Chapter Text
present day
Natasha has seen that Clint's been shot, of course, she's seen it.
It's not something they do consciously, always knowing what the other one's up to when they're in battle together. They've both been doing this job for far too long to let unprofessional headaches distract them. But as the years have passed, they've developed an effective interaction, watching each other's back most efficiently. Since they were put in a team with a handful of freaks, they perfected it. They don't have any powers like the other Avengers to protect themselves in an open gunfight like this, facing ruthless HYDRA mercs. Natasha doesn't even wear Kevlar.
Clint is always making fun of that, telling her he won't stop laughing if a bullet might be faster than her reflexes for once. She makes a mental note that she'll have to remind him about that when she hears his scream on the other side of the street and sees his muscular silhouette fall. Fall right into the protective range of some car wrecks, fortunately. Sometimes it's actually useful, this trail of destruction the Hulk leaves, stomping through a battlefield.
Besides, Hill is close and is heading for the injured agent right away, so Natasha ignores the pulse of running through the middle of combat to get to him. Taking out the last of these bastards with a bullet right between the eyes takes priority. Additional heads or not, a muddy mess of a brain usually doesn't regrow. These scumbags disqualified themselves by planning to attack one of the government's largest nuke storages. If they would have succeeded with what they wanted to do here, right in the heart of Washington … Just picturing it leaves Natasha mad enough to take down the last of the enemies still shooting at them.
It's not been an easy victory. Never is when they can't rely on Thor's help because he's back on Asgard. Even someone like Tony Stark knows that shit just hit the fan when Bruce reluctantly brings himself to release his dangerous mutation. Today, they didn't even have Iron Man by their side. Tony, using Jarvis' help, has been busy till the end locating and deactivating every single one of the enemy's charges.
Steve held the silo's entrance, and it's probably only thanks to his advanced healing factor that he's still on his feet. Even from here, Natasha can see a lot of tears and red stains on his uniform.
Gone, mostly forgotten already. There's been damage but nothing serious. Probably their greatest problem will be Fury slapping their wrists tonight for the need of renovating yet another district after the Avengers have been there.
Well, better that than a whole continent made uninhabitable and a few hundred million dead people.
Relieved to hear the last blasts on Falls Road and the last sporadic, distant detonations fade away, Natasha lowers her Glock, straightening up from her pullback position behind some waste containers. Not her favorite hiding place. With the urgent wish for a shower, the last adrenaline dies away.
First, she hardly notices the sound of a helicopter approaching. Authorities, probably, or S.H.I.E.L.D. sending reinforcement. Maybe it's the press. Since her team saved New York from a psychopathic alien and his army, Natasha sees her face on six o'clock more often than she cares for.
Her headset catches a S.H.I.E.L.D.-radio frequency, hectic voices, unusual after a successful mission. At the same moment, she turns to the entrance where she last saw Clint.
Her weapon hits the street with a dull bang. There's also the hammering sound of her own heels so her body apparently reacted before her mind really understood.
Before she understood why not only Maria but Tony, too, is kneeling over there, next to her longtime team partner. Or why the helicopter is circling right above them now, getting closer to a much too small landing place between two mass car crashes. Before Natasha can catch, through the thickening fields of fog, that Clint is lying in a pool of blood.
Even before her growing shock allows her to accept that the mission has not been successful at all.
Tony pushes her back before she can come too close, telling her something, empty words drowning in the chattering on the radio anyway. He's lucky to wear his suit, and that she doesn't have a useful weapon in her hand.
No, of course, she doesn't have to get any closer to know that it's bad, very bad. And Natasha can rely on Hill to do her best to help till professional assistance will arrive. She can't do anything here anyway, Clint is being taken care of …
And that's just what she thought a few minutes ago, making a decision that might just have been the most fatal of her life. With a growl, Natasha ducks away under Tony's arm - it does have advantages to be the shortest team member. Though horror threatens to take her breath away, she forbids herself to look away. She's done that for far too long today. Therefore, it doesn't come as a surprise what Hill has to tell her, what she catches in the overlapping conversations in her earpiece. All these comforting phrases, hysterical orders, and complicated terms, in the end, mean the same thing.
Natasha has turned away at the wrong moment.
And now Clint is dying.
„These are the last. Hopefully." Nick coming up from behind, addressing her, stirs about as much interest in Natasha as the last visitors have. It's the rattling of razor-sharp shrapnels on the drug table that makes her startle. „Forensics sends their regards. There were two dozen of them. The goddamn bullet fragmented at first touch. It wouldn't have made a difference, Romanoff. There's nothing but deadly ammo in an arsenal like HYDRA's. Considering that, tough little trashmouth here actually does pretty well." For just a wink of his remaining eye, Nick stands looking at the sickbed before examining Natasha's stiff shape on the visitor's seat.
Her hands are tense around the armrests. She can see the hopelessness in her blurred reflection in the window whenever she lifts her head. Nick means well but he's ignoring the point, just like her teammates with their clumsy encouragements did earlier.
She couldn't have done anything; that, she knows.
Nothing about Clint almost bleeding to death on the battlefield or about his left thigh being a ruin. Nothing about the highly poisonous alloy of the HYDRA bullet destroying every tiniest hope either. The next 24 hours will show if his body will recover from all these chemicals in his system. Natasha spent enough time in the Helicarrier's sick bay to know when people are only waiting for things to end.
No, when the attack happened, she probably couldn't have changed anything. If there'll be even one more soldier trying to get this into her head, she'll have to unceremoniously slice their throat with a pen ball. It's not because of that she's sitting here, still wearing her suit and the smell of waste, smoke, and blood on her skin, waiting for the inevitable.
Clint probably won't wake up from the induced coma, but if he does, no matter how long … Then she wants to be with him, the way she should have been earlier.
Nick has murmured something else before leaving the room, maybe even something helpful like about making sure that the two of them will be alone. He's the only one who understands, always has.
The digital numbers right above the bed tell Natasha that there hasn't even an hour passed since the shot. Since this short sound of pain echoing in her ears like the crack of an explosion right next to her. That was the moment when she should have moved.
She can't remember ever hearing Clint scream like that. He's always been the stronger one between them though probably he'd disagree with that assessment vehemently. At least he would have done so if he hadn't caught a goddamn bullet and wasn't lying in intensive care with half a dozen tubes in his body.
A dull throb in her palms reminds Natasha to relax her hands before she can knock the chair to pieces. If she'd started to break things now she couldn't have stopped till the room wouldn't be of any more use. Starting with the nerve-racking peeping of the ECG. It's begun on the battlefield already, this coldness in her mind being wrapped around her darkest emotions like Siberian ice, protecting what she's been trained for, for years. The rationality, the discipline, the control. This mechanism is about the first thing she's learned from Clint. There haven't been many outbursts of temper since he freed her from her old life.
Occasions when she had felt as off as today … Since then they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Maybe on two hands.
And thinking about it … Every single one of them somehow was related to this man who maybe became the most important constant in her life without her even realizing it. Clint … has always been there, without either of them ever feeling a need to be bonded to each other.
At least not in a way that others would notice. In fact, Clint is the only red in Natasha's ledger that she has never managed to wipe out. Probably she won't ever get the chance to now.
She'd love to close her eyes, to flee from the accusation of his sight, the lens tube in his mouth, the needles in his arms, the thick bandage under the cover. Instead, she has to remind herself of blinking from time to time. She won't flee, not again, not this time. This time she'll be there for him as he was for her all these years, from the day he entered her pathetic existence for the first time.
It will be the longest 24 hours of her life.