“Don’t you ever knock?”

Kate’s smile only widened. “Oh, I’m sorry, was I interrupting?” She didn’t sound sorry at all. The second lump in Clint’s bed shifted, revealing the woman who had been sleeping within—she tried rather ineffectually to cover up with the blanket when she realized Kate was there. “Another red-head, Clint?” She tsk’ed, sounding far too amused for Clint’s taste. He groaned, reaching around to grab his pillow and then tossing it half-heartedly in her direction. Kate easily danced out of the way, laughing. “Ok, ok, I’m going. Just thought you might wanna know Natasha’s in your kitchen, drinking my coffee.”

“What?”

“Natasha. In the kitchen.”

“No, I got that, I meant why.”

“I didn’t ask, yet. Thought I’d give you a chance to ditch the fling and at least get some pants on before she decides to come up here herself.”

“You’re telling me to put on pants?”

-

For Kate’s part, days that began with a red-headed Russian in the kitchen, particularly of the ‘superspy’ variety, tended to have… mixed results. Sometimes Clint had to endure a whole lot of laughter at his expense whenever Natasha Romanoff was in a storytelling mood, and sometimes they almost died, depending on the day. It took about five minutes for Kate to realize that today was going to be one of the potentially life-threatening ones. It usually was, when HYDRA was involved.

They had a weapon. That was either all Nat knew or, more likely, all she was telling, but it was a weapon that SHIELD was desperate to get out of their hands by any means necessary. “So basically, SHIELD wants us to do their job for them? Too scared to get their hands dirty?”

The corners of Nat’s mouth twitched, almost becoming a smile. “There’s a reason I came here. And a reason that it’s me. Now, when I leave, there’ll be a piece of paper on the table that may or may not have the address of an interesting building in downtown Manhattan. You may or may not find anything there, and if you do, well… you don’t owe SHIELD a thing, not really. You’re… how does Fury put it?” She paused for a moment, taking another sip of her coffee. “Oh, yes, ‘dangerously unpredictable’.” Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “So who knows what you’ll do?”

There was more than she was telling, but Kate knew better than to ask. It wouldn’t do any good, and besides, she was more intrigued than she’d care to admit. Plus, any day they were able to knock Hydra down a peg or six was a good one in her book.

“We’ll do it,” Kate said, before Clint had a chance to go on with his ‘bad feeling’ bs or whatever. At least he didn’t argue, unless one wanted to interpret that groan as the approximation of any argument he’d be able to give. Natasha laughed and shook her head.

“Good luck. And do try to bring this one back in one piece.” She jerked a thumb in Clint’s direction, which seemed to catch his attention.

“Hey! I can keep myself in one piece just fine!”

There was a beat, and then both Nat and Kate burst out laughing. Clint was Not Amused.

-

Kate was the first one to wake up, dazed and disoriented but definitely alive, and that was the important thing. The first thing she noticed was that she was handcuffed to a chair in a windowless, concrete room. There was a lightbulb hanging from a thin string above her, casting a dim yellow pallor over everything—or it would have, if there was anything in the room besides concrete and a door. Oh, and Clint, who she realized was tied up right behind her.

“Clint? Clint! Wake up! Now!”

When he began to move, Kate released a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “What happened?” he asked, and Kate shrugged.

“I don’t know. Last thing I remember is breaking in, thinking the first five floors were easy… too easy… and then-”

“And then we walked into an ambush,” Clint grumbled, and Kate nodded.

“Ok, we need to get out of this. I’m not sure why they didn’t kill us outright, but I know I don’t wanna stick around to find out. If I could only reach the…” She trailed off, and a sickening pop echoed dully through the room.

“Did you… just… dislocate your-”

“Yep.”

“Ouch.”

“Yep.”

And then Kate was free, popping things back into place and pulling a bobby pin from her hair to make quick work of Clint’s shackles. “Wait!” she hissed, as Clint got up and moved towards the door. “I think someone’s coming.”

The door burst open just as they managed to get back in their respective chairs. “Wow, all these guards just for little ol’ us?”

That was the cue. Seconds later, half a dozen Hydra goons were stuffed in the cement-walled cell, missing several comm devices and keys. “Not bad, Hawkeye,” Clint said, and she returned his exhilarated grin.

“Right back atcha, Hawkeye—on your left!” she added sharply, just as another goon came around the corner. Clint knocked him out with a well-aimed shackle to the temple.

“These guys just don’t quit, do they?”

“Would it be any fun if they did?”

“Well, probably not, but- Kate, wait up!” She had run off down the hall, and Clint followed her towards a steel door with a biometric pad set into the wall next to it. When she glanced back at him with that expectant look on her face, Clint sighed and shook his head. “Fine, I’ll be right back.”

He returned a few moments later, dragging one of the unconscious Hydra goods. Kate helped him stand the man up so she could press his hand to the biometric pad, and then quickly slid his keycard—if she shoved a little harder than was necessary and he hit his head on the opposite wall as she slipped into the control room, well, maybe he’d take a little longer to wake up.

“Ok, where are we?” Clint asked, as Kate moved towards the central computer bank and began tapping at the keyboard.

“I’m not sure, but I think we’re in a Hydra facility that has somehow been operating under SHIELD’s nose for who knows how long,” Kate muttered, watching the screens as windows popped up and then closed back down. She was looking for something specific, though she wasn’t entirely sure what. Blueprints, maybe, or a map of some kind to show them exactly where they were and how to get out.

“So you’re a hacker now?” Clint tried, not very successfully, to keep the note of impressed surprise from his voice.

Kate just laughed. “I have a friend who’s good with computers,” was all she offered in explanation. Then, “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“What?”

“Well, for one thing, we’re still in New York City. We’re on the goddamn wharf.” She pointed at a screen that showed a scaled map of the surrounding area. The waters of the Atlantic Ocean stretched over the right side of the screen.

“Ok, so what, we’re in some kind of converted warehouse? Shouldn’t be hard to get out of.”

“Shouldn’t,” she agreed. “But we don’t know what kind of- oh, my God…”

Clint noticed the change in her voice and stepped closer to the computers. “What happened, what’d you find?”

She tapped a key and a viewing window popped up, linked to one of the security cameras in the complex. Through it, they could see a young girl, maybe twelve but not a whole lot older, curled up in the corner of a stark white room, arms wrapped around her legs. “They’re taking kids now?”

“This is it. This is what Natasha wanted us to find.”

“Ok, seriously, since when are you and Tasha on a first name-”

“This is why she sent us,” Kate continued, riding right over Clint’s confusion. “We have to rescue her. She’s three floors up.”

“Up? Don’t we want to go down and get out of here?”

“And just leave her here? No way. Don’t even try to tell me you’d be ok with that, we both know you’re a terrible liar.”

Clint sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Ok,” he said. “Where do we go?”

-

Three floors up and across the building, through acres of Hydra agents, the Hawkeyes found the other pod of containment cells. Most of the key cards they tried didn’t work, until they found the scientists cowering in the janitor’s closet—they were Hydra by force, not choice, and with enough… convincing, the head of the lab coughed up what he knew.

It wasn’t much. Evidently, Hydra had taken a renewed interest in people with abnormal abilities, perhaps hoping to recreate their own defunct Super Soldier program. The girl had been discovered to have some sort of alien DNA, though the scientists on the project now knew very little about her development or what she could do, if she could do anything at all, because the last crop had all seemed to have… accidents within weeks of each other.

The kind of accidents people had when they discovered something they weren’t supposed to.

With the leader’s key card and thumbprint, Kate was able to get into the cell block—the containment cells themselves ran on a completely different security system, one not even they had access to. Somehow, when Kate got to the only occupied cell, the door had disappeared.

The girl was also standing up and staring at her, a curiously serene expression of curiosity on her face.

“You are not Hydra,” the girl stated matter-of-factly.

Kate laughed. “No, I’m not. Neither is he. We’re here to rescue you.”

“You’re going to take me from this place?”

“Yes. You’ll be safe with us, we just have to get out of here.”

The girl closed her eyes, as if deep in thought. Before Kate could ask her what she was doing, her eyes snapped open again and she spoke. “They are coming for me.”

“Well, they’re coming for us, too. We made kind of a mess on the way here. Come on, we need to go.”

Kate led the way out of the cell block, pausing to consult the crudely-drawn map she’d made from memory after the power had been cut to the control room below. “We need to go- shit.”

She could hear the thundering of booted feet coming from around the corner, and then Hydra agents were swarming the hall from both ends. Kate barely had time to react before the girl shoved her from behind, knocking her into Clint and sending them both to the ground. “What the h-”

That’s when she felt it—a vibration so loud (and yet completely silent at the same time) she could feel it in her bones. She looked back at the girl they’d just rescued, and she stood in the center of the hall, arms outstretched, sending waves of what Kate could only assume to be some kind of energy at the agents bearing down on them.

One by one, the guns came apart in their hands and the agents began dropping to the ground, as if their bones had all been liquefied.

“Holy shit,” Kate whispered. There had to have been at least two dozen men bearing down on them, yet five seconds later the silence was deafening.

The girl lowered her arms, then looked down, meeting Kate’s eyes. “They would have killed you,” she said. And then she walked on.

-

“We have to call SHIELD.”

Clint had pulled Kate aside, keeping a wary eye on the girl but lowering his voice so she wouldn’t hear. His face was tense and drawn, and the younger Hawkeye had a feeling that he didn’t like saying it any more than she liked hearing it.

“What?” We can’t just turn her over to them, Clint!” she hissed back, hoping the girl was not listening to closely. She didn’t want her to think they would just abandon her.

“You saw what she did back there. She vibrated at least twenty to death in less than a minute!”

Kate gave a frustrated sigh, running a hand through her hair. What she hated most was that Clint was right—there had been a moment, when she saw the bodies and tried to figure out what that girl had done to them, that she’d begun to wonder (for the first time in a very long while) if she was in over her head. But she wasn’t going to back down. “Look, if Natasha wanted this girl to end up in SHIELD’s hands, if she wanted to so much as risk it, she’d have come here herself.”

“Does Tasha even know what that girl is capable of?”

“She’s the Black Widow, what do you think?” Kate shot back, before shaking head. “Look, what do you think will happen to her if we call Fury? Would you be able to live with yourself?”

Clint looked uncomfortable for a moment. Then, “SHIELD isn’t Hydra.”

“No, but you look me in the eyes and tell me right now that they wouldn’t look at her and see a weapon, or an animal to be caged because she’s just too dangerous to be let loose.”

Clint did meet her eyes, unwavering even in the face of her steely determination. “Would they be wrong?”

In that moment, Kate hated him—he was right. But that didn’t change anything. “I… I don’t know, Clint, ok? But I believe her. She only killed them to protect us. And if you want to leave her behind, you’ll just have to leave me, too.”

Clint looked startled, hurt flashing through his eyes.“You know that’ll never happen, Katie.”

“Then trust me. Please.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, then looked over at the girl, standing awkwardly halfway down the hall. “I do.”

-

“The building is going to explode.”

Kate froze, then turned to look at the girl. “What are you talking about?”

“You wondered why we had not met any enemies since the detention block, nor even any guards. They are gone. I felt them leave—I felt the security system lock down. The… vibrations,” she offered by way of explanation, clearly interpreting the nonplussed look on Kate’s face as a question. “They would rather destroy me than allow me to fall into the hands of their enemies.”

“I wonder why,” Clint muttered, but he fell silent when Kate jabbed her elbow none-too-kindly into his ribs.

“Ok, that explains why all the doors are dead. We’ll have to find our own way out. Here,” Kate continued, pulling the piece of paper with the map from her pocket. “I thought I saw—yep, right there. A window. We’ll have to jump, it’s the only easy access to the outside.”

“Uh, Katie, you do remember we’re five floors up, right?”

“Yes, and I also remember that this is a converted warehouse on the wharf, Clint. There’s water on that side. Might hurt a little, but it’s survivable.”

“We may want to hurry. We are running out of time.”

Kate looked where the girl was now pointing, and noticed a timer she had somehow overlooked, set high in the wall above the door. It was steadily counting down from one minute.

“Ok, time to go.”

Kate grabbed Clint’s hand and the girl’s (making a mental note to find out her name—when they were done trying to not get blown up, of course) and ran, dragging them down the route she could picture in her mind as clearly as if she were still looking at the blueprints on the computer screen.

“Uh, Kate? Kate? Katie!”

Clint dug in his heels and yanked, pulling Kate to a stop. “What?!” she shouted, whirling on him. He just pointed towards the end of the hall, the destination they’d been headed for—when she looked, too, she could feel her stomach drop. Where there should have been a big glass window, easily breakable, there was nothing but steel.

The girl seemed less perturbed. She stepped forward, thrust her hands out—and suddenly, there wasn’t anything there at all. Just open air.

Kate barely had time to react. Clint stood, grabbing her hand this time, and the three of them ran as the timer ran out, leaping from the building just as several deep booms echoed from somewhere down below.

-

When Kate hit the water, it felt like concrete. Stars burst before her eyes as the wind was forced out of her lungs, and she dropped like a rock through the frigid water before her body caught up with her mind and she remembered to move. She clawed through the water until her head finally broke the surface and she gasped, drawing in great lungfulls of air until she nearly felt sick with it. (She’d never been happier to breathe in the city’s smog.)

By the time she pulled herself from the water and onto the dock, the girl was already there, helping her up. “Hey, Clint,” she said, assuming he must have been on the dock by then, too, “talk about going out with a bang, am I right?” She laughed, turning to guage his reaction.

Except he wasn’t there.

“Clint?” She tried again, louder. “Clint! Clint!” Kate whirled around, eyes just this side of wild, wordlessly begging the girl to tell her she’d seen Clint surface already, that this was just some kind of stupid prank.

The girl only shook her head.

“No! Clint! Please!” Kate ran to the edge of the dock, searching the steel-grey waters for any sign of blond hair or well-shaped ass or anything resembling Clint Barton.

Seconds stretched into minutes, and she didn’t see a goddamn thing. Slowly, as if every movement pained her, Kate sank to her knees. She didn’t even realize she was crying until it occurred to her that everything had gone blurry.

“Ok, note to self: jumping out of tall buildings is never a good idea. Even over water.”

Kate slowly looked around. There, looking like nothing so much as a very blonde, very drowned rat, stood Clint, ringing out his shirt. She was up and running across the dock before she had time to think about it—Kate tackled him, and Clint started to laugh but then Kate was kissing him, and in his shock, he went completely silent, for what was possibly the first time in his life.

They swayed unsteadily on the dock as Clint took a few moments to figure out what to do with his hands, and Kate’s own tangled into his hair. When she finally pulled back to take a breath, a grin spread across his face.

“Jesus, Kate… If I’d known…”

He trailed off as Kate laughed. “Please, Clint. You’re a human wrecking ball, ok? I could have tap-danced in front of you naked and I don’t think you’d have gotten it.”

“Naked, huh?” Clint lifted an eyebrow, the grin turning into a smirk. “Now that you mention it, maybe we should test that theory, huh?”

“Shut up and kiss me, you idiot.”

A minute later, the girl crossed the docks toward them. “We will not be alone for long.”

As if on cue, Kate heard the sound of sirens drawing steadily nearer, probably drawn by the burning wreckage of the warehouse only a few hundred meters away. “We probably shouldn’t wait around for them,” she said, untangling herself from Clint’s embrace and looking back at her rescue-ee. “Hey, kid, what’s your name?” she asked, as they began to walk across the dock to the warehouses on the other side.

“They referred to me as Subject D-2479. I never knew another name.”

“Ok, that’s just terrible.” Kate glanced around, her eyes settling on a patch of grass dotted with white and yellow flowers. She smiled, and looked back at their new companion. “I think I’m going to call you Daisy. Is that ok?”

The girl seemed to consider it for a moment, before a slow, hesitant smile spread across her face to answer Kate’s. “Daisy? I like it. Thank you.”