sparrow // mcu

Stormwater

The rain started just as Imogen reached the city of Spokane. It was just a light patter of drops on the windscreen at first, but before long it had built into a proper deluge. The day was grey and gloomy, thunder rumbling in the distance; for a while, she just sat in her car, parked in the back of a reasonably empty parking lot, and watched the rain slide down the windows. She could feel the weariness setting in from not having slept the night before, slowing her mind and exaggerating her aches and pains. She almost dozed off right there and then, but no, she had to find Barton first.

If he wanted to be found. If that message really had been for her and wasn't just there to throw HYDRA off the scent.

Flipping up the hood of her jacket, she took a deep breath and then left the warm interior of her car for the rain outside, pushing the bow and quiver as far out of sight as she could. No sense in leaving them out in the open. Then she started walking.

She'd come to the main shopping district of the city, more because of the promise of food than because she thought she might find Clint here. She had no idea where else to start looking, or if he had already seen her, or if HYDRA were following her right now and she just hadn't noticed. The street was quiet, most people driven away by the rain or working at this time of the day. The stores looked warm and welcoming in comparison to the deluge outside; the first coffee shop she saw, she just stopped and stared at for a while, trying to decide if she should eat or keep going. And then she caught sight of her reflection in the window, wet hair sticking to her forehead and dripping down her back, dirt still smeared on her face, a lovely bruise blooming on her jaw. Her clothes were cleaner now, though still torn and dirty-looking, from climbing under thorny bushes and rolling around in ditches.

She decided to keep going.

There was no sign of Barton, the whole way down the street, but there was a cluster of fast food stores at the end of the road, brightly coloured and too inviting to ignore. At the sight of them, her stomach finally won out, and she used most of her meagre savings buying herself a burger and fries. The burger was gone before she even made it out of the store.

Walking back to her car, she wondered where she should go next. To hotels or something, maybe, or drive some of the residential streets in search of a safe house. Her chances of finding him, she realised now that she was here, were very low – and it was likely that he'd moved on anyway, or had never been here in the first place. She should really just keep driving too, before HYDRA caught up with her. It wasn't hard to follow a trail of stolen cars, especially not for a good agent like Will, and she'd left a pretty clear trail. She didn't have the knowledge or skills to go hacking into police reports or anything like that to throw them off the scent.

Rounding the corner to the parking lot, she stopped dead. None other than Clint Barton was leaning against her car, arrows slung over one shoulder and bow resting casually in his hand.

When he saw her, he pushed off the car and picked his way through the mess of broken glass on the ground that used to be a window. "I thought you'd come back," he said cheerfully. "What happened to your face?"

She touched her bruised jaw. "I left HYDRA," she explained bluntly, trying to sound braver than she was. In truth, she felt overexposed, standing in the corner of a wide open parking lot with this man who was good enough at fighting to be on the Avengers. "What happened to yours?"

He smoothed out the dinosaur bandaid on his nose. There was another one on his temple, a spot of cartoon t-rexes amidst a wide patch of bruising. How he didn't have a black eye too, she wasn't sure. "Fell over a fence," he admitted sheepishly. "Y'know, after fighting off your friends the other day."