It's hot. The air shimmers above corrugated rooftops. The small, sunburnt courtyard is hidden from view by a crumbling ten-foot tall stone wall, and in the shade of the wall, a man lies dead in the dust, an arrow protruding from his back. Another man, equally dead, hangs halfway out the open window of the old abandoned house, an arrow sticking out from the side of his neck. A swath of red paints the clay façade and the ground under the body. Flies are already buzzing around it.
Clint collapses his bow and clicks it into the harness across his back. He jogs towards the boxlike metal construction that squats in the middle of the small yard. Five foot by five foot by five foot. Painted matte black. Without breaking pace he heaves himself up on top of it, the heavy, two-foot bolt cutters from his bag already in his hand. The metal surface is blisteringly hot under his hands. Heat radiates through the soles of his boots as he gets to his feet and crams the blades of the massive bolt cutters in around the shank of the padlock. The lock falls away, clanging against the metal. He doesn't care. There's no one left alive to hear it.
The rusty hinges groan as he pulls at the hatch, heaving it open. Overheated air rises from the darkness, smelling like hot metal and sweat and dirt. It's ninety-six degrees outside, but as he gets down on his front he thinks it's gotta be a hundred and fifteen at least in there. It's an oven. He peers down. Sweat runs down the sides of his face, succumbing to gravity and dropping down into the darkness below. There are only a few narrow horizontal slots just below the roof of the box, but he sees enough.
"Widow."
Natasha is slumped in one of the corners and he reaches down into the heat and touches the top of her head. No reaction.
It will be too tight for him to get in there with her, so he leans in and grabs her. It's awkward and heavy, he has to lean halfway inside, but he manages to get her up and out onto the top of the box. Her skin is deeply flushed and when he checks her pulse it taps rapidly under his fingers.
"Hey." He shakes her shoulder lightly. "Hey, Natasha."
Her eyes are half-open but he can tell she's not tracking quite right. The tip of her tongue comes out to slowly lick at her dry, cracked lips. She had left the day before wearing a Moroccan kaftan and a hijab. The kaftan and headscarf are gone, so are her shoes, but the black jeans and the tank top she'd worn underneath are still accounted for. Clint puts his hand on her forehead. Her skin is hot and bone dry. Fuck. She's beyond dehydrated if she's not even sweating any longer.
"Not that this isn't a charming place," he says and tries to keep his voice light as he slides down the side of the box, "but what do you say we get the hell out of here?" He drags her to the edge and pulls her arm over his shoulders before getting her down. Once she's on the ground he gives her two seconds to try to stand on her own. It's no big surprise when her knees buckle, so he just shifts his grip around her waist and scoops her up.
She tenses for a moment, then slumps back down in his arms. "Barton?" she asks hoarsely as he carries her towards the side gate that will take them to the narrow alley behind the house.
He looks down to see her squinting up at him, blinking sluggishly. "Of course it's me. Who else would come after your sorry ass?"
She closes her eyes. "No one," she mumbles.
He hikes her up a bit in his arms. Okay. So that bit of attempted levity didn't exactly lead them where he planned. "Coulson might be a little hurt if he heard you say that," he reminds her.
He has to put her down to check the street. This time she manages to lock her knees, but he keeps his arm around her waist, keeps her pressed against his side just in case. With the gun in his hand he peers out. The car he stole an hour ago is parked a few houses down and it's a matter of twenty seconds to get there. He sees no one. He knows that doesn't mean no one sees them, and he stands out there more than Natasha does with her dyed hair, fake tanned skin, and dark contacts.
He gets her into the passenger seat, unclips his harness as he rounds the car at a jog. As soon as the engine growls to life, he turns the fans up to max. It's an old car and it has no air conditioning, so it's like sitting in front of a hair drier, but it's all he's got right now. He reaches into the back and liberates one of the water bottles from its six-pack plastic bondage. The bottle and its content are warm under his fingers as he holds it to her cracked lips. She tries to drink, but most of it ends up on her chest and lap. Clint gives her another couple of tries, then simply pours the rest over her head, putting his hand on her forehead to keep the water out of her eyes before tossing the bottle in the back and grabbing another. He pours half over her shoulders and chest, the rest goes over head. She definitely needs to rehydrate, but he knows it's her temperature that's killing her, and he needs to get it down. Now. He puts the car in gear. He will take her back to the safehouse, he decides. It's no more than eight minutes away. He left it a bit of a mess, fully intending on never coming back, but he doesn't have time to look for something else.
"You with me there, Romanoff?" he asks, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching out to shake her shoulder lightly.
She doesn't open her eyes, but she gives a tiny, delayed nod.
The Atlas Mountains lie blue and hazy behind Marrakech as he takes them out from the small cluster of farm houses and onto the dirt road that will take them to the highway and back to the city. The road is in bad condition, badly cracked and potholed, and Clint almost runs them into the ditch as he takes one hand off the steering wheel to fumble blindly behind him in the backseat, trying to locate another bottle by touch. Even though cooling her down is at the top of his list, it doesn't mean he can't try to get her to drink some more. His fingers close on air and he curses himself for not bringing all of it into the front when he grabbed the first one. After another close call he hits the breaks and the tires scrape across dry gravel and sand as they lock up. They come to a standstill in the middle of the road, dust flaring up around them. He twists and gets the pack of bottles, places it between the center console and Natasha's leg. He snags one and cracks the cap before pushing it against her chest.
"Drink," he orders as he gets them up to speed again.
She fumbles with the bottle, and it slips through her hands, tumbling down into the footwell, spilling water everywhere. She makes no move to retrieve it. His fingers tighten around the steering wheel. There's no way to know if she's been kept inside that oven all day, all he knows is that she had been made at some point during the night, and it had taken him far too long to make that rat bastard Mehdi tell him where they had taken her.
He gets the burner from his front pocket and calls Ismail. Clint's Arabic is sketchy at best, and Ismail's English is even worse, but they've got enough French between them for Clint to get the message through that he needs Ismail's help to disappear the car. It can't be seen at the safehouse.
Quinze minutes, fifteen minutes, is the only answer he gets, then the line is dead.
The safehouse is at the very edge of Marrakech, and once they hit the paved highway Clint gets them there in six minutes. He slings the heavy bag with all of their things across his back and carries her up the rickety exterior stairs up to the second floor apartment. It's tricky to unlock and open the door with a boneless Natasha in his arms, but after a little swearing he manages.
The air is stifling in there. He drops the bag on the floor and heads straight for the bathroom. Thank God this place has running water. Calling the bathroom small is being generous. He can reach both walls if he puts his arms out. It's got a toilet wedged between a cracked sink and a miniscule shower in the corner. A moldy shower curtain hangs from a rod. The bathroom is as hot as the other room and smells faintly like sewer and mildew. Natasha is motionless in his arms as he nudges the lid to the toilet closed with his boot and puts her down before turning the shower on. The pipes start to rattle and for a moment nothing happens, then the water starts running. It runs brownish with rust for a few seconds, then goes clear.
"Hang on, I'll be right back," he says and hurries back into the front room and locks the door. He curses as he realizes his bow is still in the car, but there's no way he'll leave Natasha right now to go get it. He checks his watch. If Ismail is there as promised, the car will be gone in less than ten minutes. He takes a split second to mourn his bow, then mentally writes it off and puts it out of his mind. He grabs the bag with the rest of their weapons and a new, still unopened six-pack of water bottles from the small table before heading back to Natasha.
He drops the bag on the floor inside the open bathroom door, tosses the bottles into the shower, and pulls his gun from its holster, placing it the sink to free up his hands.
"We've got to get you cooled down," he tells her and tries to get her to stand up.
Natasha shakes her head and curls in on herself. Her teeth have started chattering and her skin is covered with goose bumps. He knows it's nothing but a paradoxical reaction to the extreme heat stress she's under. When he tries again to get her up she growls and pushes at his hands, but there's no time for coaxing so he simply lifts her into the running shower while she hisses slurred curses at him.
He doesn't bother with his boots or his clothes, just gets in under the spray with her and kicks the water bottles to the side before lowering her to the floor. He reaches behind him for the gun he left in the sink. He has to stretch awkwardly to reach it, but he manages and puts it on the toilet lid. Close at hand, but protected from direct water spray by the dingy shower curtain. He checks the sightlines into the room outside. He can see the end of the bed and just a few inches of the door. Good enough for now.
He grabs the shower head from its holder and gets down on his knees. A moment later he has to drop it to grab her as she tries to crawl away. She kicks inefficiently at him as he pulls her back. Then her elbow comes up and he swears under his breath as he ducks away, because the confusion and combativeness are signs that she's beyond heat exhaustion, this is heat stroke, and he hopes to God he got to her in time, please, please, please, let him have gotten to her in time, because if he didn't her organs could be failing this very moment, her brain might be taking damage, and god knows what the hell else.
She continues to struggle to get free, but he wedges himself in between her and the wall, maneuvers her until she's sitting sideways between his legs. He pins her legs down with his thigh and wraps one arm around her to keep her in place. He shouldn't be pressed up against her right now, his body heat will do nothing to help cool her down, but he needs to keep her under the spray of the water.
She's weak and uncoordinated enough that it's enough to use one arm to hold her and he picks up the shower head from the floor where it has been spraying water all over and directs the flow over her head again. The water is still lukewarm, nowhere near as cold as he would like, but as it hits her the fight suddenly melts out of her and she slumps against him.
"See. It's not so bad, is it?" he says. She doesn't move, but he still gets another few mumbled expletives in return.
Over the next couple of minutes, the water turns cooler, but not by much. The risk of another escape attempt seems to have decreased a bit, so he dares let go of her and reaches over his head to wiggle the cold water tap, trying to convince it to a better job. Natasha slowly relaxes more heavily against him. She's still shivering, but other than that she doesn't move. Clint keeps up a continuous but fairly meaningless monologue, and every few minutes he checks her pulse again. It's still worryingly fast, and despite the poor light in the bathroom, her pupils are pinpricks.
He reaches past her and pulls the pack of water bottles closer without letting the shower head move from above her. "Think you can try to drink a little? You really need to get some fluids onboard."
She lets him hold the bottle to her lips. He tips it carefully, keeping the water spray to the back of her head as she drinks greedily. "Slow," he tells her, and pulls the bottle away an inch, because yes, she needs water, but if she drinks too fast she might end up throwing up and that would kind of defeat the whole purpose.
She grips his wrist, trying shakily to pull the bottle to her lips again.
"Wait," he says and doesn't let her. "Let it settle for a few seconds, okay?"
And it turns out he was right in being cautious, because only moments later she hunches over with a choked cough, and the water she gulped down comes back up. It splashes down over his pants where his thigh is still pinning her legs, and he clinically notes that she hasn't eaten much since yesterday, because it's mostly water that comes up.
A few minutes later he allows her to try another small drink. She manages to go slower this time, and for a while there it looks like she'll be able to keep it down, but then she moans and her fingers dig painfully into his leg as she throws up again. Fuck. He'll have to take her to one of the local hospitals if he can't get her to keep it down, and there's no way El Alaoui won't have all of them watched.
"You think you'll be okay for a few seconds if I get up?" he asks.
She doesn't answer. Clint helps her get situated against the wall before he gets to his feet. He leaves a trail of water behind him as he gets the first aid kid from under the bed. He has to step over Mehdi's body that's still tied to the overturned chair on the far side of the bed. There's blood on the floor. On the bed sheets. The hot air is heavy with the smell of it. He puts the kit on the small table and quickly finds the electrolyte replacements. He grabs a couple of sachets along with the small bottle of eye drops. He's almost at the bathroom door when he spots the desk fan. He goes back for it and puts it down in the doorway. He points it into the bathroom and turns it on. Air flow on wet skin will help cool her down further.
When he gets back to her he puts the shower head back in its holder up high but keeps the water running. It's the work of seconds to rip the sachet open with his teeth and pour the powder into the bottle. He shakes it vigorously to dissolve it. He only allows her a few sips for now, and this time it stays down. He gets up and angles the shower head away before opening the bottle of eye drops. He puts his hand under her chin and tilts her head back.
"Gonna remove your contacts, okay? Stay still." When she doesn't protest, he drips saline solution in both eyes and lets her blink a few seconds before adding more. He holds her eye open and carefully removes the left contact, revealing her natural eye color underneath. The right one follows moments later. He adds more eye drops. "Feels better, right?"
She nods.
"Arms up," he says, and when she complies, slowly and clumsily, he pulls the tank top over her head.
He balls it up and tosses it over his shoulder. He reaches around and unclasps her bra, pulls it off and lets it join the tank top. Working her out of her jeans and her underwear isn't easy when she's sitting down. The wet denim is difficult and uncooperative, but Clint is nothing if not stubborn and eventually they come off. While he works, he sees her watching him, eyes half-closed, but she seems a little more present, a little more there. But maybe it's just wishful thinking on his part, because he knows it takes way longer than this to lower someone's core temperature any significant amount.
Clint wedges himself in between her and the wall again, arranges his still clothed legs on both sides of her bare ones and pulls her back to sit back to chest. She sighs, and puts her hands on his legs, fingers splayed. He closes his eyes and leans the back of his head against the wall, settling in to wait. He'd rather not stick around now that they without a doubt have a bounty on their heads, but he can't risk moving her yet.
The water runs out half an hour later. Clint opens his eyes as the spray turns into a trickle turns into a drip turns into nothing. Natasha doesn't move and he leans over her shoulder and catches a glimpse of her eyes under lowered lashes.
"How are you feeling?" he asks.
"Bad." Her voice is still thin and thready.
He puts two fingers on her cardioid artery again. Still rapid, but not quite as frantic. He feels her forehead. Despite the time they've spent here under the cool spray, she's still too hot for his liking. "Do you know who I am?" He's pretty sure she does, because even as messed up as she is, he knows she would have made his life very difficult if she didn't.
A nod.
"Good. Do you know where you are?"
She shakes her head.
"Marrakech. We're at the safehouse."
She makes a sound like oh, yeah, I remember now, but Clint is pretty sure it's an automatic reaction. Never let anyone know you're at a disadvantage. Admitting to not knowing where she's at is a slip that never would have happened if she wasn't in such a rough shape.
"You were made and they took you," he tells her.
"The op?" she asks hoarsely. "Compromised?"
Clint turns his head and looks out the door into the front room, at the feet sticking out from behind the bed. Mehdi Aziz is dead and if the guards Clint killed haven't been found yet, they will be very soon, and then Kamran El Alaoui will be in the wind.
"No," He tells her and has no compunction about lying, because she doesn't need to know that now. She's not reacting quite right just yet, and if he can avoid it he doesn't want her mind to go off in bad directions. The Red Room created a number corrosive and unhealthy feedback loops in her psyche. Most are deeply buried these days, broken down and taken control of, but once or twice she has slipped up, letting him know that her past sometimes still whispers dire predictions in her ear, telling her that any failure, no matter magnitude or reason, will come at a terrible cost to her. Untangling herself from her past those times takes time; days or weeks, so no, he will tell her later.
Natasha makes no move to want to get up and Clint stays on the floor with her, watching the light that falls into the front room change from steely white into something softer and less harsh. The fan whirrs quietly in the doorway. The faint sound of cars and trucks and angry honking bleeds through the walls. He feeds her very small portions of the water a few minutes apart, and cracks open another water bottle when her skin starts to dry in the warm air flow from the fan. He pours it over her head and wipes her down to allow the evaporation to continue to cool her down.
He doesn't have to check his watch to know when an hour and a half has passed. The distant sound of the mosques calling out for prayer around the city let's him know afternoon has slid into early evening. The heat will start to let up in a few hours, dropping back into the much more civil low seventies.
He reaches around and plucks a strand of wet hair from where it's sticking to her face, tucks it behind her ear. "Wanna move?" he asks.
She shakes her head and Clint settles back against the wall.
The slice of sky he can see through the window gradually turns a deeper blue before starting its slow slide towards indigo. Then finally, in a matter of a few short minutes, the North African night tips the balance and the sky turns black.
By the time the last prayer call of the evening rings out, Natasha is still lethargic, but she's aware and awake in a way she hadn't been when he found her. This time when he asks if she wants to move to the bed she says yes. He gets her up and back into the front room where he strips the bed of the stained sheets before helping her lie down. He realizes belatedly that there's a digital oral thermometer in the first aid kit, and puts it in her mouth now. She's still too hot, still in the triple digits, but it's manageable.
"What time is it," she asks as he wipes her down with a wet towel again. She sounds sleepy now, not half-out of it as before.
"Half past nine, give or take."
She frowns. "Really?"
"Really." He could quip something about her lazing away all day, but the memory of her, lifeless and limp in his arms as he pulled her out of there, that still lingers a little too close. "Here, have another sip," he says and hands the bottle to her. This time she can hold it herself.
He collects the fan from the bathroom doorway and places it on the small table next to the bed. He turns it on. Natasha curls up on her side and is asleep within minutes, exhausted from it all. Clint can finally strip out of his own soggy clothes and he drops them on the floor in the bathroom on top of Natasha's. He grabs a pair of underwear and pulls them on before going to open the window. He leans the side of his face against one of the metal bars that cover the window and closes his eyes as the breeze fans over his skin. The air is already cooler.
He stands in front of the window until his watch beeps. He has set it to thirty minutes intervals to make sure he gets some more liquids into her.
By the time his watch has gone off twice more the temperature outside has dropped further, and he pulls a t-shirt over his head and puts a pair of khaki cargo pants on. It's still warm in the room, so he drags a chair to the window and sits playing Tetris on his phone as he keeps half an eye on Natasha and waits for the next beep-beep-beep. Around one a.m. he resets his watch to sixty minutes and starts letting her sleep a little longer. Twice during the night she wakes on her own, grabbing at her leg, hissing sharply at the muscle cramps that hit. He gets on the bed, presses the flat of her foot against his abs to keep it flexed as he kneads the muscles that contract painfully. When the cramps pass, she melts back into the mattress and is asleep almost a instantly.
He mixes another bottle of electrolytes for her, opens a new water bottle for himself and chews down two peanut flavored protein bars. He lies down next to her in the middle of the night, making sure to keep his distance, because she's still too warm and doesn't need his body heat to add to it. He drifts a little, but true sleep doesn't happen for Clint that night. Every time he wakes her to drink, he checks her temperature and it finally drops under one hundred. Even then it's hard to relax for real, and at first light he gets up and starts setting up their trip out of there.
Natasha rolls out of bed two hours later and stumbles to the bathroom, blanket around her shoulders. Clint has never been so happy to hear her pee in his whole life, because that means her kidneys are still online. He takes a swig of lukewarm water from his bottle to celebrate.
She comes back out and heads to the bag he transferred back to the bedroom last night. She moves like she's sore. He sees her eyes fall on Mehdi's body.
"So, seeing as we had strict orders to keep him alive and bring him in, I guess the job was a bust?" She digs around in the bag for a change of clothes and starts pulling them on.
Her hands look a little unsteady still and her face is pale, but all in all she doesn't look too bad, so Clint feels okay with telling her the truth this time. "Total bust," he says. He nods his head at Mehdi. "That bastard had the audacity to die while we were having a nice, civil conversation about points of interest I should visit."
She gives the blood spatter a pointed look.
"He, uh, fell." He gives her a sheepish smile.
"Onto your knife? And your fists? Repeatedly."
"Right."
She doesn't smile back. "You compromised the mission."
Clint drops his grin, because he can see where this is going. "You bet your ass I did."
"There must have been another way."
"No. There wasn't."
She scowls at him and he feels his eyes narrow in return. He hasn't slept going on thirty hours, and if she wants to have this old discussion right here, right now, he's game. He's more than game, because she almost died and now she's pissed he prioritized her over some asshole weapons smuggler. Bring it, Romanoff, he thinks, because this is one fight he will never back down from.
But then Natasha shrugs and the tension around her lifts in the blink of an eye. "Okay," she says. She points at the table and at the powerbar lying there. "Is that for me?"
He nods and turns his back on her, going back to working on their travel plan. He's not the kind of person to stay angry for long, but it takes a little more than one point two seconds for him to simmer down, even when the fight never actually happened.
He concentrates on finding a flight from Rabat. He doesn't want to risk going through the local airport, not with the connections El Alaoui has, so he has decided that they'll drive up to Rabat and take a flight from there to France. The passports already lie lined up on the table next to him. Mr. and Mrs. Claesen. They will drop those covers in Paris and get back into the US separately, under other aliases.
The rustle of wrapping paper being peeled off the powerbar is heard behind him, then Natasha leans over his shoulder to watch him work. He's about to tell her to stop chewing in his ear when she shifts behind him. Her chin comes to rest lightly on top of his head and she wraps her arms around him in a two-second hug.
"Thank you for coming for me," she says quietly.
"Always."
They leave Marrakech three hours later. Natasha drives and Clint naps in the passenger seat next to her.