Games of Deception (Hawkeye/Avengers)

Chapter 6 - Discovery

-Clint's P.O.V-

The minute I'd gotten back to the hotel where I was staying, I immediately made a call on the phone that S.H.I.E.L.D. had provided before I had left base. This time, since I was alone, I could face Director Fury when I spoke to him. I placed the phone on the table that sat in middle of the room and stood across from it after pushing a button that produced a rectangular projection, which hovered in the air above the table. I was now looking at an image of Fury standing in a room which was empty aside from an agent guarding the doorin the far corner.

"You cut me off, Barton," he said sternly. I sighed, realizing that he was in fact still pissed for this afternoon.

"I'm sorry, sir, she showed up before you had finished. But I do have a few things to report."

Fury nodded. "Go ahead."

I crossed my arms as I spoke to him. "Well, she's very keen on keeping most personal information to herself, at least the info that we're concerned with. However, she did mention indirectly that about two months from now she would be gone for a while, which I assume means she'll be after another agent. It's likely she'll start tracking any time now."

"Two months from now?" Fury sighed impatiently. "She's going to take much longer than I thought. Barton, I hate to do this, but I'm gonna need you to stay there until then. She can only hack our databases to a certain point, so we're going to give her some fake information and set her up. I'll let you know what you need to do when the time comes, but until then just keep an eye on her. We need to know exactly how she goes about this. Consider the time in between...vacation." He seemed frustrated by the last statment; agents didn't do vacation.

My eyes widened at this. "You want me to stay here? Director, I'm sure there's some other way to--"

"Agent Barton, we have an increasing threat to our entire operation out there; we found out just this morning that three of our recent missing agents set in D.C were killed by her less than a month ago. She's been sliding past us for too damn long. You will be staying in Manhattan until that woman is in our hands and locked up, understood?"

I sighed, no way was I going to get out of this. "Understood. I'll report again tomorrow morning if anything changes."

"I'll be waiting."

With that, the projection disappeared and I groaned, throwing myself down onto one of the chairs in the room. I know I'd said that I liked being on solid ground, but staying in some hotel room and following around a girl who could randomly try to kill me for two months? I should have seen it coming. It was more of an annoyance than anything. If I needed to, I could definitely take her. Or so I hoped.

My mind drifted back to that afternoon. I kept thinking about her eyes, they were a deep green. I had tried to read them as we'd talked; she played it off well, but I occasionally caught glimpses of the pain and anger that they held inside them. Her life hadn't been easy, and I was going to make it even worse.

I quickly cleared these thoughts from my head, this was no time for sympathy or guilt. What did I care? She was killing members of the organization I had vowed my loyalty to in cold blood, and she had to be stopped. Director Fury had said himself that he trusted me far more than any other agent to accomplish this, and it was my duty to complete the mission, which I would.

However, I knew that I couldn't deny the way that I had felt being with her that afternoon. It was something I'd never really experienced. I wanted to talk to her, and not just to get some information out of her. She was different, and interesting. I had laughed more in those few hours than I had in probably years; like I'd said, the other agents are a bit lacking in the humor department. And then, what I'd done right before we went separate ways for the evening, I couldn't explain it. This sudden feeling of concern that I wouldn't see her again had made me react in a way that wasn't like myself at all.