Summary: What happened after Hawkeye ran out of arrows and crashed through the window? Maybe he met a tiny, angry, civil engineer with a thing about air ducts…
Rating: M
Word Count: 100,402
Status: Complete
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10597530/1/Through-A-Glass-Darkly
Chapter 1: Crash
This is going to hurt. This is going to really hurt. Fuck, I hope that glass isn't bulletproof, if it is I'm gonna bounce…
CRASH
"Owwwww…." Fuck, I'm winded. I can't breathe. Oh, fuck, I think I broke some ribs…
"Are you all right, mate?"
Under the circumstances, that small voice was not at all what Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, aka the World's Greatest Marksman, expected to hear. Unable at that moment to catch his breath or speak, he turned his head in the direction the voice had spoken from and tried to take in the room.
It looked like a boardroom of some sort, probably not unexpected as it was on the top floor of the tower he had spent the last ten minutes shooting aliens and directing the battle off. What was unexpected was the girl under the boardroom table he was lying beside. At the moment all he could see was a pair of slender, attractive legs, with bare feet, stretched out to the side, emerging from the hem of a pale grey skirt suit which had probably started the day looking very smart and expensive but was now not in such hot state. Rather like himself.
"I think you're winded, mate," and the girl emerged in a fast crawl from under the table, shoved him over onto his side and pulled his knees up towards his chest. "Try and breathe."
Clint blinked at her, astonished. She wasn't very big, he thought, although the platinum grey suit was showing some rather nice upper body curvature in addition to those pretty legs. She had dark golden blonde hair escaping from a French pleat and electric blue eyes - for an instant he had a flashback and tried to scream.
"It's OK, I don't think they're coming after you right now," the girl said. He couldn't place her accent. Or her age. Or anything about her. She seemed awfully comfortable with the fact that he had just crashed through the window in the middle of an alien battle.
"Who - you?" Clint managed to croak out.
"Jen," she wasn't training those blue eyes on him, but instead peering over his body and out through the smashed window. "Can you move? I think we'd better go. They'll figure out you crashed that window soon enough." She looked down at him and he realised she wasn't as unaffected as he'd thought. There were tear tracks on her face. "Come on, archer, we need to go," slim, small hands tugged at his arm. "Stay low. Can you crawl?"
I'll fucking crawl out of here . Somehow he made it to hands and knees and followed the girl - Jen. She crawled out through the door, and Clint realised he wasn't that dead when he caught himself admiring her ass. As he made it through the door beside her he got a breath, and made to stand up
"No!" Jen caught at his arm and pointed. They were in a corridor, the ends glassed, and there were flying aliens everywhere outside. If he'd stood they might have spotted him.
"Follow me." She gave him a considering look, taking in the empty quiver on his back. "Are you out of ammo?"
"For the bow." He'd discarded it back in the boardroom. But there were still two pistols strapped to his calves, and he had six magazines in various pockets. He might as well ditch the quiver now, actually, and he unclipped it and laid it by the wall, detaching the heads selector and stowing that in a cargo pocket. There were still some useful goodies in that even without arrows. Clint slipped one of his pistols and racked the slide. Jen held out a hand expectantly.
"No fucking way!"
"Bollocks to that," she tried to grab the gun and he pushed her away gently.
"No. If you shoot at them they will come for you. You need to hide and let me handle this."
An eyebrow arched. And then she said eloquently, "Fuck off."
Clint couldn't help it, he let out a laugh. "So what's your plan?"
"I am so glad you decided to consult me on that, Robin Hood. FYI, there is one of those alien things searching the building. Right now it's a few floors down from here working its way up. I was thinking the two of us might ambush him. But you can totes do it on your own if you want. I'll hide in the air ducts and wait."
"What?" Clint blinked, totally bemused. The only person who ever teased him about air ducts was Natasha. This girl didn't even know him. "Are you a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent?"
"Whatever the fuck that is, mate, no."
"Then who…?"
She sighed exaggeratedly. "Me, civil engineer, know this building and its air ducts. Big brother, soldier. Me know guns. Gimme."
"No. But - show me the air ducts."
"Oh, for fuck's sake ." She glanced warily at the windows, and then crawled across the corridor and pushed open a door marked FIRE STAIRS. Just inside was an air duct cover. Clint smiled.
A/N Music soundtrack for this chapter:
Pandemonium: Killing Joke
Bring Me To Life: Evanescence feat. Amy Lee
You Could Be Mine: Guns 'n' Roses
We Dance To A Different Disco: Short Stack
And do me a favour - don't hate on my music taste. I like nearly everything from death metal to country to electro-pop and I don't care about your opinion of it. If you haven't heard of the band, they're probably Australian and brilliant so give it a try. Who knows - you might like 'em. This is just the music that seemed to me to fit the chapter. Listen or don't, your choice.
Chapter Two: In The Ducts
"Tell me more about the alien in the building?"
"It was searching," Jen whispered a couple of minutes later. They had worked their way down a couple of floors, through a maze of air ducts she seemed to know like the back of her hand. Tiny and swift, she was the only person who had ever made Clint feel clumsy in this, what he considered his natural habitat. "I was on the way up to a meeting on the twenty-third floor. In the elevator. You saw the glass elevators on the outside of the building?"
He had, of course. But since they weren't moving by the time Tony dropped him up top he'd figured that they had been shut down and the building evacuated. "Go on."
"Well when some twit pulled the fire alarm the elevators stopped. I forced the doors but we were between floors so I couldn't get out."
"Why didn't you go out through the roof hatch?" Clint asked logically.
"Because I am five foot four in five inch heels, dickhead, and there is no fucking way I can climb to the top of a nine-foot glass lift without help or tools!" She glared at him, and he conceded the point with a nod. It explained her bare feet too. Five inch heels would have been a major liability.
"So I got a birds' eye view of the battle on the ground. Saw Iron Man put you up on the roof. Couldn't see much of you out there but I could see the arrows and aliens falling out of the sky." She was giving him a look of grudging respect, he could make out in the dim greenish light in the air duct.
"Anyway, so a few minutes ago you shot something big and it crashed the other side of the building. The elevator kind of jerked and dropped a few feet. I thought - I thought it was going to crash all the way." She kind of gulped.
Clint found himself suddenly feeling very sorry for Jen. She had been totally helpless, trapped in a glass box, watching that awful battle, and then suddenly thinking she was going to be smashed to her death.
"Anyway," she continued after a moment, steadying her voice, "the elevator dropped just enough that I could force the door on the next level down and jump out. Found myself on the nineteenth floor, headed for the stairs and started running down. Planning to hide in the basement like I think everyone else in the building had. Except," she gulped, and he saw the tears begin to trickle from the corners of her eyes again, "I was running down and I heard this noise - I looked over the rail and this thing came out of the basement… it was tracking bloody footprints as it started up the stairs. I froze, just - couldn't move, and after a couple of minutes I realised it was systematically searching all the floors. So I waited for it to go in the third floor and I ran up to the very top and hid. I guess I was hoping it would get bored or be called away before it got that far."
Clint didn't know what to say. How did he tell her that all her co-workers were dead and that unless his colleagues could pull off some kind of fucking miracle, they were going to die too? But the look in her blue eyes as she stared at him told him that she didn't need telling. She knew. She'd been looking death in the eye ever since she watched the portal open and the aliens come pouring through, from the inside of that glass elevator.
"I can't promise to get you out of this," he said very softly in the end. "But I will kill that one for you."
Jen gave him a very small smile and he thought that she would probably be very beautiful if she ever smiled properly. "Thank you, Robin Hood."
"Call me Hawk." He heard it, then, and pressed his finger to his lips. She froze, huddled, and he looked down through the air vent he had selected, the one that gave an excellent view of the enclosed room in the middle of the nineteenth floor. It had originally been a server control room, Jen said, but all the servers were now in the basement. It was perfect for his purposes because it was one of the few rooms in the damn glass-walled building which could have no witnesses from outside.
The alien came in through the door, looking around the room, stalking across with its weird stiff-legged gait to look behind the furniture. It never had time to turn around as Hawk dropped through the vent and stabbed a knife straight into the spine. He'd watched Natasha kill one of the flying things this way just minutes ago. Sure enough, the alien keeled over dead without a sound. Clint pulled his knife back out and wiped the green blood off on a nearby office chair.
"Hawk?" He looked up to the small, pale face peering through the vent hole.
"Come on down."
"Er - I usually enter through low level vents - I'll just go back and around…"
"Jen, come down. I'll catch you." He sheathed the knife and his gun and held out his hands. She hesitated for a moment, and then slipped her legs over the edge of the vent, lowered herself to hang by her hands and dropped.
She couldn't weigh more than ninety pounds. He caught her with ease and set her on her feet. Bloody hell, she really was tiny. All right, his combat boots probably added an inch to his normal five foot ten, but she didn't even reach his shoulder.
"Why are we leaving the ducts again?" She glanced longingly upwards, and Clint smiled. Was this actually his perfect woman? He had never met anyone other than himself who preferred air ducts to open space.
"I need to see what's going on. My earpiece blew out just before I jumped in the window, so I'm out of comms. I need to see if I can help out there."
She looked doubtfully at the pistols he had drawn after putting her down, but then seemed to think twice. Maybe she remembered seeing Natasha doing a bloody good job using identical guns.
"And why am I coming with you?"
"Because if anyone comes looking for buddy back there," Clint nodded to the dead alien body, "and sees the big fucking hole in the ceiling, it's going to be pretty obvious to start looking in the ducts."
Jen said nothing. She just followed him. They slipped out into the corridor, and Clint found himself looking at the elevator bank. His eyes tracked over the one set of forced steel doors, and up to the tiny gap at the top through which daylight could be seen.
"You came through that ?" He looked back at Jen. He didn't think even Natasha could have slipped through that space. It couldn't be more than nine inches.
"Given a choice between getting though and falling to my death, I picked the tight squeeze," she deadpanned back, though he saw her own eyes widen at the size of the gap. She pressed a hand to her breasts. Yes, that must have been bloody uncomfortable. Surely she would have bruises.
Clint moved on, staying close to the wall, going to the end of the corridor. He crouched low as he got there and looked both ways: another corridor.
"Go in there," Jen pointed opposite to an office door. "There will be a window: this is the north side of the building. You'll be able to see Stark Tower and the - the whatever the fuck it is in the sky."
Hawk nodded. He eased the door open and they both entered the room on their knees, crawling under the desk and crouching below the windowsill. They were both crouching there, peering through the window, when they saw four more huge whale-ships come through the portal.
"Oh, shit," Clint whispered. It had taken Hulk, Thor and Iron Man together to stop the last two. Four more at once - it was over. He could feel Jen beginning to tremble by his side, hear her breathing start to hitch.
"I - I don't want to die," she whispered, and he turned to her, his eyes filled with pity.
"Jen…" Even on their knees, she was tiny compared to him. For a long moment they stared at each other, both knowing that death would come soon.