A/N: Here's part two, enjoy! Disclaimer is the same as always!
/
Chapter Seven
Tears: Part II
Clint returned to consciousness sluggishly. He felt like he was trapped in Jell-O. His muscles refused to respond to his brain's signals. For an eternally long moment panic spiked through him, until he managed to twitch his tongue and then grimaced at the taste of blood that coated it.
He blinked his eyes open cautiously and spat out the bloody saliva, groaning throatily as his body let him know just how much pain he was in.
"Easy," Natasha murmured. "You had a seizure, Clint."
"Yeah, noticed," he rasped, blinking slowly and staring up at her.
"Try not to move too much, okay?"
Not feeling like talking, he just grunted and did a mental assessment of his body. Every muscle ached, his head felt hot, there was sweat beading on his forehead, he'd bitten a good chunk out of his cheek and it was stinging like hell and still bleeding, his throat felt raw, and his head was pounding.
Lovely.
"Coulson and the medical team are about three hours out," Natasha told him. It sounded like she was shouting at him down a long tunnel; her voice was faint in his ears. "They don't know what's wrong with you, so they brought doctors to make sure you're stable for the trip back to the Helicarrier; she's headed for us and will be about an hour away when Coulson gets here."
Clint tried to answer, he really did, but his throat wasn't working and all he could do was stare up at her.
"Oh God, not again," she whispered as his vision started to fade.
/
The next time Clint came to, he felt even worse than he had before. He was rolled on his side, with bloody saliva filling his mouth. He coughed roughly, ignoring the spasm of pain in his abdominal muscles, as he spat the blood and skin and saliva shit from his mouth and took a deep breath through his nose. Something cool touched the side of his face, and he sensed rather than saw it was Natasha.
"They're almost here, Clint, just breathe, okay?"
He made a noise in the back of his throat that she seemed to understand was a question. His eyelids hurt too much to open, so he couldn't ask her with his eyes. Natasha understood though; she always understood.
Natasha's voice was shaking when she answered, "You had two more seizures, Clint."
Two? He didn't remember having two. He recalled the first one, and coming to from the one he'd just had. Worry started to filter through him; if he wasn't remembering it he must have been unconscious, and that was never a good sign.
The back of his throat tickled mercilessly. He coughed roughly, gasping as his muscles all protested with stabs of pain through his chest, back, and abdomen. It was like a chain reaction—coughing only made the tickling worse, which made the coughing come from deeper in his chest, which caused his muscles pain, which robbed him of his breath.
"Shit, Clint, you need to breathe!"
Clint flailed in panic as he felt his lungs begin to burn with protest, but he was coughing, and shit he couldn't breathe—
Small hands pounded his back, and the coughing stopped abruptly, allowing him to suck in air with the desperation of a drowning man. Those same hands reached over to cradle his face and slide under his back, and he felt his body being shifted upwards. Even then, he couldn't summon the energy to open his eyes. When she settled him down again, it was on pillows that propped him up slightly and it was a bit easier to breathe.
"I am going to fucking kill Byer, I swear to God," she whispered, pressing her hand to his forehead.
Too exhausted to do anything else, he just twitched his lips up into a faint smile and sucked in deep lungfulls of air. He had never taken breathing for granted — unfortunately most torture techniques involved water and simulated drowning of some kind or another, especially in the Middle East — but for now, he was just grateful that he was alive.
Or at least, mostly alive.
And then it happened—that feeling, passing through him again.
By sheer force of will, he pried his eyes open and stared up at her. "Tash," he rasped desperately.
She looked like hell. Her hair was disheveled, her complexion was pale, and her eyes were glassier than he'd ever seen them. At his voice rasping out her name, her eyes closed for a brief moment before she swallowed and looked at him with something in her eyes he'd never seen before.
"Again?" she whispered, and he blinked twice.
The swallowing started; his vision was going gray at the edges. He stared at her as long as he could before his body started jerking and everything went black.
/
Natasha felt like she'd been through emotional hell. It didn't matter how much she shoved her emotions to one side, seeing Clint in so much pain and completely out of control of his own body was the most horrible thing she had ever been forced to watch. She could withstand being forced to watch people torture him, because they had been trained to. Clint would be able to handle seeing her being tortured as well. Neither would like it, and both would want revenge, but they could handle it.
But this?
This was completely different.
Her heart felt like it was shattering, because this was Clint Barton—the man whose caustic humor and sharp wit hid his shyness, whose stormy blue eyes missed absolutely nothing, who preferred to stand back and quietly observe as everything fell apart. This was the man who had never cried out in pain, even while being tortured and nearly drowned; who had never screamed, not once, even when they laid hot pokers on his thighs.
The only human being she trusted on Earth, and in a lot of ways the toughest person she knew — completely out of control of his own body and as helpless as a newborn baby. Never mind the fact that he was in so much pain his throat was raw, and this from a man who only screamed under very specific circumstances.
Clint Barton was never vulnerable, not visibly. Yet here he was, his body jerking like a puppet whose strings had been cut and coughing so violently she was mildly surprised he hadn't coughed up a lung yet.
Natasha bent over him to press her lips to his forehead to gauge the temperature. It was spiking again, and he was shivering under a fresh sheen of sweat.
For the next hour she watched her partner's fever rage, struggled in vain to get his temperature down. She held him up over the trash can while he vomited and then dry-heaved twenty-seven times in a row, moaning incoherently when the spell finally passed and he slipped into semi-unconsciousness with his eyes flickering beneath his lids.
All she could do was swipe the cold washcloth gently down his face and hope that Coulson got there before shit really started to go downhill.
/
E/N: Reviews are loved!
