Hello, darlings! I'm sorry I'm a terrible updater. I've been distracted by Batman and my birthday and all kinds of fun stuff! So. Yeah. Sorry... As I was writing this, I realized that everything that has happened so far has happened over the course of one day and I was like 'dang. they must all be tired.' Hence the chapter title I suppose. As always, I hope you enjoy! Read and review!

Disclaimer: I don't own Avengers or any of these characters. All of this belongs to Marvel.

Chapter 10-A Hell of a Day

"Fury is out."

Andrews' voice is sharp, rang across the camera to the rest of the Council in their respective countries, where they sit in their dark, silent rooms and share secrets. She knows, they all know, that what she said was just a statement of the obvious. She wouldn't be standing where Fury normally stood in the SHIELD headquarters if Fury was still in charge. They all know she said it to reaffirm her position over them, she was the one that planned it all and she was the one that would now have more power than the rest of them. And maybe they didn't like it, but her one person power trip is better than Fury's team of six super persons power trip.

"Now what, Andrews? We liked your plan, but now that you've gotten what you wanted, at our expense no less, you have to cooperate with us," Zharkov snaps, uninterested in her preening. "There are things that you must do with SHIELD."

"I know, Zharkov. I know what I have to do."

Thor is on his knees, eyes glazed over, Mjolnir laying heavily in the dirt. Clint watches Loki as the others watch Thor, watches as he steps forward and narrows his eyes at his brother. Thor shakes, clearly suffering, but his fellow Avengers make no move. They don't know what to do, have no idea which side they're on anymore. Natasha turns to Clint, her eyes telling him that she needs reassurance that she's doing the right thing, but Clint knows that he isn't really the right person to judge this anymore. Clint looks at Tony, who nods and steps forward. Tony's quicker at things like this, speaking, making bad situations sound a little bit better. Maybe he can justify their actions to Thor.

"Thor," Tony says calmly as the god's eyes snap towards him, the glaze clouding his blue eyes dissipating. "We're not suddenly the bad guys, okay? We're still on your side, in a way. We want to be on your side, and we want you to be with us. But right now, we need Clint alive and Loki on this planet, so we can't let you do what you were sent here to do. We don't want to fight you over this, but we will if we have to."

"And we're not just doing this because Loki is forcing us to," Clint adds carefully, feeling the need to second what Loki had already told Thor.

Thor doesn't even need to speak for all of them to know what he's thinking. His face plainly shows his distrust for the archer, shows that those words coming from Clint offer no reassurance.

"It's true, Thor. It's not just Clint saying this." Natasha moves forward protectively, dangerously, putting herself between Thor and Clint. "There's something going on here, something that we don't understand, and we all need to be on the same side to figure it out."

"And having Loki with us would be helpful," Bruce adds. "You can take him back to your prison once this is over, but until then, we need you to work with us."

"Although, to be honest, I think I'd rather have him in one of our prisons, considering how quickly he escaped yours," Tony says without any accusation in his voice.

"That wouldn't have happened if-" Thor starts to say.

"Yes, we know. It's all Clint's fault. But, considering the situation, it's really not that bad that he's here is it?" Now there is warning in Tony's voice.

Thor looks at all of them, seeing the determination in their faces, knowing that they will fight him if they have to, knowing that he will not win if it comes to that.

"What is it that you need him for?"

Tony smirks at him. "Something that you're not going to understand."

"Agent Hill? What've you got for me?" Fury says, tapping his fingers impatiently on the glass table. "I haven't got all day, you know."

"You haven't even got right now, apparently. Neither have I," Hill's voice came through the intercom somewhat frantically.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

There is silence on her end for a moment, then the sound of a card being swiped carefully. "It's saying that I'm not authorized clearance for this. What? I'm always authorized clearance for this. This whole thing was my idea, for the love of god!"

"Agent Hill, calm down. Go back to whatever it was you were doing before, and let me see if I can somehow fix this," Fury says calmly.

"This is what I was doing before! Running the trackers, making sure all the agents in the field were alive. They can't just shut me down. This my operation. This is mine." Fury can practically see her at the other end of the line, shaking and pushing her hands against her head in annoyance.

"But we can just shut you down, Agent Hill." This voice is British and belongs to a woman that is wildly out of place in the agency that she now runs.

"And who are you?"

"Andrews," Fury mutters too quietly for the intercom to pick up.

"I'm Director Andrews, Agent Hill. I'm taking Fury's place, and because of that, I do in fact have every right to take control of your operation and do with it as I please."

"And what exactly do you want with my operation?"

"I need it to track down a few agents," Andrews says casually.

"That's not what this operation was designed for, and you know it. In fact, I'm pretty sure you're one of the people that opposed it for that very reason. It's not to be used to hunt people down. It's there to keep our agents safe. Like being out in the field with them and knowing just what they need from thousands of miles away."

"It's a very nice sales pitch, Agent Hill. And I'm sure you might have even talked yourself into believing it was true. But I know what it's really used for, and I'm not afraid of what it can do. I'm not afraid of the moral ramifications of hunting people down for the right reasons."

"Who are you hunting down?" Hill's voice is calm and reserved, her front that she put up when faced with something that she disagreed with.

"I think you know," Andrews says patronizingly. Fury can almost picture her patting Hill on the head as steam came from his agent's ears.

"This is wrong. Hunting down people like this? You can't do this!"

"These aren't 'people,' Agent Hill. They're different. They hardly count."

The door slams and the intercom crackles off, and Fury is left in silence in the empty conference room, left to contemplate what had just happened.

He hadn't thought it would come to this. He's been assuming up until this moment that Andrews would dismantle the Avengers and send them to the far corners of the earth. But now he's not so sure. Using Hill's GPS tracking chips, created by Hill out of genuine concern for field agents' safety, to hunt down his Avengers could only end badly. Probably for Steve, Natasha, Tony, Bruce, Clint and now Thor, but even they had the chance to fight back against whatever special ops team Andrews was sending in, they would end up painted in the bad light.

Somehow, Fury was going to have to get in contact with his agents before anything could happen.

If Agent Hill had been able to operate her tracking system, she would have seen the Avengers, more specifically Clint Barton, heading back to Stark Tower by way of obscure backroads, and then occasionally routes that weren't even roads.

"You know, this is terrible for my poor car," Tony complains as his overpriced, underused car bounces gracelessly over the ground of the off-track route that Natasha is leading them on.

"Staying off main roads is probably the best thing we could be doing though. We need to avoid attention," Steve says from where he sits in the back seat.

"Yes, well. This is ridiculous. I don't think she even knows what she's doing up there. I bet we're lost and she's just bluffing."

Natasha actually seemed to know exactly what they were doing, Tony realized, as they pulled out onto a main road, and then highway, just a few miles before reaching the bridge they needed to get to Stark Tower.

"See?" Bruce says. "She knew what she was doing. She's a super spy, after all."

They park under the tower, and Natasha seems to be out of the car as soon as it comes to a complete stop, followed by Clint. "What's the plan?" Natasha asks, her voice echoing off the concrete.

"We get him upstairs," Tony says, jerking his head towards Loki, who has just been pulled from the SHIELD car by Thor. "And I get back to my computers and we try to figure this out. And then we'll have to come up with a way to make this whole situation look better than it does, but I'm sure Pepper can handle that."

They crowd into the elevator, Thor eyeing the doors distrustfully, and go up past all those seemingly unused floors to the very top of the building. Once they get to their destination, they spread out, Tony, Bruce and Natasha going to the computers and beginning to type rapidly. Clint circles the room carefully before sitting down next to Steve across from Thor and Loki.

"I'm feeling incredibly useless right now," Steve comments.

"So am I, but I have this feeling we'll be coming in handy soon. Surely our presence here can't go unnoticed. Some of us aren't exactly supposed to be here. For the love of god, I'm not even supposed to be alive," Clint says.

"I am sorry about that," Thor says remorsefully.

"I've dealt with worse. It comes with the job." Clint glances at Natasha and she smiles briefly before going back to her work.

"So you think SHIELD will be coming here at any moment?" Steve asks.

"I wouldn't put it past them," Clint says as he gets up and paces the room. Steve watches him for a minute before getting up and following him.

"I would do anything for some time to sleep," Clint comments. "It's been a hell of a day so far and it's not even dark out yet."

Then Steve gets too close to Clint, examining the back of his neck suspiciously. Clint turns and looks at him. "Whoa, Steve. Whatcha doing there?"

"What's in the back of your neck?" Steve asks randomly.

"Um. My spine? Why?"

"What's that?" Steve asks, pointing at a little cut that was almost impossible to see. Clint reaches back to feel it, to feel the bump roughly the size of a crumb protruding from under his skin.

"What the hell is this, Natasha?" Clint says, voice beginning to raise in panic. "This wasn't there, what is this?"

Natasha is behind him now, feeling the bump. "It feels like... Stark? What is this?"

Tony has pulled up Clint's SHIELD files and was scrolling through them quickly. "It's a tracking device."

Clint looks at Tony in horror. "A tracking device?"

"I guess you were right. SHIELD's going to be here very soon to finish what they started."