Thank you to all the support for the first chapter of this!

Disclaimer: I do not own the Avengers.

Chapter 2: Extreme Ways

Extreme ways are back again

Extreme places I didn't know

I broke everything new again

Everything that I'd owned

Clint didn't even bother to look cool, calm, or collected. He just got the heck out of dodge. The first right he took led down a smaller, restaurant filled hallway. He didn't hear any rapid footsteps behind him, but that didn't mean anything.

Clint received a few strange looks as he darted between weary travelers, but in comparison to the rest of the people, it must have been relatively normal to see people sprinting through airports. Or maybe it was just New York. Clint nearly tripped over his own feet when he tried to stop and take a sharp turn down a hallway. At the end of the hallway was a doorway that read Private Offices. Clint sent a quick prayer and hoped that the door was unlocked.

His wishful thinking was to no avail. Anyone who wished to enter Private Offices was required to swipe their ID in front of a detector. Clint swore and turned back to the main hallway, making sure to round the turn that time. Just as he was turning, Clint noticed a man trotting through the crowd, looking around. Clint would bet his savings that the man was either working for Clint's stalker or in the same business. And he was almost positive that the two had help.

Unsure of where to go next, Clint ducked into the men's bathroom before he realized that he'd cornered himself. He went into a stall and locked the door. Clint glanced up at the ceiling. It was a drop ceiling, but it was maybe twelve feet in the air. He could probably get into the ceiling by balancing on the top of the wall of the stall and taking a leap of faith, but someone was bound to notice.

There was the sound of a multitude of feet, multiplied by the narrow walls leading into the bathroom. Not long after, a voice spoke.

"Can everyone please leave the bathroom. There is no need to panic. Please walk calmly out of the bathroom. There is one a little farther down the hallway if you need." The voice was clipped and professional.

There were murmurs of confusion, but one by one, the bathroom slowly emptied. Clint figured that they had to check each person to make sure that Clint wasn't trying to escape. That left Clint a very small window of small chaos to make his escape.

Clint backed up to the door and tried to get as much momentum as possible as he stepped on the toilet seat and launched himself at the wall on his left, twisting in midair to cling to the top with both hands. He then pushed off the wall with his feet and swung himself up so he was crouching on the wall.

There was a shout from below.

Clint turned his head. The two men that had been following him were staring back, accompanied by four airport security guards who were preparing to draw their weapons. They blocked the entrance to the bathroom. That all happened in less than two seconds. Clint looked back up at the ceiling, calculated the distance and where he would have to place his hands, and vaulted off the wall without a second thought.

Hitting a drop ceiling while traveling at a high velocity hurt Clint's hands more than he expected. His fingers scrabbled for purchase on one of the support beams just as one of the guards fired a warning shot. Clint paused momentarily, hanging from a twelve foot high ceiling by only his fingertips, to glance at the group.

"Clint Barton," the stalker called out. He was the one with the professional voice. "Please come down from the ceiling. My name is Phil Coulson of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. We would like to talk to you. However, if you do not, we may be forced to take any measures to ensure the security of those in the airport."

Clint looked down. He was hanging right above a toilet. He shook his head, and swung his legs up, kicking the section of ceiling away and pulling himself into the ceiling. A couple shots rang out at the same time.

The ceiling would not support his weight, Clint knew that. So before he fell through, he reached up and grabbed one of the metal beams above him, shifting mos of his weight onto that beam. Thankfully, the support beam he was on and the one he was holding onto ran parallel to each other. He started the process of heading down the beams, careful not to put more than a small amount of weight on the drop ceiling.

The space between floors was not very glamorous. There were no lights, but electrical wires were like spaghetti below him. Above him, pipelines and other things he couldn't name made movement very difficult. Not to mention the fact that the space was only about two feet high. Clint quickly learned that hanging like a sloth simplified things a bit.

Once he deemed that he was far enough away from where he made his escape, Clint lifted a section of the ceiling and peeked. He was above a small office. Four or five tall filing cabinets covered one wall and right below him was a cluttered desk. There was nobody in the room.

Repeating the process he had done to get into the ceiling, Clint slowly lowered himself down until he was hanging by his fingertips. Then he dropped lightly onto the ground, bending his knees to absorb the force and lessen the sound.

Clint walked casually out the door like he hadn't just broken into the office. Briefly checking the signs, he turned to the right and walked straight out the of airport. He had no idea what happened to his bag of weapons—he had ditched it as soon as he had started running—but it was too dangerous to go back into the airport. He started walking in the direction of the city.

-.-.-.-

Clint thumbed through the phone book. He had been searching for someone named Phil Coulson for a while now, but it looked like Phil Coulson didn't live in New York. He was American, Clint could tell that much, but he could live in Cleveland for all Clint knew. The company Coulson claimed to work for didn't seem to exist, either. So this was all either a large hoax, or the agency was very secretive. In either case, Clint didn't want to find out.

Clint sighed and closed the large yellow book. He stepped out of the phone booth and returned to the bus stop. It was late at night, but everyone was still awake, it being New Year's and all. Clint was feeling a large sense of deja vu, having just celebrated the New Year a few hours ago in Switzerland.

Clint had found a small street vendor selling New Year apparel. He had quickly found a shirt, and hat, and picked up a jacket and a new pair of jeans in a small retail store. His sweatshirt and old pair of jeans were stored safely in his bag until he could find a safe was to dispose of them.

An hour later found Clint riding the bus south through New Jersey. His plan was to take public transport down to BWI Airport in Maryland, then take a flight down to South America. How he was going to get a flight to South America hadn't been planned out yet, but Clint would have to think of something.

Nick Fury didn't glance up from his desk as the person entered the office.

"You had better be here to tell me that you have Hawkeye in custody."

Agent Coulson only shifted slightly. "Not exactly."

Fury looked up. "Agent Coulson, I gave you free reign on this project. You told me you would e able to bring him in. And now you're telling me that you can't?"

"No, sir," Coulson replied. "It's not that we can't bring him in. It's that he's proving to be more difficult than we expected."

"Then why are you here? Shouldn't you be in Switzerland, chasing this child down?"

"Clinton Barton left Switzerland hours ago. We have reason to believe that he is heading south. Our sources reported seeing someone that looked like him in a clothing store in New York a while ago."

"Do you mean to tell me that he was able to take a plane across the ocean without my agents noticing, and then to enter out country and get past security?"

"Actually, sir, I told the agents on the case to let him get onto the plane. We have stronger resources in America than we do internationally. It would be easier to catch him over here."

Fury glared at the younger agent. "And did you tell them to let him loose once he was inside the country, too?"

At this, Coulson hesitated. "No, sir, he managed to escape through the bathroom ceiling."

"He wants to recruit a monkey," Fury muttered. "This assassin is nineteen years old."

"Eighteen," Coulson corrected.

Fury simply glared at the man. "I don't care what you have to do. He shouldn't be able to outsmart one of my best agents and anither five agents who are twice his age! Get to it before he manages to skips the country again!"

"Yes, sir." Coulson could tell the conversation was over and left the office. He looked at the five men on his team who had been sitting outside the office, nervously awaiting Fury's wrath.

"Barton was last seen in New York two and a half hours ago. He could be anywhere by now. I want to find him. Look for plane tickets in nearby airports that were purchased recently. If you don't find any, expand your search to include the entire country. Contact our security checkpoints. Look up train, bus, subway, and boat tickets. We need to find this man!" Four of the five men sprang up to get to their jobs. The last one stood up slowly.

"How do you know you are going to find him?" Agent Sitwell asked.

"I have faith."

"But even if we do find him, he's already made it clear that he'll be dead before we get him."

Coulson gave his friend a side glance. "That's why I'm going to treat him like an assassin."

So this was a short chapter, but there was definitely some action.

And look, I updated before two months! I figured I'd get this out to you rather than make you wait for a longer chapter.

Have a fabulous weekend everybody!

-Silver out.

PS the song used is this chapter is "Extreme Ways" by Moby. I do not own it.