it or not, but Coulson looked a little smug as he revealed this information, almost proud of the amount of information he knew about him.

"Yeah, and I guess you had a nice, normal childhood with two loving parents and a white picket fence, huh," he sneered. "And you just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run away from home."

"I never said that," Coulson said, his features annoyingly calm.

"You didn't have to," Clint shot back. "You've got that 'no childhood emotional damage' look to you."

"So, you consider your childhood emotionally damaging," Coulson said… or did he ask? Clint could really see it going either way without the aid of knowing his tone of voice.

"Well, it wasn't warm and fuzzy, I'll tell you that," Clint muttered, his eyes darkening at the thought.

"Why do you say that," Coulson said.

At least he could tell that was a question. But like hell was he going to spill his entire life story to this guy that he didn't even know.

"Why bother, you know everything there is to know about Clinton Francis Barton, don't you, Phillip," Clint spat.

Phil's shoulders raised and then lowered again. He either sighed or shrugged, two gestures that were frustratingly similar but with vastly different connotations.

"Well, you don't want me to just stand and stare at you," Coulson said, "you don't want to talk… what do you propose for the next couple hours." Pretty safe to assume that had been posed as a question.

Clint's head was starting to ache just behind his eyes. It had been a long time since he had had to concentrate on reading lips for this long. Not to mention he hadn't gotten much sleep in the past week. He sighed, allowing his shoulders to sag as he abruptly but carefully lowered himself to sit on the floor of the jet.

"I'm gonna take a nap," he announced, not even bothering to look at Coulson for his response as he settled himself sitting up next to the bench he had been perched on earlier, leaning his head back against the wall behind him and closing his eyes. "If you're planning on killing me, just do me a favor and wake me up first. I'd like to at least see the bullet coming."

He didn't care if Coulson responded or not. Hell, he didn't care if the guy was loading up his gun right now. He couldn't bring himself to care about anything in that moment as he just let go and slowly drifted off into blissful unconsciousness.