A/N - the next chapter will probably be the last, surprisingly. That went by fast. I've got another kidnapping story already posting, though, as well as my usual conglomeration of oneshots and of course Midnight.
Tony picked up Clint's gun and shot at the man who had taken down the master assassin. He fell just as Clint had, but absolutely dead and Tony really hoped his friend wasn't the same.
"Buddy, talk to me." His words were groaned out, and he tried to feel for a pulse in Clint's neck, and there was blood everywhere but there was a pulse! "All right, where ya hurt..."
Clint had been shot through the stomach. There was a lot of blood, but as far as Tony could tell, the man might live if he got medical attention.
There was only one thing for Tony to do. Sunlight right ahead, a dying man beside him, enemies coming up fast behind him...
He picked Clint up and ran for the exit.
"Like... hell..." he muttered when something deep inside him considered the option of leaving Clint behind. Even the tiny voice that had suggested it concurred when Tony said, echoing his friend, "We're going together."
He didn't add or not at all.
He didn't add going where?
And he definitely didn't add, in the dark place in his brain, or we're gonna die trying.
In the end, it was Clint who saved his life at the last, waking up right outside the mouth of the cave system, grabbing the gun from Tony's limp fingers as the genius finally fell, and opening fire.
The chaos within the lines, combined with a concentrated push from the Avengers and the S.H.I.E.L.D. reinforcements, broke open the tiniest of holes.
Clint picked up Tony and ran through the hole, taking another bullet graze to the arm but paying it no attention as he ran, and ran, until he ran right into Steve's arms and promptly passed out cold, still clinging desperately to his friend.
Natasha was crying, light, shoulder-quivering sobs as she pressed on Clint's stomach to stop the bleeding and stared at Tony nearly bleeding out on the sands. She wasn't embarassed, because honestly the men were crying harder than she was.
"Medical evac is here!" Agent Hill was practically screaming at them as she and Thor grabbed Tony from the sand and ran for a helicopter. Steve and Natasha followed as fast as they could with Clint, still trying to stop the bleeding.
The medics grabbed their friends, but there was only room for one other passenger in the helicopters. They all glanced at each other, and Natasha made an executive decision that she really wasn't authorized to make. "Steve." She wanted to stay with her partner and her good friend, but she knew their leader should be there to make any tough calls, to argue with doctors, and everything.
"Thank you," Steve muttered, leaping in and trying to stay out of the way.
He wasn't really talking to Natasha, but to the struggling and brutally wounded men in front of him. Thank you, he thought, they all thought. Thank you for being alive.
The beeping of hospital heart monitors was a bit of a shock for a barely conscious Tony Stark. He didn't fear the things, but for the life of him he couldn't understand how he got from a cave in the middle of who-knew-where to a hospital.
Then things came rushing in. First the fact that he knew where: in the general area of Takht-e Olya. Second, he had told the Avengers that important fact.
And then, everything. Every bullet flying around them and every plunge into icy water that ended with him gasping and retching on the floor.
"Hey... hey, calm down, Tony, it's okay... Tony?" The voice was hard to place for a moment. Steve. Of course, Steve. "It's okay, you're safe. Are you with us? Are you awake?"
He considered the question, vaguely remembering being locked in fever-driven nightmares for what felt like years. He also wasn't sure his throat would support his efforts to speak.
Only one way to find out. He tried to pry his eyes open, and was 'rewarded' with a stab of too-bright light. "Ow!"
"Shit! Bruce, the lights!" Suddenly the stabbing at his eyes was gone, and the room was lit only be the gentle glow of medical displays. "Better?"
"Much..." he stammered out the word and blinked his eyes half a dozen times. There was only one pressing question to him. "Clint?"
To his surprise, his answer didn't come from Steve. "Right here." A feather-soft touch floated across his cheek, and his eyes wandered to the left to find a battered, bruised, bandaged and so very much alive Clint Barton. He nearly started crying. "Right here, I'm fine. You'll be fine, too."
"Hot damn," he tried, "we are good."
"Who the hell is we, I seem to remember you doing all the work," Clint pointed out. Tony barely noticed Steve and Bruce slip from the room. "Tony, you saved my ass."
Tony rolled his eyes. "Right... because carrying my beat-up ass out of there – no, Clint, twenty feet to the edge of the cave doesn't count – wasn't work. We saved each others' ass."
"You took it all." Clint rubbed circles in the palm of Tony's hand, trying to drive away the shaking in the man's fingers. "For me."
"Sorry about that," he joked, "Mister I'm-An-Agent-I've-Been-Trained needed to use his training to get us out of there." He tried to relax, but the pain was everywhere, especially his mind.
Clint frowned as he realized that Tony wasn't shaking the memories off. "Tony, I'll be honestly. I've been in hundreds of life-or-death situations, I've been involved in dozens of infiltrations, but that was the bravest thing I've ever seen. And I mostly mean a totally beat-up and barely conscious Tony Stark heaving my bleeding-out ass over his shoulder and running out of there."
"I don't really know what happened after that," Tony admitted. "I assume you got off your ass and carried mine to the team?"
Clint nodded. "S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't get in, so we had to get out, but once we were out in the open, the team got us away from there."
"Remember what you said? Something about us getting out, together?" Tony grabbed his hand, still shaking. "Thank you. The last time I did this... that wasn't a promise he could keep."
Now it started making sense. Tony wasn't still caught in that place in his mind, he was still caught in the place before, the cave in Afghanistan. "Tony, look at me." He met those sharp brown eyes and gently brushed Tony's hair aside from them. "We're both alive. We did make it out together, and I'm not going anywhere until you can come with me, okay?"
"Thanks, Clint." Tony slowly came back to the present, and pulled Clint closer until he could rest his head in the archer's lap. "You know, I should teach you French Sign Language, or something else cool," he muttered drowsily, already falling asleep with Clint's hands lightly resting on his head.
He dimly heard the reply. "I'd like that."
A/N - They're safe and sound! ^_^
