An Unlikely Romance - The Avengers (Part 2)

America's Asshole

The night air was cold when it filtered in through the window that didn't properly seal. You could have afforded a nicer hotel room by now, but dealing with a slight breeze in your room in order to save a few bucks every night added up pretty quickly. Honestly, things were looking a lot less bleak for you than they had just a few short weeks ago.

With a prepaid smartphone you'd done some basic research on building up credit from nothing... not only did hearing the stories of others teach you about secured credit cards and ways to start your financial life over, but they gave you good <I>excuses</I> for why you needed them. Things you could tell people that didn't involve SHIELD, HYDRA, or amnesia... since then, you had worked your way up to where you were now. Shitty hotels, sure – but you'd had a handful of job interviews over the past week, and you were set to view a few apartments just barely within your price range. Things had been looking up for a little while now.

Which was why you probably should have been on alert – even before you heard the voices approaching. Good things never lasted long.

Picking out voices had been one of your pasttimes when you were particularly bored, but you never stayed around any given hotel long enough to learn your neighbors, and the few times that you did, your neighbors usually changed on a nightly basis. Still, it was hard to miss the voices outside.

<I>"Dillon, you're up front. You two, you're in next. Mitch is covering. Move fast, we don't want the cops in on this."</I>

At first, you thought maybe it was a robbery, or a turf war of some kind. You wouldn't put it past the kinds of people that chose rooms like this to be involved in some pretty nasty shit. Honestly, given how many people you'd hurt over the past several weeks, you couldn't really say you were the most innocent person there, no matter how much they deserved it.

But even after the voices went quiet, you could hear the footsteps as they moved through the hotel parking lot. You'd been able to hear whispers – just bits and pieces really – even back in a SHIELD facility that was supposed to be soundproofed; listening in on conversations a few yards outside the door was nothing, and even judging distance and positioning from footsteps had become child's play over time.

So you knew before they were even at your threshold that they were almost certainly walking right toward you.

For a normal person, firearms would have been far too expensive to afford in your situation, especially in New York of all places. Heavily restricted to begin with, overpriced, too much identification and too thorough a background check required in most legitimate sales... a lot of obstacles.

For someone who didn't deal with the criminal elements of the city on a nightly basis.

You reached into your dresser for the miniature Glock you'd picked off of the unconscious body of a man who had very nearly finished rifling through the cash registers at a local grocery store when you stumbled upon the broken window he'd made his entrance through. It was the only gun you'd ever found small enough you could conceal it in your shoe without drawing attention to it, though it only held four rounds in the magazine.You quietly used your other hand to reach under your pillow and pull free the full-sized handgun you'd snatched off a would-be gas station robber. It didn't fit as a concealed carry... but it provided you the firepower you were now concerned that you would need.

There was a light rattling at the door, only the very quietest of plastic and metal jingling around. They had a key, probably a master keycard they'd either stolen or duplicated from the hotel's minimum wage staff – not that it would do them any good. The door's electronic lock slid open easily enough, but the wardrobe you'd slid over and laid against the door frame was far too heavily to move so easily. You heard them try once, then twice to press it open after they figured out the lock. When they realized there was another obstacle at work besides the hotel's cheap old-fashioned locks, they gave up on subtlety. You heard the lock release once more as a card was swiped.