New story time! This one's been in my head for a while and I finally decided to put fingers to keyboard and start it. It takes place a little bit before AoU and before CA:CW. Chapters will be short in the beginning, but will gradually get longer. Updates will be at least once a week. Thank you so much for reading and feel free to drop a review :)

Shout out to my amazing friend and fanfic buddy, I-Write-Upon-My-Whims for reading this, giving me advice, and always making me smile. She's an amazing writer as well!

Disclaimer: I do not own the Avengers. Shocking, I know. Also, I edited photos from the internet to make the story cover. I don't own those photos. Again, this should come as a shock to many people.

As he took in the view from the fifth floor, lights went out all over the city. The once bright and bustling landscape was now pitch dark. Screams sounded over cars crashing and people running. Clint looked for a few more seconds, hoping to see the lights go back on. Maybe someone had tripped a wire or something. A city-wide electrical wire…?

As the screaming continued, he shook his head and went back inside the hotel room, closing the door to the balcony as he did. "Something's going on out there," he announced. Natasha was on the bed, hitting the remote with her hand in a half-hearted attempt to get it to turn the television on. Steve stumbled out of the shower, pulling on a shirt and a pair of jeans. His hair was still wet and there was shampoo in parts of it.

"Lights went off in the bathroom," Steve said as Clint eyed his hair. He grabbed a towel and started to scrub it dry.

"Lights, and power, went out everywhere. It's pitch black outside," Clint replied as Natasha swung her legs off the bed and stood up.

They were staying at a hotel in the Philippines, taking a two day break before heading back to SHIELD. The mission had been completed sooner than expected and Fury had given them two days to themselves.

"Let's find out what's going on. Maybe then we can get the television up and running again," Natasha muttered and tossed Steve his jacket. He strapped his shield on underneath it, as he never went anywhere without it, and then shrugged the brown jacket on. "You too, flyboy. You always complain about getting cold."

Clint chuckled and took his jacket from the closet. Natasha put a few more weapons on her person and pulled on a pair of boots. Clint secured a gun, seeing as a bow was slightly conspicuous for a power outage. He followed Steve and Natasha out of the hotel room and down the stairs to the lobby, where people were crowded. "What's going on?" he asked to one of the workers.

She shrugged and said, "we're working on it, but all of our systems are down. It's possible something happened off the coast, but the alarms would have sounded. Check down by the power main." Clint nodded and reported back to his other two friends.

"The one mission we don't bring night vision googles," Natasha muttered, pushing her way past the crowd of people and out onto the dark street.

"You're practically half cat, with the way you flip around and kill things. You're telling me that you can't see in the dark?" Clint joked. He muttered an 'ow' two seconds later after Natasha punched him playfully in the arm.

"Come on," pushed Steve from up ahead a few paces. "The faster we get to the power main, the faster we find out what's going…" he trailed off, perking up his head to listen to something.

Clint tried listening also, but he heard nothing. Even with his hearing aids, he couldn't tell what Steve was listening to. "Apparently Steve's actually part eagle. He's part eagle, you're part cat. Does that make me part hawk?"

"Sh, I hear it too," Natasha chided. Clint closed his mouth and focused. Off in the distance, there was screaming. Then it would silence and more would start. It was like an undulating wave of screams. It wasn't until he heard the crashing closer to them that they all realized what was about to strike.

"Tsunami!" Steve screamed. Instantly, everyone around him started running to find higher ground. Natasha and Clint stood completely and utterly still, listening as the ominous wave grew closer and closer. And it was still pitch dark. "We've got maybe ten seconds. We need to get high, and fast," he ordered. People had already started rushing back into the hotel, and the stairways were bogged down. There was no going back that way.

Clint nodded, but Natasha was staring down the street in front of them. "Too late," she whispered, pointing at the street. Water had started to fill it up and was pouring towards them. It was angry, dark water.

Clint looked around frantically for a staircase, a building to scale, anything. Eventually he opted with, "run!" He tugged Natasha with him and they broke into a sprint in the other direction with Steve behind them. When that street ended, Clint banked left and kept running. All the while, he pushed past people and tried to outrun the wave.

But they could only keep that speed up for so long. Eventually his legs began to burn and water started to pool around his feet. Still they kept running. One soggy boot in front of the other. When he tripped over a railing, Steve hauled him back up.

That was when the rest of the wave hit. It forced past their legs and carried them up off the ground. He lost his grip on Natasha as she screamed. Natasha never screamed. The very sound brought terror washing over him.

Their hands were wrenched from each other as she went in one direction and he went in another. Everything went silent as he was tugged under the water and fought to come up for air. He didn't know what happened to Steve. When he did get up again, sputtering and coughing, he tried calling out for them. His voice was met with a chorus of screaming. Clint's body was pulled back under and after a few seconds, was met with the side of a building.

He could feel the ribs crack under the weight of his body and the water. He pushed against the ground with his feet and shot up, head breaking through the surface. Clint gulped down a few lungfuls of air and let loose a string of curses before the water got him. It tossed him down the streets like a rag doll. His legs became a mess of tissue after colliding with broken glass and his once fractured ribs became broken ribs after another collision with what used to be a car.

There was no way to see anything in the dark water. He fumbled around inside of it blindly, praying for some break in the thrashing. After being under the water for nearly a minute, the scenery got darker as he lost consciousness.

Steve had heard Clint calling his name, but his lungs had filled up with water and he had been unable to answer. He was once again drowning in cold, dark water. It ripped him apart and smashed him to pieces with absolutely no remorse. His back connected with multiple pieces of debris, but the shield protected it from the brunt of the injuries. He tumbled and spun and rolled through the water, not even conscious enough to try and dodge some of the debris.

Almost ten minutes after the wave had hit and he had been carried who knew how far with how many injuries, he managed to get his hands around a ladder that descended from one of the buildings. Steve tried to calm his burning lungs, taking in air as fast as he could. He held onto the slick, metal ladder with all of his strength, praying that soon the onslaught of water would come to an end.

With only his torso out of the water, his legs became subject to whatever mutilation the waste in the water decided to offer. What felt like a large plank of wood or metal smashed against the back of his knee, sending spots into his vision. His entire limb was encased in fire from the inside out, making Steve grit his teeth to avoid crying out more.

And still he held on.

Natasha had never liked the water. It was always an implement of torture for her. While in small, innocent amounts it kept her alive, in many other senses it had almost ended her too many times to count. This time was no exception. She had lost consciousness after being underwater, and was surprised to find herself awake again. Between the darkness of the water and the darkness of the world around her, she had assumed that the darkness of death would soon join them.

But that was not the case. Instead she woke up, coughing and sputtering to get water out of her lungs. She later found out that it was an awful idea. Natasha was laying on her side, with her back facing a building and her front facing the street. Trying to move away from the building only brought an onslaught of pain. Pain that, when she looked down, found was from a large chunk of pipe. Pipe that went in one side of her abdomen and came out her back.

This time, it wasn't the water that caused her to lose consciousness.