Then comes the day when Stark decides it's time to stop inventing and finally bring Clint into the brain-fixing game. Finally. Only, Clint doesn't feel the relief he expected he would when he sits in the miming sessions that are arranged in the days leading up to D-day. They're all trying their best to give him as much information as possible, but most of it is too complicated to mean much to him, and it doesn't help that half of his brain is stuck on the fact that yes, there's a chance the procedure might fix him, but there's probably an non-negligible risk that it might not, that it might actually make things worse, because if it was easy and straightforward it wouldn't have taken them four months to figure it out.
But he's in good hands. He knows he is. Everyone is acutely aware of what's at stake here. He just hopes that Banner has been on his toes during all of this, because as much as Clint trusts their combined intelligence and perseverance and sheer fucking tenacity, an unchecked Stark has a way of throwing caution to the wind, trusting fully that no matter what, he'll solve the problem. And he usually does. But not always on the first attempt, and this is a time when a home-run is needed on the first strike. Luckily, Banner is the voice of reason, the devil's advocate to Stark's full-tilt, bulldozer confidence. So Clint is going to be fine. They wouldn't go ahead if they didn't think there was at least a decent chance it would work. They wouldn't risk it.
They wouldn't.
*' *' *'
On the morning of the procedure he sits on the couch in his living room and waits, palms pressed together between his knees, headset lying next to him. The tech is a mixed blessing, because while it dampens voices amazingly, it also filters out just about every other sound, and he uses his ears almost as much as his eyes when he's in the field. Sure, he's in the tower, safe and sound, and he doesn't really need to stay vigilant at all times, but he's been trying to tell his limbic system that for a while now, and it has still to take.
He glances at one of the analog desk clocks that mysteriously appeared in pretty much every room a few weeks after this all had started, and sternly informs his knee that bouncing is not allowed.
Come on, people. Let's get this over with.
Despite expecting it, he startles at the knock on the door when it finally comes. Natasha gives him a tight smile and leads him down to the floor where Stark's prototype device is being built. Clint slides the headset on.
At first he doesn't even think it's the same room, it looks so different. All the machine parts and electronic parts that had been scattered on the floor and on the workbenches have now been assembled into something that looks vaguely like one of the brain scanners he's become so chummy with, only a lot bigger and a lot less streamlined. Electrical wires, wrapped in bundles as thick as his wrist, snake across the floor from a wall full of floor-to-ceiling computer racks. Cooling fans hiss. A thousand little LEDs blink red and green and blue on monitors and control panels. Clint has to grudgingly give HYDRA some credit, because they must have some pretty brilliant guys working for them in order to fit this kind of technology into the sleek, hand gun-sized device that had landed him in this shitty situation.
A large group of people are crammed into the room. Some of them are rapidly clicking away on computer keyboards, some are bent over open access hatches with tools in hand, some are arguing around a bunch of slowly rotating holograms showing circuitry. As he and Natasha step fully into the room, talking stops and every head turns their way. Clint's step falters a fraction as he is caught by the ridiculous urge to step in behind Natasha, to let her shield him. The no-talking is probably for his benefit, but it just makes the whole thing even more uncomfortable and weird, and Clint doesn't want to be there. He wants to be pretty much anywhere else than here. He doesn't get the chance to start panicking about that, because a moment later a man calls out what's clearly an order to get back to work, and everyone returns to what they were doing.
The guy carefully steps over toolboxes and power cords and makes his way to them. He points at the headset, then gives Clint a wide grin and points at himself. Ah. Stark. Clint's guess is verified when Natasha taps his shoulder to get his attention and then makes Stark's sign. Another man makes his way towards them, and this one makes his own sign. Banner. Clint glances at Natasha who gives a tiny nod.
Clint shoots them both a tentative smile and gets two in return. Stark's is excited and exhausted. Banner's is just plain exhausted. Stark pulls Natasha a few steps to the side and starts talking, but Banner's attention remains on Clint. He looks like he wants to say something, but yeah, that's kinda the crux of the problem, isn't it, buddy, so in the end he just gives Clint another tired smile and pats his arm before going back to his computer.
Stark concludes his conversation with Natasha and turns back to Clint. He puts his hands firmly on Clint's shoulders and looks him directly in the eye.
His gaze is intense, as is the message in them. This will work and you will be fine. I won't have it any other way. There's more lurking in there, but it's murkier and harder to read, and before Clint can figure it out, Stark gives him a firm slap on the arm and turns on his heel to return to whatever he was doing before they arrived. As he leaves, he says something over his shoulder that makes Natasha roll her eyes.
Clint and Natasha are shown to another room, a medical examination room, and he's made to change into a hospital gown. It's one of those stupid open-back ones, but at least he gets a pair of pants to wear, so all in all, it could have been worse. What comes next is literally hours and hours and hours of basic and not-so-basic tests. He's already been through most of them in the past few days, but he'll gladly do them ten more times if it means an end to all of this. They weigh him (he sees Natasha frown at the number on the digital scales, and he knows it too low, he's lost muscle mass in the past few months), they measure his blood pressure, take his temperature and about ten vials of blood. He gets to pee in a cup and do a string of close-your-eyes-and-point-at-your-nose kind of exercises that he passes with flying colors. Then comes another brain scan in one of the un-modified scanners down the hall. They insist on moving the bed rather than letting him walk, which is ridiculous, but Clint is determined to be as cooperative as possible, so he lets them.
As usual the scan takes approximately forever to complete, so when he comes out Natasha has had time to change. She is prepared, and her identity is established within seconds. He stares at the light fixtures overhead as they roll the bed back into the examination room.
Please let this be the last time, please, please, please.
After the scan he gets fitted with EEG electrodes all over his scalp and ECG electrodes on his chest, but the leads aren't hooked up just yet. Natasha waits patiently by the door, out of the way of the medical staff, but still in Clint's direct line of sight. She looks grim, arms crossed and mouth set in a hard line. Everything about her is broadcasting don't mess with me right now, and it's like a physical force field around her, making people give her a wide berth as they move around her. He suspects he's radiating something similar, because most people look like they would rather juggle live hand grenades than spend any significant time in his personal space.
Clint tries to distract himself by identifying as many items as possible in the room that he could use as a weapon. There are reassuringly many. He glances up to see Natasha casually twirling a scalpel between her fingers. When their eyes meet her mouth quirks up with a dark smirk, and there is no doubt she has picked up on what he's doing. He snorts, amused, but when the doctor turns to look over his shoulder at the source of his amusement, the scalpel has vanished and Natasha is back to stony. Clint ducks his head and grins.
Then a nurse approaches, and his amusement dies. He glances up at Natasha again and kicks himself mentally when he catches himself doing it. He's not six years old, he doesn't need constant reassurance. But then he looks back to the nurse and has to admit that right now he could kinda use a little reassurance, because there's an IV kit on the tray.
They're going to sedate him.
For some reason he'd been under the assumption that he'd be awake for this, but it seems they're either going knock him out completely, or give him enough happy juice to make him sleepy and pliant. Neither options appeal to him. In fact, they both freak him the fuck out, and every cell in his being wants to look at Natasha again, wants to know that this is okay, that she sees no danger here, because she is his first and last line of defense. He forces himself not to, forces himself to trust that Natasha will intervene if something isn't right.
The nurse, a ridiculously young woman who looks like she's barely out of high school, stops a few steps away and waits until she establishes solid eye contact with Clint before moving in and placing her tray on the rolling metal table next to the bed. She's got more sense in her than most of the people who prod and poke and move around him. Clint likes her better already. But he doesn't like her enough to want her anywhere near his veins with that needle. Sadly, he knows that if he wants any kind of normal life he needs to let them do what they feel they have to do, so with some difficulty he tamps the anxiety down and pushes his sleeve up.
She's good at what she does, and it's done in a matter of seconds. She pats him lightly on the arm in a good boy kind of gesture that almost makes Clint smile, because he's gotta be what? Ten, twelve years her senior. As she leaves the room he flexes his arm and touches the tape that secures the line to his skin. It's not connected to anything yet, but he has no doubt that it's just a matter of time.
But a matter of time turns out to be a hell of a long time. Another two and a half hours, to be exact, during which people come and go at what seems like random intervals. Natasha has seated herself on top of one of counters by the wall. Her feet swing slowly, calmly, but where she is zen personified, Clint can feel his own nerves getting tighter and tighter with every minute that passes. Come on. Come on. Come on. To kill time he spends a few minutes signing one-handed dirty words at life in general. He knows they're just as incomprehensible to the rest of the world as his words are, so he goes for the worst ones he has ever learned.
Then more people arrive in the room and the change in energy tells him it's show time.
Three people descend on him and start attaching wires to both the EEG and ECG electrodes. He's hooked up to a number of machines that light up and start to beep and flash little lights. He gets an Oxymeter clipped to his index finger, and then two bags of clear liquid are hung from the IV stand next to the bed.
He hears the soft sound of Natasha's sneakers hitting the floor as she hops down from the counter top. Clint tenses and turns his head sharply towards her, but there's nothing in her body language or her eyes that speaks of danger. She unceremoniously shoulders in between two of the many people buzzing around Clint and lays claim to a spot near his shoulder. The dark looks she gets from the displaced doctors and nurses are ignored.
A few seconds later Clint is hooked up to the IV. Okay. So, they're at t minus a few minutes now. He lies back and watches the ceiling tiles as the room clears out around him. Natasha doesn't move. Someone dims the lights on the way out. Silence falls, save for a few random beep from machines. For the first time since they arrived Clint doesn't feel cornered and crowded, but that relief is small and pale, because they're going to mess with his brain in just a little while now, and he doesn't want them to. He really doesn't. A magic wand would be so much nicer.
A magic wand. My kingdom for a magic wand.
But magic wands are hard to come by, and even if they weren't, Clint's little kingdom is pretty damn run down, not worth a lot to anyone, so the situation probably wouldn't be any different. He'd still be screwed.
He lies there and tries to feel any effect of whatever is dripping into his bloodstream, but the only thing he feels is cold. The bed dips as Natasha sits on the edge of it. Her fingers curl around his. He knows her thoughts are circling the same topic as his. There are no guarantees here. He might wake up fine, with his brain up and running again. He might wake up just the way he is now, damaged. He might wake up more damaged, or not himself. He might not wake up at all. One small relief is knowing that if things go to shit in a bad way, if he comes through it a drooling vegetable, Natasha will be there for him. Though not in a way the others would understand, but he doesn't expect them to. She understands and that's what counts.
He reaches up, curls his fingers around the back of her neck lightly and pulls her closer. She comes without resistance. He doesn't stop until their foreheads touch, until they're too close for eye-contact and he closes his eyes. He suspects he doesn't have a lot of time, so he better get this out.
But finding the words is more difficult than he thought it would be.
"Thanks," he tells her, because that seems like a good place to start, an easy place to start. "For putting up with me. Not just now, I mean always. I've been told I'm a bit of an ass sometimes." He sighs. "And speaking of being an ass, I'm sorry I took off like that. It was a shit move, I just…"
Yeah. He just what? He had left her behind. Chosen to leave her behind. The one thing he had promised never to do.
"I'm sorry, Nat. I truly am. For a lot of things."
He feels her fingers run lightly down the side of his face, and not looking makes it easier to push past the barrier that her shape-shifting creates, it lets him settle into her touch in a way he hasn't been able to for a long time. He realizes that the drugs are probably starting to kick in, and that he likely has them to thank for that, but who cares, at this point he'll take what he can get.
There are so many things he would like to say, so many difficult things, but then suddenly she's pulling back and no, please, Natasha, please don't. Please. He tightens his fingers even though he knows it's the absolute wrong thing to do, but he can't help himself, he doesn't want her to go. Then he realizes that she isn't moving away, she's just shifting to lie down next to him on the bed, and he almost starts to cry from the intensity of the relief, because he if this ends badly, he wants the last thing he knows to be her.
She arranges herself carefully around all the medical equipment he's hooked up to and settles down against his side. He presses his forehead against her shoulder, hides his face.
"I'm scared," he admits, and his voice comes out unsteady. "Nat, I'm really, really scared."
The way her hand comes to rest on his hair lets him know she understands if not his words, then the emotion behind them.
The way she holds on lets him know she's as scared as he is.
*' *' *'
Clint doesn't remember much of the procedure itself, it's mostly a vague impression that he hadn't been completely knocked out. What he does remember is coming out of the haze of drugs feeling sick and disoriented and fundamentally wrong.
He's sitting up in the bed, hunched forward and throwing up before he's even fully awake, and there are people all around him, hands steadying him and holding a pan in front of his face. Wrong. Everything is wrong. His skin is the wrong size, his bones feel out of place, even his thoughts are the wrong shape, and god, the high-pitched buzzing of mosquitos around his ears is driving him crazy. He hates those fuckers, especially when any movement is a risk to the entire op and has to lie there for hours and hours and let them feast on him.
Everything spins around him. He lifts his head and tries to pull his surroundings into focus, and he almost manages, almost, but just then something clatters to the floor, and it's loud and sharp, and then everything is loud and sharp, and he hunches over, arms over his head. Someone attempts to coax him to lie back down, but he shoves at the hands, doesn't want them to touch him. But nothing is working right, and all he manages is a kind of feeble flailing against something that feels like sandpaper but turns out to be the front of someone's scrubs. They're blue. Blue. Blue. His mind gets inexplicably, stupidly stuck on the color, then there's a taste of metal at the back of his mouth that isn't blood. It isn't anything he can identify, but something about it is familiar and not in a good way. He twists and sees the syringe being emptied into the access port of his IV. He tries to rip the IV from his arm, but his eye-hand coordination is as fucked up as everything else, and he misses by a wide margin.
*' *' *'
He thinks he sleeps.
He thinks someone talks to him.
He thinks he sleeps again.
*' *' *'
Clint lies curled up half-asleep under warm blankets and with a soft pillow under his head. He is dimly aware that he must be under the influence of something pretty heavy-duty, but he doesn't care. He doesn't care that he hears people in the room, he doesn't care that he has no idea where he is. And best of all? He doesn't care that he doesn't care.
It's pretty damn nice to not care.
Through closed lids he can sense daylight. Wherever he is, there are windows. He hopes they're large. He likes large windows. His mind shows with miles and miles of farmed fields outside, yellow wheat and endless rows of dark green potato tops. He sees pale, drying cornstalks that rustle like paper, and it's like they're trying to talk, to tell him secrets that have long been buried in the soil.
The light changes gradually and he slowly becomes more aware of things around him, of himself, his body. He flexes his fingers without opening his eyes and this time they feel like his own, like they fit with the rest of his body. His thoughts are still moving in slow-motion, but they feel like his own thoughts. By the time he convinces himself to open his eyes, his brain has started processing at a slightly higher speed. He squints at the daylight that falls in through the window, disappointed to see that it's a regular sized window. From his spot in the bed he sees not farmland and clear skies, but concrete and glass and steel, framed by low-hanging clouds.
New York.
When he looks closer at the room he recognizes one of the medical suites in the tower.
What did he do this time to end up here? He does an inventory on his body, and it doesn't feel like anything is broken or cut or otherwise damaged. In fact, he's not hurting at all. That could be the drugs, he reminds himself, because yeah, from what he can tell they're pretty damn potent.
It takes a while to get a firm grip on the threads of memory that leads him to the correct place.
Stark's device. The procedure.
Is it over? He decides it must be, because he's quite certain there would be more activity around him if it was still going on. So, let's count the blessings, he decides. One, it's over. Two, he's not dead. Three, he still feels sluggish and slow, but as far as he can tell there is no drooling going on and he's pretty sure he's not a vegetable. Just to make sure he wiggles his toes and watches the blanket move. He does it again. Good. Natasha won't have to put him down. That's good. Okay, Barton, back to counting. He was at… four? Yes. Four, five, six. Wait, what was he counting?
He quickly decides it's not worth the effort to try to remember, if it's important it will come back to him. Instead he tilts his head in the direction of the hushed voices he's been hearing all along. One male, two females stand by a desk at the other side of the room. Visual cues tell him it's a doctor, another doctor, and a nurse. He's more than content to just watch them for a while, and later he will blame the pharmaceuticals for the time it takes to realize that something is different. The sound is different. When it registers he fumbles with a hand at his ear. No headset. And he hears… human voices.
Normal human voices.
They're murmuring, speaking too quietly for Clint to pick out individual words, but what he can pick out is that there is no banshee screeching going on, no nails on blackboards, no microphone feedback squeal, just normal voices having a normal, low-volume conversation. He sits up in the bed. Fast. Too fast, and the room around him skews and rolls for a moment. When his head clears the male doctors is by the bed, and the nurse and the woman doctor are on their way to the door.
Clint looks up at the man. "I can hear you," he says stupidly.
The doctor holds a loaded syringe.
"No, don't. You don't have to—" Clint raises his hands clumsily, trying to ward off more drugs, because seriously, he's only just able to string together a sentence, and he needs to clear his head, because voices, he hears voices.
He shares this with the doctor, then giggles and promptly slaps a hand over his mouth, because telling the man with the sedatives in his hand that he's hearing voices is maybe not the best thing to convince them to not shoot him up with more drugs, and he'd rather not have an antipsychotic cocktail added to whatever they're giving him. He's been on the receiving end of that once before, and thanks, but no thanks.
Something occurs to him, and he stops grinning. Is that even an issue? Saying that he can hear voices? Can they even understand him? The doctor hadn't reacted to the statement. Clint frowns and tries to shake the cobwebs from his brain. That was part of it too, wasn't it? Part of what Tony's tech was supposed to fix. He looks up at the doctor again, who is hesitating with the point of the needle hovering right by the IV access port.
"Can you… Do you understand me?" Clint asks. The syllables feel slippery, weirdly rounded in his mouth.
The doctor gives him a concerned frown.
"Do you understand me?" he asks again, this time taking care to enunciate properly.
The doctor answers, and fuck, Clint doesn't understand a word. It's like listening to a foreign language for the first time, and he feels sick. Physically sick. It didn't work. He still can't understand them, and they still can't understand him. He's still fucked up. Still stuck in this hell. A hand lands on his shoulder and he shoves it away. Get away, he wants to snarl, don't touch me, this isn't right, it's supposed to be okay, he's supposed to, god, he's supposed to be alright. He's supposed to be fixed. And he's not. Clint grasps at his hair, pulls at it in desperation. He feels short of breath, his whole chest feels tight and his blood has started pounding in his ears. This isn't right. It's not fair. It's not—
A sharp cry rings out, and Clint startles. The sharp sound of heels against the floor is heard and someone inserts herself between him and the doctor and plucks the syringe now inserted into the IV from the doctor's fingers. It goes flying across the room with an angry flick of her arm.
Her back is to Clint, an effective shield between him and the doctor, and even though he can't see her face and she never raises her voice, the anger comes through crystal clear. Clint's throat goes tight, because he knows this voice. He knows it. The doctor takes a step back, then another one. He tries to get a word in, but Natasha talks right over him, her voice low and even and terrible, and the doctor finally turns on his heels and hurries out of the room. She doesn't move until the door closes fully behind him, then her shoulders relax a little, and she brushes her hands down her sides, like she's straightening her clothes after a scuffle.
When she turns, Clint doesn't know her face, and he knows that it should bother him so much more, it probably will once the drugs have worn off, but in this very moment all he can think is that small victories are victories, too, and beggars can't be choosers, and if this is all he's ever allowed, he will hold on to it with both hands and he will thank whatever deity is out there every day for the rest of his life. He manages to get to his knees and wraps his shaking arms around her and just fucking holds on, too desperately, too tightly, but he doesn't care, because he knows her voice.
Natasha's voice.