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.

A/N Soundtrack for this chapter:

Radioactive: Imagine Dragons

Where The Streets Have No Name: U2

Don't Cry: Guns 'n' Roses