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“Hold him down!”
Trick Shot’s voice was a barked command in the crisp night air.
Clint thrashed against the hands that pulled at him, tugged at his clothes, and tried to pin him down.
“Fuck off, lemme go! Clint snarled, struggling to throw off the hands and uncover his eyes and get a look at what the hell was going on. Had he been asleep? How had someone gotten the drop on him?
“Speak when spoken to!” Trick Shot’s voice was the cracking of a whip in the sudden silence, and Clint flinched from the reminder that not only had he contradicted Trick Shot in a meeting with his cronies, but he was now making the punishment much worse for himself.
Clint ought to take things quietly, make things easier on himself.
Not hardly.
Clint twisted his hips and jerked his knee up, and was rewarded with the rushing wheeze of someone having the air driven from their lungs. The pressure on his torso eased.
He wrestled his right arm free and, hissing through his teeth at the pain that seared from his wrist to shoulder at the motion, scrubbed across his face with his forearm, trying to get his vision back.
Pain burned across his forehead and then blinding fluorescent light bit into his eyes and made his temples throb.
Hands dragged his arm off his face and pinned down his wrist and latched it down and
“A weapon is only valuable if it can be wielded properly.” The voice was as unforgiving as the fluorescent lightbulb that dangled above him.
Clint groaned. He’d hoped never to be in the room with the drain again. It had been an awful enough fifteen days in Volgograd that he’d hoped never to return, but wasn’t that just how it was.
His left wrist was also being pinned to the table and latched down.
“You have potential, but you are nothing if you don’t live up to it.”
Clint was just so, so tired. Knowing he was back in this room had made the fight go right out of him.
His eyes hurt, his head hurt, his arm hurt, it hurt to breathe, multiple pairs of hands pinned him down and he wished, not for the first time, that they’d just let him die already, instead of the taste of the drink that was inevitably coming.
“The more you fight us the more this is going to hurt, buddy.”
The voice and tone were all wrong but the meaning was there, and Clint hissed in pain as the words were punctuated with a glancing blow in his ribs that left him dizzy and gagging with the pain that spasmed through his body. He must have cracked ribs, maybe even broken ribs -- wait, when had that happened?
Clint hadn’t had broken ribs in Volgograd, although he had had pneumonia.
His rational train of thought was broken by the pure fury he felt of his giving up to an amateur , some asshole who was torturing him, and hurting Natasha, and was just being so unprofessional about it.
Clint’s wrists were tied down, but they’d neglected his feet. He kicked out, and felt the bone break under his heel even before he heard the bone break.
Clint positively relished the sharp cry of pain at his successful strike.
And then there was a sharp stab of pain in his arm, and then Clint heard, felt, and thought nothing.
Sound was muffled, swimmy, in the way that Clint recognized as he slowly returned to consciousness.
He reached up to see if his hearing aid was still in his ear (it didn’t sound like it was, but it could have shorted out), and couldn’t move his hand more than an inch off the --
He was laying flat on his back, wrists and ankles bound. The room was dark but he could see a white tiled ceiling - commercial, not residential.
Clint tried to take inventory -- it’d be easier to list what wasn’t injured than what was. His head fogged and swam, making coherent thoughts difficult -- concussion for sure. The back of his head throbbed like he’d collapsed and hit his head, but his temple hurt like he’d been struck. He had a cut across his forehead and could feel the bandage there, tender over the wound. He had a puncture wound in his ribs and broken ribs as well, his legs felt tender, like they’d been burned.
The memory was useless -- he had no idea how he’d been injured, and the harder he tried to remember, the foggier and swimmier his head felt.
Clint huffed in frustration, and then let the emotions go. Easy problem first. He still wore his boxers, and his wrists were bound but they were beneath the light blanket that covered the lower half of his body.
It took time, but he could reach the hideout picks sewn into the waistband of his boxers if he was careful.
It wasn’t the time required that made the task difficult -- it was that it was hard to concentrate.
The pain in Clint’s ribs meant that even the slight straining he did to accommodate the restraints and his limited reach made his torso ache.
It was hard to concentrate even on these small tasks, and so as he worked, Clint slowly accumulated more and more of a headache behind his eyes.
Still, Clint wasn’t back in Volgograd (he wasn’t chained to the floor naked in a room with a drain0 and he wasn’t back at the circus (no awful smell of hay damp with his blood, no pit in the mud), so whatever else was going on was tolerable. He’d just have to be patient.
Time was something Clint had a lot of, and he made good use of it.
Soon enough he had the pick in hand, and after that it was just a few twists to get the pick in the lock of the restraints and get himself free.
He had an IV in his right arm, which was irritating, but it was easy enough to peel off the tape and pull the needle out. He was more careful with the leads on his chest and his neck-- those would lead to machines that made noise if he removed them without turning off the boxes first.
He did his left wrist, and bit back on a yelp of pain as he sat up to free his ankles. Fuck that hurt. He hadn’t had broken ribs in a while. He hissed the pain out through his teeth and took a steadying breath when he got his feet on tile.
The floor felt ice cold, and the cold helped clear his head. He stood and unplugged the machines that were connected to the sensors on his chest and neck, and then removed those too.
He was dizzy, then, and needed to pause, leaning against the machine stand to catch his breath.
Then he found a small table with a water pitcher and his hearing aids. He drank water from the pitcher until he began to feel nauseated and put in his ‘aids.
One was busted, fried, but he put it in anyway. SHIELD tech was expensive, and would more easily be repaired than replaced --
Oh shit -- Clint glanced around, and as if they had materialized since he had the thought, he suddenly saw SHIELD logos everywhere , on the blanket on the bed, on the scrubs he wore, on the stack of linens on the counter in the corner.
Clint sat back on the bed, right on top of the leads and tubing he’d piled so neatly, and sighed deeply.
It seemed like way too much work to put all that shit back in, but he’d have to. He hadn’t been abducted or wasn’t alone on some mission -- for fuck’s sake, Barton.
He was at SHIELD, he was part of STRIKE Team Delta, he’d been brought in by Phil Coulson more than two years ago, and he had more recently himself brought in Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow.
Clint was decidedly not supposed to react to sedation like some kinda crazy person who tore himself out of restraints --
He frowned at that. Who the hell had decided to restrain him? Why? He thought he’d trained some of the medics here pretty good. Hell, he even liked one of the medics here, a guy called Cavanagh…
Clint recalled the sensation of bone breaking under his foot, and flinched. He’d broken some poor medic’s face. Aw, fuck…
Clint tried to bury his face in his hands, but his fucked up ribs did not like that, so instead, he stood up.
Time to blow this joint and apologize later. Right now he needed to get the hell outta here and --
He winced as the door opened -- guess he’d be apologizing sooner rather than later --
Clint’s shoulders eased, tension draining from his body as he recognized the red hair tucked into a severe bun as the doctor came into the room sidelong, closing the door carefully behind her.
“You had quite the night, Agent Barton.” Natasha’s primary sense of humor was saying very droll things without even a flicker of humor in her voice or expression.
Natasha wore a white lab coat that fell to her knees, and looked somewhat average (a feat attributable to her expertise with undercover work, Clint knew) in a pair of green hospital scrubs.
She glanced up at Clint, and he snorted, clutching his painful ribs. She wore a pair of dark rimmed glasses perched on her nose to complete the outfit, and he couldn’t help but laugh.
“May needed help in Bahrain,” Natasha said without preamble. She discarded the clipboard and glasses on the counter and moved quickly towards the supply closet to the right of Clint’s bed.
Clint nodded. That explained why Coulson was not here. He frowned at Natasha’s back. “Weren’t you in Bangkok?” The details eluded him, but that name felt right.
Natasha unfolded a wheelchair from the closet and moved it towards him. “If you ask nicely, people will give you anything you ask for.”
Clint snorted again. “You must have asked very nicely.” He glared at the wheelchair.
Natasha pushed it closer still, ghosting the edge of the chair just close enough to Clint’s feet to make him want to kick at it. “I did. And I am again, right now.”
Clint huffed. “I can walk.” He showed her so by standing up off the bed.
Natasha narrowed her eyes at him, a nearly imperceptible gesture that in someone else would be a glare. “You died on the table. Code blue.”
Clint raised his eyebrows, massaged his ribs carefully. “Explains the fucked up ribcage.”
Natasha leaned towards him. “You’re not allowed to die when I’m not around.” Her voice was a deadly whisper. “Get in.”
Clint sat in the wheelchair, not wholly of his own volition.
Natasha had always taken owing him for getting her out from under the KGB’s control very seriously, and after their recent experience in Volgograd, she’d seemingly doubled down on this idea of it being her job to keep him out of trouble (as if he needed anyone’s help).
Most of the time, she was as likely as he was to ditch medical care and ignore medical advice.
Sometimes, like now, she got that very still look on her face and Clint knew it was time to listen, not argue. Even he could take a hint. Eventually.
Still, he almost got up again when she grabbed the blanket from the end of his bed and put it on his lap, scary-voiced Natasha or no.
“I--” he began.
She cut him off. “--need to look convincing.” She put the clipboard on top of the blanket, and took a moment to adjust her appearance before opening the hospital room door.
Clint sighed, and nodded.
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Later, after they’d eaten Thai from their favorite place and he’d taken a nap in his own bed, they passed a bottle of his favorite Polish vodka back and forth.
“Hunter messaged me.” Natasha broke the silence, her voice barely audible.
As usual, Natasha packed a tremendous amount of meaning into relatively few words.
“You weren’t done in Bangkok.” Clint concluded with a wince, taking a large pull to console himself -- Natasha had many successful ops under her belt, and didn’t need his protection from the SHIELD higher-ups any more than he did.
“Oh, I got what was required.” Clint could hear the smirk in Natasha’s voice, even though they both faced the muted Discovery Channel documentary on the television, currently showing lions drinking from a river.
Clint tried not to, but he sighed a little in relief at the words. The nap earlier, and the vodka now, and Natasha’s agreeing to stand guard, was combining to make him feel warm and drowsy.
A sharp finger in his shoulder made him sit up straight and glare at her. Some guard.
“You died.” Her eyebrows crinkled a little in the middle.
Clint rubbed his shoulder. “Yeah, code blue, you said that already.” He was fine, well, sore, but he was fine. Didn’t see what the big deal was.
She went to poke him again, and let him grab her hand instead. “It’s not just a ‘code blue,’” she said, her voice very quiet as she looked right at him. “It’s you. You died.”
Clint let her hand go, feeling sudden heat rush to his face, shrugging away the intensity of her words. He took the bottle from her other hand and took a pull, enjoying the heat it roused in his belly, made it easier to ignore the heat in his face and the magnetic pull of Natasha’s seriousness.
They sat in silence for long enough that Clint hoped she was done, watching lions on the savannah and zebra and rhinos.
After some time, Natasha had one more thing to say. “You risked your life in Volgograd. You’re worth fighting for, too.”
Clint had nothing to say to that. His chest was painfully tight, and not because of the ribs or the alcohol. It was tight in a place he couldn’t name, and there was nothing he could possibly say that wouldn’t come out wrong, or stupid, or worse, mushy.
But he heard what she meant -- it was bullshit that he got to risk his life for her and she couldn’t care about him or worry about him.
She was right.
Natasha always seemed to be right.
Everybody thought Natasha was some unfeeling robot, but she was smarter about a lot of that stuff than Clint was, even though he came across as more personable than she did.
The cushions shifted next to Clint, and a lock of her hair brushed his cheek, and lips pressed feather-light against the bruise on his temple, and then she was gone, padding to the kitchen.
He heard the whistle of the kettle, and fell asleep before he could think anything else.