They'll do it every time. Ain't that the way it goes. Clint wasn't quite clear on the meaning of irony—Nat had tried to explain it, but it kept seeming to mean just about everything. But he was real clear on the other thing. That feeling when you just knew how something would go and it went and was gone that way, dead-center, bullseye, not off by a fraction of an inch. Not ironic, not a shock, not a twist, except in how freakin' obvious it was that the universe had not taken one iota of creativity in playing shit out to the finish.
He thought it was a uniquely Southern concept—maybe a little Russian, the way they gushed on about tragedy, which was maybe why he and Nat got along so well—but for his money, Southerners had perfected the notion.
The lack-of-irony was why it was so fitting that he'd been around the world a couple'a dozen times, been here, there, and everywhere, and now he was going to die in an unSovieted hellhole dustbowl that made good old Deerfollow, Alabama look like a resort town.
Join the Army, see the world, get shot somewhere that could've been a neighborhood two blocks over, if you just replace the bearded fundamentalist hillbillies with bearded fundamentalist Chechen separatists.
Not that he was shot-shot. That was Nat. He'd barely been grazed, but she'd taken one in the chest and one in the leg, and it was so bad she hadn't even been able to respond in kind. He'd had to do it for her, so now her shooter was gonna need to be fitted for either an eyepatch or a coffin.
Which left him in a piece of shit shack that had been bombed out despite its piece of shit status. It didn't look much more ramshackle now that its aluminum siding had been blown out, but it was still a precariously set assemblage of walls and ceiling that, like an Occupy Wall Street march, had little unity and even less idea what they were trying to accomplish. All the shit really did was keep anyone else from getting line-of-sight on him and Nat. Because if Nat was dying, sure as shit he wasn't making it out.
"Stay with me," he told her. In a moderate crisis, the adrenaline gave you a quick wit. Major crisis, you went with clichés. "Hold my hand. It's right here, Nat. Give me a squeeze to let you know you're still here."
Clint had seen grown men whimper when they'd been hit, battle-scarred veterans whose bodies shut down on them. It was just the nature of the beast. He'd felt it himself. Human technology had produced a sensation that human bodies were not meant to feel: shattered nerves in torn flesh, cracked bones, ripped viscera, even the burning of the bullet's passage through the surrounding flesh. It was hell on earth. Nat looked good, but even she was no super-soldier. She had put off registering pain, kept her well-disciplined body feeling just the pressure of the hit long enough to stagger with him in here.
Now the pain hit, and she squeezed his hand like she was interrogating him, the pain bordering on the euphoric. A fresh bout of sweat wrestled with her face, tried to make that lovely visage go ugly. She was tearing up, noseful of snot, grimace seared into her mouth.
Fuck, he hadn't known she could look less glamorous. She took punches from guys who could man the door at a club for bouncers, got picturesque little scratches and no bruises. Got into knife fights and was left with nicks that accentuated her cheekbones. This was pain, though. Not endurance, not strength, just pain. Nothing pretty about pain.
Endogenous catecholamines—euphoric hormones—barreled into her system to cover up the pain and replace the lost blood. It was one of the few things Clint knew better than her. He'd been a punching bag, a piñata, batting practice while Natasha was dodging hits, ducking bullets. He knew how to deal with pain. Nat knew how to suppress it. That went far until her body wouldn't let her suppress it, until biology turned on her and told her she was getting her second wind. Like she was playing fucking tennis.
"I'm fine," Nat said. "I'm fine, fine…"
"You ain't," Clint retorted, pressing her back down as she tried to sit up—last thing he needed was her aggravating her wounds more.
"I've had worse… s'not serious…"
"No, I've had worse. Trust me. This is the kind of bad you need hospitals for. Only we don't have hospitals."
Nat tilted her head back and tried to summon up that serenity that some people mistook for being a cold bitch. "Next time we book a vacation, make sure there are hospitals."
"Yes ma'am."
"Hospitals with painkillers…"
"I've been in a lot of hospitals, Nat. Must've picked something up…"
"A UTI?" Natasha asked him. She was loopy enough to smile. He set a hand on her shoulder, the one she wasn't rolled over on, and rubbed briskly up and down, trying to make her feel him through the hurt and the confusion.
"You gotta stay calm, babe. Don't you move. We keep your blood pressure down, that's real good for us."
"You wanna get me my yoga mat?"
Clint tugged off his jacket, threw it over her, knew it'd have bloodstains on it by the time he was finished. Two gunshot wounds, one in her leg, one in her torso. First, torso. He took one of her hands, stuffed it full of a rag, and pressed it to the wound.
"Direct pressure—bandage it in a moment." Belt off, wrapped around her wounded leg, he pulled it into a tourniquet. "Okay, this is gonna be no fun. Got a hand?" She held up her free hand. He took it with his free hand, rubbed a blunt thumb along the delicate tissue between her thumb and forefinger. The fingers were delicate, the palm small, the rigid scar tissue on her knuckles a surprise in all that softness. He rubbed that last, then eased her wounded leg up, onto an overturned stool, left it so that the wound was above her heart.
Nat didn't enjoy it one bit. Her breath hissed in and out of her, corded and strained, her lungs working like an engine out of gas. He kept her clenched hand in his as she shuddered through the worst of the pain, her other hand applying pressure to her wound, adding to the pain, he couldn't do anything to lessen it. She just had to take it.
"Nice and easy, baby girl, nice and easy. You're doin' great. Won't be long now. You just have to keep going a little bit longer and then we'll be done, alright?" There was no response. "Alright, sweetie?"
Nat blinked her eyes like a duckling trying to fly. It was a moment before they opened a crack. "Yeah… yeah… we gotta, gotta…"
"Pressure bandage, that's all. Then we're done, okay, I promise."
"Mmm-hmm." Nat's murmur was weak, almost childlike in its pitiable stubbornness. He quickly stroked her cheek, burning up with heat, wishing he could tell her the fucked-up kinda pride he took in how strong she was being, how amazing she was being, but there wasn't time.
He checked her leg wound. Bleeding had stopped, great, fucking finally some luck. He took his canteen, moved to clean it almost automatically before looking to Nat—even now it was hard not to think of her as some automaton, a Terminator assembled out of metal instead of a scared little girl.
He did look at her, saw her lift her free hand slightly, wondered if she was asking, fuck it, he reached over and held onto it tightly as he poured water onto the wound, cleaned it one-handed, then slipped his hand away to put on the pressure bandage. It was only when he stopped holding her hand that she whimpered.
Chest wound, still bleeding, he had to pry her hand off it. He tossed the rag away—Christ, it was bloody, redder than anything he'd ever seen, a bright shade he hadn't thought blood was. He slapped on the new bandage, and Nat went silent in a way fraught with tension—not her usual companionable silence, but something taut and suffering, a silence that shivered inside her as a scream. He added extra layers of gauze, almost all of it, they'd been traveling so damn light, and taped it down as firmly as he dared, feeling Nat's eyes on him, seeking, desperate. But it stopped the bleeding, thank God, thank God…
Leg wound, good. Chest wound, good. Now he just had to worry about shock. Usually, that'd be the last thing he'd worry about with Nat, but she was fighting her own body on this. Blood loss and blocked airways and sickly sweet adrenaline hammering on her insides, all trying to fix her, all useless.
It made Clint grit his teeth with rage. What the fuck was she doing here, that body shouldn't have scars, it should be in magazines, she should be a fucking pop star, even if she couldn't hit any note but an A, she should be lip-syncing bullshit Autotuned nonsense, showing up on Good Morning America, not this. She shouldn't be so broken that the only way she could live her life was breaking herself even more.
"Heat," Nat said, firmly, but divorced from her usual directness. It sounded almost like she was confidently sounding a word out. "Shock… blood loss… heat."
Now Clint remembered. He had to keep her warm, and not just with his jacket. Not with the way winters got in these fucking backwaters. He reached into his pack. They had enough of nothing, but they had a few chem-packs, and he used them all, turning about five square feet of the room into a sauna.
It didn't last—three of them crapped out immediately, and he didn't trust the other three. He laid down beside Nat without thinking about it, wrapping her up in his arms, his only concern being to avoid aggravating her wounds. The chest wound was high on her torso. He wrapped one arm around her stomach, the other around her shoulders, bicep supporting her head. Cradled her to him like she was a dog being taken to the vet.
Blood pressure, too. He had to keep her calm. He had to let her know she wasn't alone, and that wasn't anything to do with blood, he just knew too well what it was like to be hurt and dying and be a million miles away so it was like no one cared. One thing to think they cared, another to know.
He rearranged Nat's hair into something like her usual style, mopped her brow of sweat, took her hand again and rubbed it between his fingers, wondering if she could feel it. Finally, whatever dignity he was protecting, his or hers, ghosted. He petted her hair. He stroked her back. He spoke to her gently, lowly, telling her that it would be alright and that it would be alright and that it would be alright. He called her baby girl and sweetheart and darling, not knowing if he'd always thought of her that way or if they were names that had been born in the blood. He gave her sips of water with the little he hadn't used cleaning her rooms, just what he thought she could keep down. He held her so that she knew he wouldn't let her go.
At first she was stiff, even more tightly clenched than she looked—but with an awful insensateness to it. Like there was some core of angry stubbornness to her, holding her together, and her limbs, her face, they were at the furthest reaches of that central power, slack and aimless with the slightest trace of it.
The funny thing was, though, that when she loosened further, when that stiffness retreated into her, he thought it was conscious. She was looser, but the tightness going away was her choice, her conscious choice, an acceptance of the comfort he was giving her. She shook a little, breathed audibly with conscious exertion, but she was occupying herself, not pulling inward like her soul was in full retreat.
He felt her with him as he held her, a motionless receptacle for his care and attention, but one that pulled in all it could.
Natasha felt dizzy. Lightheaded. It was an unfamiliar sensation. She knew what it was to be crisp, clear, centered—nothing else. Alcohol didn't work on her. She studiously avoided drugs. In the morning, she awoke bright and early, no matter how long she'd stayed awake or how long she'd slept. Her mind, working sluggishly as it was, called up words for her. Anemia. Dehydration.
Clint forced a canteen to her lips. She wanted to tell him she could drink by herself, but her head swam and felt leaden at the same time—a lead balloon that managed to float—and he further secured his hand behind her head, holding it in place while he tipped the canteen up a little and allowed a trickle of water to wash away the dryness in her throat. He kept that up for about ten seconds, Natasha cursing him as she had to slowly suck the moisture down, but she had a vague memory of spitting it up when she'd tried to purge her thirst all at once.
It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense anymore.
He stopped the canteen away and set it carefully on the floor. Natasha could see that water was pouring down from a hole in the roof—it was raining?—and that was filling the canteen up.
"Alright," Clint said. "I think they've moved on."
Natasha was fastidious with his words, trying to fit them into her memories when everything was in motion, nothing solid. It was like trying to grab blackbirds, fit them together… the terrorists, they'd been in the neighborhood, "keep your head down," too dangerous to do battlefield surgery when there could be a firefight, wait, wait…
And something else. A feel, a warmth. She remembered the impulse of resistance, then something else, a slow surrender and a rush of calm, of safety. Ridiculous, feeling safe here, in this. She was never safe. She was who she was.
"I need to check the wounds," Clint was saying, taking his jacket off her, a sudden influx of cold drafty air...
Natasha felt like she was talking to him over a bad line, a slow connection, not getting his words until a few seconds after he'd said them. "Okay, doctor."
Clint looked up—he'd taken her silence for understanding, and now realized she was… what? Hallucinating? Natasha didn't have anything to hallucinate about. No white light to go to, no lost loved ones to talk to her. She was lost in her own body, trapped in it. Scars and cell doors.
Clint went slow unzipping her catsuit, not out of any seductive instinct—like he had much of that—but because the faster and rougher he did this, the more he thought it would seem like a violation, even an assault. Not a good way to keep your nose in its proper place with Nat, not under any circumstances.
Natasha moaned slightly, then gave him a knowing look as he brought the zipper down. She didn't know where she was or what she was doing, he suspected, and that coupled with the blood everywhere and the artillery strikes in the distance made for a poor showing.
She wore a gray sports bra, quite a bit more modest than the adolescent fantasies most guys would imagine to go with the catsuit. Sodden with blood, the thick fabric pressed in on her cleavage, clinging to the red-spackled curvature of a heavy breast. It was almost enough to ruin boobs for him. Good thing he was a leg man.
Really, the bigger deal was finding out that Natasha had freckles. A whole field of them on her shoulders like gold dust in a pan of wet sand, spackling, gilding her collarbone. He supposed it made sense—redhead—but then you had her perfect face, with its complete lack of pores, and you kinda thought her skin didn't obey the laws of normal people at all. Tiny hairs were standing up, shocked by the shift in temperature, and Clint resisted the absurd urge to pet them down.
He undid the wad of bandages he had left over her gunshot wound, peeling it back for examination. It wasn't bleeding anymore, not too much, just seeping out pus. An infection. In this mudhole, she'd probably gotten it the moment she'd been shot. He took a moment to assure Nat, petting her hair, whispering to her—he only knew a little Russian, because even he wasn't old enough for the Cold War, but he asked for directions and to use the toilet, as gently and softly as he could.
Then he drained the wound, Nat groaning—not even in pain, in suffering. She grasped at him like a wounded animal seeking comfort, burrowing into it, and he let her hang onto his arm as he wiped the pus away. He held the canteen over the wound, his thumb over its mouth, and squeezed to send the water out in a pressurized stream, washing the wound out. Natasha thrust her head back, eyes closed, whimpering. He paused again, took precious seconds to tell her it would be okay, little girl, okay, okay, okay, and put on a warm compress. The heat would vasodilate the capillaries around the wound, let the immune cells go straight to the infection.
He changed the bandage. He'd run out of Russian.
"I used to do this for my brother," he said, letting his mouth run without his brain leashing it—the way Nat said he usually talked. "Not bullet holes, though that was a near thing. But poison ivy, sunburns, that kind of crap. Kinda weird, thinking back on it now. Probably shouldn't have been me taking care of him. Wasn't too good at it. But mom wasn't there, dad wasn't interested… seems like the only times we got along, now. When I could take care of him."
He went down to her leg. He'd ripped open the tear in the fabric before, but there was no helping it now. He cut her legging off neatly, keeping the lower fabric on her leg, checking the wound, cleaning it, changing the bandage. It at least didn't seem infected. He decided to chance stitching it up.
The pain was familiar. The cold was familiar. They were the backroads of her mind, old paths she could trace and follow. She'd been shot before, knifed before, bled, scarred over, let flies land on her infected wounds and maggots eat away her necrotic flesh. But it was never easy. She wasn't unfeeling, no matter what impression she wanted to give off. She was burning slowly, rationing her suffering as she felt it, preparing herself to save herself.
And it fell away.
"I'm here, I'm here…" Clint said to her, over and over again—surprisingly unimaginative for a man who brought a bow and arrow into battle.
He was sewing her up, the lancing needle barely a tickle in the numbness of her shock, the ache of her lost blood. Usually she'd do that herself. All it took was time. Time broke down everything but her. If she could get some place quiet, rest, then she could parcel out her healing. Stop her bleeding, clean her wounds, dress them, stitch them…
Clint was doing that for her.
Part of her was relaxing into that, lowering her guard, as she'd reluctantly learned to do with the doctors at SHIELD. In the Red Room, she'd been punished for not staying alert, even during treatment. If she wasn't careful as a bone was set, the doctor would deliberately misplace it.
And as a free agent, she couldn't trust doctors. When she needed fixing she couldn't do herself, she made sure not to allow them any anesthesia.
It was only at SHIELD that she'd let them put her under, because Clint had yelled at her for about five minutes about how goddamn stupid it was to stay awake while shrapnel was yanked out of her internal organs, and if nothing else, she'd wanted to reward him for going so long without repeating one curse word. The man's vocabulary was smarter than he was.
But she'd still never done that in the field. She could compartmentalize safety, convince herself that parts of her life were secure, lie that the world were safe if it were a certain time of a day or a certain place—just like anyone else. But not out here. Not when she was the Widow.
So part of her was relaxing and the other part was fighting it, following the scars, trying to stay cool and aloof and cerebral. She had been broken to be unbreakable. She could bend, but she could not change. She was still what the scared little girl in the Red Room had died to create. What she did to accommodate Clint, to put SHIELD at ease, was not her. She could not give up anymore, she could not weaken anymore, she physically could not.
Yet she was. Natasha was shoring herself up against something that shouldn't even be possible.
Clint had finished the stitches. The pain had receded, and the realization that she didn't have to steel herself against it so hard hit Natasha like a blow. She gasped in air, forced more stiffness into her body to compensate for the show of weakness, and that in turn rippled into her wounded flesh, her ruptured tissue, the strain on it bringing fresh pain to her body.
"Easy!" Clint said, steadying her shoulders with both hands, then cupping her face in his palms. He stroked her cheeks, brushed her hair back from her eyes, made her feel centered in a way she couldn't explain—then, as if embarrassed of the intimacy, he pulled back slightly.
His puzzle ring was a bare glint as he reached down to her zipper and pulled it back up, gently closing her freshly bandaged chest wound inside the catsuit's confines. Engaged to be engaged… she couldn't remember where she was, but she could remember that…
The pain echoed, growing fainter with each repetition. Natasha couldn't keep up the stiffness, couldn't argue herself into taking pain over sleep. Tears laid siege to her—took her eyes, then her cheeks, then Clint's hands as he brushed them away. She felt the warmth of her own blood as it smeared on her face, mud and grit and grime.
He took the canteen, had her drink once more, then washed off his hands, her face, using and reusing a wadded up wet tissue until it was more stirring the dirtiness around then mopping it up. He threw it aside. Wouldn't bother with any further cleanliness. He was a dog, Natasha thought. A big friendly dog that couldn't help but love rolling around in the mud.
She released a shuddering sigh, a weak smile. Clint went to put the canteen back under the flow of water, but Natasha's mind was working too inefficiently to make the connection. She saw him turning away and thought he was leaving.
"Don't go," she said, her voice lighter than she remembered, smaller. She could've been gasping for breath.
"I'm not going anywhere," Clint told her, big and confident, his voice booming no matter how quiet it was. "And neither are you."
Natasha blinked her eyes, taking a long moment in the dark to find her center. Slipping, everything was slipping, nothing was solid. Soon the infection would really set in, then her fever would be up. Then things wouldn't be slipping because there'd be nothing to slip.
And she'd be defenseless. Except for Clint. She'd been trained never to rely on anyone, but how many times had he relied on her? Begrudgingly at first, with a mixture of macho arrogance and wary distrust, then with less and less reservation. He could do it so easily—let himself be helpless, admit need.
They all could. Everyone at SHIELD could rely on each other and trust in one another, in their own paranoid way, and then there was her, a wolf among wolves. Alone on both sides—slipping…
He brought her more water. Natasha sipped slowly, killing her thirst before she'd noticed it. She could rely on Clint. That was another part of Natasha, her trust in him. And if the yearning for whatever it was that felt warm in this darkness wasn't enough to overcome her innate divorce—her widowing—from all that was human, the fact that it was Clint coupled with that, built on that, and she could breathe. How long had it been since she could breathe?
"Don't go," she said again, as if she were just learning the words, memorizing them by stale repetition, no meaning in the syllables except their ordered arrangement. But the way Clint looked at her, like he understood, provoked a tight feeling within her, strangling, suffocating, but with heat blossoming in the middle of it.
He laid down beside her, moving so slowly she'd almost worry he was injured himself, so careful was he not to touch her, not to jostle her. He was laying on his side, to her left, facing her. He brought his right arm out from under his body, guiding it under her head, gently lifting her skull so he could ease his arm under it, crook the elbow so his hand came to her face. He held her chin and he stroked his thumb over it, his fingers through her tousled red hair, over and over.
She was wrapped in him—lying on him, being caressed by him, his body even pressing in on her from her left side like a shield. Natasha felt wetness in her eyes, compelling her to blink away the tears. Clint's left hand came over, fingers wiping them away, swabbing little riverbeds out of her dirty face. The fingers of his right hand cupped her chin, its thumb stroking her cheekbone.
"I'm staying right here," he said, his voice so low she felt it through his body more than she heard it. "Right here."
"I… выеть… I need a tissue."
She hadn't even realized her nose would get stuffed up from her crying jag… all she could hope was that Clint would assume it was from the pain… he reached into a pocket, brought out one of the tissues he'd been so stingy with, and actually held it to her nose instead of giving it to her. The feeling in her gut tightened, warmer and softer, but taut. She blew her nose and Clint wiped her nostrils and tossed the napkin away—they were being very inconsiderate houseguests of whoever owned this dilapidated shack. Natasha laughed at her own thought and tried to tell Clint, but it came out all Cyrillic. Clint shushed her.
"Shhh… later… just rest now. I'm right here. You can relax. You don't have to worry. Just close your eyes. Go on. Close them."
Natasha started to, but couldn't. She would look into Clint's eyes and see them beaming at her, warm and friendly and concerned, over her. He would get himself killed to save her, to protect her. She wished she could explain to him what a waste that would be, but she couldn't, and the knowledge that he wouldn't be dissuaded from protecting her by all the logic in the world, all the red in her ledger, made the feeling tighten into a fist.
It wasn't choking her. It was squeezing in on something inside her, some unshared sadness that extended through her from bone to pore, only this warmth was grinding it down, pulling it into one tiny ball. It had filled her up. Without it, she was empty, and something else was flowing in. Everything was flowing in, filling her up: her trust in Clint, her safety with him, a thousand sorrows and regrets that had been patiently waiting their time, and she weakly fiddled her hands and tried to pretend she wasn't just about bursting.
"You have to sleep," Clint said patiently. "We got your wounds all patched up. There's no need for you to be awake. You're tired and you might not get a chance to sleep later, so you might as well sleep now."
Natasha closed her eyes. She felt an odd sense of balance, all the strange new feelings crowding into each other, pushing on one another. And the most overpowering one was the simple tactile feeling of Clint's warmth pushing in on her coldness. She relaxed into that, trusted in that, and everything shouting for attention was very quiet.
"Close your eyes," Clint whispered—she thought the sound of the muscles of his jaw were louder than the volume at which he spoke. Almost teasingly, he laid the first two fingers of his left hand on her forehead and drew them down her nose in a swath, brushing her eyelashes gently, cajoling her to sleep.
Natasha shut her eyes and sighed contentedly. She hurt, there were a million thoughts crying out for her to think them, but Clint's lungs were pumping, his heart was beating. She could feel his pulse, his breath, pulling her into their slow, supple rhythm. His fingers stroked the locks of hair splayed over her sweaty face, distracting her demons for her. This felt familiar, but she couldn't remember it. And she remembered everything.
"Батя," she said, her pronunciation slurred and uncertain, as if her mother language was her second one. "Батя."
"Yeah, yeah," Clint agreed readily. "Lots of Батя."
Natasha grinned, glancing at his face one last time. He'd mangled the word, even by her almost inebriated standards. "Батя," she corrected him.
Her eyes closed again, this time for good. She felt… sleepy. Not tired, not worn out, but a simple calming and calming and calming that pressed the energy down all throughout her body. Not the usual cessation of consciousness, or the abrupt interruption of being knocked out. She could feel herself falling asleep.
"That's it," Clint said, and she could only hear him on the most subconscious of levels. Perhaps she was dreaming his speech. "That's it. Sleep. Sleep, little girl. You earned it."
"Ба… тя…" she said, her lips forming the word only out of newfound, addictive habit. It sounded good saying it. It sounded right. "Б…"
Her deep breaths were replaced with even deeper ones, her head turned to the side, face nuzzled slightly into Clint's bare arm. With his other hand, he pulled his jacket up over both of them, tucking it under his body and holding the other end down to trap as much warmth as possible.
With Nat asleep, Clint took his attention off her, scanning the surroundings for any sign of life. As tempting as Nat was making a nap look, there weren't exactly a lot of other volunteers for guard duty.
Nat made a slightly keening noise, and Clint turned back to her—it was almost as if she'd noticed his attention wander off her, even in her sleep. He put his hand to her hair and lightly massaged her temple, tried to straighten her hair back into some semblance of couture. He knew how she liked looking pretty.
Natasha moaned contentedly, turning her face deeper into his arm, nuzzling into it so hard he wondered how she wasn't waking herself up with friction on his arm hair.
Then she did something very strange…
Moving slowly, staggered, Nat drew one hand up her body. Clint almost could've taken it for a seductive gesture, only Nat seemed far too guileless at the moment for that. Of course, that was usually the idea with a seduction.
Then she brought her hand to her mouth—those perfect lips that could torture a man into talking by chewing on the end of a pencil—and stuck her thumb inside her mouth. There, she gritted her teeth lightly into the knuckle, clearly not hard enough to wake herself, and then her cheeks hollowed before quickly returning to normal.
It struck Clint as being oddly adorable, somehow.
He held Nat close, tight, watching over her as she sucked her thumb.