Despite how Kate didn't support my decision to fight for right, I carried on anyway. I graduated from petty criminals to more; tracking down drug cartels and disposing them.

The room around me was in turmoil. Two halves of a table were lain to waste where the rotund drug lord had landed after I'd flipped him over my shoulder. His lackeys were strewn across the floor, looking like debris on a battlefield. Portraiture in the penthouse was askew on the walls, some canvases torn down the middle and flopping out of the frames. The glass table was shattered, nothing but a puddle of chips remained beneath the metal frame.

I ambled over the fallen bookcase, slipping on the landslide of literature beneath my feet - none of which I thought had been read - and raised my bow and arrow to the groaning felon. The chandelier spilling with diamonds was still swaying above, making my shadow warp and twist on the walls.

"Believe me now?" I asked, glass crunching under foot.

I staggered closer, trying not to let the pain show on my face; I'd been scathed by a passing bullet; my face had taken a good beating: my nose dripping with blood, a black eye swelling and my lip split; and I was pretty sure my knee had been dislocated.

The drug baron nodded fervently, blood oozing from both nostrils, still sitting in the puddle of glass.

"And you'll steer everyone in your drug ring away from teenagers in Central Park. Or I swear to God-" I crouched down, snatching him by the black silk tie around his neck and looping the material around my hand for leverage. "-I will come back here, and next time I won't leave you or your colleagues alive."

With that, I nutted him out of consciousness and his bulky body flopped to the ground, his white suit stained red with blood. If trashing his apartment didn't cost him a small fortune, his dry cleaners bill would be extortionate. Revenge; as far as I was concerned. His drug empire and reign of terror had cost a spate of teenage lives, this was befitting retribution.

Unseen by hostile eyes, I limped away from the wrecked apartment; pain ringing out throughout my body. The tears I'd been striving to apprehend finally sprung in my eyes as I ceased gritting my jaw. Ailments well worth it for the sake of saving others.

On I lolloped towards the window and prized open the gap wider with my bloody knuckled hands. I wiggled my arrow still embedded in the wall, testing the strength, the rope still strung between two buildings. I hooked my bow on and perched on the windowsill, the wind whipping up across the alley.

Giving myself no time to think about falling, I sprung off and zipped down the wire with a whirring sound, landing then with a clatter on the opposing balcony below. I winced, sure I'd picked up new bruises on impact.

But as I struggled to my feet in the shade of the building, a call snapped me out of my struggling.

"Hawkeye?" They called, voice amplified by the way it rebounded off the walls of the buildings. Much to my dismay, I peered through the shadows and down at the sunny street.

Peering down into the sunlight, I saw a suited man, neck craned and staring up at me. "Who wants to know?" I croaked back, specks of blood splattering around my lips as I spoke.

"Me," They retorted, waving, smug as anything. He was dressed like an FBI agent, or CIA; but his manner was informal.

I had been witnessed, I was sure, and I fired a warning shot with strained blood-stained arms, the arrow implanting in the ground between the toes of the man's shoes. "Wrong answer."

He flinched, staggering backwards with dismay. The sandy brown haired man in his impeccable suit and polished black shoes rifled around in his pocket and fumbled to withdraw a gun, cocking the pistol confidently.

"I'm going to need you to come out..." He said with exasperation, clasping the gun steadily and aiming it into the darkness where I lurked. The iron-sight was aligned perfectly with me and I stared down the black barrel of the gun.

"Or what?" I retorted, beckoning the trouble as if I could really take one another fight. My tone was bold enough, but my voice crackled; alluding to my wounds.

"Or I'm going to have to shoot," he said aloofly, finger flexing on the trigger. "For all I know, you're armed." His stance was confrontational, and his hands were steady; whoever he was, he had been trained in firearms. That wasn't good.

"How do you know my name?" I returned, arming my bow, my arms trembling as I tried to handle the strain of the bow. I'm sure he heard the creak of the wooden arc and the stretch of the bowstring.

"I know a lot of things, son..." He assured me, gun trained unwaveringly on me. "Your name is just one thing of many." His eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to figure out more than my outline where I loitered.

"Then why on earth should I trust you?" I spat, fingers being bitten into by the sharp bowstring, aching to be twanged. "Are you one of those men on dark suits whose come to take me a away?" There were very few ways he would've come across me, and my name, and his bespoke suit was of no comfort to me.

"Not if you come quietly, I'm sure we could come to some kind of agreement." The nozzle of the gun lowered slightly, aligned with my sternum rather than head.

From my perch, hardly able to stand upright, I told him "I'm not gonna come out..." In all honesty, I wasn't sure if with my mangled legs that I'd make it to the ground.

"Sir-" I grit my jaw, the name had too many negative connotations. "This is for your own good-"

I let the arrow fly and that time, it scuffed the tip of his shoe, peeling away the top layer of leather and stabbing into the tarmac.

"It's Hawkeye..."

"Okay, okay..." The agent backed away, eyeing the arrow with his chest heaving. "That's fine... Hawkeye, will you come down?" He called up, tilting the gun and gesticulating to the ground with it.

"Over my dead carcass..." I shouted back, turning to make away from the scene, clambering up the rusted metal railings and steps affixed to the side of the derelict apartment block.

"So be it..." A gunshot rang out, the pop of the bullet loud enough for me to hear and the flash of the muzzle and sparks of the ricochet caught my attention.

He must've been an apt marksman, because the bullet dislodged something in the frame of the already decaying steps and they started to come away from the building, creaking and crashing.

I was left with no choice but to spring down to the alley and landed with a painful tuck and roll; groaning and staggering to my feet.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way... What's it going to be?" Phil asked, hands skimming the silver cuffs clinking on his belt rung.

Wincing as I straightened my spine, "the hard way," I gritted.

The man lunged at me and I barely avoiding a punch hurled at me, stumbling back. I returned a snap-kick, watching the agent double over, clutching his wounded and winded middle.

I turned and attempted to lollop away whilst he was clutching his middle, but no sooner than I had gotten three paces, I was tackled onto my front.

My head hit the pavement, and my face, ground into the gravel. I thrust my elbow back, hearing a grunt emitted close to my ear. I flipped us over, so I was atop and threw a disjointed uppercut.

No sooner than my punch had landed, he scuffled so he was on top again and a punch was directed at my nose. I roared with pain and threw a sloppy punch back, which he caught; manipulating my arm so that it was bent up and flaring with pain behind my back.

"Give in, it's for your own good..." The agent growled.

I thrashed and kicked and jerked, and then the mask was pulled from my face. I was flipped over, my felonious face revealed.

I squinted and seethed as the daylight poured into my retinas and recoiled and screwed my eyes shut as a fist was raised to impact into my cheek.

But the fist remained static, never striking down and smiting me for my crimes. I peeled my eyes open, and with a furrowed brow, looked up at my combatant.

"Christ..." They breathed. "What happened to you?"

Feeling the cut on my brow sting in the open air, I retorted. "Who cares?" But I could feel the bruising swelling on the slashed bridge of my nose and in my split lip.

The agent clambered off of me, stood ram-rod straight and brushed the grit and dust off his pressed black trousers. "What are you? Fifteen years old?" He offered me a hand up.

"Seventeen, what's it to you?" I sneered, dragging a hand across my scarlet-stained mouth and smearing blood across my pasty skin.

"Everything..." He seemed fretful. "Seventeen years old and you don't miss a shot..." And full of veneration. "What's a boy of your age doing on the streets? Playing a vigilante? What kind of kid your age goes home to his parents with injuries like that and doesn't get asked questions?" I batted away his hand with my bloody one, leaving flecks of my blood on him.

"I don't have parents..." I responded, chastising him for his assumptions. I scrambled to my feet, wobbling and staggering until I found my footing.

The man pressed a finger to his ear and looked right through me. "Base... This is Agent Coulson... There's been a... A complication..."

I narrowed my eyes at him.

"What kinda complication are we talking about Phil?"

"Director, I'm sorry... I... I can't take down this- this- kid! He's only a kid!" He declared, running a hand through his shaggy dark brown hair.

"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on... Kid? You're telling me that the masked vigilante archer we've been tracking is a kid?"

"He's seventeen years old, Nick! I'm sorry, I can't complete the assignment. I have complete alignment with the agency and with the law... But sometimes I have to make a moral call. And this is one of those times... I can't put a bullet in a seventeen year old kid. That's just... Not right!"

He was arguing loud enough and voraciously enough for me to make sense of the snippets of sounds I could hear and the bold and articulate shapes of his lips.

"Woah, woah, wait!" I rubbed the gashes on my elbows to clean them out of the gravel and grit from the sideways. "Hold on!" I bared my palms in a surrender. "What do you mean, "bullet"?!"

Fury sighed. "Look, I don't know what to say. You're going to be the one reporting to Pierce now we have to tell him that the man responsible for a murder spree - be it the murder of criminals - in the New York area, hasn't been crossed off."

Coulson - or so I had discerned his name to be - peered at me with a sympathetic look. "Man isn't the right word for the adolescent I'm staring at..." He looked me up and down, a pinch between his brows.

"Bring him in, Phil..."

"Yes director, Coulson out," the man drawled despondently, bowing slightly, almost out of habit.

Barely balanced on my jellified legs, I was snatched by the wrists and two metal cuffs were snapped onto them, wound up tight until the blade-like edge was tight against my skin. "Yo, what are you doing?" I protested shaking the manacles, feeling the razor-sharp metal bite into my skin.

"Something for your own good," he informed me, placing a hand at the small of my back and guiding me away from the scene of our scuffle: I could see a black armoured car with tinted windows, stationary, parked on the sidewalk. "What's your name, kid?"

"What's it matter to you?" I spat back, resisting the arrest by digging my heels into the tarmac and rattling the metal clanking on my forearms.

"We have ways of getting it out of you if you don't tell us..." Coulson said nonchalantly, disinterest painted across his face. Sounding too much like a shady government agency, I blurted my name instantly.

"Clint. Clint Barton."

He smiled disingenuously at me and his finger rose to the bulky wired plug in his ear again.. "Oh and Fury, can we pull up all files on a Clint Barton." He articulated my name excessively -- making no room for misidentification, I was sure.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked as he attempted to wrestle me into the back of the car. The back of my head was shoved down and I was battled onto the spongy leather seat; beige upholstery.

"I'm not gonna harm you kid, don't worry, you're in safe hands..." He did the honours of drawing the seatbelt across my body and clipping me inescapably into the deluxe Chevrolet pickup. Ordinarily, I might have been grateful to travel in such a flush vehicle; and it was all the bells and whistles: backlit dials, polished wood panels and suede grips on the wheel.

"On it, Coulson. Come and find me later."

"Yeah, that's what my dad said..." I murmured to myself disdainfully, shooting Agent Coulson a sideways glance.

"What was that?" His hand froze as he reached to plug in the seatbelt.

"Nothing."

Adjusting the tie that I had unclipped and made lopsided, he told me "If you've got something to say, speak your mind..." Deft fingers nimbly redid the Windsor knot.

"Are you the police?" I asked, having not heard sirens of seen the blues-and-twos. No fluorescent markings decorated the vehicle, nor were there any lights perched on top of the rotund vehicle; but this seemed too routine and official to be anything less.

"No... God no. I'm a whole lot worse than that. Your talents have not gone unnoticed, Clint; you've captured the attention of my agency."

The driver glanced in the rear-view mirror and Coulson gave him the signal to pull away. With a purr of the petrol-guzzling engine, he rocked away from the pavement and rolled into the street.

"Who's that?" I asked, shifting uncomfortably in the squishy seat, stifling a pained whine as the metal pinched where the cuffs were locked.

"The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division..." Coulson spewed intelligibly without tripping over a single syllable.

I snorted, and my scoffing was silenced with an icy glare. "That's a bit of a mouthful, have you thought of shortening it?" A quirked an eyebrow.

"SHIELD, for short..." Coulson added as an afterthought. "But Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division sounds way cooler." A far less mature side of the stern agent bled through, a twinkle of glee in his stormcloud blue eyes.

"Now you're just showing off," I jeered, daring to smirk in handcuffs.

"Oh yeah," Agent Coulson agreed, a sly smugness plastered across his face.

The journey wasn't a comfortable one - a journey to god only knew where - the bulky vehicle with its bouncy suspension and the rumbling and spluttering engine.

"What do you people do? How come I've never heard of you?" Because the James Bond act was all very well and good, radioing back to HQ with a earpiece, producing a pistol and wearing bespoke black suits: but why on earth would a government agency be interested in me? The deaf school drop out from a shanty town in Iowa.

"We're a secret government agency. We're the department that deal with things when the cops are out of their depth, which is always. Gifteds, aliens and kids who like dressing up as Robin Hood apparently." He couldn't resist smirking at the last part, clearly amused at my circus get-up. But I was no clown.

"Hey, I'll have you know that this costume is Kevlar, police grade." I gestured awkwardly to my tabard and chaps, indigo and black. "Completely bulletproof, my shin and forearm guards, titanium plated and my hand guard is leather. If anyone's playing dress up, it's you. Who are you meant to be, a less attractive James Bond?"

That's when Agent Coulson took offence. His joviality transmuted to sourness. He was evidently protective of his title.

From the fatherly clearing of his throat and the disappointed sigh, I knew I was in for a reprimanding. It was eighth grade parents' evening all over again. "Alright kid, let me put it plain and simple to you... I'm a nice guy. You'd probably like me. I was sent out to kill you, because you conducted a spree of killings-"

"Of bad people-" I interjected; he made me sound like a common felon. I had a moral code. I wasn't a murderer, and I didn't kill meaninglessly. I was a hero! He only had to pass a newsstand or tune into local radio once in a while to know I rescued innocent citizens.

"I'm not done yet, Clint. Don't talk until I'm finished." My mouth snapped shut. The authority he exuded was something I hadn't come across in plenty of years. "But I didn't kill you because I realised you were just a kid, but I could take you out just the same and justify popping a bullet in your head. Under the laws of self defence, I could get away with it, and that's the bottom line."

"But you won't." I objected, checking the safety of the gun slung in his holster, swinging on his hip.

"What makes you so sure Falcon-eye," Coulson retorted aloofly, his words oozing condescension, enough to make me feel sick.

If there was one thing I couldn't stand, it was being belittled. Made to feel worth less, based on whatever superficial factor.

"It's Hawkeye," I snapped, like the crack of a whip on a horse's back.

"You're a smart kid, Clint. I'll give you that. But you've got a hell of a gob on you. Lose that mouth, and you could make a valuable agent..." Coulson hinted and I chuckled at his expense; the very notion of me buttoned up to the collar, in a pressed suit and shined shoes was laughable.

"What makes you think I'd ever want to join your agency? Become a stiff like you?" Recollection of being confined in that scratchy suit for Kate's sister's wedding - though that wasn't the most memorable thing about that day - drifted through my mind, making my skin itch at the memory.

Coulson rolled his eyes. "My God, you're so young... So naive... So immature. Do you ever listen to yourself? It's like a constant forecast of inanity. Do you know it's not illegal to shut your face? Do you have a retort to everything?"

I took great glee in giving the retort he was dreading. "Yes I do, actually." I beamed at him.

"It would do you a world of good if you just said nothing right now. You're awful spritely for a guy who just got arrested..." He remarked. But then again, I suspected I wasn't the usual type that got arrested. How many vigilantes in carnival costume went around firing arrows in New York City.

"I've been in more unpleasant predicaments..."

Because I had been. I'd been lying on the ground, beaten, bludgeoned, and had to be scraped off the floor by paramedics before. I had been bullied so badly by the assholes in high school that I locked myself in a stall for the whole of recess, snotty crying into balled up toilet roll. I had slept on a street corner in the rain, in tatters of clothing, afraid, in the dark.

"Like what?" He asked, his words hanging in the air and looming over me like a dark cloud. But I wasn't about to spill my autobiography.

I found away to cross my arms even bound in cuffs. "I don't see why it's of any interest to you..." I averted my gaze, kicking the floor self-consciously.

"Look, Clint; as we speak, my director is pulling up everything about you from the US government database: when I get back to base, nothing about your identity is going to be a secret to me anymore. I'll have your schooling record, your family records, even records of your mail and phonecalls... And since I'm the agent applied to your case, I'm going to be the one trawling through and analysing every aspect of data on you."

I swallowed thickly, my nerves shot through. But I tried not to let the fear raging on the inside translate to my face. Instead I pouted petulantly and gritted my jaw.

"Is that strictly speaking legal? Are to allowed to do that? You shouldn't be allowed to do that. That's highly invasive, I have human rights!" I declared, shuffling away from him on the seat, only to be locked in place by the belt strapping me down. I felt like a patient on an operating table, and my psyche was about to be dissected.

"You kinda gave up your right to privacy when you killed a bunch of people. And this is the US government, privacy is a myth to us. We know everything about everyone. And your file, that's just the tip of the iceberg, Clint. Then comes the psych eval, the doctor's analysis and interrogation..." He smiled larily at me. "We're about to spend a whole lot of time together, kid." He even went as far as to patronisingly clap me on the back.

"Aw," I whined putting my head in my manacled hands. I knew I'd fucked up.

There were certain things that didn't need discovering. And my past was one of those things. I'd rather bygones remained bygones. I wasn't ready to be psychoanalysed and psycho-scrutinised.

"Something to hide, slick?" The agent probed; and it felt like my interrogation had already begun.

"No." I wouldn't give him the victory of letting my resolve fray so early. But my equilibrium was already teetering.

Coulson gave a smug hum of satisfaction. "Everyone has secrets. And yours will be spilled soon enough, one way or another." He sounded so sickeningly sure of himself.

"What're you gonna do?" I snorted, willing to doubt his act. Pride before a fall. "Inject me with truth serum?"

"Don't tempt me!" He said urgently. "Sodium pentathol is usually a last resort..."

I called him on it. "You're bluffing. That shit doesn't exist." But a hint of uncertainty made my voice waver.

"Oh you wish, kid..."

Tiring of feeling outdone, I put my head in my hands and mulled over the day's events. This looked bad.

"Having regrets?" Coulson chuckled to himself, looking like a bobble head as we bounced over the pot-holes that punctured the roads of downtown New York City.

"Yeah..." I breathed, only imagining what Kate would think if she found out I was arrested. I would've proved her right, and taxed her with my extortionate bail. What if I couldn't afford a bail? Bail for vigilantism wasn't going to be cheap. What if I needed an attorney? I was in deep shit.

"Just cooperate, and you won't come to harm. If you cooperate, it will be rewarded, I promise." A trustworthy smile was etched onto his face and he placed a palm on my kneecap.

For a second, I trusted Junior Field Agent Phil Coulson; but that trust was broken in an instant as a black bag was stuffed over my head and the strangest smell entered my nostrils. Sweet, stifling, smoky.

The world spun, my centre of gravity thrown by the dizzying scent that I had inhaled.

The world went black.

A/N - Sorry I took so long to update today; I had the dialogue for this written months ago; but I couldn't find the inspiration and coherency to string together the dialogue with events today.

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