Natasha had said all along she'd return to the Red Room. Since the first opened up to Clint, she's told him that she'll got back for her creators, that she'll devastate the programme and leave them dead on the ground for what they made her into.
It's the worst thing she ever does.
She jumps on early intel while Clint's still on a solo operation in Tokyo, and the first he hears of what she's done is Coulson disbanding his own mission and ordering him on the first plane to Moscow. He's briefed on the way, told how Natasha disappeared inside the facility which hasn't functioned for three days but she still hasn't left the premises according to their trackers.
What they're telling him is to bring the body of his partner home.
He goes through the motions of any other mission, a man driven by motivation of at least making sure that he can take her corpse from the building before he burns the facility to the ground like he knew she intended to do. But she's not dead. She's still alive.
For her sake, he almost wishes that she was dead. For the first time, he has to call back up.
She's in one of the cells where they trained the children, he knows that from the stories she's told him, her vivid recollections of what they had called "conditioning rooms" but were really torture chambers. He knows as soon as he's seen her in the corner of the room through a half-opened door that they've done it to her again. The hall leading to her is littered with bodies which are distorted in the most cruel and creative ways, but she has retreated here, to where it all began, and he sees her arms wrapped around herself, her face streaked with blood and her entire body trembling and he calls the team waiting outside before he even attempts to approach her. They've done it again.
The Red Room were known for their chemical manipulation of the girls they took, and they took a great deal of pride on their surviving operatives not being held back on simple hold ups like fear. It was no good having a spy who was afraid of heights or scared of the dark, and unfortunately they were common fears in children. They had very unique ways of ensuring that their girls could work through their fear, so they enforced it, manipulated it, until the fear was all they knew. It's what they've done to her now. It'll wear off in twenty-four hours, he knows, but he isn't sure what to think as she's already been classed as MIA for three days now. They must have overloaded her on the dosage and she lashed out in the only way she knew how; killing every single one of them.
It takes them three hours to tempt her out of the room, and that's only when she's emptied the remaining gun she's holding into the wall by Clint's shoulder before he's even halfway through the door. It takes him one of those hours to cross the room, and another thirty minutes for her to react to him touching her. When his fingers brush the bare skin on her wrist, she reacts like a live wire, clutching at him as if he's the only salvation in this hell she's experiencing.
He does everything that she begs of him, because of all the people waiting to escort her back to SHIELD, he's the only one that's ever known how to read her truly, and no one's ever experienced a scared Natasha besides himself.
She sits in his lap like a child in the helicopter ride home, facing him with her face hidden in his shoulder. She's so reluctant to leave the embrace of his arms that he adjusts the safety straps and uses them to secure them to her. It doesn't calm her at all, but she does stop her from struggling. She spends a four hour flight trembling so much that her muscles must surely be cramping, but when they arrive he doesn't rub out his thighs to ease out where she's been sitting on him for so long, he just carries her through to the infirmary with one arm beneath her backside as she clung to him like a monkey.
Three minutes after, he's carrying her back to their room, because the infirmary trip nearly results in three dead nurses.
And it is their room. It's the room where they sleep together, where their possessions are, and it's the room where they exist apart from assassinations and missions. It's their small home. It's something when they had nothing, and right now it's all he has to offer her. He sets her, unwillingly, on her feet and turns her to face the room. "We're home now, Tasha," he tells her softly.
She just backs against his chest, seeking more comfort. Her eyes dart around each corner of the room, and he can see her try to figure out how she got there. "Come on," he coaxes gently, his voice barely more than a whisper, distancing himself fully from the men who would have hurt her. "Let's wash all this dirt out of your hair."
She doesn't fight him on the shower, but she doesn't co-operate either. He has to undress her, nudge her leg so that she steps into the stall without slipping, and guide her beneath the water. It isn't until he's stepped in himself that he sees it's too hot and she wasn't paying enough attention to let him know her skin was scalding. He adjusts the water, cursing softly to himself before washing five days of grime from her hair and body. He's careful as he washes her, not knowing the line between when she knows it's him and when she thinks he's them, but the shaking never stops.
She starts to scream as the bathroom fills with steam, and it's when he's wrapping her in a towel and rushing her back to the bedroom that he realises that's how they administered her fear - gas.
It's the longest night of his life, even longer than the time he wasn't sure he was going to survive a large head wound. In the first hours after the bathroom incident she screams and cries like a toddler having a tantrum. She claws at his chest because he doesn't get a chance to put on a shirt, and at one point her screams are so loud that Fury himself demands entry to their room and overrides their security lock to find out what's going on. Before Natasha can turn on him, Clint holds her in a death grip against his shoulder, refusing to release her while he insisted to their boss over and over "I got this. I got her."
He would be covered in bruises the next day, but that didn't stop him reaching out to her continuously until she drew blood with her nails when she scratched at his arm. He reacted calmly, crossing the room back to the bed and sitting on the mattress with his back to the wall. His arms are at his sides, bearing himself to her so she can see the lack of threat. Her eyes remain on the small show of blood on his arm, and her shaking never stops.
She remains in the centre of the room, looking around her, centring herself, until her breath starts to come slower and even out more. The one thing that makes this room their own, more than a military barracks, is a photograph of the two of them taken during a mission in Vienna last year. It's pinned to the wall above the bed with scraps of tape, slightly uneven. Her eyes fall on that and he watches the stress of what she's endured fall so heavily on her shoulders that her knees buckle beneath her. He reacts quickly, darting across the room and supporting her before she can collapse, bringing her slowly to the ground and into his arms.
Hours pass again, and there's no screaming but she's still trembling. They remain on the ground, pressed together in silence while she slowly but surely begins to calm, but it's not until they've been locked in their room for seven hours and the sun is starting to rise again outside their window that he decides it's safe to start moving. He lifts her up into the bed, leaving her there for only a moment to avoid any more episodes, but he only goes into the small adjoining bathroom to get a glass of water from the tap there. He brings it back and sits beside her, and he doesn't have to coax her to move into his arms.
She places herself between his legs and leans back with her head on his shoulder, allowing him to hold the glass to her lips and control the water flow. She's exhausted and dehydrated, and eventually she'll feel the hunger too, but for now all she feels is the warmth of his body and the sweet relief of the water he allows her. When the glass is emptied, he places it beside them and wraps both of his arms around her, stroking up the sides of her arms and drawing the blankets over them.
Her shaking never stops, not all through the night and well into the next day. He strokes over the skin that pimples beneath his touch through the tremors and he whispers words into her ear with gentle kisses to the side of her head. He combs his fingers through her hair and he allows his meaningless words to drift into song lyrics that they laughed at one on the New Zealand coastline. He treats her like a frightened child having a nightmare, because that's what they've reduced her to.
When the sun sets on the next day, both of them exhausted and drained beyond relief, she rolls her head onto his shoulder with a heavy sigh, as if she were waking from a deep sleep. She hasn't slept though, she's just stared ahead of her and barely reacted to his attempts to bring her back. As her head rolls back, he glances down and for the first time, her eyes truly meet his.
He smooths back her hair, shifting so that when he turns his head she's facing him even though she's cradled in his arms. "Hey," he whispers to her, his voice worn and rough.
"Is it over?" she asks him, her voice still shaking but her body no longer was.
He nods to her, confident enough for the first time since finding her to place a kiss against her sore and bitten lips. "Yeah, it's over."
And though he's burning to move and his back cramped hours ago, he doesn't shift as she replaced her head against his chest and allows herself to drift into sleep. He tangles his fingers in her hair and takes up his previous habit of murmuring song lyrics from a not-so-distant memory.