Disclaimer: I would say that I owned Amanda, but that would kind of be child abuse, so I don't own anybody.
A/N: And finally, our characters meet!
Chapter 4
Phil had a tracker in his wallet. Of course he did. He was a highly trained SHIELD agent. If someone was going to take his wallet, and got away with it, he wanted to know. And not just so he could recruit them, no matter what Fury said.
That being said, for all his skill as a SHIELD agent, he was expecting to find a fully grown person who had years of pick-pocketing beneath their belt.
Not a little girl who couldn't be more than six years old, shivering on the dirty ground of an abandoned house.
Phil walked closer cautiously, because as much as he would have liked to help the girl having one run in with Charles' mutant children was enough to make even Natasha cautious.
"Please don't hurt me," The girl begged. Phil stepped closer and crouched down next to her, noting how pale she seemed and how she was shaking violently even though it was almost eighty degrees out.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Phil said, gently rolling her onto her back. She screamed, though Phil couldn't tell if it was from pain or simply from the fact that he had touched her. He pressed a hand to her forehead and it came away damp and hot. "Jesus," He swore. "What hurts?"
"Everything," The girl groaned, eyes flickering over Phil's shoulder. Phil turned around, not at all surprised to find Clint behind him. All of the Avengers had been overly cautious with him ever since he almost died by Loki's hand.
"Should I call nine-one-one?" Clint asked, his phone already in his hand.
"I think we should just take her," Phil said, mentally calculating. The hospital was only three blocks away and by the time they called the ambulance and it was dispatched and everything more time would be wasted up.
"Take me where?" The girl asked, surprisingly lucid for her condition.
"The hospital," Phil informed her shortly, curling an arm under her knobby knees and one around her back, lifting her up easily, and not because he had muscles hidden under his suit, though he did. Clint opened the door for him and Phil started the trek, hating how harshly the girl's breath was coming.
"What's your name?" He asked, trying to get her mind off of the pain. Her fingers were forming a tightly clenched fist on the shoulder of his suit and he pretended that did not clench his heart.
"Amanda," The girl gasped.
"Can we call you Mandy?" Clint asked from beside Phil. The girl nodded tightly and Clint smiled. "I'm Clint and this is Phil,"
"Pleasure," The girl said, her words forming into a moan of agony towards the end.
"We're almost at the hospital," Phil promised, taking another turn. They walked in silence until they got to the chaos of the emergency room, nursing bustling around and taking Mandy from him.
He knew he should have walked away, let everybody else deal with it. The girl had stolen his wallet, after all. He had no responsibilities towards her.
But when her pale little hand, with tiny little half rectangular finger nails reached out for him, he didn't hesitate to slide her small palm into his.
He always had a thing for orphans, after all.