She’s achingly vibrant like this, poised on the edge of disaster and waiting for the chips to fall. And he knows, knows like he knows the sun will rise tomorrow and the feel of his bow in his hands that he will never meet anyone like her again in his life. He will never know someone with this much fire and desperation and beauty and steel all wrapped together and thrumming under her skin.
He doesn’t know if she knows he’s there. If he had to put money on it, Clint would guess that she does, because she knows her surroundings, and knows when she’s being followed and he’s followed her for a while now, dogging her steps and nipping at her heels at every corner where he could get close enough. He thinks she does, but he’s not entirely sure because she’s been slipping lately, cut loose from the place that had made her into what she is, and spiraling down into a place where he knows he can’t follow. Where none of them can follow. Where she can’t be redeemed. And he has his orders.
But he watches, on his perch, and waits. He watches as she looks down at the face of the innocent man she’s been hired to kill, that they both know is wrong for the mark, that they both know didn’t do the things the people hired her think he did, and he wants to hold his breath. He’s got to take the shot before she makes the move with the knife in her hand, but he’s hesitating, because there’s that part of him that is stunned by her, and that part that’s growing larger every moment he sees her like this that hopes, hopes she might make a difference choice.
There’s a flicker, he thinks, in her eyes, as she looks down at this man tied and gagged to a chair, one of her hands in his hair to expose his carotid because of course she’ll make it clean and quick, and that hope swells, a fragile, desperate little thing, and he shifts his bow, just a hair. His handler is hissing in his ear that ‘it’s time Barton, take the damn shot, you’re not going to get another chance, take her out or she’s going to kill him’. And with his thumb on his pulse he settles, watches, waits and, for the first time in his life as a sniper, hesitates.
It’s not long. A half a heartbeat, at most, but it’s long enough for those bright eyes to flick up to his hiding spot and meet his.
The arrow flies free of his bow.
It flies close enough to her cheek that it draws a shallow line of blood there, before it catches the flat of the knife and knocks it free of her hand and then buries itself in the wood of the wall behind her head.
He exhales.
Her eyes don’t leave his, and instead of listening to the instructions of the insistent voice in his ear, he steps forward and tumbles from the rafters, landing in a roll that brings him up five feet from her, the man still gagged between them. He finds her eyes again and slips his bow onto his back, deliberate.
“Agent,” he says, softly, voice carrying in the still quiet so that it’s almost too loud despite being just above a whisper, “It’s time to come in.”
(A birthday drabble for
usedtoberussian )