fortress | kate bishop

eighteen.

2024
Manhattan, New York

Kate Bishop was going to be in so much trouble with her girlfriend when she got home, but none of that mattered because Hawkeye was standing in front of her! Sure, he was like five seconds away from punching her in the face, but Kate would be okay with it because it was Hawkeye.

"Who the hell are you?" Clint asked as he lowered his fist.

"I'm Kate Bishop!" she says, "Um you may know my girlfriend. Anya? Natasha's younger sister?"

"Yeah, I know her," Clint mutters, "She's been bugging me about meeting you." Clint looks down at the mask in his hand and sighs as he holds it up to Kate, "Where the hell did you get this suit?"

Kate could hear the sirens in the distance, and she felt overcome with panic. Were they going to come after her for what she did? She was already in enough trouble with her mom, she couldn't get into anymore.

Clint could see the panic on her face and sighed once more, "Look we have to get you out of here, it's not safe for you to be in this. I'm assuming you live near here?"

"Yeah," Kate answers nodding my head, "But – but Anya might be home and she cannot see me like this. She might get mad at me, and she might tell my mom since they're best friends now. Also, I saw a dead body tonight? It was my first."

The dead body that Kate had been referring to was that of Armand Duquesne III. She'd found him in his brownstone lying face down with a stab in the back that looked too big to be a knife but was identical to that of a sword.

That body had also been discovered by Anya who had hacked into the NYPD's computer database and had found the photos as they'd been uploaded into the crime database. She clicked through the pictures surprised.

She'd expected the copycat to lure Ronin out of the shadows, but she hadn't expected it to lead him to kill again. If this was his work, which it appeared to be since the stab wound appeared to match that of the other victims of Ronin, then Anya could draw the conclusion that Ronin was here in New York.

She ran a quick scan to see if the stab wounds were a match with her software and then quickly closed her laptop as the software ran in the background.

She could feel herself getting hyper-fixated on the case and she knew that wasn't good, especially not around Christmas time. She was on break from her stressful first semester at journalism school and she really just needed to relax.

She hears the jangle of keys in the front door, and she leans over the side of the bed to look into the hallway. When the door opens it isn't Kate who enters but rather Reagan. Anya sighs as she leans back on the bed.

"You know that key is for emergencies only," Anya says.

"This is an emergency," Reagan says as she takes her coat off and kicks off her shoes, and makes her way toward Anya's room. She pauses when she notices the dog laying on the floor, "When did you get a dog?"

"Tonight," Anya answers, "I'm waiting on Kate to get home before I name him."

"Aw," Reagan says as she jumps on the bed and lays down beside Anya, "Okay so Kennedy wants to have family dinner tomorrow."

"I thought we were having family dinner on Christmas? When our parents got in town," Anya says.

"Well, Kennedy wants to have a whole bunch of family dinners. Twelve to be exact, like the twelve days of Christmas," Reagan says shaking her head, "She's always been like this around Christmas time but like it's worse because it's the first Christmas with everyone."