Phil's phone rings.
"I'm at the airport," Natasha says before he has a chance to speak. "I touch down at noon. Where is he?"
"SHIELD. Green wing." Phil looks at the door that just minutes earlier had swung shut behind the large team of doctors and nurses and technicians that had surrounded Clint on the moving stretcher.
"Status?" Natasha asks.
Phil looks at the blood soaked bandages lying on the stainless steel tray, at the medical scissors that had cut them off. Every flat surface is littered with ripped, one-time use sterile pouches and packaging. A few bloody wipes and gauze compresses have fallen to the floor, joining Clint's jacket and shirt there. Heavy drops of blood pockmark the floor where the stretcher had been standing for the first twenty minutes, while they had made the primary assessment and gotten enough sedatives in Clint to make it possible for Phil to extricate himself without a full-blown panic attack on his hands. It's not much blood, not in comparison to what Phil has seen in other situations, but it makes his stomach tighten sickly.
"Phil?"
The brittle note in Natasha's voice brings him back to their call.
"Yeah. Sorry, I'm here. He's sedated. They just took him away to continue evaluating the damage and try to do something about his hand." He sits down heavily on the lone chair in the corner. The stillness that fills the room is a jarring contrast to the activity that had descended on Clint the moment he was brought from the helicopter pad.
The sound of the busy airport around Natasha filters through the phone. He's not directly involved in her present operation, so he shouldn't know her whereabouts, but he does. She's in Frankfurt. She has been there for two weeks, and Phil had known immediately that something was seriously wrong when she had called him, fuck procedures and mission protocol. She had told him about the message from Antic that Stark had relayed, that Antic had Clint and that if Natasha wanted him back she needed to set up a video call within the hour.
Phil should be concerned that SHIELD still hasn't managed to find a way to shut JARVIS out, that Tony Stark apparently still can get deep enough into the systems to somehow find Natasha on a job and get a message through, but right now he's just grateful. To Stark and his A.I., because despite some pretty advanced counter-measures on Antic's part, JARVIS had been able to locate the geographic source of the video stream within minutes from when it was initiated. Phil had listened in on the rapidly deteriorating situation that played out over the video link while setting up an emergency extraction team.
It had turned out that Antic hadn't taken Clint far, just nine miles, and the assault team had breached the door to the room exactly forty-four minutes later. But it had been too late, because by then Clint had been blinded, deafened, and mutilated.
"Tell me," Natasha demands quietly.
"His right hand is fine, no injuries. But the left…" Phil had gotten a brief glance when the medics had removed the bandages in the helicopter. The discolored swelling and misalignments of the bones had been glaringly obvious. Even more glaring had been the absence of a large part of Clint's middle finger. "Two badly broken fingers," he tells Natasha. "They think at least one is a complex break. The middle finger was severed above the second knuckle. They're going to try to reattach it."
"What are the odds?" It's clear from the tone of her voice that she expects bad news.
Phil glances towards the door again, wills them to bring Clint back fast. "There's usually a six-hour window," he tells her, parroting the surgeon who had been standing by when they arrived. "We're well within that." He doesn't have to tell her that even if it takes, permanent nerve damage and reduced mobility is more or less guaranteed. He runs his hand through his hair, then smoothes it down. "I tried to set you up with a ride back home." He wants her to know that he had tried, even though he had been sure what the answer would be before he even made the call. Natasha's expertise had not been essential for the operation in question, Barton had already retrieved anyway, and even decade-long partnerships didn't buy you an exclusive express ride across the Atlantic. "No go. I'm sorry."
"Thanks for trying."
The ambient buzz of the airport is interrupted by the sound of a tinny gong. Phil heats a male voice say Sicherheitshinweis. The rest of the pre-recorded security announcement drowns in the sound of young excited voices suddenly close and loud, but Phil has heard it enough times to know it by heart, even the German version.
"He can still shoot without that finger," Natasha suddenly says. "His draw and release will be unaffected. He can still shoot." Her voice is stronger, more confident, more like the woman Phil knows so well, but he hears what's hiding under the statement, hears the unvoiced need for him to agree with her. To reassure her there is still some hope that things could work out okay.
Phil sighs and wishes he had some reassurance to give, but he doesn't and he won't lie to her. Not about this. "It's too soon to tell."
She goes silent again, and Phil pictures her in the middle of the busy airport, phone pressed to her ear, looking on the surface just as cool and collected as usual, like she's just talking to someone about next day's plans or what to have for dinner, but he knows it's all a façade.
"The surgeons here are the best there is," Phil says, because he can't tell her things will be okay, but he can give her something to hold onto. "They're doing everyth—"
"I have to go through security," she says abruptly. "I'll call when I'm on the ground."
Phil's phone beeps as she ends the call.
"Agent Coulson?"
He looks up as a nurse steps into the treatment room. He pockets the phone and gets to his feet. "Yes?"
"You are Barton's handler, right?"
"Yes. And his medical proxy."
The nurse holds out her hand. "Then maybe you could make sure these don't get lost."
Phil steps closer. Resting in her palm he sees the thin silver chain Clint usually wears around his neck when not on a job, along with a bracelet made from childish, lettered beads.
He nods. "Of course."
He holds out his hand and the nurse lets the two items slide from her palm to his. Several segments of the bracelet are dark with dried blood, but Phil recognizes it. It's old, well-loved and often worn. The beads spell 'FUCK CANCER'. Clint had shown it to Phil many years ago and had animatedly told him that the money collected from the sales of bracelets like his went to cancer research. Clint had looked proud and pleased with himself. It's like, I don't know, like I'm supporting life, he had tried to explain after a long description of what kind of things the money could help with. He had still been smiling when he said it, but Phil had noted the subtle change in his body language, the faintly challenging tilt to his chin. It's just a nice feeling, is all, Clint had added. I mean, with the life I've had.
Phil had been puzzled by it, but he had realized later that Clint had been worried that Phil would tell him it was ridiculous, that his desire to balance the violence with something life-affirming was stupid. That evening Phil had gone online and bought a bracelet, too. A black and white version to offset Clint's brightly colored one. When it arrived he had put it on before leaving for the office the next morning. He had spent the day making sure it didn't peek out from under his sleeve - he had a reputation to maintain, after all - but that afternoon, during a briefing of an upcoming job, he had pushed his sleeve up a fraction and shown it to Clint under the table. The high-watt smile had definitely been worth the eighteen dollars plus shipping he had paid for it.
"Thank you," he says belatedly and looks up, but the nurse has already left.
Phil slips the necklace into his pocket and carefully slides the elastic bracelet around his wrist.
For safekeeping.
*' *' *'
He's directed to the waiting area. Another nurse comes by two hours later. From her attire Phil realizes she's coming straight from the OR and his stomach clenches sickly. There's no way they're already done, not with the injuries Clint has. She apparently sees the tension in him, because she lifts her hand before she's halfway across the room.
"I'm not here as a bringer of bad news. Everything is going according to plan so far."
"How is he?"
"As well as can be expected. We have three specialist teams working around each other to address his injuries." She pulls the surgical cap off and tucks it into a pocket of the gown. "I'll start with the good news. It looks like the damage to his eyes is less severe than we feared. We see little actual damage to the corneas."
Phil is so relieved he actually feels a little shaky.
She sits down in one of the chairs with a tired groan. She angles herself towards him. "They haven't started with his ears yet. They're waiting for the eye team to finish up first, but the neurosurgeons have started working on the severed finger. When they're done they'll start to sort out the fractures, stabilize the breaks."
"How much longer?"
"Hard to say. It depends on what they find. I would say at least another couple of hours on his hand. Then the rest. So, five hours, maybe more."
Phil nods. He knew it wasn't going to be quick.
She puts a light hand on his arm. "You should go get something to eat. Get a few hours of rest. You look like you could use it."
Phil glances past her at the clock on the far wall. It's a few minutes past 4 a.m. He wants to refuse. Every cell in his body wants to stay, but he knows she's right, he's dead on his feet and he's not helping Clint by sitting here and staring at the wall.
"He won't be awake before you get back," she reassures him, then gives him a wry smile. "Trust me, we want you here when he wakes up just as much as you do."
Phil wishes he could pretend just for a moment that this could be compared to the two times Clint has actually come out of anesthesia badly, that this time, too, it will be over in a few minutes when the worst of the confusion settles and Clint recognizes his environment, registers Phil's (or Natasha's, or Hill's, or someone else that the most base parts of his brain recognizes as safe) presence and is able to relax back into hazy half-sleep for another couple of hours.
He knows that this time it will be different.
"You have my number. If I'm not back, please call me when he's out of surgery."
She gets to her feet. "Of course."
Phil stands up, too. He pulls his jacket back on. But he still hesitates, held back by the instinct to stay and keep watch.
"Agent Barton is in good hands," she says gently. "The best."
"I know." Phil checks the clock again. "If I'm back by nine he will still be out?"
"He will on enough painkillers to stay asleep for a great many hours longer than that." She gives him a final pat on the arm, then leaves.
Phil finally manages to tear himself away. As he walks to the garage, he wonders if he'll still be reduced to tapping out messages on Clint's skin when he wakes up. There's a little slice of hope after hearing the news about his eyes, but there's no knowing yet. He watches the floor lights in the elevator on his way down and tries very hard to not think about the sounds he heard over the radio link towards the end when Clint was starting to come out of it, or think about the deliberately neutral voice-over from the SHIELD operator who was providing a real time report about what was happening in the screen while Phil and the team were racing to find Clint.
He doesn't believe in fairytales and happy endings, but as he gets into the car he desperately wants to.
*' *' *'
When Phil's alarm goes off four hours later he drags himself out of bed feeling nowhere near rested enough. He grabs a quick shower and downs an Advil for the low-grade headache that hasn't been chased away by sleep. Before heading out he picks up the field gear he had simply dropped on the bathroom floor before heading to bed. He folds them and puts them to the side to be washed. The black fabric is stiff with dried blood in places where Clint had pressed against him.
When he arrives at SHIELD, he stops by the room that houses the task force already set up and running at full speed. Phil figures he must look as tired as he feels, because as he walks in one of the agents gets up and pours a cup of coffee and pushes it into his hand without a word. Phil nods in thanks and sips the hot, bitter liquid.
The area is buzzing with activity. The tech teams are analyzing the original message, the streamed video, tracing the phone calls and wireless connections of everyone within half a mile of the location. Other teams are collecting footage from every working surveillance camera and traffic camera in the area, trying to identify the rest of the participants and map their movements. The financial investigators are going through every aspect of Antic's finances, along with those of the fish processing business and the owner of the building. They need to figure out if Antic was operating alone or if someone was hiding in the metaphorical shadows, using her drive for vengeance as a means to an end. It wouldn't be the first time.
Phil is talking to one of the team leaders, asking about progress and strategies when Sitwell comes up behind him, puts his hands on Phil's shoulders and steers him out of the room.
"We've got it, Coulson. Go to Barton."
Phil doesn't protest too much.
Half an hour later he steps back into the medical facility, paperwork and laptop case in his hand, because he knows he's going to be here for a while and as much as he would like to, he can't ignore the work that is piled up on his desk. He settles down in the waiting area again. The duty nurse tells him the surgeons are just about finished. They'll keep Clint in the observation ward for a few hours before they bring him up.
"Sedatives?" Phil asks.
"If needed we will administer them."
"Keep them close at hand," he advises grimly.
*' *' *'
"Is he still in surgery?"
Phil looks up to see Natasha in the doorway to the waiting area.
"Recovery. It'll be another hour at least before he's back." Phil saves the form he's been trying to complete for the past half hour, then closes the laptop. He moves the stack of papers from the chair next to his to make space for her. "How did you make it back so fast?" He checks his watch. "I thought your flight wasn't due for another two hours?"
"It wasn't." Natasha drops her bag on the floor and sits down next to him. "Tony somehow magicked up a Stark jet from somewhere. I didn't know anything about it until I was pulled out of line at security and told to follow the two nice gentlemen." She makes a sound like a short, hard laugh. "I thought my alias had been flagged on some watch list, and I'm not kidding you, Coulson," she brings her thumb and index finger close together, "I was this close to taking them out and helping myself to a plane, because I had no intention of sitting around in custody for days, waiting for SHIELD to sort things out."
"On behalf of SHIELD, thank you for not causing an international incident that may or may not have involved military jets trying to blow you out of the sky."
"You're quite welcome." The small smile on her lips fades and she looks past him, towards the inner doors through which they will bring Clint at some point. "Any news?"
"They finished up with his hand, that much I know. And it looks like the damage to his eyes isn't as bad as they feared."
She just nods and folds her hands carefully in her lap. "And the rest?"
"No news on his ears yet."
"He's deaf." It's not a question.
"We don't know that, Natasha."
"Yes, we do," she says flatly. She stares at the bland, gray wall across from them. "There is no way that didn't completely destroy his hearing. We'll be lucky if he comes out of this without brain damage, and you know it."
He shakes his head. "That spike would have had to be at least an inch longer to do that kind of damage." It had been brought to the hospital in a plastic evidence bag to give the doctors as much information as possible about the damages that lay hidden deep inside Clint's ears, and Phil had made himself look.
"You saw it close up?"
Close enough to see the dark blood. "Yes."
She watches him. He can see the war raging inside her, between the side that wants to believe that maybe it's not as bad as she had imagined, and the side that says that things are always that bad.
"Antic," she says. "Tell me you got her."
"We did," he confirms.
"Where is she?"
"Dead."
A flash of hard anger passes behind Natasha's eyes, and Phil knows she had wanted to get her hands on Antic. Never mind that was never on the table, SHIELD would never allow Natasha to get anywhere near her. She knows that as well as he does, but Phil can relate to the desire to inflict a massive amount of pain on anyone who hurts your loved ones.
"Why?" she demands. "What happened?"
"When we entered the room she was the only one still there. She was waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
Phil hesitates. "For you, I think."
Natasha waits for him to continue.
"By the time I was inside she already held a gun to her own head." There had been an absolute calm in Antic's eyes, the look of someone who had made final peace with the idea of dying. "She asked where you were. I think she wanted you there to get a chance to gloat."
Gloat over what she had done. Over what she was about to do.
"When she realized you weren't going to join the party she pulled the trigger." Phil rubs at his eyes. "They found the husband dead yesterday morning. Overdose of morphine they think. Antic quit her job last month. Sold the house, updated her will. Set all her business in order. There are no signs she ever planned on getting away."
"Pulling that trigger was one last 'fuck you' to me," Natasha says tonelessly.
Phil nods. Antic had made sure she got the last laugh after forcing Natasha to watch Clint be tortured by making sure that when everything was said and done there was nothing left for Natasha to exact revenge on. He rests his elbows on his knees and runs his hands over his face. He glances up when Natasha suddenly gets to her feet and walks out.
The door closes silently after her. He thinks for a moment about going after her, but decides against it. For now. If she's not back in twenty minutes he'll go find her. He doesn't blame her for needing some time to collect herself. She had been forced to watch her partner, her best friend, be hurt because of something she did. Two things she did. Crippling Antic's husband all those years ago and then releasing the SHIELD documents that led Antic to Clint.
He closes his eyes and runs his finger slowly over the beads of Clint's bracelet. He had put it under the tap when he got back home, watched the blood coloring the water. It's unprofessional to have favorites, but Phil has long ago accepted the fact that Natasha and Clint will always have a special place in his heart. They have worked together for well over a decade, have been friends for a good part of that time, but it hasn't always been easy. Not with Natasha. And certainly not with Clint.
Clint's life had early beaten a few lessons into him. Beaten them in hard. 'There's always a hidden agenda' had been one of the first ones. Clint, still young when they met, had been reeling from the changes in his life after being brought in by SHIELD, he had struggled to figure Phil out, to establish some kind of baseline with him, but when Phil hadn't met his skewed expectations and instead given him fair treatment, trust, and regular human kindness, Clint had first withdrawn, confused and nervous, then gone on the offensive.
No one does anything for free, Clint had hissed at him during one of their early confrontations, challenging Phil to deny it. The only thing that ever changes is the currency. So, what's yours, Agent Coulson? Money? Someone to do your dirty work off the books? Maybe a quick fuck on the side when you feel like it? Just skip the bullshit and say it. Then I can respect you for being honest at least.
But Phil hadn't engaged, that particular baseline wasn't something he was interested in, and Clint had left that argument frustrated and angry. The psych consult who was assigned Clint's case had told Phil that the fact that Clint's expectations, disturbing as they were, were now spelled out and on the table was to be viewed as progress. That meant they now had something to work with.
Phil had let them both cool down for a few days before breaching the subject. Sitting in a quiet, undisturbed corner in the cantina he had explained very calmly over lunch what his expectations were and what they weren't. Clint had been sullen and silent, slouching in the chair like some overgrown teenager. When Phil had slid the code of conduct manual across the table, telling Clint that he expected him to be able to recite the section on what constituted sexual harassment and the disciplinary actions associated with that everything about Clint had gone defensive. 'Never thought you were such a delicate little flower," he had huffed.
Miscommunication had been the name of the game back then, a stark contrast to the almost intuitive way they understood each other these days, and Phil had to explain that it wasn't because Clint had done something wrong, or sexually harassed Phil, but to make sure he knew where the line was if anyone tried to solicit unwanted favors from him. Clint hadn't replied, just kept scowling, but when Phil had dismissed him he had folded the manual and slid it into his back pocket before walking away.
Clint did not, in fact, have it memorized the following week, and it had been another round of conflicts and revoked privileges until Phil in frustration had put Clint in a chair in his office and told him to read the damn thing out loud. That had been how the extent of Clint's reading abilities, or lack thereof, had come to light. Phil had ended up reading the code of conduct out loud to him that night. With Clint's astonishing ability to retain information he had memorized most of it the first time. They had repeated it two days later, and after that he was able to recite the relevant section back to Phil. The fact that he enacted it with an imaginary sock puppet told Phil he still didn't believe a word of it, saw it as nothing but pretty words printed on a page, but he knew it verbatim, and it had been a start at least.
It had taken four months for Clint to drop the near-open hostility, another few for the more easy-going side of his personality to slowly, cautiously start showing its face. Things got better as time went by, but Phil knows it had been years before Clint truly trusted that he would have his back both on and off the field. Then Natasha had been brought in, and Phil knows that's what finally cemented it. Not the fact that Phil had backed Clint up against Fury when he went against orders (though that probably helped quite a bit), rather because Clint suddenly was in a position where in order to make the situation work he had to convince someone else to trust Phil, and that had required him to take a long, hard look at his own habitual doubts. Payback's a bitch, Barton, Phil had laughed when Clint had moaned about how hard it was to get Natasha to open up.
Phil's phone pings with a status report from Sitwell. He scrolls through it quickly, then rolls his shoulders and gets to his feet. He's getting water from the water cooler when he hears Natasha come back. He looks over his shoulder to see her stopped halfway across the room.
She crosses her arms over her chest like she's cold. "What's our game plan, Coulson?" she asks.
A feeling of helplessness falls over Phil. Natasha trusts him to have the backup plan, the contingencies. But he has nothing here. "There's no game plan for this," he sighs. "We just have to wait."
"I'm not good at waiting." The words come out like a plea, like she wants him to tell her what to do, how to fix this, how to not be useless and reduced to waiting in a hospital for news that won't be good.
"Come here," he says and holds out his hand, beckons for her to come closer. Natasha doesn't move. Phil puts the water cup down and closes the distance between them. He carefully pulls her in. Natasha stands rigid for a moment, and Phil almost expects her to twist away and leave again, but then she sags against him. She doesn't move for a moment, then makes a quiet, choked sound and wraps her arms around his neck.
Contrary to popular belief, the Black Widow is actually human. Natasha Romanoff even more. And never more so than when it comes to Clint.
Phil has to admit that she's not the only one needing a little comfort right now.
