Clint doesn't see it coming.
Oh, he sees the three guys just fine, sees them watch him furtively as he passes on the other side of the street, head down against the rain and hands deep in his pockets. He keeps his attention on them until he turns right two streets over. Hopefully it's nothing. He's about halfway down the poorly lit side street when he hears them come up behind him. Dammit. Broken glass crunch under a shoe. A wet sound as someone steps in a puddle. They obviously know shit about moving silently.
"Hey!" one of the guys shouts from behind and Clint stops.
He sighs and squints at the rain that has started to fall harder. He was up at four this morning and that was a long fucking time ago, he's tired and cold and he's just not in the mood for whatever bullshit these guys are up to. He just wants to go home and go to bed. Is that really too much to ask? He turns and watches the three of them saunter up. They've pulled bandanas up over their mouths and noses, hiding. Idiots. Like he hadn't committed their faces to memory the moment they pinged his radar.
He keeps his hands relaxed by his sides. "What's up, fellas?" he asks lightly, then winces at himself. Wow, he's been spending too much time with Rogers. He's starting to sound like him.
They don't answer, just keep approaching; one straight on, two fanning out to each side. He sees the metal glint of a knife in the hand of the middle guy. He points it at Clint, makes a small stabby motion, and Clint sighs again. Fucking amateur hour.
He holds up a hand. "Whatever you've got planned, guys, let me state up front that this will not end well for you."
"That right?"
"Yeah."
"Phone, wallet, watch," the middle guy demands. He makes a greedy 'gimme' gesture.
The phone is cheap and crappy, and there's nothing in Clint's wallet that's of any value to him, just a fake id, a few bucks, and a debit card with a balance of sixty-four dollars. If it were just those things he might be tempted to simply hand them over, to skip the fuss and the fight and the whole mess. But the watch, he flexes his fingers, forget it. They're not getting his watch.
They fan out further and Clint shifts casually, readying himself for a fight without making it overly obvious. The element of surprise is a great ally. He will have to keep an eye on that knife, but a throat punch will incapacitate the first one, the second one will be on the ground with a broken arm a moment later, and hopefully at that point the third one will grow a brain and take off. Clint really, really hopes he will grow a brain, because he's seriously not in the mood for this.
"Hand 'em over," the guy demands again.
"Not gonna happen."
They must have been waiting for that, for a reason to pounce, because they charge, all three of them at the same time.
He easily sidesteps the first one, blocks the knife and makes it through steps one and two in his plan, throat punch and snapped radius, and the two guys hit the rain wet ground at his feet. But it's the third one who throws a spanner in the works, because he doesn't in fact grow a brain and take off, instead he tackles Clint, a real linebacker tackle that Clint might have been able to field if not asshole number one had chosen that moment to grab at his legs, and Clint goes down.
It's a mess of arms and legs and angry shouting, but Clint has training and years of experience they don't. He slams his knee up, catching number one over the face. Something breaks, and it isn't Clint's knee. One drops the knife, rolls away with his hands over his face, groaning. Bright red blood runs between his fingers. Number two is busy screaming about his broken arm, so Clint wraps his legs around number three, locks him in a scissor grip, and he is just about to roll them both when the guy slams something against his neck and he hears a sharp click-hiss. For a brief, horrible moment Clint is sure that it's the knife, that he's been stabbed, and he has a moment to think: what a fucking useless way to die.
But then the moment passes and he realizes he's not stabbed, because the knife still lies where the guy dropped it. He wrenches away, grabs at the hand that's still pressing against his neck and twists until something gives. Number three shrieks and something clatters to the ground. Clint shoves him away and rolls to his knees, his palm pressed hard to the side of his neck. A pricking coldness is spreading like icy water from the point of contact. Shit. Shit, this is bad. He gets to his feet and backs away unsteadily. There's no way a group of wannabe gangbangers would be using a jet injector to subdue him instead of just cutting him up or putting a bullet in him. This must be something else, something masquerading as a robbery.
He takes another couple of steps back, aiming to get some distance between himself and his attackers, but he stumbles and has to grab the side of the dumpster to stay on his feet. The prickling cold is deepening, spreading down his arms and chest, and he fumbles for the phone in his pocket. His fingers feel fat and clumsy. He stumbles again, but manages to get his phone out.
He tries to keep one eye on the three men while he attempts to unlock his phone, but his fingers won't move like he tells them to, he can't swipe the fucking screen properly. He tries and fails again. What the hell was in that injection? He desperately tries to work his phone. Help. He needs help, he needs... A moment later swiping isn't his biggest issue, because he watches the phone slip from his useless fingers. It clatters to the ground by his feet, landing face up in a shallow puddle. His knees buckle and he slides down the side of the rusty dumpster.
Fuck me, he thinks dizzily. This shit works fast.
His blood pounds in his ears as he tries to fight the drugs, but with every second that passes his body shuts down further. His muscles feel leaden. He tries to shape his mouth to speak, but his face feels stiff and wrong, and just a strangled groan comes out. Then gravity becomes too much and he topples forward. He hits the ground with a thud, his right arm caught awkwardly underneath him. The fingers of his free hand twitch feebly towards the phone that lies lit up not more than a foot away, but that's all he manages, his body has turned to wood, to stone, to something heavy and dead and not his own, and he gets a panicky flashback to another time he was trapped inside his body, unable to do anything but tag along for the horrible ride.
The asphalt is wet and rough under his cheek as he lies there in the rain. He blinks slowly at the guy with the broken nose get to his feet. The guy swipes the back of his hand under his nose, smearing the blood across his cheek as he stumbles towards Clint.
"Motherfucker," he hisses thickly, and Clint tries to roll away from the vicious kick, but his muscles have shut down. Pain lights up his ribs and his body rocks limply from the impact. No muscle control, but there's apparently nothing wrong with his pain receptors. Thanks a fucking lot, he thinks bitterly as the guy lands another savage kick. You couldn't have chosen something that incapacitated me completely?
The asshole who had stabbed him with the injector hobbles over. He snarls a curse and lifts his foot, but not for a kick and Clint tries to pull his exposed hand away, get it to safety, but shit, he can't, his body won't obey him any longer and he can only watch as the boot comes down to stomp on his loosely curled up fingers. Something snaps and Clint screams, his whole head echoes with it, but not a sound leaves his frozen lips. His hand is nothing but a bundle of nerves on fire, supernova hot and bright and horrible, and he wants to curl up around it and protect himself, but he can't move. He can't move.
Then hands grab the back of Clint's jacket and he is dragged deeper down the alley. Where are they taking him? He hangs limply in their grip, his knees dragging along the gravel and wetness and he wonders who he pissed off lately. Is this a SHIELD thing? An Avengers thing? Or a Clint Barton thing?
They drag him through a door into what looks like a derelict apartment building hallway. He can't lift his head, so all he sees is the dirty floor and the trash and old newspapers that litter it. Their little procession come up on a broken red tricycle lying abandoned in the middle of the hallway, and Clint sees injector guy's boot kick it to the side. It skids into the wall and topples over.
Without warning they both drop him. He hits the floor face first. Hard. Warm blood bursts from his nose. They wrestle him over onto his back and continue dragging him down the hallway, by his ankles this time. He tastes the coppery tang of blood as it runs down the back of his throat. His head flops uselessly to the side, and he's left to watch the parade of flimsy, graffiti adorned apartment doors that pass. He can't make his eyes focus the way he wants to any longer. Fuck. What did they give him?
The second to last door is open two inches, and as they drag him past it Clint sees a pair of dirty sneakers. The size and model tells him it's probably a woman. He hopes a bleeding, unconscious-looking guy being dragged on the floor will prompt her to call the cops, but in this neighborhood it's unlikely. People keep to themselves. Putting your nose where it doesn't belong tended to lead to it being shot off your face. He hears one of his attackers bark something sharp and short, and the door closes sharply.
They reach the end of the hallway and he's taken outside again. A black car is waiting by the curb. It looks shiny and new and very high end, but Clint's position won't allow him to take in much detail. Mercedes, he thinks as they haul him up. Maybe. He's dumped face down in the dark backseat like a sack of potatoes and before the car takes off one of them - he can't see who - takes his watch. Motherfucker.
Clint's face is pressed uncomfortably into the upholstery, and he sees absolutely nothing, just hints of indirect lights in the corner of his eye sweeping across the interior of the car as it makes its smooth way through traffic. His busted hand is trapped under him and his ribs are jostled every time the car turns or stops or hits an uneven patch of road. It hurts like a goddamn bitch and he can't even shift to take the pressure off.
As they travel, he tries to determine how long it might be before someone realizes he's gone. Too long, is the conclusion. Natasha is working, location and ETA unknown. Clint himself is on mandated stand-down after last week's cluster fuck in Bogota and Phil had told him not to show his face at HQ until he was to report back for duty in three days. Maybe Tiger? Clint had agreed to watch tomorrow's game with him and his new girlfriend over at the sports bar Tiger always hangs out at, and Clint hopes maybe he will wonder if he doesn't show up. But Tiger knows the name of the game, he's been with SHIELD for almost as long as Clint has, and more likely is that he will assume Clint got sent out on a job on short notice.
So, chances are pretty good no one will realize he's missing until it's too late.
He tries to keep track of the turns, of the number of stops, of the sound the road surface makes, the quality of the road. With the way his face is smushed into the seat, breathing freely isn't terribly easy, and after a while he feels a forerunner of fear trickle in. He tries to remember what he knows about nerve agents, about neurotoxins, about neuromuscular blockers, but all that seems to have stuck is that if he's actually been hit with one, he shouldn't be able to breathe. The lungs need muscles to work, to inflate and deflate, and Jesus, he hopes it's not something that sets in late, because he really doesn't want to suffocate to death in the back of this car. He can't turn his head, can't even open his mouth wider or take a deeper breath, and his lungs are starting to indicate that they would like just a little more oxygen, please. He does his best to convince himself that he's not going to suffocate, that he's getting more than enough air right now, he just needs to calm down. Calm down, Barton. You've got nothing to gain by working yourself up.
The car comes to a stop surprisingly soon. Twenty minutes tops, his internal clock tells him. He hears the front doors open and close. The cold air that invades the car carries with it a heavy smell of fish and briny sea water. Waterfront, then. Fish processing. There are any number of places close by that fit that description around, so it doesn't really tell him anything. He hears voices. New voices. He's still trying to figure out how many more assholes have joined the party when the backseat door opens. A second later, hands grab him and flip him over. The back of his head cracks painfully against the doorstep as they drag him out of the car, and that hit must have scrambled his brain pretty good, because things go a little flickery, a little lopsided all over, and next thing he knows he's inside somewhere, being hauled through a solid looking metal door. His head pounds and aches, and that's probably a minor concussion. Just what he needs right now.
Bright, commercial grade light fixtures pass overhead as he's dragged deeper into the building. The light hurts his eyes. It's colder in there than outside, and the stink of fish grows stronger. Yep, he thinks dizzily, fish processing plant, because the low-frequent hum of refrigeration units is all around, and there are industrial sized freezer doors all along the wide center isle that they're taking him down. He hopes he's not going to end up dismembered in one of them when this thing is over. He's not loving his odds.
Their little posse stops. He hangs boneless between two of the newcomers as a third pounds his fist twice against a hollow sounding, metal door.
The door opens a few seconds later.
"Bring him in," a woman says.
It's just three words, but it's enough for Clint to hear a hint of an accent, an almost imperceptible hardness to the consonants. Eastern Europe, he thinks.
With the way his head flops forward, he can't see much, but his peripheral vision still works and gives him a sense of the place. Decent sized room. Thirty by thirty feet, maybe. Just as brightly lit as the rest of the facility. As he's dragged forward, he sees the feet of two people at the other end of the room. The heels and sheer nylons tell him the one to the left is a woman. Probably the one who spoke. Standing slightly behind her and to the left is a man. Shiny black shoes. Expensive-looking but practical. Black pants. Massive frame. Clint thinks he's wearing a black suit jacket as well, and his mind pins the label 'bodyguard' on the man.
But the two of them only holds his attention for a split second, because he catches a glimpse of something else, and Clint feels a sharp stab of something that's very close to honest to God fear.
It looks like an operating table.
Please, please, let him be mistaken, let it be a really wonky regular table, a work bench or something, but as he's taken closer he realizes that no, he's not mistaken. It's an operating table. A fucking operating table, and as they dump him on it Clint tries again to break the hold of the drugs, tries to push back, to dig his heels in and fight, because operating tables are not his friend, especially not in a situation like this, and what the hell is an operating table doing in a fish factory anyway? What the hell is going on? But it's no use, and they arrange his arms and legs on the table without him being able to even twitch.
His head falls limply to the side, away from the door, and he hates not being able to keep the assholes that attacked him in sight, but he can't do anything about it. At least he's getting a better look at the woman and her bodyguard. She's out of focus, but he sees enough to tell she's in her fifties. He then adjusts his approximation to late fifties, because there are subtle but sure signs of surgical maintenance. Light brown, shoulder length hair, graying but dyed, light complexion, vaguely Slavic looking bone structure and nose. Together with the accent he's now pretty sure he's right about Eastern Europe, but he needs more to be able to pinpoint her origin further. He also needs more to be fully certain it's not a red herring, that she's not trying to throw him off her scent with a fake ethnic identity.
Her heels click against the concrete as she approaches the table. She stands for a long moment looking down at him. A whiff of perfume reaches him, heavy and sweet and powdery smelling. All he sees is a blur of blue as her jacket a few inches in front of his face.
"This is him? Are you sure?"
"It's him alright. It's Clint fucking Barton," Clint hears broken nose guy say from the door. He sounds nasal and pissed off. Serves the asshole right for stealing his watch. He's getting that watch back. Phil gave it to him.
The woman's hand is warm on his cheek as she turns his head to face her. The back of his abused skull throbs and aches as it shifts against the table, but he can do nothing but endure. She leans a little closer. His focus is stubbornly locked in the middle distance, so he can't be sure, but he thinks her eyes are gray.
"I've waited so long," she tells him quietly and softly, like she's sharing a secret, but something about her voice makes Clint think about deeply buried rage and violence waiting to happen.
And unfortunately, it looks like it will happen to him.
Who the hell is this woman? What has she been waiting for? 'Revenge' comes high on Clint's list of guesses, but revenge for what?
She straightens up and makes a gesture with her arm at someone Clint can't see. "Let us get started."
No. No, let us not. Clint is definitely in no rush to get started with whatever the hell this is, but the woman steps around the table to Clint's other side. He hears the rustle of people repositioning themselves in the room.
"Ready?" someone asks.
"Yes," the woman replies, and from his right Clint hears a faint click and a sound he can't quite identify. She stands silent and unmoving next to him for a long time, and Clint is starting to get seriously antsy when she finally speaks again. "This is me settling a score," she says.
Yeah? Which score, he wants to ask, because he's stacked up about a thousand potential ones over the years.
"What have you done to him," Natasha's flat, angry voice says from a speaker somewhere to his right, and Clint has a moment of blank 'what the hell?', because Natasha is working, she's on a job, and he doesn't understand how she already knows he's been taken. It's been less than an hour. A lot less than an hour. Shit. Something occurs to him. Did he lose time somewhere along the way? He worries about that for a second, then realizes what the most obvious explanation is – he blames the drugs and the blows to the head that he didn't think of that first – they must have contacted Natasha. It's the only reasonable explanation to her being on the line this soon.
But why? Is it a play for an exchange of some kind. Exchange of intel? Money? The release of someone SHIELD has in custody, maybe? But if it's something to do with SHIELD, why is Natasha the point of contact? They have hostage negotiators on call 24/7 much better suited for the job, and how the hell did they get a hold of her, anyway? Clint aches to turn his head, to look in the direction of Natasha's voice, because he suspects there's probably a TV screen somewhere, or a computer screen, and he really wouldn't mind seeing a familiar face right about now.
"Don't worry. He's alive," the woman says. She knocks her knuckles lightly against Clint's forehead. "And awake. He is just… unable to participate right now."
"He better stay alive." The warning is clear in Natasha's growl.
"I have to admit it feels a little strange, this," the woman says. "I have spent so many years searching. I looked everywhere, I hired the best of the best, I had them track down every rumor, every whisper, and it never amounted to anything. But now—"
"Ivica Antic," Natasha interrupts, and Clint just knows she deliberately waited until the woman had gotten started with what is apparently some long, dramatic backstory. She's upsetting the balance of power that this woman is trying to establish. "Born 1959 in Novi Sad to Vanja and Milos Vranjes."
So Clint had been right on the money. Eastern Europe. Croatia. He'd pat himself on the back if he wasn't, you know, paralyzed.
"One sister, three brothers," Natasha continues. "Graduated from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, magistra znanosti iz arhitekture." She segues seamlessly from English into Croatian, and Clint has enough of a basic South Slavic vocabulary to understand key words. Natasha is calmly listing this woman's life's history; places she lived, boyfriends and fiancées, the hushed up teenage pregnancy, jobs held, academic publications, the first husband who killed himself, the second husband, a fellow scientist and in the field of nanophysics, confined to 24-hour care after an unfortunate workplace accident in '03 left him paraplegic and brain damaged and...
"Enough," Antic finally snaps, and Natasha smoothly stops her info dump. She manages to do it in such a way that it's clear that she's in no way giving in to the barked order, but rather that she is satisfied that she has made her point. Which is that she knows everything about this woman, and this bitch better not hurt Clint or she'll be in a world of hurt.
At least that's what he hopes it means.
Whatever it means, the amount of information she managed to collect in such a short time is impressive. Clint thinks JARVIS must have had a finger in gathering all this, because he can't think of any other way it could have happened. JARVIS's facial recognition software is scarily good, his search algorithms even better, and hey, maybe that's how Antic got a hold of Natasha. If anyone outside of SHIELD can get a hold of her, it would probably be Stark. He hopes so, because Natasha and SHIELD are solid, but add Stark and JARVIS to the mix and they're pretty much unstoppable.
"I could have had him killed, you know." Clint feels Antic's hand run down his arm and he wants to pull away from the touch, it makes his ice cold skin crawl. "I could have told them to shoot him in the head. But I didn't. Do you know why?"
Natasha waits.
"Because I want to educate you." Antic picks up his left hand from the table, the one with the broken fingers. Her touch is feather light, but it hurts like a bitch anyway. "I knew it wasn't an accident right away, because Anton had told me he suspected that someone had put out a contract on him. But you failed. You didn't kill him." She puts Clint's hand down, arranges it across his chest.
Clint knows she's wrong about the 'failed' part. This whole thing hailed back to a time before Natasha had joined SHIELD, back to the days when she had been living from shadow to shadow, on the run from the Red Room. But if anything, she had been even more ruthless back then, and he knows without a shadow of a doubt that if this man really was Natasha's target and she left him alive, then it was because she meant to leave him alive all along. In exactly the condition she left him in.
Spending a lifetime as a sentient vegetable had to be its own kind of hell.
Antic goes on. "I had no idea who you were back then. I just knew you were a contract killer. I had no name, no face, no hometown, or even nationality. But there were whispers. Rumors. The Black Widow. I spent a long time researching you, and for the longest time there was nothing. Nothing at all. But then SHIELD's dirty laundry was aired and..." She makes a motion like she grabs something from the air. "There it was. A point to start. I paid a lot of money for little scraps here and there, and this, Ms. Romanoff, is what I found. You have no family. No husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, fiancée, dog, cat, goldfish. No friends. No attachments." Antic pauses. "But a partner." Her voice goes soft. "You have a partner. One you seem very fond of."
As she speaks, Antic positions Clint's head so he's facing away from her. It lets him see the TV screen by the far wall. Natasha is sitting down, her hands are clasped on the desk in front of her. He sees a plain white wall behind her. No windows, no paintings or decorations of any kind, no natural light. It's all deliberately bland and non-descript, she's not giving any hints about her location, not even the slightest indication of the time of day where she is. Clint struggles to focus just a little better. He needs to see her eyes clearly, needs to read what she can't say out loud, because he's getting pretty fucking concerned here. Nat, please tell me you magically have pinpointed my location and you're about to crash this fucked up party any moment.
Antic picks up his hand again, and motherfucking son of a bitch. Lady, would you please stop doing that, he wants to beg. She leans over him. "She will know what I have lived for the past twelve years. I will take something she holds dear and return it broken beyond repair. I'm sorry it has to be you, but you are the only thing I have found in her life that she doesn't considered replaceable or expendable."
"No. Wait. I did that to your husband," Natasha says from the screen. "Not Barton. You want me."
"No. I don't."
Someone who isn't Antic suddenly grabs his hand and something cold and sharp closes around his middle finger. Clint's brain goes straight to flailing panic, he fucking panics, because he can't turn his head to see, but that feels like bolt cutters, and Jesus Christ, that crazy bitch is going to cut his finger off, she's going to do it, and he can't move. He can't stop her.
"Your partner uses his hands a lot, doesn't he?"
On the screen Natasha shoots to her feet. "No, don't," she shouts, raising her hand sharply, and all he can think is that he needs his fingers to shoot. Please don't do it. Don't do it. Natasha, stop her, don't let her. Then the cutters close on his finger and Clint screams without sound, without movement as there's a snap and a sick crunching sound. He distantly feels his hand being released. It flops over the side of the table, hang limply over the edge.
The sound of heavy wetness hitting the floor underneath the table starts up, blood dripping from his hand, and he feels sick, so sick.