The recon Quinjet rattled as it cruised at a low altitude. The wings carved through the dense cloud cover, the aircraft bouncing turbulently as they bowed and flexed. Sailing through the maelstrom of snow and fog, snow stuck to the aeronautic flaps. The windows frosted over, the crystallized ice resembling a spiderweb, with beads of moisture clinging to the threads.

The hum of the stealth jets propelling them along vibrated the canister they excused for a hull, the metal walls quivering at the bolts. Beyond the frozen portholes, Clint could see the flashing red lights adorning the tips of the wings, shrouded with cloud even at close proximity.

"Have you got your earpiece in?" Coulson checked, strapped into the jumpseat opposite, bolt upright with two seatbelts crossed over his chest.

Clint tapped his ear furtively, wincing as feedback squealed from all the probing. "Yeah, it's in... And on," he called to be heard over the purr rumbling the aircraft.

Coulson winced in turn, Clint's voice amplified through his earpiece. "Your mic seems to be in order too," Coulson assessed, encrypting the wavelength on his brick of a PDA. "Alright, now it's simple as jumping out of a plane!" He chirped.

"One minute to ETA!" A voice rung out from the cockpit, tinny in the enclosed space. "Scared, Barton?" Bobbi called from the head of the hull, flashing a winning smile over her shoulder.

"I don't get scared, Bobbi. What do you take me for?" Clint retorted aloofly, smirking like a schoolboy.

He could feel the adrenaline pulsing through him, flooding every ventricle and vein, it was the flightiness at the base of his spine and the tingle in his fingertips. Growing up with an abusive dad, it seemed cowardly to be petrified of such superficial things as heights, the dark, or death. A quiver was in his hands, which he scarcely tamed with a furl of his fists, and he swallowed the pusillanimous lump in his throat.

"Thirty seconds," Bobbi informed him, unlocking the bay door at the butt of the jet.

A hiss susurrated as the lock depressurized, and a sibilation snaked from the hydraulics as the hatch lowered. The air entered the container with a whoosh, and the aeroplane shook. The sound was fierce, and Clint fought the headwinds to reach the door.

"On my mark!" Bobbi's voice crackled in his earpiece, secured beneath his cowl.

Clint's secured the chute tighter, leather-coated fingers fumbling with the fiddly buckles. He shielded his eyes with the goggles supplied and stared down into the void. Passing punctures in the clouds revealed the drop.

"Ten-"

He could see the bulky expanse of the city, all the beacons of the night time. The cars and lorries that crawled along like ants in tow on winding streets dotted with lampposts. The enclaves of light where squares broke the orderly patterns of streets, hubs of luminescence. The sprawl of streets was labyrinthine; intricate webbed lines of light, lanes threaded between, strands of the city reaching out into the countryside until they trailed away.

"Nine-"

Beneath the rushing of air and the howling of the wind, he was aware of the apogee of noise orchestrated by the city. The screeching of tires, the tooting of horns, the racket of engines buzzing. The industrial clanking of cranes and construction vehicles as they tried to reconstruct areas devastated by conflict.

"Eight-"

Surrounding the island of industrialization, he could see the sweep of rural region that acted as a sea. Grids of farmland, ploughed up, squares of brown turf in disorganized countryside. An invasion of green that conquered the slopes in thickset forests, vanquished only by the river that advanced through the sylvan landscape.

"Seven-"

The architecture was archaic, it made the art-deco of New York City blush with youth. Barbed buildings, carved columns, and ornate facades; convoluted constructions purposed to stun the beholder. Artistry that put the strict and straight lines of the tower blocks, and garish billboards and bright lights to shame.

"Six-"

The scale was immodest. Industrialisation branching out into the recesses of nature and raging against the green kingdom, gobbling up the planes of vitality and plotting then with buildings. Clint had to turn his head severely to get an all encompassing view of the urbanised hub.

"Five-"

Clint was vaguely aware of the pong of fumes that hung in the air, chugged out of the Quinjet skimming through the clouds, and smog being churned out of chimneys in great batches to fire up the city; a haze hung over the town, the product of cars and lorries and factories. That, and the salty stench of his own sticky armpits, a cold sweat on a cold night.

"Four-"

Clint could tell the headwinds were exacerbating the temperature, and the the emaciated atmosphere density didn't hold heat like solid ground, but the chill was bitter. His cheeks and lips were wind-bitten, he sported a rosy nose - starting to run - and rosy cheeks, bared to the barrage of snowflakes kicking up in the blizzard.

"Three-"

He caught his breath.

"Two-"

He rocked on his heels.

"One-"

He plummeted.

As the black dot of his stealth mission clothing was swallowed up by the grey mass of cloud, and Clint's whooping faded out of earshot, the bay door clicked shut.

Coulson settled a finger on his earpiece. "Is he singing the James Bond theme tune?"

Bobbi snorted from the pilot seat. "Affirmative, sir. I think he is."

~

The wind whistled around him, nothing but the sound of his flapping overalls and rushing air filled his ears.

The city enlarged before his eyes and he headed towards it, arms and legs spreadeagled to slow his descent.

The watch on his wrist beeped and he grabbed the metal hoops, and pulled.

The parachute shot out and he came to an abrupt halt in midair, and the air was punched out of his lungs. He emitted a breathless laugh and punched the air; he was strung up like a marionette, the parachute rippling above him, dangling above the city - the view the most picturesque he had ever seen. Hands on the cords, he spiralled down to the drop zone indicated on his wrist PDA, singing the iconic bass guitar riff of the Bond theme.

He came in steep, circling towards the ground, towards a field on the edge of the city - innocuous, inconspicuous.

The realisation of velocity dawned on his as he raced towards the grassy ground. "Woah! Woah!" He kicked fervently, trying to hit the ground running, and collided with a stumble, a fall, and a thud.

He toppled over onto his face as the parachute kept drifting forwards, and he was dragged by the ropes. Fumbling, he unclipped the harness and he lay front-down in the dirt, catching his breath, as the chute bounced away like tumbleweed.

His heart thudding in his ears, he started giggling, cheeks smeared with mud, and knees stained with grass. He outstretched his arms and embraced the ground, thankful for solidity under his quivering legs.

"Barton, you alive?" Coulson's voice crackled through his earpiece, backdropped by the roaring of the jets.

"Yeah-huh!" He cheered, pounding the mud with his fist in triumph. "Face-planted though," he explained, wheezing with laughter, voice muffled by the earth.

"What did I say about tuck and roll?" Bobbi reprimanded, tones of humour in her voice.

"I know, I know," Clint breathed, sighing deeply; contently, cheek to the grass.

After renewing his relationship with the ground, he clambered to his feet, and started to remove the black jumpsuit, unzipping the front and shimmying out of the arms. His breathing was still laboured.

A farmer ambled by on his tractor on his way to the nearby barn from which Clint became aware of 'moos' and 'baas'. Seeing Clint stripping down, he eyed him and the deflated parachute suspiciously, the chugging of the engine loud enough to cover up his foreign expletives.

"Hi!" Clint shouted, waving boisterously, bouncing on the tips of his toes.

The farmer averted his eyes with a head shake and sped away, the treads of the chunky wheels carving patterns into the dirt.

"Clint, what are you doing?" Coulson's voice rang out in his ear.

"Making friends with the locals." Clint's words surfed the back of a shallow breath, grabbing his knapsack with his bow and arrows from the ground and shrugging it onto his shoulders, over his thermal gear.

Clint used the Danube as his compass into the city as it sliced through the middle. Washing the cud off his face from an accessible shore of the river, he headed onwards, aiming to get to his hotel before his legs gave out.

~

Within the walls of Budapest, Clint stopped at a payphone, the glass box was cracked from stumbling drunks rattling around in them, and vandalised with illegible graffiti by the youths who treated the device as obsolete.

The light flickered distractingly above him in the claustrophobic space and he posted the foreign coins into the slot with a click. The absent tone hummed in his ear where he clutched the plastic phone between chin and shoulder.

He jabbed the cold metal digits, scratched and losing the definition of the numbers with the traipsing of fingers. A few beeps sounded, and it started to ring.

He drummed his fingers impatiently on the interior, eyes darting about the near empty streets and scanning faces of the passersby on the off-chance one happened to be Miss Romanova.

A bubbly voice danced from the handset and Clint sighed. 'Hi, Kate Bishop and Lucky here, leave us a message and we'll get back to you!' Her voice adopted a comedic persona. 'Yes we will, won't we, Lucky!' The dog barked down the phone and the beep sounded.

"Hiya, Katie, it's Clint..." He began, struggling to find the words. "Remember me..? The arsehole who ditched you a year ago? The one who grew up with you in Iowa?" He chuckled nervously. "Yeah him... Look, I can't tell you where I am, Katie - then I'd have to kill you!" He spluttered, then trailed off humourlessly. "-But I can tell you I'm so far out, and that I really wish you were here... My God, this place is so beautiful, so big, so many lights... And it's approximately five thousand miles from home." Clint hung his head, he was already feeling isolated. "Why am I calling? That's a good question... I'm not sure if even I know the answer..." He braced his head and hand against one of the glass sides of the cubicle. "I guess I just wanted to hear the sound of a familiar voice, a friendly voice... I'm about to do something so amazing, and so terrifying at the same time, and-"

Clint realised he was babbling and put a halt to his prattling before he spilled sensitive information.

"Katie, I love you. And the moment I get back to the States, I'm going to make this all up to you; I'm going to speak to my seniors, see if I can explain. I'll take you to dinner. A proper dinner! Not just pizza from the local takeout; how about we go to that food court with the really great Italian place, just off that plaza with the statue. And I mean it! You can hold me to it!"

Clint paused, dabbing tears from his eyes. 'One minute remaining' a robotic voice informed him, or so the dial told him in accordance with the Hungarian words.

"I'm not such a lazy waste of space anymore, I'm earning money, Katie. I'm self sufficient, but also horribly dependent on those I love to afford my sanity... Sorry I've been so distant. Wish me luck, and see you soon."

Clint hung up the phone with conviction and strode away, bounding off to the grand hotel down the street where he would be bunking for the following week - if it went well, far less - to settle down and recuperate his thoughts.

A/N - Amazing, I managed to spit one of these chapters out whilst completely hungover and in the midst of doing an essay on Oscar Wilde - who is fascinating by the way, if anyone was wondering/didn't know - and I feel pretty good about it.

The Halloween party yesterday with my mates from my new school was amazing (Or I suppose it was technically still today as it was gone 3:30 by the time I crashed out) - besides the whole vomiting twice thing. The smell of gin makes me recoil now, I don't want to touch a drop of anything for months.

Happy Halloween for yesterday! X