Time to go

Mistakes

"It was a horrible plan, but it was the only one I had. It was never supposed to happen. Natasha was supposed to come up with a daring escape plan that would rival mission impossible. Tony was supposed to be able to ninja his way around Fury to get you both out. But they couldn't. It was the only way."

"Bruce, can you just tell me what the hell you did?" Clint leaned against the wall heavily.

"I went to Fury with a deal. He would let you go in exchange for one mission executed by the two of you."

"Fury wouldn't go for that." Clint frowned. "He's too smart for that, he wouldn't make a deal to do something he could do anyway."

"That's why I told him I would give him information if he agreed to the bargain."

Clint's eyes widened. "What information?"

Bruce closed his eyes. This was his last chance. His last chance to lie, his last chance to make a speedy exit without Clint hating his guts. In fact he was already digging for a good lie when he heard his conscious offer up the most damming rhetorical question ever. Hasn't Clint been lied to enough?

He had. So with great difficulty Bruce swallowed his anxiety and answered.

"Intel on the supposed location of the Tesseract."

"Bruce!" Clint groaned. "Why would you do that? How could you d-" He paused. "Wait. How did you get that information?"

"I know, it was a massively stupid decision, but it was the only bargaining chip I had that was big enough to warrant your release. And I found out about the Tesseract by accident. I was working on a new design for a spectrometer, something strong enough to pick up even a slight amount of gamma radiation in a city block-"

"Wait, what?" Clint interrupted. "Why would you be working on that?"

Bruce bit his lip. "I became the hulk because a accident with gamma radiation, right? Well, I thought that the hulk may not be the only side effect, that there was a chance I could by emitting gamma radiation myself. Low levels, but still very concerning. Anyway, I had the spectrometer on the roof for a test and when I turned it on it started going crazy, with a reading coming from the northwest. And not northwest as in the edge of New York, like as in British Columbia northwest. The only thing that could be making that big of a reading had to be something powerful like the Tesseract."

"Okay something isn't making sense again. I remember Dr.Selvig saying it was releasing low levels of gamma radiation, nothing on a scale big enough to show up all the way from Canada. How did you know it was the Tesseract?" Clint was grasping at straws, all he could think of we're his "hallucinations" in solitary confinement and Loki's smile when he said:

No one bats an eye when Odin takes the Tesseract out of the treasury.

Could Loki really have been real? No. Clint refused to believe that the god that put his brain through the meat grinder was anywhere other than dead. He remembered the day Thor had came to Earth to tell them of Loki's death, and how deeply it had cut the normally childlike warrior. How it seemed like all the years he had lived were finally kicking in. Clint remembered how the skies churned with thunder clouds for days after Thor had left Earth, and when they broke it was like the city was crying. How hard Thor had mourned his fallen brother. Could Loki have been that cold to let his brother grieve him?

You did the same thing. A voice in Clint's head murmured with a malice. You let Natasha, you let Kate, you let the other Avengers tear themselves apart over your "suicide".

Clint pushed the voice out of his skull. He couldn't deal with that now, there were bigger problems than his pretty well deserved self hatred. Both his life and Bucky's depended on this information.