Nomad | Hawkeye FF ✓

ENGLISH MUFFIN

SHE could hardly keep her hands from trembling as she cupped her mug of steaming hot coffee, fresh from the pot. Two creams, no sugar.

"Be on the roof of the Triskelion at zero six hundred hours for your...first mission with the Avengers tomorrow." Fury's voice echoed in the back of her mind from their call yesterday.

She glanced quickly to the cafeteria's clock hanging over the door frame as one would enter into the room; which read four in the morning. Two hours away from her very first mission with the Avengers.

She wondered how she was going to be fighting alongside the heroes, and what part she would play in the instrument of this operation.

After her phone call with the director, he had emailed her a brief of the mission: information regarding location, time, floor plans, what to bring, and even who she was going to be up against. Even though she knew already who it was, how things were going to pan out, and conjectured what her role was, she still couldn't get rid of a certain sinking feeling of dread that something horrible was going to happen.

Setting aside such grave emotions, Sophie kept outlining passages she could use if trouble came her way, marking hallways that weren't heavily guarded, and went over the initiated training protocol she did at the Professor's school.

The aerial photo Fury had sent to her—no doubt taken from one of SHIELD's drones—of the Hydra base they were to engage, helped her study where the exits were located and where to enter unseen. Silent as any enigmatic creature. She smirked into her coffee cup. She loved being the one who was undetected, out of sight and sneaky, with a little pinch of dramatics—

Wait, she thought and bunched her eyebrows together, that's Fury...or Stark.

Shaking her head to rid the men from her mind, she went back to the little meeting she was having with herself.

Over and over and over again, sipping her coffee, she memorized the email, and everything else that was required of her to do so, as she scrolled through its contents on her phone. "If you add some sugar to that, I think it might make you a little bit sweeter," a deep, sleepy voice said as she felt the cafeteria table shake a little.

Sophie drew her concentration away from her phone and upturned her head, forcing her eyes to follow the path to where she heard that familiar sound. Sitting in front of her, sandy blonde hair disheveled, with a wrinkled white t-shirt and black boxers and eyes barely staying open, Clint lazily drew a side smirk.

"Don't you just look dandy this morning," she muttered under her breath as she looked the Avenger over with owlish eyes. She blinked and shook her head to clear her throat from disuse first thing in the morning. "How did you know I didn't have sugar in my coffee?"

Clint raised his own black mug, filled to the brim with dark liquid, pointing in the direction of the kitchen in the cafeteria. "The nice lunch maid in there told me what you took, and how you took it." Sophie watched as he hurriedly took a greedy gulp of his coffee.

She wanted to retort, and you're one to talk, you have straight black coffee! But somewhere in his reply, the young teen caught something else interesting that the man had said.

"Clint," she started, and glanced over her shoulder at the petite woman behind the counter arranging sandwiches for the morning, "she's a, lunch lady," she corrected and looked back at the hero. "not a lunch maid."

"Give me a break," he said after taking another swig of his coffee. "It's freakin' four in the morning, shouldn't you be in bed?" His voice was muffled near the end as he brought the mug to his mouth.