Oh, I love this! Your writing muscles are still fully intact!! <3

Here's a bit of mine, from a story I posted a year ago (Heart and Soul):

______



You’d have thought the End Times would come with a bang or a flash of lightning, followed by eternal darkness. Not so, apparently. The apocalypse, it turns out, has a half-life.

The walking wounded are everywhere. Watching loved ones, colleagues or even perfect strangers disintegrate has left no one unaffected. Many are empty husks around the holes where their hearts used to be. Some manage to hold on and get on with things, even take advantage of the general paralysis; others will never be the same and are moving like ghosts, dragging chains that get heavier by the day.

If Clint is able to move more sharply and faster than others it’s only because he’s had to do it so often – losing his parents, his brother, the circus, S.H.I.E.L.D., watching comrades-in-arms fall. The ability to carry loss is a suit of armour Clint Barton has kept polished all his life; it keeps him on his feet now.

In most cities, remnants of authority and people with a sense of duty are rallying to keep basic services running, for a population that wavers between numbness, despair and screeching fury. The attempt works wherever public servants, trying to cling to some form of normalcy even if there may not be a pay check or things to buy with it, show up to work in power stations and hospitals, in police detachments and bus depots. But there are not enough of them to deal with all the elderly, the disabled, the very young suddenly left without caregivers. The dying continues in a seemingly endless series of aftershocks.

Elsewhere, street gangs, preppers and survivalists gloat over their ammo stockpiles, ready to seize their chance to prove who’s the fittest among them. The “well-regulated militias” the Second Amendment waxed on about have nothing on the wannabe warlords now rising from their basements and fallout shelters, armed to the teeth.

Clint loses count of how many store robberies he breaks up on his way across the land; how many small-town diners he saves from a hostile takeover in exchange for a free meal; how many times he ends an attack on a courthouse or other vestige of civilization with maximum prejudice. Or how many orphaned, starving kids he takes to places where they might find food and shelter, maybe even fill an empty space in someone’s heart.

He’s hardly being a hero though, let alone an Avenger. Truth is, there’s a comfort in the pattern of taking and saving lives; it’s like riding a Harley down a mountain road - one hand on the throttle, the other on the brake, but always moving, moving. And the gas is free while there’s unmanned stations and abandoned vehicles to tap.

One place he comes to is a farm, under siege by a gang of marauders because it promises meat and food for those who can’t be bothered to grow stuff for themselves on one of the many places lying empty. When he’s done with them and the bodies are burning on a stack of last year’s hay, the woman who’s been holding the place together for her surviving kids asks him to stay the night, to share a meal.

She’s half Asian, Japanese probably, although he doesn’t ask. Smart, college-educated, self-sufficient – and in mourning for her husband and youngest child. What Laura would be if the Great Death had taken him instead of her, and so he says ‘yes’ against his better judgment. After dinner, the surviving two kids in bed, she makes it clear that she knows who he is.

“I don’t suppose the Avengers could have stopped it?” she asks, looking at him with a mixture of resentment and despair.

Clint just shrugs.

“Don’t know if they ever got the chance,” he says. “Haven’t heard from them.”

He can see in her eyes that she knows he’s speaking the truth.

There’s been no word of his old team, except for that pundit who'd been whining about Ross’ failure to call them in. Ross himself, when he shows his face on TV, continues to be conspicuously silent on the subject.

There’s no way Cap wouldn’t have put up a fight, so the way Clint figures is that they tried and lost, someplace where the TV cameras didn’t reach and bystanders were too busy surviving to point cellphone cameras. And now, if statistics hold, half of his erstwhile friends will be gone. More, if some went out fighting before the Vanishing. Or if the fucking destiny fairy that took all of Clint’s family had another joke at his expense.

(Natasha?)

Over a bottle of scotch Clint had scored from one of the would-be raiders – corpse looting is a thing now, and he’s not above it - the farmer, Kuniko, tells him he reminds her of a wandering samurai.

“If you can’t be part of the Avengers anymore, you could always be Ronin,” she says.

He stays for three days, fixing a tractor, installing a tripwire system, helping bring in the hay for the cows. Kuniko offers him her bed for the night, but that’s not a comfort Clint needs, nor is it one he is ready to give. He does take her up on her offer of a haircut though – it’s been a while - and says nothing when she shaves the sides of his head in the style her husband apparently liked.

But when he leaves, he holds on to the name she’s been calling him, because it’s a gift and those are rare nowadays: Ronin.

Others who recognize him along the way aren’t as forgiving.

“You could have stopped it,” someone says. “Aren’t you supposed to be heroes?” And another, “There were no aliens until you freaks put Earth on the map.”

It’ s your fault, he hears. You failed.

They’re both right and terribly wrong, of course, but now when he does his killing and saving and killing, he puts on a mask and a suit. Vision always said there is grace in failure, but peace - that requires anonymity.