Natasha:
Natasha doesn't dislike the desert, exactly. It's a little outside of her general skill set, but she could learn to love it on nights like this, with the stars scattered above her like diamonds on velvet, with the breeze a cool whisper and not a punishing hot lash. Around her, she can hear the sounds of nocturnal creatures rustling, including a small owl that wings past her head with a steady flapping.
But the desert and its beauties are only momentary distractions, because on a bedroll, pillowed near one of their three camels, Clint is feverish and shaking. Whatever was on the little dart from the ambush a few hours ago is clearly responsible, a deduction as obvious as it is useless. She plucked it from his neck with steady, gloved hands, and has it bagged for analysis by one of Coulson's pet scientists, but that's not going to do Clint much good right now. She pulls the blanket back over him as he thrashes momentarily, and then, as his distress intensifies, she sits next to him and puts her hand on his forehead. He settles and she watches him carefully, not bothering to hide any of her worry from him. At the moment it doesn't seem like he entirely knows she's there, although he's lying more quietly under her touch.
"It's all right, Clint. Try and sleep. Shh, go to sleep." He murmurs something and his chin sags as he drowses off again.
Their two Bedu guides have gone off to raise the local SHIELD outpost, and hopefully a rescue is not more than a few days away. But Natasha knows that the man they were most loyal to - their handler, their friend - is dead now, buried in the desert after the same attack that got Clint a dart in the neck and left them stranded with no means of communication. The only hope is a trip back through the desert, and that's a journey that Clint would clearly not survive. Natasha can only hope that Afif and Ihsan will make the difficult journey back and send a rescue party. They worked with Natasha and Clint for a paltry eight days, and if there are any further attempted ambushes they may decide that they've done all they can and disappear quietly back into the desert. Or they could be killed. Or bribed. Or take too long. Or. Or. Or.
Natasha shakes her head. Too many negatives, none of which she has any control over so it's no use to obsess about them. The two guides were solid men, and since she has no choice but to trust them, she will continue to do so. They helped her bring Clint to the small clump of trees next to an oasis that's barely more than a puddle with ambitions, but it's the closest source of water to supplement the skins they brought in with them. The water tastes strongly of dirt, a nice compliment to the water in the skins, which tastes strongly of camel. Nonetheless, it's precious moisture and she's not going to turn up her nose at it.
Before he left, Afif gently untied Clint - strapping him to the saddle had turned out to be the only way from keeping him from slowly sliding off the beast - and stretched him out in the shade. Clint was sweating and clammy but still game, trying to walk on his own, making jokes that kept trailing off into nonsense.
Ihsan and Natasha consulted on the map, plotting out their exact coordinates so that SHIELD's rescue team can locate them. There's no room for error - they're one small point in the middle of a vast desert. She watches them ride off until they're just blurred silhouettes, and ties her headscarf more firmly against the wind.
Clint:
After Clint brought Natasha in from the cold, he appointed himself her social secretary and began the long process of dragging her back out into the world.
"I've been to New York a hundred times, Barton," she protested, but he was stubborn.
"You know the air ducts of every major financial institution, but do you have a favorite pizza place? Crappy bar in which to drink crappy beer? Source for eggrolls? Coffee in the right little blue cups? Roll of toilet paper at three am? These things are important, Tasha."
"I don't know that I need a man who eats tuna noodles with potato chips on top lecturing me on how to be a citizen of the urban jungle. And don't call me Tasha."
"No need to get personal," he said, slightly wounded. "The casserole has a noble heritage. It's the dish of my people. It's the glue that binds the family together. And," he said, warming to his theme, "if you had to live in a sod hut in the middle of the prairie, and there were bears, and long winters and you had to grow potatoes, you'd invent the casserole too. And tater tots. Aaaaaand tater tot casserole, which is what tater tots were put on earth to do."
He paused, savoring the image.
"Well, now I know what I want for dinner."
Natasha's eyeroll should have been immortalized for posterity.
She did, however, begin taking him up on his invitations, although her acquiescence wasn't exactly an epic breakthrough in communication. Sitting in whatever grubby bar or pizza place he picked, Natasha would become selectively hard of hearing and spend most of the evening nursing a beer, her eyes far away. Her responses to any small talk he might attempt were minimal and a whole evening could go by with less than twenty words spoken between them. It was like she sat next to him on the other side of a perfectly translucent sheet of ice, invisible until he reached towards her and found his fingers numbed by an unyielding resistance. On the other side of the ice, she would smile politely at him and take another miniscule sip of beer.
Eventually, they'd return back to their respective quarters in silence.
Natasha:
The night is spent fitfully dozing, and the morning brings rising heat and Clint croaking out her name.
"Tasha," and she's immediately next to him. "Why're you here? You should have gone with the guides."
"Oh, yes," she says tartly. "Leave you here to fend for yourself. I'm sure the jackals would be delighted. Be quiet and drink this."
She tips a cup of water to his lips and he drinks it, more or less obediently. "Mmm, camel-flavored," he mumbles, but she gets it all down his throat. With a damp rag, she wipes his face, and he sighs back into another fitful sleep as she passes the wet rag over his temples and his forehead. Two fingers placed on his neck discover his pulse is weak and fluttery.
If it's poison, thinks Natasha, he may already be dead. Or maybe it's doing something horrible internally that I can't even see. If it's biological, maybe he can fight it off. If I can keep him hydrated.
She stands up and paces in a small circle. If only the comm hadn't been destroyed. If I just had more equipment. She stopped herself forcefully, before she wound herself up any further, and said out loud,
"If I had a djinn and a magic carpet, things would be just fine." The absurd thought of her and Clint clinging to an animated rug swooping over the dunes is enough to break the yammering panic in her brain.
There's nothing they can do but hold on, so she holds on for both of them. She fusses with the canvas half-shelter she rigged yesterday, an attempt to keep more shade over Clint as the sun moved through the sky, and finally sits underneath it with him, unwilling to lose more sweat. She closes her eyes and thinks of ice cubes, glaciers, Siberian winter camping trips where she thought she'd freeze solid. Overhead, the sun throbs sullenly.
Clint:
He can't quite say what the first crack in the ice was due to. His own stupid persistence? Coulson's homespun wisdom, delivered in his trademark deadpan? Something that Fury said? Natasha coming to a conclusion based on data known only to herself?
Let's be honest, Natasha always came to her own conclusions in her own time. Although perhaps his rakish charm had helped…? He'd have preferred that it didn't come right on the heels of her nearly breaking his nose in the sparring ring, but then, you can't have everything.
"Ow! Goddamnit!"
"You were supposed to duck."
"I know that! I just...didn't! Ow, ow, ow."
Natasha passed over a towel from a pile standing to the side of the sparring mat, and Clint dabbed at the two bright streams of blood dribbling out of his nose. She regarded him for a brief moment, then padded over to the small infirmary located just down the hall from the gym and returned with a coldpack.
"Here, idiot." Her voice was surprisingly fond and Clint looked up, startled out of his moment of performative self-pity, and took the ice pack from her. He held it to his nose and let out a soft moan.
"Aggh. It's good. It hurts. But it's good."
"Don't tell me it's never been broken before."
"Twice. And once I broke a cheekbone. That sucked. I'm just mad because I was going to badger you into going to the Czech Festival tomorrow and eat sauerkraut with me. And now I won't be able to taste it properly."
"Sauerkraut? You know how to show a lady a good time, Barton."
"They have really good duck and dumplings. They're amazing, seriously." He gives her his best little-boy-pleading-for-ice-cream face, although the effect is undermined by the bloody nose and the black eye that's beginning to blossom.
"Come with me and eat duck and dumplings, Tasha. I'll eat your sauerkraut. C'mon, I might be a proud Czech inviting you to partake of the rich traditions of my ancestry. Rejecting this is like rejecting me! Personally!" He flipped over what he obviously thought would be his trump card. "There'll be polka!"
He put the tip of his finger to his nose and wobbled it, gently. "Hey, I think you might not have broken it!"
Natasha studied him. He was covered in drops of blood, the ice pack pressed to his face, which was already swelling. He'd be a rainbow of colors tomorrow. But he was grinning at her (in a lopsided way) and she couldn't help but laugh.
"I thought casserole was the rich tradition of your ancestry. Besides, aren't you some sort of English mutt type? Not Czech at all?"
"Natasha, you're not listening. Duck. Dumplings. That's the most important part. Great food served by church ladies who all look like my gramma. Duck. And dumplings. It'll be awesome."
"All right, Barton. But you have to promise me something."
He made a big, elaborate, cross-my-heart gesture.
"If there's polka to be had, I want to dance."
Either Clint turned pale, or the blood loss was more severe than she realized.
Natasha:
It's night again, and Natasha is nestled next to Clint. He's having chills, his body shuddering in the cool air even though the sand he lies on still radiates the heat of the day. So Natasha has relocated one of the camels to serve as a warm, smelly backrest, then tucked herself in against him, holding him as the wave of tremors roll over him.
"Stay with me, Barton," she murmurs. "We have to get back to the city. Think of all the dive bars that would go under if you didn't show up to spend your paycheck."
Clint lets out a small huffing laugh. He's apparently coherent again, or else he's hallucinating someone much funnier than she is. She repeats, "We just have to hold on a little bit longer. The evac's coming soon."
She curls closer to him and he puts his face against her neck, his breath huffing against her skin. "I'm really glad you're here, Nat."
It's not a confession she thinks he'd have made under any other circumstances, and her heart does a little stutter-step when he says it. She leans into him, then in a moment of unexpected tenderness, kisses his forehead, and says, "I'm glad too." He falls asleep again and with a tired sigh, she joins him, their bodies nestled together and cradled by the warm sand.
Clint:
Turns out, Clint is a terrible dancer. But he keeps his word, hopping gamely along to the music, a bewildering sight with his bruised face and his almost-broken nose, which has a wide bandage holding it all together. Natasha, on the other hand, dances like she does everything else - with both precision and grace. Other, more skilled dancers make note of her and Natasha is whirled into several additional polkas, waltzes, marzukas, and some sort of clappy-hand-almost-square-dance thing by a variety of men and women in brightly embroidered outfits. Clint finally pulls her away with the promise of church basement where the food is being served is full of rickety folding tables and chairs, but there are bustling grandmotherly ladies making sure everyone gets fed heartily. The place smells incredible.
Natasha looks carefully at the women. "I don't think they look like your grandmother, Clint. I think they look like everybody's grandmother."
"I know, isn't it great?"
They're served heaping helpings of duck, sausage, dumplings, sauerkraut, bread and butter - plus, of course, mugs of beer. Later, Natasha is forced to admit that the sauerkraut was actually pretty delicious. Clint manfully refrains from saying, "I told you so."
On the drive home, the silence between them has a new quality. It's companionable, not distancing. Clint looks over at one point and Natasha is asleep, completely comfortable. He knows exactly what that means, when it comes to Natasha.
From then on, the ice thaws steadily, until he barely remembers it ever existed.
Natasha:
Clint wakes up, shuddering from head to toe in Natasha's arms. It's still night, but not for long. Small birds are starting their pre-dawn twittering and the sky looks more grey than black. His movements have awakened Natasha, who mumbles, "'S awright?" as she stretches.
"I feel...I feel…"
"What? What is it? Do you feel worse?"
He sits up, slowly. "I'm dizzy as hell. But I feel a little bit better, actually."
She puts her hand on his forehead, then his neck, frowning. "You don't feel as feverish as you were."
"Think something in those vaccines Fury pumps us full of fought it off?" He tries to stand up, sways, and thumps back to the ground and Natasha glares at him.
"Stay down, idiot. Do you need water?" She stands up and gets some before he can say yes or no, returning to thrust a cup in his face. "Drink."
He drains the cup while she studies him. "You've got the constitution of an ox, Barton. Or whoever designed that bioweapon didn't take into account your hearty Midwestern stock. Fueled by tater tots, no doubt."
He makes a face at her at her. "You're just mad because I almost died and it made you nervous. Who'd you push around if I were gone?"
"I've got a whole SHIELD facility to pick from."
"They won't let you beat them up during sparring practice like I will."
She laughs, her first unrestrained, joyous laugh since the mission began, and Clint can't help but grin dopely at her as she does. He slides an arm around her waist and pulls her close, although he doesn't have much strength and Natasha assists him by hitching herself over. He kisses her temple, and then her ear, bold with the shock of his near-death. If she hits him, he's going to claim that he's still feverish and out of his mind.
"Thanks for riding it out with me, Tasha."
She turns to face him, and meets his gaze, a smile still playing over her lips. She leans in and returns his kiss, first next to his nose, then the side of his mouth, and finally, squarely on his lips. His hand slides up her back and into her hair, and he sighs softly against her cheek as her hands come up to gently cradle his face. "Tash," he says, almost dreamily, "I…"
Her body tenses against him and she pulls away, leaving him blinking.
"Listen. Hear that?"
He listens, and after a second hears the familiar thwop-thwop-thwop of a chopper breaking the still air. As gold and red begin to light the horizon, a SHIELD helicopter becomes visible, streaking towards them. In the cockpit, Clint can see Ihsan gesturing wildly at the pilot, pointing at them.
Clint sighs, and meets Natasha's eyes in a moment of mutual recognition. Something has changed, something that will have to be worked out later. He smiles suddenly, and she returns the smile, and then Clint tries to stand up too fast and nearly falls over into the camel. Natasha, making a disapproving noise, catches him, puts an arm around his waist and supports him as he finds his feet. They walk forward together as the chopper swings in a wide circle and bears towards them, gleaming in the daylight.