Avengers - Time, Baby
Title: Time, Baby
Genre: Het, Clint/Natasha
Rating PG-13
Length: ~11,000 words
Warnings: Injuries, violence, language, references to human trafficking, death of background/unnamed characters
Synopsis: A mission gone horribly wrong leaves Clint and Natasha trapped, injured, and suffering a slow death of suffocation. Time and each other: they have one and kind of need to steal some more of the other.
Author's Notes: I think there might be a 50/50 divide between fluff and angst in this one.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no profit from this.
Also available on AO3.
The elevator was slower than usual. It had to be. The trip up to the residential floors never seemed to take this long before.
He shifted slightly, tried to ease the agony that was his left knee without alerting the elevator's other occupant to the fact he was doing just that. Her head whipped around though, unsteady as she was on her own busted ankle, and he caught the briefest flash of guilt before she schooled her features back into the "pissed at the world" expression she had taken on since about halfway through their clusterfuck of a mission.
"Not your fault," he said, again, and knew it didn't quite fall on deaf ears so much as those who chose not to fully listen.
The doors finally opened and Natasha managed three whole hobbled steps, Clint barely two behind her, before their teammates descended upon them like vultures. There were the usual greetings and mockery and then Stark, because it was always Stark, asked, "What did you break this time?"
Clint caught the way Natasha's lips tightened even if no one else did and so, with weight carefully balanced as much as he could currently manage, posture as straight as he dared, he stressed, "Sprained only. Wrist and knee." He gestured to his left knee with his right hand, as if the high-tech braces he wore on each weren't telling enough.
And it was the truth, really. They could look at his medical file and everything. Both were severe sprains and technically a tiny little bone in his wrist was broken, but he had talked the docs into labeling it solely as a sprain so that it was nice and official and everything when Natasha inevitably pulled the file for herself. Mind, to get them to do so may have involved pointing out that they were going to have a homicidal, slightly depressed, and severely pissed off assassin on their hands should anything more serious be listed, but they were the ones who made the call and he just stuck with it.
"And Widow?" Thor asked because he was the only one bold enough to do so.
Natasha did not immediately answer so he did so for her, dutifully tattling, "Broken ankle and dislocated shoulder." Her left arm was in a sling to reduce the pressure and strain as the tendons recovered, making her usual grace less than sublime considering it was her left ankle that was wrapped up safe and sound as well. She had other injuries, of course, just like he did. Scratches and scrapes and bruises littered all exposed skin so they couldn't hide those, but the team tended to back off if you pretended to be honest and upfront about at least some of the more major issues, letting you deal with the rest on your own unless or until it interfered with an actual job to be done.
"And a bullet graze," Natasha added quietly to explain the thick bandage wrapped around her upper arm. She took another step and adjusted her grip on the bag she carried on her right and then she made an almost invisible wobble as the shift upset her already tenuous balance, barely there yet so very telling to those who knew her.
Steve had apparently had enough already, and snagged the bag from her unwilling hand, his superior strength overwhelming her urge to keep still and steady and give no further tells. He handed said bag off to Tony and swooped her up in his arms in a move few had ever tried and even fewer had ever survived.
"I could kill you where you stand," she warned, and Clint caught sight of a blade already poised to attempt just that.
"But you won't because I'm just bringing you over to the couch where you will rest that ankle of yours," Steve countered, barely blinking at the threat. He lowered her to the cushions gently and even let her keep her knife as he added, "Because there's no way you should be on that thing yet if you only just got back."
They hadn't just gotten back, of course. Their mission had technically ended three days ago, and they had been rescued two days ago, made it back to a SHIELD medical facility a day later, and had been freed of extraneous medical equipment approximately two hours ago. Clint was willing to bet most if not all of the team already knew that though, whether they were supposed to or not.
"Why don't either of you have a wheelchair?" Bruce asked. Clint gave him credit for being brave, or at least relying upon the fact he became a giant rage monster impervious to simple things like pain at the drop of a hat for saying so.
"Oddest thing, that," Clint said with false innocence. "They seemed to meet an untimely end somewhere between HQ and here." He caught the hint of a smile on Natasha's face before it returned to a scowl, and considered it worth the effort.
Of course, he reevaluated that opinion when Thor nodded as if that settled it and picked him up bridal-style to deposit him beside his teammate on the couch, pausing only to pluck the bag and bow case from his hand and add it to Tony's growing pile of goodies. "There," the big guy declared after setting Clint down and pushing an ottoman towards him to use to prop up his leg, then doing the same for his other teammate. "Now Widow has no need to feel singled out for attention."
Now it was Clint's turn to scowl. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the various glass items that surrounded them, and Natasha's beside him, and decided they made a perfect pair. He crossed his arms in front of him despite the pseudo-cast, and she did her best to do the same at his side despite the sling, and the two tried to make it very clear that they were about to become the worst patients ever to inhabit the Tower, and that included Stark himself after an incident that involved a flamethrower and Pepper getting JARVIS to lock him out of his lab.
Speaking of Stark, he dumped their gear with relative carefulness, at least by his standards, and made certain it was well out of their immediate reach before he stepped up to assess the situation for himself. He skipped over their obvious injuries and Clint knew the exact moment when he saw the less obvious accoutrements as his eyes grew wide with something between fear and unholy glee. "Oh, fuck!" he crowed. "You finally did it? No wonder she's so pissed."
Clint felt that the resulting kick to the balls was wholly justified. The fact that no one caught Tony on the way down only furthered that belief.
The mission sucked. It had sucked from roughly an hour into it and had gone downhill from there.
Four days later found Natasha running down a muddy slope of a washed out hill and him slipping and sliding behind her. A handful of bullets whizzed by, a slight grunt and the bloom of red the only tell that one had hit its mark. Clint turned mid-stride and aimed for the man who just didn't know when to give up. The ground shook as the explosive arrowhead detonated, which he admitted was quite the overkill for a solitary human but really could do nothing about it as the quiver controls had been fucked for the last day and a half due to some unknown interference that may or may not have been the package they were sent to recover and he had yet to find time to try to poke at them to correct the issue.
Needless to say, an explosion on an already slippery slope was less than ideal and he lost his already less-than-there balance and slid roughly sixty-seven meters with debris raining down upon his head and shoulders before he made a very definite stop against the old stone and metal gate that surrounded the blink-and-you-miss-village at the bottom of the incline. Natasha appeared beside him near instantly, bloody and muddy but not any more obviously worse for wear, and offered him a hand up.
It was then he was fairly certain he was screwed.
His knee screamed in pain and promptly decided it really did not want to take any weight whatsoever and that it would be much happier if he'd just lay down and not move for the next month or two. Of course that wasn't actually an option, so he forced himself to stand and forced himself to shoulder his bow with his quiver because he was man enough to admit he was totally going to need Nat's help to get the hell out of Dodge.
A kid of roughly eight, too dirty to be certain of an actual gender, pushed the squeaky gate open and then tugged it shut behind them as soon as they were through. "Is that everyone?" Clint asked, even though he knew it had to be, even though he knew they had gotten everyone else out long before they made the run for it themselves.
The kid nodded and pointed towards a mud-brick, plaster, and wooden structure that appeared to be the first semi-solid and not vegetation in nature type thing around. It was slightly better up-kept than rest of the little hovel-filled area and he barely registered the cross etched on the weathered wood before said door opened to reveal an equally weathered priest urging them to hurry up already.
They made it in and the door slammed closed before they even really crossed the threshold. Parishioners slid a beam into place to secure it, and then ran around doing similar things to every tiny window in the place.
"The bad guys are gone," Clint promised. Natasha lowered him to a lopsided bench that served as a pew and then went to help the others, clearly not trusting their success given the failure rate so far and clearly ignoring her own obvious wound. "We got them before they got us," he insisted.
"Yes," the priest agreed in rough and heavily accented English. "But now it is the earth's turn."
It was then Clint remembered the explosives he had set in the truck at the top of the incline, and how the priest had been present when he first pulled them out. If a single arrow sent him flailing down a hill, they were likely about to be well and truly fucked by a landslide, dilapidated gate or no, and there was no outrunning that, not with a bum knee and a couple dozen kids and elderly.
"What do you need me to do?" he asked, ready to push himself up and help. It would hurt like fuck, but if it made a difference he was more than willing to do it.
The old man shook his head and said, "You have done enough already." Clint searched his expression, looked for a double meaning, looked for anger or hate for what they had brought to this muddy little place, but found none. The man seemed genuinely grateful for what they had achieved so far, even if hell itself might rain down upon them at any moment.
There was a muted explosion breaths or hours later, the hunks of rock and earth tearing apart louder than the actual chemical combustion. He swore he even saw the flash of red and yellow and light and destruction through the slats of the shutters before Nat shouted to any and all that could understand her, "Get down!"
The priest translated and urged his parishioners to the far side of the building, the one furthest away from the door that faced the hill, the one most likely to survive with the least amount of damage even if its only exit was a small barred window already shuttered and closed. Clint forced himself to his feet and started tossing the bags and boxes of supplies that had barely made it inside the building to anyone and anything that might be able to hold them and protect them. A kid, maybe the same one as before, rushed over to help him and he knew that his shout that it wasn't safe, that he should run while he could, was lost in the rumble of the land currently behind and soon to be on top of them.
Natasha was there though. She had stepped closer, hand out as if to help Clint make it across the uneven flooring, and shifted her attentions to the child instead. Her hands made it around a skinny little waist just as the door buckled and gave way and she tossed the mass of matted hair upward and outward, not the safest option but far better than getting buried alive.
Clint watched in horror as Natasha tried to follow the kid and made it exactly nowhere, foot caught on uneven stone or broken wood, and how she didn't even have time to tuck and roll as the grass and dirt and rock and debris flooded inward, blanketing her even as it knocked him down and out, wrist exploding in pain when his knee decided to give up the ghost and fail him once and for all. He heard screaming that may or may not have involved his own voice and felt a thudding in his very bones and then he felt nothing at all.
The next sound he heard was the beating of his own heart. It was amplified in his ears by the sheer pressing silence that surrounded him. He didn't even hear his own breath, and it took him precious seconds to realize that was because he wasn't breathing, not fully, not yet. His mouth was filled with iron-rich filth and his nostrils plugged with the same. He spit and huffed out what he could, hoping to find a few atoms of oxygen to tide him over instead of cloying suffocation.
There was a pocket of air, tiny and apparently growing, that he could almost access if he wrenched his neck to the left, felt the tremors of abused muscles ripple through that neck and down across his shoulder to his arm. He blinked open eyes that much preferred to stay shut to see a hint of dingy light filtered in through the half a hillside that he was buried under. Hands, multiple, both tiny and gnarled, scraped and clawed and dug, one nearly taking part of his ear with it, but then there was an opening, small and shallow and wonderful from which he breathed as deeply as he dared.
There was chattering that he hoped translated to relief that he lived and not promises to turn him over to the baddies that somehow inevitably survived. There was another voice, this one he understood far clearer even if he could barely make it out, especially when Natasha - sweet, loving, alive and extremely angry Natasha - demanded, "Barton, report!"
"This spa sucks," he coughed. Yeah, he was going to need to scour his lungs after this. "I am so asking for my money back. I don't think the masseuses are trained at all, though I do give them credit for reimagining the term 'mud pack'..."
He reevaluated how much English the priest new when the old man spat out a laugh and he thankfully didn't need to be worried he offended the guy as the small gathered crowd continued to try to dig him out. There was barely any light to see by, and none of it came from any natural source, the handful of candles and one already failing flashlight illuminating the heap of what was once the hillside and was now their hopefully only temporary home.
"Injuries?" she asked and there, just slightly, was the pinched breathiness that meant she was far from okay herself.
He tried to move and couldn't, felt only pain and pressure and really, more pain. "Hard to tell until I get out of this living grave, but I'd say my knee is well and truly fucked - sorry, Padre, don't translate that one for the kiddies - and my wrist hurts like Kiev and either the urchins have multiplied or I'm currently seeing double," he reported.
"You have about half the front masonry on top of you and a chunk of rock covered in blood next to a gash above your ear," she told him. This gave him vital information including the source of his blinding headache but, more importantly, that she was nearby and whole enough to do the assessment.
"What about you?" he prompted when she did not immediately provide a self-review.
There was a grunt and a breath and a sneeze followed by, "My ankle's going to hurt like something I can't say with children present once I get it free, which I hope is soon because I'd really like to get this shoulder back into its socket."
He could picture it then, even if he couldn't outright see her now, couldn't assess the situation for himself, couldn't take comfort from anything more than her voice. Her foot had caught on the flooring while she tossed Tiny Tim or Tina - that much he remembered - the force of the avalanche behind her would have then forced her down, arm still outstretched and upward and vulnerable, and she most likely damaged herself to prevent damage to someone who had already proved quite the helpful little resource in their most recent adventure. Given where she had been relative to his own position, he felt safe to guess that the other half of the masonry was on top of her, or at least a good portion of it. Because, really, the mission hadn't been FUBARed enough already.
Of course, he cursed them all simply with thinking that - which he really didn't think was fair at all because he hadn't even had the chance to say it out loud and take credit for screwing them over royally. There was another rumble and an eerie creak and then the wall to his right that he had just finally been able to make out beyond dust and shadows began to collapse inwards, bringing even more of the outside in to join the fun and excitement.
He passed out again after that, and didn't wake up until it felt like someone was trying to rip his leg right off and drag the rest of his corpse across a rubble-filled countryside, or at least try to turn him over so he was facing upright and breathing something more than shards and footprints. He may have possibly made a less than manly sound at that, and may have possibly had his mouth covered with a hand that itself was covered with things he didn't want to think about, but he heard the old priest urge, "Shh, we are not safe here."
He thought that kind of went without saying but took an extra moment to respect the wisdom of one not so confined as himself before he managed a highly intelligent, "Huh?"
The priest sighed in a way so many of his former handlers had before and slowly released him, shuffling out of the way so that he could take stock of the situation for himself. The children and elderly were huddled in a corner, eyes wide and mouths firmly shut, and he tried not to count just how many there were and reconcile it with how many there had been before. To his side lay Natasha, right hand free and held to her lips, eyes cast upwards to a ceiling of plaster and wood that may have once been a wall and was currently far lower than it had any right to be.
Now that he knew to listen for it, he could hear the creak of footfalls, the mutter of a language his brain was too muddled to make out even if he semi-recognized the voice from the earlier recognizance of the trucks and the planting of the the very thing that made them so very trapped now. The creaking seemed to be moving away though, and he slowly and silently released the breath he was holding as he heard scathing tones and dark chuckles as the searchers were apparently satisfied with their demise.
Or maybe not so satisfied considering the next thing he heard was a hail of bullets clearly shot downward into the rubble, strafed into and around the gathered survivors who stayed so blessedly silent, even when the glass and plastic of one of the packages exploded upward and outward, even as shards flew through their tiny area and embedded themselves into anyone and anything, even as the men finally thankfully walked away, still chuckling the entire time.
"Father?" Natasha asked after a long enough wait to hopefully be safe. The fact she hadn't translated the word was troublesome.
"Get them out of there," the old man directed instead of replying.
His minions dutifully moved to do so, but Natasha was less concerned with their progress than she was with the well-being of their savior. "Father!" she repeated, and managed to translate the word more than once. "You are injured. Tell me how severe so that we can attempt to tend to you."
"You can tend to me once you are free," he hedged, but Clint caught the undertone, the breathiness, the choked off moan of pain when he tried to shift within their tiny confines.
Even though it hurt like fuck, he angled himself slightly upwards, almost into a plank position save for the part where his right wrist would in no way support his weight. From there he could see the scene more clearly. There was new and interesting debris of glass and wood and plaster and deformed bullets mixed in with the hillside that surrounded them now, decorating their cohorts' clothing as much as the bloom of dark red that stained the once white robes the man wore.
Natasha spoke the language a hell of a lot better than he did, so he tattled and had her request things to be used as bandages to be prepped and ready. Of course, the priest's minions were more loyal to him than they were to her, so they first wrapped the still oozing bullet wound of her upper arm, and then readied to fully remove her from the wreckage.
Freedom, when it came, was agony. Before he had at least had the near cast-like properties of the clay-like under-layer of the hill to support his torn and twisted muscles and tendons, and now he had nothing. The ceiling was too low to stand up and hobble around on his own, and crouching or crawling was just plain stupid with a bum leg. Natasha was quickly learning the same, though her innate flexibility probably made it a little bit easier on herself in the long run. It wasn't like Clint was stiff as a board or anything like that, he couldn't be with his past or his present, but he doubted he would have been able to manipulate his body in the ways his partner currently did to free herself, reduce the dislocation, and then somehow end up close enough to the injured priest to offer her own version of TLC while slapping well-meaning hands away from her own less dire needs.
They splinted his wrist to prevent him from accidentally damaging himself more, and then created makeshift braces for both her ankle and his knee though she insisted her boot could do most of the work on its own. The various scratches and scrapes were ignored for the most part, sealed with dirt mixed with drying sweat and no need to waste supplies that they may need later when full spectrum antibiotics would be the name of the game should they survive anyway. It was less than perfect, but it wasn't like they were moving around much, so they took what they could get.
They then tended to the masses, such as they were, and found mostly similar scrapes in similar states and the potential for some serious bruises and a few busted fingers and bare little toes. The priest was the worst of it, though he tried really hard to pretend he was not, but gunshot wounds didn't lie and it took a lot of packing and the possibility of impromptu surgery if help didn't come in time. Most of the trapped silently lamented the need to use the so recently rescued medical supplies on themselves while trying really hard to pretend it didn't matter in the first place.
That was not to say the situation was all love and puppies as a whole. Two walls were fully caved in and impenetrable. A third was listing severely, and the fourth and final held the tiny barred back window that showed only dirt and rock and was slowly trickling the outside in through shattered shutters. A few adventurous souls tried poking at that, reasoning that the shift downward meant there had to eventually be a limit and, behind that limit, blue skies and fresh air, but even they were smart enough to stop when they realized they were only making it worse and possibly speeding the arrival of near certain death for them all. Apparently the gray and humid skies from earlier had resolved themselves into a proper rain, and now rivulets of mud oozed downward, cloying and pungent and sealing the tiny air pockets in the loose dirt and bullet ridden pseudo-ceiling, preventing even that from reaching them.
"Were you able to hit the beacon?" Clint whispered when Natasha shifted closer. The air around them was stale and suffocating, but he still smelled her soap and sweat through it all and took a small amount of private comfort from that.
She mirrored his position on the rubble that made up the floor, laid out flat and stretching aching muscles. The roof, such as it was, was near enough that they could reach up and draw patterns on it, but neither really needed the dust and grime to pry free and drift down into their already compromised lungs. It was higher elsewhere, but not by much. They let the villagers use that space as the two agents were far more accustomed to the restrictions a mission could gift them with versus people who spent the majority of their days out in the sun and fields.
It took her too long to answer, so he turned his head slightly, ready to ask again. The double vision had remedied itself for the most part, but it still took far too much concentration to focus on something so very close to him. Her jaw was set in an expression of disappointment, which was answer enough, but she gifted him with actual words when she said, "I was reaching for it before the boy. It fell from my hand when I grabbed him, and I cannot confirm if the switch was depressed at that time." Unspoken was that the device was now buried under half a building or more and completely unreachable to verify its status firsthand.
So, possibly no and possibly yes. Yes meant help was on the way, hours out at best. No meant they were on their own until the rest of the villagers that had made a run for it returned and thought to dig for survivors and hopefully managed to do so without caving in the rest of the delicate supports. Not ideal to say the least, but he was not about to voice that fact, not now and not ever.
"I'm sorry," she blurted, and sounded pissed that the words broke free.
"Nat, it's not your-" he started, but was cut off.
She resolutely looked at the wall of ceiling above them as she said, "I altered the mission objective and jeopardized us both. It is because of my actions that we are trapped here now."
He snorted and a puff of dust rose above them before adhering itself to their damp and sweaty faces. It was sweltering in there, the heat of the day mixed with the confined bodies mixed with the lack of any sort of airflow. He would have loved to strip out of the oven of his uniform, but thought both that it really wouldn't make a difference at this point, and that there was no reason for partial nudity in front of people traumatized enough as it was. "I 'alter' things all the time. You have orders and you have reality; you just have to hope for the best with both," he told her. He tried to squeeze her hand reassuringly, but then remembered that was a dumb idea when it involved a broken wrist against a hand attached to a recently severely dislocated shoulder.
"I just..." She stopped whatever line of thought she had and changed it to, "I should have ignored the distractions and simply obtained the package and left." He could physically feel the shift from the woman he knew and loved to the dutiful agent, a mask and an act and a protective shield in one. She sounded more like she was reading from a mission report or giving a deposition versus sitting next to a nearest and dearest friend or more.
This time he did squeeze, knowing it hurt them both but also rather kind of forced the whole issue of getting her attention and keeping her more herself and less a character to be played. "Our package was one little box. The 'distraction' was crates of stolen medical supplies and a half a dozen girls about to be sold into a life no one should ever have nightmares of let alone live through!" he reminded her.
He remembered their faces, dirty and bruised where they were shackled behind slats of wood. He remembered the pleading in their eyes even if blinding fear had mostly driven the will to speak out of them already. There was no way they were going to leave them behind, and that was before the posse of the Padre and several of his cohorts tried to sneak around the makeshift compound of trucks to get to them, nearly getting caught and shot along the way. Mix in the fact they knew the medical supplies had been earmarked for a charity based three ramshackle villages over, one created specifically to help kids in that very situation, and it was a no-brainer. It was a call he would have made himself, with or without her and with or without a handler screaming in his ear, though he knew her well enough to know she feared her own personal baggage had clouded her decision in this despite the fact that she would admit this to pretty much no one ever, even under extreme duress. He also knew her well enough to call her on that crap, and so he did so now.
He tried to soften the blow though by manipulating their still joined hands close enough to kiss her knuckles without actually doing more harm than good. "You made the right call," he promised her.
"I condemned them to a slow and painful death of suffocation," she countered, and there was the slightest hint of bitterness to her tone despite her best efforts to avoid it. He blamed her exhaustion and injuries on letting that much show through now versus in the privacy of some darkened room somewhere free of potential onlookers. They had been going non-stop for days and he had been beyond tired before he had fired the arrow that fucked up his knee. Mix that with the past couple of hours of suck, and he really couldn't blame her for the slip considering he gave up trying long ago. She was more determined than he was, always had been and probably always would be, so it was no surprise when she continued, "If we had let the trucks go-"
He stopped her right there. "If we let the trucks go, yes, there was a small chance we would have been able to track them down later," he agreed. "But, more likely than not, we would have lost them or gotten caught up in bureaucratic red tape created by concerned government officials receiving a healthy payout to make sure that concern did shit. Something fucked with my quiver controls, you really think a tracker that's far more complex than a simple detonator would have been reliable? Also more than likely is the fact that Mr. Minister here would have gotten them all killed anyway if we hadn't intervened. And it's a damned fact that, if the trucks had been allowed to escape and we weren't able to find them again, those girls would be suffering a far worse and far more drawn out fate than this." He'd been on these missions before, seen traumatized young men and women welcome death more than having to return to their captors and resume their hellscape of a life.
"I..." she started, but trailed off. It's not like they needed words anyway. He knew her too well, knew her past, knew her fears even if she wouldn't admit them to herself, and knew that the emotions she would deny ever having played far more of a role in her life than the common observer would expect. She was scared, not at anything as pesky as dying or getting hurt, but scared that she had made the wrong call and that others were going to pay the price for it. She so rarely got like this, and he knew many an agent that wouldn't believe him if he told them, but there were a few things - very few - that rattled her enough to create self-doubt. He knew each and every one of them, just like she knew each and every one of his own dirty little secrets of the past. She would complete her mission and more than likely save the day and still wonder if things could have gone better/faster/different if she hadn't let even the slightest hue of emotions color her decision. Usually this would be resolved via drinking or other more rigorous activities, or at least resolved enough to take her mind off of it until the next disaster reared its head and they marched off to create new nightmares and ulcers for themselves and those who dared to cross them.
"I know," he promised. He kissed her knuckles again and tried to hold that little bit of her that he could reach close. It didn't quite work, not without a fair about of non-existent morphine involved, but he liked to think she understood anyway. She lowered their joined hands into a less pain-inducing position and wiggled a tiny bit closer, heat of her thigh now pressed up against his own, comfort of self gifting him with a bit of his own.
Most importantly, he noticed she didn't actually let go.
They lay like that for an hour, maybe more. At least until he was fairly certain that it was more than crumbling plaster that caused the blobs of black that hovered at the edges of his vision. Three of the elderly had already passed out and one of the kids was hyperventilating enough that she should join them shortly. The limited water supply was damned near used up, and he had caught one kid licking hopefully at the mud before spitting it out and being scolded for his stupidity.
Clint was insisting that those who were oh so very still were merely unconscious and nothing worse. He had almost convinced himself of this fact, which he felt was the first step in convincing others.
"You know," he said, apropos of nothing save for distraction. "I really miss the hotel portion of this mission." The hotel was where the gear for their cover currently lay, along with a "do not disturb" sign and a tiny piece of tech that made the key reader think they were still coming and going at odd hours of the day and night. The hotel was where they read the final mission briefing, solidified the plan based on what they knew and what they suspected. The hotel was where they then did things that most definitely did not involve reading even if they involved planning of an entirely different sort.
He remembered the way her skin had felt against the sheets, cool and smooth, compared it to the hot grit-covered clamminess of it now, thought of all the different ways he had experienced it, felt it, knew it by touch and sight and smell. Maybe that was why he turned now, pained and dizzy from his injuries and the quickly depleting oxygen supply, and said, "I love you."
"I know," she replied. She gave his hand a little squeeze and went back to her exercises in shallow breathing, each wheeze a mark of the passage of time.
"No," he insisted. "Like, love you love you. Like, am happy you're in my life even though that life is shit at the moment."
"I know," she repeated, and he had a feeling that the lack of volume was from more than just the lack of air.
He wasn't sure how to put it into words, but decided to try anyway, turning fully now to face her. It was hard, laying on his side with his bum knee propped on his good one, the pressure of his own body aggravating the way his wrist swelled and ached, his lungs searching for oxygen that simply wasn't there, but he thought it was worth it, that she was worth it, and fuck all hate of sentimentality because there really wasn't much else left at this point and he was going to take what he could get.
"I love you. I have loved you for years and will keep on loving you and I think you've figured that out and know I mean more than just a quick screw or the world's most awesome partner to go fight the baddies with," he told her. He didn't let her cut him off this time, and just plowed on ahead with, "I am glad that you are in my life and can't imagine it without you. It could have been any other agent here, or Steve or Tony or whatever, and I would regret that it wasn't you. I would regret that my last moments weren't looking at your beautiful face after blowing the shit out of some assholes. But you're here, you're with me, and I don't regret a single thing."
"Clint..." she said, and it was a warning and a blessing and a confirmation.
"No regrets, baby," he smiled, honest and truthful and painfully open. She smiled back, just a flit of a thing in the almost dark, and he knew it was worth it. All the heartache, all the gaping wounds and getting his ass handed to him time and time again, all the words he just managed to say that he didn't really ever admit to himself more than even really knew that they were even inside of him in the first place.
Their private little moment was broken with a reminder that the situation really wasn't so private and that they, in fact, had a bit of an audience. The priest coughed, harsh and liquid. "You two, you are together, yes?" he asked.
"Yes," Clint answered even as Natasha said, "No." Clint amended his response to, "Figuratively if not literally." Natasha huffed, and he considered that a success as well, proud he could earn her fond exasperation even in a time like this.
The priest hummed at that, contemplative, before he asked, "Do you wish to be?"
And Clint really should have seen that coming, honest and truly. The thing of it was, there was no shock or real surprise at it all, just a final little piece sliding into place like the nock of an arrow against a bowstring, movement and tension and the perfect fit. He looked to Natasha, to her blinking eyes and dirt streaked face and knotted hair that lay everywhere save for where it should, and really hoped he wasn't reading the situation wrong, not at this of all times. "Hey, Nat, wanna face death head on, side by side, as husband and wife?"
He wasn't sure what he expected as a response, save for possibly a slap, but instead he received a very careful, very deliberate one-shouldered shrug and a droll, "Why not, we've faced it every other way already."
"Hot damn," he smiled, and felt the grime on his face crack and snap as his lips stretched wide into a grin.
"I... I can give you this in return for what you have done, what you tried to do for us all," the old man said with a nod. He was serious and proud and so very, very pleased that he could finally offer them something in return. Clint would have questioned that, the need to give them anything at all, but he had seen it far too many times in his life and line of work. The man was dying, they all were, but he was doing so on his terms, on his sense of righteousness. He would have died earlier, no lie as one of the gunmen would have pulled the trigger long before his half-assed plan worked, and the girls would have suffered and more would have continued to suffer. Now though, the girls, at least these girls, were spared a truly horrific fate per his beliefs, saved from a destruction of the soul and body itself, and the men who were responsible suffered a hell of a loss themselves.
It wasn't the world's best bargain, but it wasn't the worst either.
Clint looked to Natasha again, saw the same truth echoed in her eyes. "We have to do this right," he said with all of the mock bravado he could muster. "We have to have everything in place. I won't have you telling the other suffering sinners in Hell that I did you wrong."
"Of course," she agreed. Her voice was tight, pain writ across every movement and shouted from every consonant and vowel and told him she was likely not completely truthful about the state of her injuries. She cleared her throat, a sound as dry as his own, and dutifully prompted, "Something old?"
He pretended to contemplate that for a moment before he reasoned, "Well, we could go with the old bullet wounds and scar tissue, or we could go with the old carnie coin I've got in my pocket."
"If I'm going to marry a carnie, I should probably have a piece of that life," she agreed reasonably. He tried not to laugh at how solemn she was being, knew she was doing this for him just like she had done so many other things before. She was humoring him, giving him this as a distraction from the true state of their lives even as there was the tiniest part of her gripping onto it with everything she had as well. It was redemption and retribution and maybe even a little bit of something more.
He fished it out and pressed it into her hand and asked, "Something new? Other than your most recent bullet wound, that is."
She fumbled for the small bag at her side. She ignored the precious package that had gotten them into this mess in the first place, and dug out a tiny stone bird, hand-carved and jet black and likely originally to be gifted to Bruce to add to his collection upon their return. She presented it to him and they placed it next to the coin.
"Shit! We need something blue," Clint remembered, snapping his fingers as though it would make it magically appear.
The priest's eyes were lit with amusement in the dark cavern, the few remaining oxygen-stealing candles that were keeping the children from fully freaking out flickering and failing one by one. He said something Clint didn't quite catch, and one of the girls yanked a blue ribbon off her dress and held it outward. It was not much more than a string really, and was filthy and misshapen and kind of perfect to represent so much about the situation as a whole.
Natasha took it with the seriousness and respect it deserved, and the girl smiled and hung her head and played with the frayed edges of the fabric she wore. "That counts as borrowed too," she pointed out, but Clint shook his head.
"No doubling up, I want to do this right," he reminded her.
She rolled her eyes, familiar and amused, and asked, "Okay, fine, then what do we have that's borrowed to make this work for you?"
She was prompting him, knew he had something in mind that was likely ridiculous and cheesy, and he loved her that much more for it and so, with a tilt of his head and a gleam in his eye, he replied, "Time, baby. We're living on borrowed time."
"Have been for a while," she agreed, not even mocking him for his sappiness. She turned to the priest, a somewhat slow and clearly less than comfortable process. Clint followed suit, both mostly on their bellies, a collapsing ceiling above them and hard stone digging into their ribs. After Natasha took a moment to catch her breath again, she asked, "Okay, Father, what do you need us to do?"
The man was drifting, but trying so hard to be there for them. He blinked, hard and fast, and asked, "Do you have something to exchange? A token? Or will your baubles work?"
Clint flopped backwards for a moment because it was easier to grab for his bow that way because like fuck was that ever going to be out of reach. It was scratched and filthy and the scope mostly shattered and the string clearly frayed, but a single part of the sight was still round and whole. He unscrewed it and rolled back over to a questioning soon-to-be life partner, offering it out to her with as cheeky of a smile as he could manage and said, "We're doing this right, remember?"
She reached for her gauntlets with a barely hushed grunt of pain, pausing only to swipe at the sweaty hair that clung to her forehead. She flipped something open and unscrewed something else and, soon enough, offered up a small circular piece that's original purpose was to hold one of the canisters in place.
The priest nodded as though that were perfectly acceptable and then began reciting words he had clearly memorized ages ago even if it was just as clear he was slipping in and out of English as his concentration faltered. It didn't take long, and they had the questioning and soon to be unconscious onlookers as witness and a rubble-filled hole as backdrop and they were down to three struggling nubs of candles by the end of it.
When it was over, Natasha slid the bit of non-reactive ceramic onto her trigger finger because it fell off her actual ring finger when she tried. There was no way the piece of her gauntlet would fit anything but his pinky finger, and he slipped it on to just below the second knuckle. It was unconventional and not exactly fancy and really kind of weaponized and really kind of them.
The priest pronounced them hitched and they gave each other a half-assed kiss because they couldn't quite angle themselves the right way beneath the sloping ceiling. Clint did the next best thing though, and raised their clasped hands, the coin and the stone and the ribbon locked between them, and pressed his lips to her knuckles. She did the same for him, and then they lay there together, joined and whole, and watched each other take shaking breaths even as they watched the last light of the last candle finally succumb to the inevitable. They probably could have breathed easier and with a lot less pain and a lot less effort if they had flipped back over, but Clint didn't want his last view to be of a crumbling shadowed piece of masonry, not when there was a much better vista to be had.
When he could no longer see her, he listened for her, tried to make out which wheeze was hers above the pounding headache based upon the hint of breeze he felt across his face. When both of their breaths were far to shallow to discern, he simply concentrated on the feel of his hand in hers, of the feel of metal and stone and string and sweat and the skin he loved so much.
It was because of this lingering touch that he felt it, semi-delirious as he was, when she suddenly tensed. He feared the worst for the briefest blink of a moment, until he heard the telltale sound of her powering up her gauntlets, the arc of blue bright and blinding in the dark.
"Company," she warned, and he resolutely did not think of the glimpse of the limp bodies that lay around them that he caught from the burst of light.
His bow was in hand even though he didn't really have room to draw it, and the baubles as the priest had called them were unceremoniously shoved into one of the pockets of his tac pants before Natasha used her now free hand to palm a pistol. He missed her touch but knew he had something even better in her protection.
He felt she deserved the same, or at least as much as he could offer, and so he edged his way over to where their coffin of a room had enough of a depth to approximate a proper draw. He ignored the soft things that grunted in his passing just as he ignored those that didn't grunt as well. Instead, he focused on getting to where he was needed, and hopefully not passing out before he got there.
The first speck of sunlight was a hallucination, it had to be. The accompanying rush of humid, ozone-tainted air was salvation. Of course, he didn't trust that salvation at first life-affirming breath, and so he waited for what he knew was coming, what he hoped was coming, what damned well better be coming.
Two voices, not immediately recognizable save for definite American accents, sounded from beyond their current prison. One was near the weak spot created at the very top of the barred window, and the other near enough to where the wall was serving as ceiling to make him nervous. The first warned that he was not nearly stupid enough to simply burst in alone, not if what he suspected to be behind the wall of debris was truly there. The other called him a pansy, but notably didn't make a move himself.
Clint was tired of them already. His head hurt and his chest hurt and really pretty much everything hurt and he really wanted to get the fuck out of there, and he'd rather have liked it a few hours prior. Either they were baddies that were going to kill them outright in a blessedly non-suffocation sort of way, or they were legitimate rescuers who needed to speed the hell up. Either way, he really would have appreciated them getting a move on because while a thin sliver of air was like manna right now, it was still just a thin sliver of air and the room hopefully full of survivors could really use more than that.
He did what he felt was the reasonable thing and fired a warning shot of what he hoped was a standard arrow through the small opening, making sure to avoid the shadow of the hesitant idiot, but also keep close enough to let him know there was still a threat at hand. His wrist screamed in protest to the action and his vision threatened to double again, but the man also screamed in surprise, right before he yanked a clump of dirt away enough to reveal a face that was probably familiar from a briefing or three. More familiar was the logo just barely visible on his shoulder, the one that matched Clint and Natasha's own and while Clint didn't immediately lower his weapon, he did relax his grip a little when he heard the words, "Oh thank fuck, it's Barton."
A series of calls and responses followed, verification codes and counter-codes, signs and counter-signs, and bottles of water lowered through the ever-increasing opening even as both he and his partner warned of weak spots and the chance for complete and utter collapse and had those warnings echoed by creaks and cracks and chunks of their world shrinking around them even as their potential exit grew.
The priest was rescued first, the few villagers roused by the whole actually breathing thing insisting on bodily lifting him free to have his wounds tended to before they themselves would accept such assistance. Clint saw the hesitance on more than a single face when they turned to look at Nat and him, but he shooed them away, needing that at least relieved from his conscience before he could deal with more pressing needs.
Of course those needs were the fact that he couldn't really lever himself into position on his own and like hell was he going to force some old folks and kids to push his sorry ass up and out. An engineer dropped down to survey the place, shook his head, and pretty much told the medics that they were screwed. No equipment could be used without risking further collapse of the structure, and so the brute force method won out, big and burly men and women slipping in and pretty much tossing them out in a matter of moments with little regard to excruciating if at least not life-threatening ailments, clearing everyone back and away before the wannabe church gave up the holy ghost.
Not long after, he found himself propped up on a gurney against medical advice to lay the fuck down already, side by precious side with Natasha. Oxygen masks were firmly in place and the not even quite strong enough to be used as chopsticks bits of wood that were splinting his wrist were replaced with something far more sturdy. They sliced up his pants leg to take a look at his knee, and tried to cut off Nat's boot but she refused to let them close enough with anything potentially bladed to do so.
A truck pulled up, big and bold and so very much a part of their organization, and the last person he expected stepped out. He looked to Nat to confirm he wasn't seeing things even though it was fairly obvious he wasn't by the way the medics and various other agents jumped to attention. Bigwigs tended to get that reaction. Level Nine bigwigs tended to get it more often than others.
He tugged the mask down slightly and greeted, "Agent Hand."
Agent Victoria Hand strode forth and it was possibly the first and likely only time he would ever see her in anything other than a suit and power heels. She wore fatigues, mud spattered up the boots and legs and more gathering about her as she walked, but not a single strand of her oddly red-hued hair was out of place and her painfully practical glasses shone clear and clean. "Agent Barton," she returned. She motioned to his mask but spoke to one of the medics as she ordered, "Make sure he actually keeps that on."
"It's on," he insisted. It was about two inches away from his actual face, but the airflow was actually lined up so he felt that totally counted. A glance at Natasha showed she was in less than full agreement with him, but letting him dig his own hole for now. To further that digging process, he asked, "To what do we owe the pleasure?"
The senior agent crossed her arms in front of her and looked to the burnt out wreckage on the bit of hillside that had managed to survive, and then to the well and truly collapsed church that had been his grave and salvation for the past far too many hours. "I'm going to pretend you're not that stupid because I've read your file," she told him in her usual matter of fact tone. "We received the beacon signal and my team responded as we were nearest to what we eventually determined to be the source. I did not expect you to have taken care of part of my problem in the process of burying yourself alive though."
"Our mission was to retrieve a package," Natasha told her, deliberately vague in the way spies like them always were.
Agent Hand nodded. "Yes, and you inadvertently found a link we had missed at the same time," she agreed. "Your package contained the specs to and a partial example of classified tech we believed may have been stolen from a major distributor. It turns out they were smuggling far more than intel. The men you stopped were just one tiny piece of a far larger machine, but that machine ground to a halt when they didn't report timely." She flipped a perfect curl over her shoulder with a shrug and expanded, "They panicked, and that panicking made them sloppy. My team is currently tracing lines of communication that we didn't even know existed six hours prior, and those traces appear to be leading us right to the source we have been hunting for over eight weeks at this point."
"So we did good?" Clint guessed.
"You did very good," Hand agreed. She shared that hint of a smirk that seemed an inherent trait in all redheads, and then thoroughly broke the moment with a very pointed, "Just as you will do very good on the paperwork you will need to complete."
Clint frowned. "I always complete my mission reports," he protested. True, the ones that did not immediately relate to an imminent mission or lives to be saved sometimes got pushed to the back burner, but he did always get to them eventually and possibly when violently prompted by Natasha, unless it was one of the few times she got Steve to guilt him into it instead.
Hand raised her eyebrows and looked between the two agents currently laid out on gurneys before her. "If you two decide your little side project is legitimate, there is paperwork for that. If not, well, there's paperwork for that as well," she said as though she had very little opinion on the matter. Her eyes had a gleam to them though, like she knew far more than either one of them were letting on. She turned on her booted heel to go deal with some other mess that did not involve agents who made brash decisions after see-sawing over them for years. As she left, she called over her shoulder, "Just let me know if congratulations are in order, no matter what you decide. I believe there is a pool at this point."
"You know," Clint said glibly, not even pretending to watch her retreating back as he dug in his pocket to make sure the three little baubles were still there. "Sometimes working for an elite spy organization sucks."
"It really does," Natasha agreed. There was something to her tone, a lack of humor of any kind, an underlying sadness to it all, that made him turn his head to face her, short lead on his mask be damned.
He followed her gaze, not to the senior agent and not to any of the other agents that currently milled around them. She looked past them all, to the neat rows of black bags that slowly sunk into the mud and mire. "It's not your fault," he told her.
"Clint..." she protested, reminding him to never underestimate a Russian's effort at self-flagellation, or at least one Russian in particular. "They might still be alive if it wasn't for me," she admitted. There wasn't quite sorrow so much as acceptance, but it still hurt to hear.
He took her hand, happy both when she didn't immediately squirm away and also to see their ridiculous bands in the light of day. He lifted them both, fingers woven through to grip tightly, and gestured to where the priest and a fair deal of his parishioners were being treated. "And those guys over there are there because of you. That one's a certainty. You are dwelling on an unsupported probability."
She frowned. "That's not like me," she admitted, and he knew she just needed to hear the words a few dozen more times for it to sink in. He was happy to be the one to say them for her. "I just... I know how my mind works when it comes to certain issues, no matter how much I attempt to use rational reasoning to overcome that bias. I understand that our actions likely saved others, but I regret that they may well have cost others their lives as well." She was reasoning now, which he felt was at least a stuttered step in the right direction.
He squeezed her hand, as much of a public display as he would risk, and only because their gurneys were close enough to get away with it. "Is there anything else you regret?" he asked. He kind of hated the unsurety and insecurity that colored his words, but figured there was not much he could do about it. She knew him too well anyways and would have seen right through any attempt to hide what he really felt.
She squeezed back with a force that was truly and utterly painful. "No," she replied with a vehemence he knew not to question further.
The medic that had been doing his best to ignore them both at this point cleared his throat and held up the tablet he had been taking readings on. "Sir, Ma'am, Agent Hand has requested I relay a message to you both," he said a bit nervously. He was very young, and wise enough to be intimidated by those who surrounded him.
He offered the tablet to Clint because Natasha was busy with one arm in a sling and the other holding on to her partner's. Clint let the thing scan the fingerprints of his free hand and typed in his authorization codes to reveal a very unassuming text message that read: "Your forms will be waiting for you upon your arrival to base. Champagne will be waiting once you are both medically cleared to have it."
"Who won the pool?" Natasha asked, resignedly but with enough curiosity for him to catch a glimpse of the real her.
"Probably Hand herself if she can get to the file in time," Clint mused, and received more than a single nod in agreement.
It wasn't until they were loaded into the Quinjet for transport, neatly strapped in and way too far apart despite their less than subtle threatening looks, that he caught Natasha playing with the little bit of black around her finger. Not even the medics were dumb enough to try to take that away, which meant the two of them were willing to behave for now and not just due to the pain factor. She had flinched at every bounce and bang, but not her own, only his. Before the rear hatch closed, he caught her staring resolutely at the landscape, no doubt further memorizing it for later review. He saw body bags and discarded medical supplies and frightened girls and terrified villagers. He also saw people moving about freely of their own accord, SHIELD response teams already surveying and plotting and planning and promising to do their best to keep them and other innocents like them safe and sound and as whole as possible.
He knew she didn't see that last part yet, not completely, but he decided it was his duty to remind her as often as possible until she got it through her stubborn skull that things could have been a hell of a lot worse, for each and every person involved. Then, once she reluctantly nodded but looked like she wasn't carrying the weight of the small impoverished country on her shoulders, he would get them both drunk off their asses and start to deal with his own demons regarding the most recent clusterfuck of their lives.
His thoughts were drawn back to the present when she asked, "Hey, Barton?" far too casually. He turned to face her, not that he had ever really looked away since the hanger door slid shut, and raised his eyebrows for her to continue. "I reserve the right to kick Stark in the balls if he makes a comment," she announced.
Two of the medics visibly flinched and one of them smirked. For his part, Clint just nodded and agreed, "Yeah, that seems fair."
They still had reports to file and tests to pass and medical wards to either escape from or talk their way out of, but it was a start back onto the path of abnormality that was their lives. It might take a while to get there but they had already borrowed time before, so who was to say two grisly old spies couldn't lie and cheat and steal their way to a little more? As an added bonus, this time they both most definitely had someone at their side along the way.
Feedback is always welcomed.
This entry was originally posted at http://cat-77.dreamwidth.org/458629.html. Current comments
Genre: Het, Clint/Natasha
Rating PG-13
Length: ~11,000 words
Warnings: Injuries, violence, language, references to human trafficking, death of background/unnamed characters
Synopsis: A mission gone horribly wrong leaves Clint and Natasha trapped, injured, and suffering a slow death of suffocation. Time and each other: they have one and kind of need to steal some more of the other.
Author's Notes: I think there might be a 50/50 divide between fluff and angst in this one.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters and am making no profit from this.
Also available on AO3.
The elevator was slower than usual. It had to be. The trip up to the residential floors never seemed to take this long before.
He shifted slightly, tried to ease the agony that was his left knee without alerting the elevator's other occupant to the fact he was doing just that. Her head whipped around though, unsteady as she was on her own busted ankle, and he caught the briefest flash of guilt before she schooled her features back into the "pissed at the world" expression she had taken on since about halfway through their clusterfuck of a mission.
"Not your fault," he said, again, and knew it didn't quite fall on deaf ears so much as those who chose not to fully listen.
The doors finally opened and Natasha managed three whole hobbled steps, Clint barely two behind her, before their teammates descended upon them like vultures. There were the usual greetings and mockery and then Stark, because it was always Stark, asked, "What did you break this time?"
Clint caught the way Natasha's lips tightened even if no one else did and so, with weight carefully balanced as much as he could currently manage, posture as straight as he dared, he stressed, "Sprained only. Wrist and knee." He gestured to his left knee with his right hand, as if the high-tech braces he wore on each weren't telling enough.
And it was the truth, really. They could look at his medical file and everything. Both were severe sprains and technically a tiny little bone in his wrist was broken, but he had talked the docs into labeling it solely as a sprain so that it was nice and official and everything when Natasha inevitably pulled the file for herself. Mind, to get them to do so may have involved pointing out that they were going to have a homicidal, slightly depressed, and severely pissed off assassin on their hands should anything more serious be listed, but they were the ones who made the call and he just stuck with it.
"And Widow?" Thor asked because he was the only one bold enough to do so.
Natasha did not immediately answer so he did so for her, dutifully tattling, "Broken ankle and dislocated shoulder." Her left arm was in a sling to reduce the pressure and strain as the tendons recovered, making her usual grace less than sublime considering it was her left ankle that was wrapped up safe and sound as well. She had other injuries, of course, just like he did. Scratches and scrapes and bruises littered all exposed skin so they couldn't hide those, but the team tended to back off if you pretended to be honest and upfront about at least some of the more major issues, letting you deal with the rest on your own unless or until it interfered with an actual job to be done.
"And a bullet graze," Natasha added quietly to explain the thick bandage wrapped around her upper arm. She took another step and adjusted her grip on the bag she carried on her right and then she made an almost invisible wobble as the shift upset her already tenuous balance, barely there yet so very telling to those who knew her.
Steve had apparently had enough already, and snagged the bag from her unwilling hand, his superior strength overwhelming her urge to keep still and steady and give no further tells. He handed said bag off to Tony and swooped her up in his arms in a move few had ever tried and even fewer had ever survived.
"I could kill you where you stand," she warned, and Clint caught sight of a blade already poised to attempt just that.
"But you won't because I'm just bringing you over to the couch where you will rest that ankle of yours," Steve countered, barely blinking at the threat. He lowered her to the cushions gently and even let her keep her knife as he added, "Because there's no way you should be on that thing yet if you only just got back."
They hadn't just gotten back, of course. Their mission had technically ended three days ago, and they had been rescued two days ago, made it back to a SHIELD medical facility a day later, and had been freed of extraneous medical equipment approximately two hours ago. Clint was willing to bet most if not all of the team already knew that though, whether they were supposed to or not.
"Why don't either of you have a wheelchair?" Bruce asked. Clint gave him credit for being brave, or at least relying upon the fact he became a giant rage monster impervious to simple things like pain at the drop of a hat for saying so.
"Oddest thing, that," Clint said with false innocence. "They seemed to meet an untimely end somewhere between HQ and here." He caught the hint of a smile on Natasha's face before it returned to a scowl, and considered it worth the effort.
Of course, he reevaluated that opinion when Thor nodded as if that settled it and picked him up bridal-style to deposit him beside his teammate on the couch, pausing only to pluck the bag and bow case from his hand and add it to Tony's growing pile of goodies. "There," the big guy declared after setting Clint down and pushing an ottoman towards him to use to prop up his leg, then doing the same for his other teammate. "Now Widow has no need to feel singled out for attention."
Now it was Clint's turn to scowl. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the various glass items that surrounded them, and Natasha's beside him, and decided they made a perfect pair. He crossed his arms in front of him despite the pseudo-cast, and she did her best to do the same at his side despite the sling, and the two tried to make it very clear that they were about to become the worst patients ever to inhabit the Tower, and that included Stark himself after an incident that involved a flamethrower and Pepper getting JARVIS to lock him out of his lab.
Speaking of Stark, he dumped their gear with relative carefulness, at least by his standards, and made certain it was well out of their immediate reach before he stepped up to assess the situation for himself. He skipped over their obvious injuries and Clint knew the exact moment when he saw the less obvious accoutrements as his eyes grew wide with something between fear and unholy glee. "Oh, fuck!" he crowed. "You finally did it? No wonder she's so pissed."
Clint felt that the resulting kick to the balls was wholly justified. The fact that no one caught Tony on the way down only furthered that belief.
The mission sucked. It had sucked from roughly an hour into it and had gone downhill from there.
Four days later found Natasha running down a muddy slope of a washed out hill and him slipping and sliding behind her. A handful of bullets whizzed by, a slight grunt and the bloom of red the only tell that one had hit its mark. Clint turned mid-stride and aimed for the man who just didn't know when to give up. The ground shook as the explosive arrowhead detonated, which he admitted was quite the overkill for a solitary human but really could do nothing about it as the quiver controls had been fucked for the last day and a half due to some unknown interference that may or may not have been the package they were sent to recover and he had yet to find time to try to poke at them to correct the issue.
Needless to say, an explosion on an already slippery slope was less than ideal and he lost his already less-than-there balance and slid roughly sixty-seven meters with debris raining down upon his head and shoulders before he made a very definite stop against the old stone and metal gate that surrounded the blink-and-you-miss-village at the bottom of the incline. Natasha appeared beside him near instantly, bloody and muddy but not any more obviously worse for wear, and offered him a hand up.
It was then he was fairly certain he was screwed.
His knee screamed in pain and promptly decided it really did not want to take any weight whatsoever and that it would be much happier if he'd just lay down and not move for the next month or two. Of course that wasn't actually an option, so he forced himself to stand and forced himself to shoulder his bow with his quiver because he was man enough to admit he was totally going to need Nat's help to get the hell out of Dodge.
A kid of roughly eight, too dirty to be certain of an actual gender, pushed the squeaky gate open and then tugged it shut behind them as soon as they were through. "Is that everyone?" Clint asked, even though he knew it had to be, even though he knew they had gotten everyone else out long before they made the run for it themselves.
The kid nodded and pointed towards a mud-brick, plaster, and wooden structure that appeared to be the first semi-solid and not vegetation in nature type thing around. It was slightly better up-kept than rest of the little hovel-filled area and he barely registered the cross etched on the weathered wood before said door opened to reveal an equally weathered priest urging them to hurry up already.
They made it in and the door slammed closed before they even really crossed the threshold. Parishioners slid a beam into place to secure it, and then ran around doing similar things to every tiny window in the place.
"The bad guys are gone," Clint promised. Natasha lowered him to a lopsided bench that served as a pew and then went to help the others, clearly not trusting their success given the failure rate so far and clearly ignoring her own obvious wound. "We got them before they got us," he insisted.
"Yes," the priest agreed in rough and heavily accented English. "But now it is the earth's turn."
It was then Clint remembered the explosives he had set in the truck at the top of the incline, and how the priest had been present when he first pulled them out. If a single arrow sent him flailing down a hill, they were likely about to be well and truly fucked by a landslide, dilapidated gate or no, and there was no outrunning that, not with a bum knee and a couple dozen kids and elderly.
"What do you need me to do?" he asked, ready to push himself up and help. It would hurt like fuck, but if it made a difference he was more than willing to do it.
The old man shook his head and said, "You have done enough already." Clint searched his expression, looked for a double meaning, looked for anger or hate for what they had brought to this muddy little place, but found none. The man seemed genuinely grateful for what they had achieved so far, even if hell itself might rain down upon them at any moment.
There was a muted explosion breaths or hours later, the hunks of rock and earth tearing apart louder than the actual chemical combustion. He swore he even saw the flash of red and yellow and light and destruction through the slats of the shutters before Nat shouted to any and all that could understand her, "Get down!"
The priest translated and urged his parishioners to the far side of the building, the one furthest away from the door that faced the hill, the one most likely to survive with the least amount of damage even if its only exit was a small barred window already shuttered and closed. Clint forced himself to his feet and started tossing the bags and boxes of supplies that had barely made it inside the building to anyone and anything that might be able to hold them and protect them. A kid, maybe the same one as before, rushed over to help him and he knew that his shout that it wasn't safe, that he should run while he could, was lost in the rumble of the land currently behind and soon to be on top of them.
Natasha was there though. She had stepped closer, hand out as if to help Clint make it across the uneven flooring, and shifted her attentions to the child instead. Her hands made it around a skinny little waist just as the door buckled and gave way and she tossed the mass of matted hair upward and outward, not the safest option but far better than getting buried alive.
Clint watched in horror as Natasha tried to follow the kid and made it exactly nowhere, foot caught on uneven stone or broken wood, and how she didn't even have time to tuck and roll as the grass and dirt and rock and debris flooded inward, blanketing her even as it knocked him down and out, wrist exploding in pain when his knee decided to give up the ghost and fail him once and for all. He heard screaming that may or may not have involved his own voice and felt a thudding in his very bones and then he felt nothing at all.
The next sound he heard was the beating of his own heart. It was amplified in his ears by the sheer pressing silence that surrounded him. He didn't even hear his own breath, and it took him precious seconds to realize that was because he wasn't breathing, not fully, not yet. His mouth was filled with iron-rich filth and his nostrils plugged with the same. He spit and huffed out what he could, hoping to find a few atoms of oxygen to tide him over instead of cloying suffocation.
There was a pocket of air, tiny and apparently growing, that he could almost access if he wrenched his neck to the left, felt the tremors of abused muscles ripple through that neck and down across his shoulder to his arm. He blinked open eyes that much preferred to stay shut to see a hint of dingy light filtered in through the half a hillside that he was buried under. Hands, multiple, both tiny and gnarled, scraped and clawed and dug, one nearly taking part of his ear with it, but then there was an opening, small and shallow and wonderful from which he breathed as deeply as he dared.
There was chattering that he hoped translated to relief that he lived and not promises to turn him over to the baddies that somehow inevitably survived. There was another voice, this one he understood far clearer even if he could barely make it out, especially when Natasha - sweet, loving, alive and extremely angry Natasha - demanded, "Barton, report!"
"This spa sucks," he coughed. Yeah, he was going to need to scour his lungs after this. "I am so asking for my money back. I don't think the masseuses are trained at all, though I do give them credit for reimagining the term 'mud pack'..."
He reevaluated how much English the priest new when the old man spat out a laugh and he thankfully didn't need to be worried he offended the guy as the small gathered crowd continued to try to dig him out. There was barely any light to see by, and none of it came from any natural source, the handful of candles and one already failing flashlight illuminating the heap of what was once the hillside and was now their hopefully only temporary home.
"Injuries?" she asked and there, just slightly, was the pinched breathiness that meant she was far from okay herself.
He tried to move and couldn't, felt only pain and pressure and really, more pain. "Hard to tell until I get out of this living grave, but I'd say my knee is well and truly fucked - sorry, Padre, don't translate that one for the kiddies - and my wrist hurts like Kiev and either the urchins have multiplied or I'm currently seeing double," he reported.
"You have about half the front masonry on top of you and a chunk of rock covered in blood next to a gash above your ear," she told him. This gave him vital information including the source of his blinding headache but, more importantly, that she was nearby and whole enough to do the assessment.
"What about you?" he prompted when she did not immediately provide a self-review.
There was a grunt and a breath and a sneeze followed by, "My ankle's going to hurt like something I can't say with children present once I get it free, which I hope is soon because I'd really like to get this shoulder back into its socket."
He could picture it then, even if he couldn't outright see her now, couldn't assess the situation for himself, couldn't take comfort from anything more than her voice. Her foot had caught on the flooring while she tossed Tiny Tim or Tina - that much he remembered - the force of the avalanche behind her would have then forced her down, arm still outstretched and upward and vulnerable, and she most likely damaged herself to prevent damage to someone who had already proved quite the helpful little resource in their most recent adventure. Given where she had been relative to his own position, he felt safe to guess that the other half of the masonry was on top of her, or at least a good portion of it. Because, really, the mission hadn't been FUBARed enough already.
Of course, he cursed them all simply with thinking that - which he really didn't think was fair at all because he hadn't even had the chance to say it out loud and take credit for screwing them over royally. There was another rumble and an eerie creak and then the wall to his right that he had just finally been able to make out beyond dust and shadows began to collapse inwards, bringing even more of the outside in to join the fun and excitement.
He passed out again after that, and didn't wake up until it felt like someone was trying to rip his leg right off and drag the rest of his corpse across a rubble-filled countryside, or at least try to turn him over so he was facing upright and breathing something more than shards and footprints. He may have possibly made a less than manly sound at that, and may have possibly had his mouth covered with a hand that itself was covered with things he didn't want to think about, but he heard the old priest urge, "Shh, we are not safe here."
He thought that kind of went without saying but took an extra moment to respect the wisdom of one not so confined as himself before he managed a highly intelligent, "Huh?"
The priest sighed in a way so many of his former handlers had before and slowly released him, shuffling out of the way so that he could take stock of the situation for himself. The children and elderly were huddled in a corner, eyes wide and mouths firmly shut, and he tried not to count just how many there were and reconcile it with how many there had been before. To his side lay Natasha, right hand free and held to her lips, eyes cast upwards to a ceiling of plaster and wood that may have once been a wall and was currently far lower than it had any right to be.
Now that he knew to listen for it, he could hear the creak of footfalls, the mutter of a language his brain was too muddled to make out even if he semi-recognized the voice from the earlier recognizance of the trucks and the planting of the the very thing that made them so very trapped now. The creaking seemed to be moving away though, and he slowly and silently released the breath he was holding as he heard scathing tones and dark chuckles as the searchers were apparently satisfied with their demise.
Or maybe not so satisfied considering the next thing he heard was a hail of bullets clearly shot downward into the rubble, strafed into and around the gathered survivors who stayed so blessedly silent, even when the glass and plastic of one of the packages exploded upward and outward, even as shards flew through their tiny area and embedded themselves into anyone and anything, even as the men finally thankfully walked away, still chuckling the entire time.
"Father?" Natasha asked after a long enough wait to hopefully be safe. The fact she hadn't translated the word was troublesome.
"Get them out of there," the old man directed instead of replying.
His minions dutifully moved to do so, but Natasha was less concerned with their progress than she was with the well-being of their savior. "Father!" she repeated, and managed to translate the word more than once. "You are injured. Tell me how severe so that we can attempt to tend to you."
"You can tend to me once you are free," he hedged, but Clint caught the undertone, the breathiness, the choked off moan of pain when he tried to shift within their tiny confines.
Even though it hurt like fuck, he angled himself slightly upwards, almost into a plank position save for the part where his right wrist would in no way support his weight. From there he could see the scene more clearly. There was new and interesting debris of glass and wood and plaster and deformed bullets mixed in with the hillside that surrounded them now, decorating their cohorts' clothing as much as the bloom of dark red that stained the once white robes the man wore.
Natasha spoke the language a hell of a lot better than he did, so he tattled and had her request things to be used as bandages to be prepped and ready. Of course, the priest's minions were more loyal to him than they were to her, so they first wrapped the still oozing bullet wound of her upper arm, and then readied to fully remove her from the wreckage.
Freedom, when it came, was agony. Before he had at least had the near cast-like properties of the clay-like under-layer of the hill to support his torn and twisted muscles and tendons, and now he had nothing. The ceiling was too low to stand up and hobble around on his own, and crouching or crawling was just plain stupid with a bum leg. Natasha was quickly learning the same, though her innate flexibility probably made it a little bit easier on herself in the long run. It wasn't like Clint was stiff as a board or anything like that, he couldn't be with his past or his present, but he doubted he would have been able to manipulate his body in the ways his partner currently did to free herself, reduce the dislocation, and then somehow end up close enough to the injured priest to offer her own version of TLC while slapping well-meaning hands away from her own less dire needs.
They splinted his wrist to prevent him from accidentally damaging himself more, and then created makeshift braces for both her ankle and his knee though she insisted her boot could do most of the work on its own. The various scratches and scrapes were ignored for the most part, sealed with dirt mixed with drying sweat and no need to waste supplies that they may need later when full spectrum antibiotics would be the name of the game should they survive anyway. It was less than perfect, but it wasn't like they were moving around much, so they took what they could get.
They then tended to the masses, such as they were, and found mostly similar scrapes in similar states and the potential for some serious bruises and a few busted fingers and bare little toes. The priest was the worst of it, though he tried really hard to pretend he was not, but gunshot wounds didn't lie and it took a lot of packing and the possibility of impromptu surgery if help didn't come in time. Most of the trapped silently lamented the need to use the so recently rescued medical supplies on themselves while trying really hard to pretend it didn't matter in the first place.
That was not to say the situation was all love and puppies as a whole. Two walls were fully caved in and impenetrable. A third was listing severely, and the fourth and final held the tiny barred back window that showed only dirt and rock and was slowly trickling the outside in through shattered shutters. A few adventurous souls tried poking at that, reasoning that the shift downward meant there had to eventually be a limit and, behind that limit, blue skies and fresh air, but even they were smart enough to stop when they realized they were only making it worse and possibly speeding the arrival of near certain death for them all. Apparently the gray and humid skies from earlier had resolved themselves into a proper rain, and now rivulets of mud oozed downward, cloying and pungent and sealing the tiny air pockets in the loose dirt and bullet ridden pseudo-ceiling, preventing even that from reaching them.
"Were you able to hit the beacon?" Clint whispered when Natasha shifted closer. The air around them was stale and suffocating, but he still smelled her soap and sweat through it all and took a small amount of private comfort from that.
She mirrored his position on the rubble that made up the floor, laid out flat and stretching aching muscles. The roof, such as it was, was near enough that they could reach up and draw patterns on it, but neither really needed the dust and grime to pry free and drift down into their already compromised lungs. It was higher elsewhere, but not by much. They let the villagers use that space as the two agents were far more accustomed to the restrictions a mission could gift them with versus people who spent the majority of their days out in the sun and fields.
It took her too long to answer, so he turned his head slightly, ready to ask again. The double vision had remedied itself for the most part, but it still took far too much concentration to focus on something so very close to him. Her jaw was set in an expression of disappointment, which was answer enough, but she gifted him with actual words when she said, "I was reaching for it before the boy. It fell from my hand when I grabbed him, and I cannot confirm if the switch was depressed at that time." Unspoken was that the device was now buried under half a building or more and completely unreachable to verify its status firsthand.
So, possibly no and possibly yes. Yes meant help was on the way, hours out at best. No meant they were on their own until the rest of the villagers that had made a run for it returned and thought to dig for survivors and hopefully managed to do so without caving in the rest of the delicate supports. Not ideal to say the least, but he was not about to voice that fact, not now and not ever.
"I'm sorry," she blurted, and sounded pissed that the words broke free.
"Nat, it's not your-" he started, but was cut off.
She resolutely looked at the wall of ceiling above them as she said, "I altered the mission objective and jeopardized us both. It is because of my actions that we are trapped here now."
He snorted and a puff of dust rose above them before adhering itself to their damp and sweaty faces. It was sweltering in there, the heat of the day mixed with the confined bodies mixed with the lack of any sort of airflow. He would have loved to strip out of the oven of his uniform, but thought both that it really wouldn't make a difference at this point, and that there was no reason for partial nudity in front of people traumatized enough as it was. "I 'alter' things all the time. You have orders and you have reality; you just have to hope for the best with both," he told her. He tried to squeeze her hand reassuringly, but then remembered that was a dumb idea when it involved a broken wrist against a hand attached to a recently severely dislocated shoulder.
"I just..." She stopped whatever line of thought she had and changed it to, "I should have ignored the distractions and simply obtained the package and left." He could physically feel the shift from the woman he knew and loved to the dutiful agent, a mask and an act and a protective shield in one. She sounded more like she was reading from a mission report or giving a deposition versus sitting next to a nearest and dearest friend or more.
This time he did squeeze, knowing it hurt them both but also rather kind of forced the whole issue of getting her attention and keeping her more herself and less a character to be played. "Our package was one little box. The 'distraction' was crates of stolen medical supplies and a half a dozen girls about to be sold into a life no one should ever have nightmares of let alone live through!" he reminded her.
He remembered their faces, dirty and bruised where they were shackled behind slats of wood. He remembered the pleading in their eyes even if blinding fear had mostly driven the will to speak out of them already. There was no way they were going to leave them behind, and that was before the posse of the Padre and several of his cohorts tried to sneak around the makeshift compound of trucks to get to them, nearly getting caught and shot along the way. Mix in the fact they knew the medical supplies had been earmarked for a charity based three ramshackle villages over, one created specifically to help kids in that very situation, and it was a no-brainer. It was a call he would have made himself, with or without her and with or without a handler screaming in his ear, though he knew her well enough to know she feared her own personal baggage had clouded her decision in this despite the fact that she would admit this to pretty much no one ever, even under extreme duress. He also knew her well enough to call her on that crap, and so he did so now.
He tried to soften the blow though by manipulating their still joined hands close enough to kiss her knuckles without actually doing more harm than good. "You made the right call," he promised her.
"I condemned them to a slow and painful death of suffocation," she countered, and there was the slightest hint of bitterness to her tone despite her best efforts to avoid it. He blamed her exhaustion and injuries on letting that much show through now versus in the privacy of some darkened room somewhere free of potential onlookers. They had been going non-stop for days and he had been beyond tired before he had fired the arrow that fucked up his knee. Mix that with the past couple of hours of suck, and he really couldn't blame her for the slip considering he gave up trying long ago. She was more determined than he was, always had been and probably always would be, so it was no surprise when she continued, "If we had let the trucks go-"
He stopped her right there. "If we let the trucks go, yes, there was a small chance we would have been able to track them down later," he agreed. "But, more likely than not, we would have lost them or gotten caught up in bureaucratic red tape created by concerned government officials receiving a healthy payout to make sure that concern did shit. Something fucked with my quiver controls, you really think a tracker that's far more complex than a simple detonator would have been reliable? Also more than likely is the fact that Mr. Minister here would have gotten them all killed anyway if we hadn't intervened. And it's a damned fact that, if the trucks had been allowed to escape and we weren't able to find them again, those girls would be suffering a far worse and far more drawn out fate than this." He'd been on these missions before, seen traumatized young men and women welcome death more than having to return to their captors and resume their hellscape of a life.
"I..." she started, but trailed off. It's not like they needed words anyway. He knew her too well, knew her past, knew her fears even if she wouldn't admit them to herself, and knew that the emotions she would deny ever having played far more of a role in her life than the common observer would expect. She was scared, not at anything as pesky as dying or getting hurt, but scared that she had made the wrong call and that others were going to pay the price for it. She so rarely got like this, and he knew many an agent that wouldn't believe him if he told them, but there were a few things - very few - that rattled her enough to create self-doubt. He knew each and every one of them, just like she knew each and every one of his own dirty little secrets of the past. She would complete her mission and more than likely save the day and still wonder if things could have gone better/faster/different if she hadn't let even the slightest hue of emotions color her decision. Usually this would be resolved via drinking or other more rigorous activities, or at least resolved enough to take her mind off of it until the next disaster reared its head and they marched off to create new nightmares and ulcers for themselves and those who dared to cross them.
"I know," he promised. He kissed her knuckles again and tried to hold that little bit of her that he could reach close. It didn't quite work, not without a fair about of non-existent morphine involved, but he liked to think she understood anyway. She lowered their joined hands into a less pain-inducing position and wiggled a tiny bit closer, heat of her thigh now pressed up against his own, comfort of self gifting him with a bit of his own.
Most importantly, he noticed she didn't actually let go.
They lay like that for an hour, maybe more. At least until he was fairly certain that it was more than crumbling plaster that caused the blobs of black that hovered at the edges of his vision. Three of the elderly had already passed out and one of the kids was hyperventilating enough that she should join them shortly. The limited water supply was damned near used up, and he had caught one kid licking hopefully at the mud before spitting it out and being scolded for his stupidity.
Clint was insisting that those who were oh so very still were merely unconscious and nothing worse. He had almost convinced himself of this fact, which he felt was the first step in convincing others.
"You know," he said, apropos of nothing save for distraction. "I really miss the hotel portion of this mission." The hotel was where the gear for their cover currently lay, along with a "do not disturb" sign and a tiny piece of tech that made the key reader think they were still coming and going at odd hours of the day and night. The hotel was where they read the final mission briefing, solidified the plan based on what they knew and what they suspected. The hotel was where they then did things that most definitely did not involve reading even if they involved planning of an entirely different sort.
He remembered the way her skin had felt against the sheets, cool and smooth, compared it to the hot grit-covered clamminess of it now, thought of all the different ways he had experienced it, felt it, knew it by touch and sight and smell. Maybe that was why he turned now, pained and dizzy from his injuries and the quickly depleting oxygen supply, and said, "I love you."
"I know," she replied. She gave his hand a little squeeze and went back to her exercises in shallow breathing, each wheeze a mark of the passage of time.
"No," he insisted. "Like, love you love you. Like, am happy you're in my life even though that life is shit at the moment."
"I know," she repeated, and he had a feeling that the lack of volume was from more than just the lack of air.
He wasn't sure how to put it into words, but decided to try anyway, turning fully now to face her. It was hard, laying on his side with his bum knee propped on his good one, the pressure of his own body aggravating the way his wrist swelled and ached, his lungs searching for oxygen that simply wasn't there, but he thought it was worth it, that she was worth it, and fuck all hate of sentimentality because there really wasn't much else left at this point and he was going to take what he could get.
"I love you. I have loved you for years and will keep on loving you and I think you've figured that out and know I mean more than just a quick screw or the world's most awesome partner to go fight the baddies with," he told her. He didn't let her cut him off this time, and just plowed on ahead with, "I am glad that you are in my life and can't imagine it without you. It could have been any other agent here, or Steve or Tony or whatever, and I would regret that it wasn't you. I would regret that my last moments weren't looking at your beautiful face after blowing the shit out of some assholes. But you're here, you're with me, and I don't regret a single thing."
"Clint..." she said, and it was a warning and a blessing and a confirmation.
"No regrets, baby," he smiled, honest and truthful and painfully open. She smiled back, just a flit of a thing in the almost dark, and he knew it was worth it. All the heartache, all the gaping wounds and getting his ass handed to him time and time again, all the words he just managed to say that he didn't really ever admit to himself more than even really knew that they were even inside of him in the first place.
Their private little moment was broken with a reminder that the situation really wasn't so private and that they, in fact, had a bit of an audience. The priest coughed, harsh and liquid. "You two, you are together, yes?" he asked.
"Yes," Clint answered even as Natasha said, "No." Clint amended his response to, "Figuratively if not literally." Natasha huffed, and he considered that a success as well, proud he could earn her fond exasperation even in a time like this.
The priest hummed at that, contemplative, before he asked, "Do you wish to be?"
And Clint really should have seen that coming, honest and truly. The thing of it was, there was no shock or real surprise at it all, just a final little piece sliding into place like the nock of an arrow against a bowstring, movement and tension and the perfect fit. He looked to Natasha, to her blinking eyes and dirt streaked face and knotted hair that lay everywhere save for where it should, and really hoped he wasn't reading the situation wrong, not at this of all times. "Hey, Nat, wanna face death head on, side by side, as husband and wife?"
He wasn't sure what he expected as a response, save for possibly a slap, but instead he received a very careful, very deliberate one-shouldered shrug and a droll, "Why not, we've faced it every other way already."
"Hot damn," he smiled, and felt the grime on his face crack and snap as his lips stretched wide into a grin.
"I... I can give you this in return for what you have done, what you tried to do for us all," the old man said with a nod. He was serious and proud and so very, very pleased that he could finally offer them something in return. Clint would have questioned that, the need to give them anything at all, but he had seen it far too many times in his life and line of work. The man was dying, they all were, but he was doing so on his terms, on his sense of righteousness. He would have died earlier, no lie as one of the gunmen would have pulled the trigger long before his half-assed plan worked, and the girls would have suffered and more would have continued to suffer. Now though, the girls, at least these girls, were spared a truly horrific fate per his beliefs, saved from a destruction of the soul and body itself, and the men who were responsible suffered a hell of a loss themselves.
It wasn't the world's best bargain, but it wasn't the worst either.
Clint looked to Natasha again, saw the same truth echoed in her eyes. "We have to do this right," he said with all of the mock bravado he could muster. "We have to have everything in place. I won't have you telling the other suffering sinners in Hell that I did you wrong."
"Of course," she agreed. Her voice was tight, pain writ across every movement and shouted from every consonant and vowel and told him she was likely not completely truthful about the state of her injuries. She cleared her throat, a sound as dry as his own, and dutifully prompted, "Something old?"
He pretended to contemplate that for a moment before he reasoned, "Well, we could go with the old bullet wounds and scar tissue, or we could go with the old carnie coin I've got in my pocket."
"If I'm going to marry a carnie, I should probably have a piece of that life," she agreed reasonably. He tried not to laugh at how solemn she was being, knew she was doing this for him just like she had done so many other things before. She was humoring him, giving him this as a distraction from the true state of their lives even as there was the tiniest part of her gripping onto it with everything she had as well. It was redemption and retribution and maybe even a little bit of something more.
He fished it out and pressed it into her hand and asked, "Something new? Other than your most recent bullet wound, that is."
She fumbled for the small bag at her side. She ignored the precious package that had gotten them into this mess in the first place, and dug out a tiny stone bird, hand-carved and jet black and likely originally to be gifted to Bruce to add to his collection upon their return. She presented it to him and they placed it next to the coin.
"Shit! We need something blue," Clint remembered, snapping his fingers as though it would make it magically appear.
The priest's eyes were lit with amusement in the dark cavern, the few remaining oxygen-stealing candles that were keeping the children from fully freaking out flickering and failing one by one. He said something Clint didn't quite catch, and one of the girls yanked a blue ribbon off her dress and held it outward. It was not much more than a string really, and was filthy and misshapen and kind of perfect to represent so much about the situation as a whole.
Natasha took it with the seriousness and respect it deserved, and the girl smiled and hung her head and played with the frayed edges of the fabric she wore. "That counts as borrowed too," she pointed out, but Clint shook his head.
"No doubling up, I want to do this right," he reminded her.
She rolled her eyes, familiar and amused, and asked, "Okay, fine, then what do we have that's borrowed to make this work for you?"
She was prompting him, knew he had something in mind that was likely ridiculous and cheesy, and he loved her that much more for it and so, with a tilt of his head and a gleam in his eye, he replied, "Time, baby. We're living on borrowed time."
"Have been for a while," she agreed, not even mocking him for his sappiness. She turned to the priest, a somewhat slow and clearly less than comfortable process. Clint followed suit, both mostly on their bellies, a collapsing ceiling above them and hard stone digging into their ribs. After Natasha took a moment to catch her breath again, she asked, "Okay, Father, what do you need us to do?"
The man was drifting, but trying so hard to be there for them. He blinked, hard and fast, and asked, "Do you have something to exchange? A token? Or will your baubles work?"
Clint flopped backwards for a moment because it was easier to grab for his bow that way because like fuck was that ever going to be out of reach. It was scratched and filthy and the scope mostly shattered and the string clearly frayed, but a single part of the sight was still round and whole. He unscrewed it and rolled back over to a questioning soon-to-be life partner, offering it out to her with as cheeky of a smile as he could manage and said, "We're doing this right, remember?"
She reached for her gauntlets with a barely hushed grunt of pain, pausing only to swipe at the sweaty hair that clung to her forehead. She flipped something open and unscrewed something else and, soon enough, offered up a small circular piece that's original purpose was to hold one of the canisters in place.
The priest nodded as though that were perfectly acceptable and then began reciting words he had clearly memorized ages ago even if it was just as clear he was slipping in and out of English as his concentration faltered. It didn't take long, and they had the questioning and soon to be unconscious onlookers as witness and a rubble-filled hole as backdrop and they were down to three struggling nubs of candles by the end of it.
When it was over, Natasha slid the bit of non-reactive ceramic onto her trigger finger because it fell off her actual ring finger when she tried. There was no way the piece of her gauntlet would fit anything but his pinky finger, and he slipped it on to just below the second knuckle. It was unconventional and not exactly fancy and really kind of weaponized and really kind of them.
The priest pronounced them hitched and they gave each other a half-assed kiss because they couldn't quite angle themselves the right way beneath the sloping ceiling. Clint did the next best thing though, and raised their clasped hands, the coin and the stone and the ribbon locked between them, and pressed his lips to her knuckles. She did the same for him, and then they lay there together, joined and whole, and watched each other take shaking breaths even as they watched the last light of the last candle finally succumb to the inevitable. They probably could have breathed easier and with a lot less pain and a lot less effort if they had flipped back over, but Clint didn't want his last view to be of a crumbling shadowed piece of masonry, not when there was a much better vista to be had.
When he could no longer see her, he listened for her, tried to make out which wheeze was hers above the pounding headache based upon the hint of breeze he felt across his face. When both of their breaths were far to shallow to discern, he simply concentrated on the feel of his hand in hers, of the feel of metal and stone and string and sweat and the skin he loved so much.
It was because of this lingering touch that he felt it, semi-delirious as he was, when she suddenly tensed. He feared the worst for the briefest blink of a moment, until he heard the telltale sound of her powering up her gauntlets, the arc of blue bright and blinding in the dark.
"Company," she warned, and he resolutely did not think of the glimpse of the limp bodies that lay around them that he caught from the burst of light.
His bow was in hand even though he didn't really have room to draw it, and the baubles as the priest had called them were unceremoniously shoved into one of the pockets of his tac pants before Natasha used her now free hand to palm a pistol. He missed her touch but knew he had something even better in her protection.
He felt she deserved the same, or at least as much as he could offer, and so he edged his way over to where their coffin of a room had enough of a depth to approximate a proper draw. He ignored the soft things that grunted in his passing just as he ignored those that didn't grunt as well. Instead, he focused on getting to where he was needed, and hopefully not passing out before he got there.
The first speck of sunlight was a hallucination, it had to be. The accompanying rush of humid, ozone-tainted air was salvation. Of course, he didn't trust that salvation at first life-affirming breath, and so he waited for what he knew was coming, what he hoped was coming, what damned well better be coming.
Two voices, not immediately recognizable save for definite American accents, sounded from beyond their current prison. One was near the weak spot created at the very top of the barred window, and the other near enough to where the wall was serving as ceiling to make him nervous. The first warned that he was not nearly stupid enough to simply burst in alone, not if what he suspected to be behind the wall of debris was truly there. The other called him a pansy, but notably didn't make a move himself.
Clint was tired of them already. His head hurt and his chest hurt and really pretty much everything hurt and he really wanted to get the fuck out of there, and he'd rather have liked it a few hours prior. Either they were baddies that were going to kill them outright in a blessedly non-suffocation sort of way, or they were legitimate rescuers who needed to speed the hell up. Either way, he really would have appreciated them getting a move on because while a thin sliver of air was like manna right now, it was still just a thin sliver of air and the room hopefully full of survivors could really use more than that.
He did what he felt was the reasonable thing and fired a warning shot of what he hoped was a standard arrow through the small opening, making sure to avoid the shadow of the hesitant idiot, but also keep close enough to let him know there was still a threat at hand. His wrist screamed in protest to the action and his vision threatened to double again, but the man also screamed in surprise, right before he yanked a clump of dirt away enough to reveal a face that was probably familiar from a briefing or three. More familiar was the logo just barely visible on his shoulder, the one that matched Clint and Natasha's own and while Clint didn't immediately lower his weapon, he did relax his grip a little when he heard the words, "Oh thank fuck, it's Barton."
A series of calls and responses followed, verification codes and counter-codes, signs and counter-signs, and bottles of water lowered through the ever-increasing opening even as both he and his partner warned of weak spots and the chance for complete and utter collapse and had those warnings echoed by creaks and cracks and chunks of their world shrinking around them even as their potential exit grew.
The priest was rescued first, the few villagers roused by the whole actually breathing thing insisting on bodily lifting him free to have his wounds tended to before they themselves would accept such assistance. Clint saw the hesitance on more than a single face when they turned to look at Nat and him, but he shooed them away, needing that at least relieved from his conscience before he could deal with more pressing needs.
Of course those needs were the fact that he couldn't really lever himself into position on his own and like hell was he going to force some old folks and kids to push his sorry ass up and out. An engineer dropped down to survey the place, shook his head, and pretty much told the medics that they were screwed. No equipment could be used without risking further collapse of the structure, and so the brute force method won out, big and burly men and women slipping in and pretty much tossing them out in a matter of moments with little regard to excruciating if at least not life-threatening ailments, clearing everyone back and away before the wannabe church gave up the holy ghost.
Not long after, he found himself propped up on a gurney against medical advice to lay the fuck down already, side by precious side with Natasha. Oxygen masks were firmly in place and the not even quite strong enough to be used as chopsticks bits of wood that were splinting his wrist were replaced with something far more sturdy. They sliced up his pants leg to take a look at his knee, and tried to cut off Nat's boot but she refused to let them close enough with anything potentially bladed to do so.
A truck pulled up, big and bold and so very much a part of their organization, and the last person he expected stepped out. He looked to Nat to confirm he wasn't seeing things even though it was fairly obvious he wasn't by the way the medics and various other agents jumped to attention. Bigwigs tended to get that reaction. Level Nine bigwigs tended to get it more often than others.
He tugged the mask down slightly and greeted, "Agent Hand."
Agent Victoria Hand strode forth and it was possibly the first and likely only time he would ever see her in anything other than a suit and power heels. She wore fatigues, mud spattered up the boots and legs and more gathering about her as she walked, but not a single strand of her oddly red-hued hair was out of place and her painfully practical glasses shone clear and clean. "Agent Barton," she returned. She motioned to his mask but spoke to one of the medics as she ordered, "Make sure he actually keeps that on."
"It's on," he insisted. It was about two inches away from his actual face, but the airflow was actually lined up so he felt that totally counted. A glance at Natasha showed she was in less than full agreement with him, but letting him dig his own hole for now. To further that digging process, he asked, "To what do we owe the pleasure?"
The senior agent crossed her arms in front of her and looked to the burnt out wreckage on the bit of hillside that had managed to survive, and then to the well and truly collapsed church that had been his grave and salvation for the past far too many hours. "I'm going to pretend you're not that stupid because I've read your file," she told him in her usual matter of fact tone. "We received the beacon signal and my team responded as we were nearest to what we eventually determined to be the source. I did not expect you to have taken care of part of my problem in the process of burying yourself alive though."
"Our mission was to retrieve a package," Natasha told her, deliberately vague in the way spies like them always were.
Agent Hand nodded. "Yes, and you inadvertently found a link we had missed at the same time," she agreed. "Your package contained the specs to and a partial example of classified tech we believed may have been stolen from a major distributor. It turns out they were smuggling far more than intel. The men you stopped were just one tiny piece of a far larger machine, but that machine ground to a halt when they didn't report timely." She flipped a perfect curl over her shoulder with a shrug and expanded, "They panicked, and that panicking made them sloppy. My team is currently tracing lines of communication that we didn't even know existed six hours prior, and those traces appear to be leading us right to the source we have been hunting for over eight weeks at this point."
"So we did good?" Clint guessed.
"You did very good," Hand agreed. She shared that hint of a smirk that seemed an inherent trait in all redheads, and then thoroughly broke the moment with a very pointed, "Just as you will do very good on the paperwork you will need to complete."
Clint frowned. "I always complete my mission reports," he protested. True, the ones that did not immediately relate to an imminent mission or lives to be saved sometimes got pushed to the back burner, but he did always get to them eventually and possibly when violently prompted by Natasha, unless it was one of the few times she got Steve to guilt him into it instead.
Hand raised her eyebrows and looked between the two agents currently laid out on gurneys before her. "If you two decide your little side project is legitimate, there is paperwork for that. If not, well, there's paperwork for that as well," she said as though she had very little opinion on the matter. Her eyes had a gleam to them though, like she knew far more than either one of them were letting on. She turned on her booted heel to go deal with some other mess that did not involve agents who made brash decisions after see-sawing over them for years. As she left, she called over her shoulder, "Just let me know if congratulations are in order, no matter what you decide. I believe there is a pool at this point."
"You know," Clint said glibly, not even pretending to watch her retreating back as he dug in his pocket to make sure the three little baubles were still there. "Sometimes working for an elite spy organization sucks."
"It really does," Natasha agreed. There was something to her tone, a lack of humor of any kind, an underlying sadness to it all, that made him turn his head to face her, short lead on his mask be damned.
He followed her gaze, not to the senior agent and not to any of the other agents that currently milled around them. She looked past them all, to the neat rows of black bags that slowly sunk into the mud and mire. "It's not your fault," he told her.
"Clint..." she protested, reminding him to never underestimate a Russian's effort at self-flagellation, or at least one Russian in particular. "They might still be alive if it wasn't for me," she admitted. There wasn't quite sorrow so much as acceptance, but it still hurt to hear.
He took her hand, happy both when she didn't immediately squirm away and also to see their ridiculous bands in the light of day. He lifted them both, fingers woven through to grip tightly, and gestured to where the priest and a fair deal of his parishioners were being treated. "And those guys over there are there because of you. That one's a certainty. You are dwelling on an unsupported probability."
She frowned. "That's not like me," she admitted, and he knew she just needed to hear the words a few dozen more times for it to sink in. He was happy to be the one to say them for her. "I just... I know how my mind works when it comes to certain issues, no matter how much I attempt to use rational reasoning to overcome that bias. I understand that our actions likely saved others, but I regret that they may well have cost others their lives as well." She was reasoning now, which he felt was at least a stuttered step in the right direction.
He squeezed her hand, as much of a public display as he would risk, and only because their gurneys were close enough to get away with it. "Is there anything else you regret?" he asked. He kind of hated the unsurety and insecurity that colored his words, but figured there was not much he could do about it. She knew him too well anyways and would have seen right through any attempt to hide what he really felt.
She squeezed back with a force that was truly and utterly painful. "No," she replied with a vehemence he knew not to question further.
The medic that had been doing his best to ignore them both at this point cleared his throat and held up the tablet he had been taking readings on. "Sir, Ma'am, Agent Hand has requested I relay a message to you both," he said a bit nervously. He was very young, and wise enough to be intimidated by those who surrounded him.
He offered the tablet to Clint because Natasha was busy with one arm in a sling and the other holding on to her partner's. Clint let the thing scan the fingerprints of his free hand and typed in his authorization codes to reveal a very unassuming text message that read: "Your forms will be waiting for you upon your arrival to base. Champagne will be waiting once you are both medically cleared to have it."
"Who won the pool?" Natasha asked, resignedly but with enough curiosity for him to catch a glimpse of the real her.
"Probably Hand herself if she can get to the file in time," Clint mused, and received more than a single nod in agreement.
It wasn't until they were loaded into the Quinjet for transport, neatly strapped in and way too far apart despite their less than subtle threatening looks, that he caught Natasha playing with the little bit of black around her finger. Not even the medics were dumb enough to try to take that away, which meant the two of them were willing to behave for now and not just due to the pain factor. She had flinched at every bounce and bang, but not her own, only his. Before the rear hatch closed, he caught her staring resolutely at the landscape, no doubt further memorizing it for later review. He saw body bags and discarded medical supplies and frightened girls and terrified villagers. He also saw people moving about freely of their own accord, SHIELD response teams already surveying and plotting and planning and promising to do their best to keep them and other innocents like them safe and sound and as whole as possible.
He knew she didn't see that last part yet, not completely, but he decided it was his duty to remind her as often as possible until she got it through her stubborn skull that things could have been a hell of a lot worse, for each and every person involved. Then, once she reluctantly nodded but looked like she wasn't carrying the weight of the small impoverished country on her shoulders, he would get them both drunk off their asses and start to deal with his own demons regarding the most recent clusterfuck of their lives.
His thoughts were drawn back to the present when she asked, "Hey, Barton?" far too casually. He turned to face her, not that he had ever really looked away since the hanger door slid shut, and raised his eyebrows for her to continue. "I reserve the right to kick Stark in the balls if he makes a comment," she announced.
Two of the medics visibly flinched and one of them smirked. For his part, Clint just nodded and agreed, "Yeah, that seems fair."
They still had reports to file and tests to pass and medical wards to either escape from or talk their way out of, but it was a start back onto the path of abnormality that was their lives. It might take a while to get there but they had already borrowed time before, so who was to say two grisly old spies couldn't lie and cheat and steal their way to a little more? As an added bonus, this time they both most definitely had someone at their side along the way.
Feedback is always welcomed.
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