Grey leaned heavily against the cold steel, using the excuse of closing the large warehouse doors to rest and breathe. She held her breath, trying to force her harsh loud gasps into regular and quiet ones.
After she got the doors closed, Grey bolted, ignoring the already painful burn in her legs and chest as she bolted to the darkest corner of the room. She could have sworn she already heard the dreaded sounds right outside the warehouse -stamping boots, the sound of a propelled rocket, faint yelling and harsh commands- but she pushed the feeling of her sinking gut to the back of her mind and focused on the task at hand.
As soon as it was in reach, Grey reached out in the dark for the rope she knew was there and started climbing. She'd hardly reached the top of the rope and was reaching for one of the steel ceiling beams when the warehouse doors burst open. Swearing under her breath, Grey stealthily pulled herself onto the beam and started to drag herself forward, keeping her chest and thighs pressed to the cold metal.
"Where'd she go?!" Grey stopped crawling. She was still about fifty or so feet from her destination, but she didn't feel secure enough to keep moving. Shit.
"We all saw her come in," the red, white, and blue clad man at the front of the warehouse spoke out. "Hawkeye, any sign of her around back?"
Grey pressed herself closer to the metal, trying to hide all her limbs in the dark before she resumed her path forward at a slow and careful crawl.
A man in a black and purple uniform appeared on the ground beneath her, jogging in through the back door with a bow in his hand. "Negative Cap, no sign of her."
"She wasn't that far ahead of us, maybe twenty seconds or so." Grey froze. The metal muffled voice has sounded just beneath her, way too close for someone who Grey hadn't even seen approach. "The doors closed a few seconds before I shot them open, there's no way she ran across and out the warehouse in that time."
Grey watched, hidden in the shadows, as the three avengers she could see made their way to the middle of the old warehouse. She was immensely thankful that the building no longer had power, as well as the fact that it was too dark for any of them so see her without some careful searching.
"Nat, anything on your end?" Hawkeye spoke into what Grey assumed was a headset. She growled quietly.
"How many of these fuckers are there, anyways?" Grey whispered to herself. She debated whether or not she should risk crawling a little faster. The small gap in the warehouse wall that she knew led to safety was only a few seconds away if she made a break for it. But…
"She's not on Nat's side of the warehouse," Hawkeye informed the rest the team, dropping his hand from his headset. "Ironman?"
Grey paused her thinking, peeking over the beam's edge for the metal Avenger. He was hovering next to his team, looking around the warehouse. "Jarvis, can you scan for any heat signatures other than the team?" Grey froze. Time moved slow as she thought through his words. If he could actually see every heat signature in the building…
"Hey!" She stood on her beam, forgetting her own safety and yelling at the men below her. She stiffened when they looked up at her in shock, but the looks on their faces a moment later combined with her own emotion pushed her to run the length of the beam towards the rope again. Maybe if she could get there and slide down, she could make a break for the door and hide in the woods…
"Agh!" Grey lost her balance, stumbling and gripping her shoulder where the shaft of an arrow was protruding.
"Fuck!" She made a tipped, making a grab for the edge of the beam. Her meager grip didn't support her body weight, as her fingers knocked uselessly against the steel beam and she tumbled to the warehouse floor a couple stories down. She landed hard on her back, knocking the wind out of her and smashing her head backwards against the concrete ground. Grey clutched at the arrow wound, mostly just to have something to hold onto and ground her. The pain radiating over her body was stunning, but it wasn't the worst she'd experienced. Still the world spun around her and she couldn't hold back the slight curses as she tried to focus. She blinked, trying to clear the blurry image from view to make out any shapes. Before she could her mind together, Grey felt someone push her onto her stomach. The rest of the arrow snapped, pushing the stump of the shaft a little further into her shoulder and making her grind her teeth to clear the tears from her eyes.
The body on top of her was straddling her hips, one hand pushing her head into the ground and another pinning her arm behind her back. None of this was helping her situation, and her injured body was screaming in protest. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move, and couldn't think.
"Who are you?!" The voice above her yelled. Grey could make out red hair and green eyes bent over her shoulder to look her in the face, but nothing else was quite registering. The redhead had their whole body pressed against Grey's back, keeping her firmly pressed and held to the ground. It might have turned her on if she wasn't in so much pain.
Another voice sounded, slightly further away and more masculine. "Did HYDRA send you? What do they want?!" She closed her eyes, trying to clear what was becoming a massive, thumping headache from her mind. Too many voices, too much going on, she couldn't focus.
"Answer us!" Yet another voice. Grey turned her head as much as she could towards this one, looking up at another arrow a few inches from her face, pulled back by someone too blurry for Grey to make out.
"So there's quite a few of you bastards then-" Grey rasped quietly, laughing almost to herself before her vision went dark.
