"Shit! Shit! Shit!"
Clint couldn't pull the knife away fast enough to avoid the gush of blood that surged forth from the deep cut into Daniill's neck. The blood kept coming and Clint was reminded again why he did this sort of thing from a distance.
A loud banging on the door suddenly made itself known as Danniill's coworkers realized what they heard were in fact gunshots. A woman bashed opened the door.
"I can explain!" Clint held up the knife in his bloodied hand. "Shit, speak Russian!" He put both hands up in the air as if she had a gun on him. "I didn't do it."
"CALL THE POLICE!" The woman's voice bellowed down the hallway.
To be fair, he didn't expect her to want to talk it out as blood still gurgled forth from Daniill's neck. More people could be heard shouting down the hall and Clint didn't want to start fighting his way through a mob of angry Russian office workers. Of course spending time for murder in a Russian prison was not at the top of his to do list either.
"I'm sorry!" He turned and scooped up what files he could from the folder he'd brought and threw himself straight through the still closed second story window.
He had done enough jumps and falls that he was able to tuck and roll just without cutting himself up with the bloodied knife still gripped in his hand. The blood was going to leave an entirely traceable trail behind him in the snow and with the sounds of the woman still screaming from the window he awkwardly trudged towards what appeared to be an employee parking lot of sorts and frantically started looking for a vehicle he could hotwire.
He found an older model truck with the door already unlocked. As he fumbled around for the ignition switch wires, he couldn't prevent the blood on his hand from leaving grotesque smears across the pristine grey of the dash and steering wheel. There was more shouting behind him and within moments he'd fired up the truck and was blasting out of town.
While Clint was used to not having an extraction in place, the total shit storm of a mission was not his standard performance despite what Natasha might say. Getting anywhere was going to be difficult and doubly so when he was covered in blood and driving a stolen truck.
He pulled into the parking lot of the first coffee shop he came across. He quickly wiped the remaining blood from the knife on the seat and tucked it back into his boot. He then turned his coat inside out to hide the blood that had been steadily drying on his sleeve.
Getting his hands clean was going to be harder. As he jumped out of the truck, Clint shoved his left hand deep into his pocket and quickly made his way into the coffee shop. It was a small blessing the bathroom was unoccupied and Clint stripped his jacket and started frantically scrubbing at the blood coating his left hand.
The tape wrapped around his broken fingers was soaked, it was going to be impossible to get it cleaned off and semi presentable. His best option was going to be to redo the tape -which he did not have the materials for.
With a wince, Clint forced the tape off of his fingers. They still weren't healed but it was the only way to get them clean. The blood soaked tape joined his jacket in the trash. As public coffee shop restrooms were apt to be, Clint was not at all surprised that the soap dispenser was not only busted but laughably empty. In fact it didn't look as if it had ever held soap. This of course only complicated his ability to get the blood off his hands.
There was a knock at the door that escalated to pounding much faster than seemed reasonable but Clint opted to ignore it as he frantically tried to get the blood out from under his nails.
"Open up. You take too long!" The angry male voice on the other side of the door shouted at him.
His arm was practically rubbed raw where he had scrubbed it, but a first glance wouldn't flag any attention so it would be safe enough to go out into the coffee shop. Without his jacket however, the weather outside was going to be a lot more complicated.
"Yeah. Yeah." Clint pulled open the door and glared at the man standing in front of him. "Let a man shit in peace, would ya?" The man shoved Clint shoulder first into the doorframe as he pushed past and Clint grunted at the jarring of his shoulder on the corner.
It wouldn't be wise to pick a fight now and with a deep breath Clint stepped back out into the main area of the coffee shop and pretended to study the menu as he surveyed his surroundings.
A woman sat alone at a table, a coat was draped over the chair across from her – a suspiciously manly looking coat. Clint stepped up to the counter and ordered a coffee to go and a cookie. He then pretended to fumble for his wallet when asked for the payment. "I'm sorry, my wife must have it." He smiled at the clerk and indicated he would be right back.
As he approached the woman he tried to keep his left arm, where it was still red from his scrubbing, behind him. "Pardon me, Miss?"
The woman looked up from her sandwich with a start.
"You wouldn't happen to have a hair tie? My sister is trying to fix her hair and is just having a horrid time of it. One of hers broke and…you know how teenagers can be." He shrugged.
She grinned at him and fished one from her purse. "Of course."
As he took it he made a show of noticing the coat across from her. "Is your husband in the restroom?"
She nodded, her dark curls bouncing down in front of her eyes.
"I ah…This is quite delicate." Clint shifted, forcing himself to look as uncomfortable as possible. "I overheard some strange sounds from the men's room when I was trying to help my sister…" He grimaced. "You may want to go check on him."
Sandwich suddenly forgotten, the woman was up and rushing towards the restrooms in a huff. Clint quickly picked up her husbands coat and patted down the pockets – wallet secure. He put the coat on and strolled back to the counter to pay for the coffee and cookie with the man's credit card. The cookie fit nicely inside his pocket alongside his new wallet.
A glance out the window alerted Clint to the fact that the police had caught up with his stolen truck. He meandered with his fresh coffee over to the milk and sugar station and grabbed a fistful of coffee stir sticks. He balanced several of them across the back of his left hand and over his busted fingers before securing them in place with the hair band he'd acquired from the woman.
Once he was certain the makeshift splint was going to work he grabbed his coffee and headed towards the door, slowing only enough to liberate a beanie off the coat rack. The green woolen cap did wonders to hide his hair as he stepped out and nearly ran into an officer on his way in to the coffee shop.
The officer sputtered at Clint's blatant disregard for other people but before he could open his mouth, Clint interrupted. "Officer. I'm glad to run in to you! A man came in…" Clint jerked his head back towards the coffee shop. "He was covered in blood. I think he ran into the restroom."
He stepped aside as the officer pushed past him with a new determination and started to stroll down the length of the parking lot, leisurely sipping his coffee.
At the end of the parking lot Clint noticed a train station down the road and with a vigor he didn't know he still had in him, he briskly walked to the train station and bought a ticket back to Volgograd.
The man's credit had been good for a private compartment and Clint settled in for the thirty two hour train ride. He slept straight through the first twenty hours and only woke to the pressing need of his bladder.
The adjourning bathroom to his compartment wasn't fancy enough to have a shower – which Clint desperately wanted but he'd gone longer without being able to wash before. As he zipped up his pants he realized this was probably the first and only time he'd have an opportunity to call in and report on his now defunct mission to Mexico.
Without bothering to wash his hands Clint pushed back into his compartment and checked to see if there was a phone. He wasn't really surprised to see that there wasn't given that he didn't even have a shower in the bathroom and so he made his way out into the corridor.
His leg started to cramp again as he hobbled down the hallway to see if there was a public phone he could use.
When he finally found it he had to wait thirty minutes for a young businessman to get off the phone with his wife so he nibbled on the now crushed cookie he had stuffed in his stolen jacket earlier. As the man finished, Clint flashed him a weak smile before stepping up to take the phone.
He dialed SHIELD's secure line and waited as the ringing directed him to the automated phone system of a fake photography studio. As the prompts were listed off, Clint quickly punched in the override code to get through to the SHIELD systems and waited for the familiar buzzclick of his transfer.
As he punched in his personal identification code, he wondered how much Coulson was going to scream at him for not reporting in sooner. The train intercom system activated to announce the next station and Clint missed what was said on the phoneline. Once the train announcement stopped he realized the line had gone dead.
"The fuck?"
He tapped the phone plunger thing down and dialed again, quicker this time. He put in his code a second time and listened for the usual greeting of whichever sap was stuck on communications duty this time.
"Authorization code denied." Clint blinked at the mechanical voice before he was disconnected again. He'd been entering that authorization code for so long it was impossible that he had gotten it wrong. Hell he'd even put that number in correctly while drunk and concussed in Rio.
He restarted the phone once more and dialed again. This time slowly punching in each number with a precision he usually reserved for his archery. The same impersonal mechanical voice informed him his code was still denied.
Replacing the phone on the receiver he stared at it a moment and tried to figure out what to do. There were other numbers, private numbers, he could call but there's only one reason they would have denied his code and not even taken a moment to speak to him.
Clint pushed out of the phone booth and stumbled past some college students on his way back to his compartment. As he passed from one train car to the next, he saw two men looking through the little glass window outside of his compartment. One appeared to be the train conductor and the other a security guard of some kind.
He watched as the conductor knocked on the door of his compartment before leaning over to mutter something to the security guard. Clint's lip reading wasn't so great with Russian, but even if he could read their lips, he didn't figure the odds were high that they had brought him a cake.
Clint turned and backtracked to the previous train car. The college students were still chatting in the hallway waiting for the phone and Clint casually swapped tickets with one of them as he went by to the next car. He checked the new ticket once he had cleared the lounge car and made his way to the unreserved seating area at the front of the train.
He collapsed into the first available seat he found in the open car and scrubbed his good hand through his hair.
"Fuck."
Author's Note: I know some of you thought things were rough for Clint before...but oh man, poor Clint is just getting going.
XD