I am so sorry that this took so long to get updated - life has really been hectic these past couple weeks, and I haven't had nearly enough time to work on this particular fic as I should have (admittedly, I perhaps should have worked on this in lieu of the one-shots that I keep posting).
Once again, thank you so very, very much to everyone who's reviewed and favorited this story (and my others!) so far. Your response has been truly overwhelming, and I am grateful for it.
If you have a tumblr, I'd love it if you checked me out over there (sidhera). I occasionally post previews of the next chapter of my stories or alternate scenes. If you're interested, I put up an alternate hospital scene a couple days ago.
Anyway, enjoy!
Clint finds Bruce standing outside the holding area, staring through the one way glass. Natasha was inside, watching Loki. Her side of the bed had long gone cold by the time he woke up this morning, and he wonders just how much of her morning she's spent here.
He looks over at Bruce, who's sipping from an oversize coffee mug. "How long has she been in there?"
"An hour, give or take."
"He said anything yet?"
"The usual threats, something about world domination and so on."
"Nothing about us?"
"Not that I can tell."
They fall silent and watch Natasha work Loki. It's a kind of dance, one that he's always been fascinated to see. He's not a half bad interrogator himself, but Natasha has it down to an art form.
He rather suspects that it's one of the reasons that he fell for her in the first place.
The pair have gone silent, and after staring at Loki for one long moment, Natasha turns abruptly on one heel and walks out of the interrogation room. She's glowering when she comes through the door.
"What did you find out?" Clint asks.
She looks at him as if she's surprised to see him there, but it's momentary. She turns to Bruce first.
"What else did you find in our blood?"
Bruce grimaces, and Clint knows this isn't going to be good.
"I wanted to wait until I knew more . . ."
"What else did you find, Banner?" Clint cuts in.
Bruce takes a deep breath before he answers. "It sounds impossible, but we're pretty sure they're nanobots."
"Nanobots?" Natasha is starting to sound worried, and he catches a slight quaver to her voice.
"What kind of nanobots?" Clint asks, a thousand different scenarios playing out in his head. He doesn't have much experience with nanotechnology, even working with SHIELD, and every encounter with it has ended badly for everyone.
"As far as we can tell, they're duds."
"Duds?" Clint asks, frowning.
At the same time, Natasha says, "As far as you can tell?"
Bruce nods at them both. "I think the malfunction was an unintended side effect of the drug that accompanied it. Apparently, Earth nanotech and Asgardian magic don't play well together. Dr. Pym is running some more tests right now, but we think that the drug somehow turned off the nanobots. Short circuited them somehow."
"What were they supposed to do?" Clint rubs one hand over his eyes, feeling mildly uncomfortable at the idea of so many little robots swimming around in his blood.
Bruce shrugs. "We don't really know. I was hoping that Natasha here could get Loki to tell us, though clearly the interrogation hasn't been going so well . . ."
"I've cracked harder cases," Natasha says drily, and Clint can tell that she's annoyed, though from Loki or Banner he can't say.
Clint's brow furrows as he looks into Loki's cell. "So, the drug, was what then, just some kind of distraction? Meant to throw us off until he could put the rest of his plan into motion? Use the nanotech against us?"
"Well," Natasha began, quirking her eyebrow at Clint. "It definitely was a distraction." She turns toward Bruce. "But I don't see how he thought we wouldn't notice them."
"The design is pretty advanced, so I don't think that they're something that Loki came up with on his own. I've asked Tony to look into it."
Clint nods. "And they're advanced enough that you wouldn't see them unless you took a closer look."
"Exactly."
Natasha starts heading toward the door then, and Clint can tell that she's itching for some exercise. He's gets his confirmation when she speaks.
"Unless you need me for something, I'm going to go for a run. I need to think this through."
Clint just nods at her, gives her the space she craves.
As she opens the door, Bruce calls out. "Can you stop by the lab again later?"
"Sure," Natasha throws over her shoulder, and then she's gone.
Clint doesn't run into Natasha until he heads down to the lab, and it's very much on purpose. He'd even avoided the gym they both favored in deference to her, and he'd kept to the roof for most of the afternoon. Eventually, though, he goes in search of Bruce.
Natasha's sitting knock kneed and looking younger than she ever was on the examination table in the main room. Bruce and Hank Pym are talking to her, but from the second he walks through the door it's clear she only has eyes for him. Pym notices first, follows the track of her stare out to where Clint hovers in the entrance.
"Oh, hello, Agent Barton!" Pym, despite repeated requests to the contrary, still falls back on politeness. "I'm glad you're here. We have some things to discuss."
That doesn't sound good, but since when has he ever gotten good news in these rooms?
Clint makes his way over to Natasha, and she looks worried, as if she doesn't know quite how to react. He's just a little more uneasy now; he cannot fathom what would upset her that much.
Bruce searches his face carefully when Clint walks over, saying, "Actually, Hank, I think maybe I'll take them into observation three. Privacy might do us some good here."
Pym nods, doesn't argue, just steps away and gets to work. He hunkers down over a centrifuge, clipboard in hand.
They're led into a little room with multi-colored ducks marching around the top border of the room, and Clint likes the purple ducks in the room especially; they seem friendlier somehow.
He is suddenly struck with an image from long ago, another life, really, when he was a child and his mother spent all day putting up circus wallpaper on one wall of his bedroom. His father had nearly put her in the hospital for that waste of money, no matter that the old woman down the street had given them the paper, leftover from covering a room for her grandchildren, no matter that his mother had done all the work by herself and it hadn't cost them a cent.
He smiles at the recollection though, because his mother, for all her faults, had loved him and had tried to make him happy. Many things in life are out of his control, but he can control how he chooses to think about his past.
Natasha boosts herself up onto the examination table, still looking like she's about to burst out of her skin.
"So, what's up?" Clint tries to keep the emotion out of his voice, and he thinks he's marginally successful. Ever since he left Bruce behind in interrogation earlier, he's been forcing himself to think about anything and everything else, whatever he can to keep his mind of the tiny machines inside of his body.
"I know we've already talked about it a little, but I think you need to hear it directly from me, too." Bruce is obviously stalling, trying to talk about other things for as long as possible before breaking the news, whatever it is.
Clint braces himself, sits down next to Natasha, the thick paper covering the cushioned table crinkling loudly in the silence of the room. He looks at Natasha as he sits down, and she's got an unbearably concerned look on her face.
Bruce continues, pulling a thin manila folder out of his clipboard. "Tony got back to me about the nanobots."
Bruce flips open the folder, leafs through the papers inside, then pulls out one sheet and hands it to Clint.
"What is this?" Clint can't make heads or tails of what he's looking at beyond the fact that it's clearly inorganic, and the legend in the bottom right hand corner of the photograph says that the image has been magnified to an incredible degree. So, the spindly, spidery things are clearly the nanobots, but that's all he knows.
"The nanobots are packed fairly densely in your blood, just over 800 IU/L. They must have had time to replicate before they died . . . " Bruce trails off.
Clint stares at the image, his heart skipping a beat in his chest and a sinking feeling deep in his gut. Tentatively, he asks, "They replicated? Are you sure they're dormant?"
Bruce nods. "Yes, they're completely inactive, and from examining Natasha, it doesn't look like they actually did anything to you." Bruce pauses then, looks away. "But, they're the same type Doom used in his little . . . experiment last year."
Of course it would have to be those nanobots.
Doom, ever missing the point of compassion when it came to science, had injected ten college students with a special, new type of nanotech last year. The promise of a few thousand dollars was enticing, and the students had signed up for his trials willingly, but Clint doubted they'd had a clue about what would happen to them.
It had started off innocuously enough, of course, with Doom using the nanobots to control little, simple things, things no one would even notice, like lunch choices and where to study after class. But Doom had increased his influence over the students little by little, changing them so slowly that by the time anyone had realized what he had done, the kids were pulling bank heists and killing anyone who got in the way.
The worst of it had been at the end, after the Avengers had been called, after they'd figured out what was going on. The team had surprised the students mid-heist, and when all the hostages were either dead or out of harm's way, Doom had forced the students to kill themselves right in front of the Avenger's helpless faces.
The idea that Loki had injected some of those things inside of him, inside of Natasha was horrifying, and it stirred up the memories of the battle of New York all over again. Clint repressed a shudder, took a breath, tried to calm himself down, tried to will himself to believe that if Loki had wanted to, they'd both be dead right now.
Clint swallows around the lump forming in his throat, and when he's sure he can trust his voice, asks, "So what went wrong? Why aren't I trying to kill you guys right now?"
He doesn't miss the look that passes between Bruce and Natasha, and he knows now for sure that her worried look is for him, that she and Bruce have already discussed Clint's reaction. He wants to act differently for them, he wants to prove that he isn't so affected by all of these events, but he's not sure that he can.
"As near as Pym and I can tell," Bruce starts carefully. "The drugs that were introduced into your system at the same time interacted with the nanotechnology. We think that the drug treated the nanobots like an invader and short circuited them."
Clint knows that he should be asking other questions right now. He should be wondering why the fuck some alien sex drug would short circuit Doom's nanobots, or whether the same drug was messing with other things in his system, but all he can focus on right now is that the nanobots aren't active, that something has prevented Loki from taking control of him.
"So they're completely dormant?"
Bruce smiles tightly, still not sure how Clint is taking the news. "Dead, actually."
"Can they be reactivated?"
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Bruce shakes his head. "It's unlikely. I did some work on them last year after . . . well, after, and I couldn't get them to restart. You should fully pass them all in two weeks or so, but I'd like to keep testing your blood for the next six weeks or so, keep a close eye on you. Just to be sure."
Six weeks to be certain that the little robots in his blood wouldn't wake up and make him into a killer, a murderer. Six weeks of testing to ensure that he wouldn't betray everyone who trusts him, the people who work with him and depend on him. His life is a careful balance of right and wrong, action and inaction, all focused on doing what was right for the greater good, and he cannot live with himself if the choice is taken away from him. Not again.
And it's that last thought that triggers him, sets off the downward spiral of self-flagellation, and he can't stop himself from slipping into it, and suddenly it's two years ago all over again and he's at the SHIELD base in New Mexico and Loki is touching his chest with a glowing scepter and all of his free will is gone as if it never existed in the first place. He remembers everything, every detail, every facet of the whole sordid affair, right from the moment that Loki took him over until Natasha kicked the Asgardian out of his brain. He still sees the faces of the men and women he killed in his darkest nightmares, staring at him with dead, accusatory eyes as he tries to run away from them. He can still see in perfect detail the way so many, too many SHIELD agents fell to the ground, lifeless, with arrows in their bodies and their blood spilling onto the ground. Most of all, he remembers the bleak period that followed, the drinking, the overworking, the fighting that could never quite displace all the guilt that plagued him.
He cannot go through that again.
Clint wants to run away, now, far away from this room where Bruce just laid out precisely what he's got inside him, things designed to take his power and control away from him, so that Loki could run his body once again. He wants to climb into a shower and scrub himself bloody, even though he knows that it won't do anything to get the tiny mites out of his system. He wants to ask Bruce for a blood transfusion, because anything is worth the risk to feel clean, to feel safe in his own skin again.
Natasha touches his arm, drawing his attention, and when she meets his eyes, he knows that she can see exactly what's running through his head right now. He wants to let her in, he really does, he wants to let her pull him out of this, but he can't, he won't burden her with this shit. He needs to be alone, he needs to work this out by himself.
He turns without excusing himself, and makes a beeline for the door.
"Clint?" She asks, and he hears an offer of comfort in her voice, one that he refuses to take.
He pauses briefly though, some part of him still reaching out to her, needing to reassure her despite all of this crap. "I just . . . can't right now, Tash. I need to get out of here for a while. I need to be alone." He doesn't add please, knowing she can hear it in his voice. He just slips out the door and tries to outrun his demons.
Please let me know what you think! It really does help to see what you guys are thinking!