AN: Putting it out there, this will not be your typical search and rescue fic. However, there will be bad language, some torture and Coulson pulling out his hair (No one else wonder if he always had such a receding hairline?) This storey follows "LOOKING FOR HAWKEYE" but you do not need to have read that to understand this one. Let me know if you think the rating should change. Enjoy.

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SHIELD

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"Oh shit!"

Hill jumped up from her chair, startling the other analysts as she rushed out of the room.

"Make a hole!" She shouted as she ran down the corridors of the SHIELD base. People automatically hugged the walls of the corridors; nobody was a stranger to seeing people rush about the base. Time was always of the essence when the agency they worked for dealt with potentially world ending disasters.

Hill took the stairs two at a time, climbing up five levels rather than wait for the elevator. Reaching her destination, she knocked on the door of Coulson's office, but for the first time in her life she didn't wait for an answer before opening the door and entering.

Coulson looked up from his computer screen, glaring at the intruder as he held his desk phone next to his ear.

"Sir, open your email. Now!" Hill said without preamble as she walked behind Coulson's desk to stand next to the man.

"Hill, I..."

"Sir, you need to open your email now. There's footage of Barton."

"What?" Coulson hung up the phone without even saying goodbye to whoever he had been previously talking too. Quickly clicking out of the documents he had been reviewing he logged into his SHIELD email account.

"Fifteen down," pointed Hill. She couldn't believe how many emails Coulson got sent, and by her quick glance it looked like the twenty unopened ones were just from the last two hours.

Coulson clicked on the one Hill pointed out. It didn't have a subject heading and the email address it had been sent from looked like it was a standard SHIELD email account. There was nothing remarkable about it.

The email itself had no message, only a single attachment. Clicking to open it, a video screen popped up and automatically began to play. Coulson and Hill watched as the black screen changed to show a young man hanging from the ceiling by his wrists.

Both agents instantly recognised the man as Agent Barton. He appeared to be unconscious, his chin resting on his bare chest and dried blood plastered on his skin.

Then the screen went black. Fifteen seconds. That's all they had. Fifteen seconds with no sound, no discernible location, no nothing.

"Is there any more?" asked Coulson carefully, even though he was certain he knew the answer.

"Nothing, but this proves he's alive, right?"

"There's no date, no evidence of when this was taken. This could have been taken the day Barton disappeared."

"Then why send it now?" asked Hill in confusion. The small amount of hope that had built up inside of her was now dwindling.

"I don't know," sighed Coulson as he leant back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. "But whoever sent this is taunting us."

"I'll get a search program running, see if the cyberlab can back trace the sender," said Hill as she started walking out of the office, pulling her cell phone out as she went.

"Good," nodded Coulson. After three weeks of Barton being missing and no evidence of where he had gone, who had taken him or why, this new development was both welcome and troubling. All they had on what had happened to Barton was the location of his last perch on a mission that was a meant to be a simple surveillance and his kit and weapons surrounded by blood. A lot of blood.

Coulson clicked play on the video again, watching the same fifteen seconds and seeing nothing new. Clicking play for a third time, he paused it when it showed the close up of Barton's face.

"Where are you?" he muttered.

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SHIELD

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AN: Thoughts and opinions welcome.