Chapter One: Hawkeye, You Dummy
Solo mission in India, they said. It’ll be quick and easy, in and out, they said. Extraction team, what extraction team? You’ll be fine, no need for any coms, any back up! An experienced guy like you’ll be alright without us!
Fucking liars.
It was just one hit. Some higher up who was trying to sell nukes to the Russians, maybe the Middle East, too? Clint didn’t really know, and he didn’t really care. All he knew was that he had a picture with a name scrawled on it and a designated point and time to shoot some guy through the eye.
How it had all gone to hell like this was beyond him.
Guns were firing after him, so many guns, and all he had was a silenced pistol on his hip, a goddamn bow in his hand, and a ragged bullet wound in his shoulder sputtering blood across his back, which was all fine and dandy, pretty manageable even, when you weren’t running for your life. It was nearly pitch-black and his booted feet were scrapping across gravel and dirt, slick from rain, because that was Clint’s luck, the luck that it had been raining for two days straight, it was the middle of the damn night, and someone had managed to leak Intel to this dirtbag, Intel that he had a big, fat target smacked across his forehead and instead of showing up and just dying, like people like him were supposed to do, he’d sent in his lackeys, goons with guns to chase Clint down through the worst slums in India and shoot him full of holes. Big, red, blooming holes, and they’d gotten him a good one because he couldn’t even shoot his goddamn bow now.
Good thing Clint wasn’t just some stupid SHIELD redshirt—he was Hawkeye, one of their best assassins, and he wasn’t about to die at the hands of the underpaid hit men of some guy whose name he couldn’t even fucking properly pronounce.
They’d ambushed him in an abandoned warehouse—because wasn’t that where it always happened? Some dilapidated building a good stones throw from where his hit was meant to arrive, and they’d ambushed him while he’d been waiting, hearing-aids off, so he could focus, zone-out and let the world fade, pinpoint every movement in the night sprawling out in front of him. Fucking brilliant move on his part. Clint, of course, hadn’t completely made an ass of himself—he’d gotten a few good hits in before he realized there were too many of them and his target wasn’t coming. Still hadn’t managed to jump out the window before they’d shot him in the back, though.
Thrown into the rain by the impact, face first into a conveniently—and disgustingly—laid pile of trash ten feet below the window, Clint could only roll to his feet, take a breath, and run like hell, bleeding like a stuck pig. And so he ran, for what felt like miles, through the slums, soaked to the bone, soaked in his own blood and soaked in the rain. The roads were narrow, most of the buildings more of sham lean-to’s than anything else, closing in on both sides, doorways covered by sheets, broken off sheets of plywood, or left wide open, pouring out guttering light from lit fires, dirty faces peeking out in abject apprehension as Clint pelted past, mud splattering under his boots, rain flinging from his pumping arms. There was nowhere for him to get higher, no footholds to get to the rooftops, no upper hand, because the people with the guns, they knew their way around, knew the lean and flow of the muddy roads, knew the language fluidly and the people just as well.
Clint did not.
More gun fire, ringing in his ears, static in his hearing aids as he ducked and dodged, cutting a quick right down another alley, skittering as he lost his footing for half a second at the loss of traction, hands scrapping the ground, palms slicing on wet, broken glass bottles, bow smearing with mud as he righted himself and kept going, because that half a second could mean his life, and he swore he could feel the idiots breathing down his back as he ran, and he was just lucky they couldn’t see in the dark like him, especially with pelting rain slashing through the air and into their faces, couldn’t get off a good shot in the night like he’d have been able to if he could just turn and shoot.
