Chapter 6
For Natasha, the first warning sign was when she picked Clint up at the airport after a mission to Amsterdam and he looked wretched.
"Air sick?" she asked.
"Wrong end," he said wanly as he maneuvered into the passenger seat with less grace than usual. He pulled his baseball cap down against the harsh glare of sunlight. "Stomach bug. They're going to have to fumigate that safe house."
She pulled through airport traffic with ease. Once you'd learned to drive in Rome you could drive anywhere, and she was very good at driving in Rome.
"Everyone got sick?" Natasha asked casually.
"No, just me." Clint drank from a bottle of water, reclined his seat, and crossed his arms over his chest."My bad luck."
Natasha didn't believe in luck. Or, more precisely, she didn't believe that luck was the primary driver of misfortune or tragedy. Certainly many unfortunate events resulted from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but when it came to her line of work she had learned the hard lesson that beneath 'bad luck' there often lurked proximate causes that people failed to look for.
"Don't look like that," Clint said, despite the fact his eyes were closed.
"Like what?"
"Paranoid."
"Drink your water," she said
Coulson was tied up in San Francisco, so Natasha took Clint back to her own apartment at the tower. He immediately headed for the guest shower. She brought him the sweatshirt and pajama bottoms he kept stashed in her closet. He was half asleep under the hot spray behind the glass door. She didn't care that he was naked; they were long past caring about superficial things like that. He blinked at her when she handed him a washcloth lathered in soap.
"I know how to clean up," he protested.
"Then do it, unless you want me to climb in and help."
He managed a half-smile. "Phil's very territorial."
Natasha scoffed. "I'd climb in and help him, too, if he needed it. Hurry up. French toast is waiting."
He was a sucker for French toast, even if it did come frozen out of a box. Natasha had no patience for cooking from scratch when there were perfectly fine supermarkets all over the city. Sitting at her kitchen island, Clint managed one slice and half a glass of orange juice, which she thought wasn't half-bad. She'd already thrown a purple blanket and big pillow on the sofa for him, and he sank down on the cushions like he hadn't slept well in a week.
"Jarvis, queue up House Hunters," Natasha said.
"Not the international ones," Clint said, yawning into his pillow. "And nothing with rich whiners in it."
While he slept, Natasha bagged up the underwear he'd been wearing and sent it to tower's biolab for analysis by one of Tony's junior scientists. She also asked Jarvis to keep a watch on SHIELD's medical division for visits by anyone on Clint's Amsterdam team. After a moment she added an alert if anyone visited a pharmacy or off-site health clinic as well. It was totally inappropriate to spy on her colleagues and absolutely unethical to try and access their medical records, but words like appropriate and ethical didn't apply when it came to protecting the people that Natasha held dear.
In fact, she had another word for anyone who cared to complain: unapologetic.
Or maybe a few words, best not spoken around Captain America's delicate ears.
Clint napped for most of the day, rising once in awhile to spoon down ice cream or chicken soup. His color improved and she was less tempted to stick an IV of saline into him. When Phil called from San Francisco, Natasha went to use the treadmill in her bedroom suite and let them have some privacy. She wasn't surprised when Phil called her in the middle of her third mile.
"I don't like sudden unexplained illnesses," he said.
"Neither do I." Natasha didn't slow down, but did decrease her incline. "The lab ran tests on samples from his underwear. No sign of poison, salmonella, e. coli, a virus, or an infection. Idiopathic gastrointestinal distress."
"Are you keeping a watch on his teammates?"
"I figured if I didn't, you would." She forwarded to him Jarvis's most recent report. Neither Lucky Heckles, Ronald Slater, or Mitch Anders had visited Medical or a private doctor, and none of them had bought any over-the-counter medicine since landing that morning. "No sign anyone else caught it, which is odd considering how small that house is."
Phil scanned the report. "I'll be back tomorrow morning. Keep an eye on him until then?"
"Of course."
When she returned to the living room, Clint was sitting cross-legged on the sofa and eating a bowl of peanut butter Captain Crunch. She hated the stuff.
"Come watch," he said, and she sat beside him while a couple on TV faced the horror of basement mold.
"I'm sure he asked you to watch over me, but I'm a big boy now," Clint said. "Go out, go do something. It's Saturday night. Don't you and Bruce have a date or something?
"He's buried in his research."
"I'm sure you can figure out a way to extract him," Clint said.
He offered a spoonful of his cereal. She ate it, and decided she still hated it.
"Let's binge-watch Property Brothers," Natasha said. "Drew's looking a little stressed lately. I'm worried about him."
When Phil returned the next morning he and Clint holed up in their apartment for two days. The reports from Jarvis on Clint's team mates continued to come up empty. Natasha was tempted to file the incident away as unimportant when, four months later, she heard Tony Stark talk about bringing Clint pizza on a mission in Antwerp. The coordinator on that mission was Ronald Slater.
She started keeping a close watch on Slater, and Phil did too.
#
Iron Man was leaving Finland--no need to know why, Tony would say, move on to the important part--when Jarvis alerted him that Hawkeye was in Antwerp. Jarvis was programmed to keep Tony updated whenever when of his teammates was nearby, even if 'nearby' was relative.
"Hey, Katniss," he said. "What kind of fun are you having down there?"
For a moment there was no answer, and Tony supposed Clint was on some tedious SHIELD mission where regulations kept him from using the tiny Stark radio that Tony had given everyone. But then Clint said, "I'm having no fucking fun at all, Tony, thanks for asking."
"Need backup?" Tony arced through the nighttime air, exhilarating in the thrill of a fast turn. "I'm over the Baltic Sea."
"I need a pizza," Clint said. "I'm starving."
"I think I own some pizzerias. Don't I, Jarvis?"
"In Ohio and Pennsylvania, sir," Jarvis offered. "You also own a company that manufactures pizza ovens and another company that makes those little pizza rolls that Director Fury likes so much."
"Stop talking about food before you kill me," Clint said.
"I'm tempted to ask why you can't just go get pizza yourself, but I wouldn't want to pry into top-secret spy business even if this is a secure encrypted line that even SHIELD can't break."
"Because my handler here is chickenshit," Clint replied.
"That I believe." Tony banked through the sky again. "Pepperoni or mushroom?"
He stopped in a late-night joint on the Lincolnstrasse in Hamburg, Germany, posed for some fan photos while waiting for his take-out order, and flew two very-well-wrapped pies to the rooftop of a nondescript building outside Antwerp. Clint was there, huddling in his jacket, teeth almost chattering as he said, "You're the best superhero ever no matter what anyone else says,Tony."
Tony preened as his helmet retracted. "Don't I know it. You got a room, or you stuck here on the roof?"
Clint nodded toward the open door to a stairwell and led Tony down in the darkness to a dusty bare room without windows. The light from Tony's suit was much better than the flashlight Clint had been using. Clint's movements were stiff and slow, entirely unlike him, and his boots squelched.
"Are you wet?" Tony asked.
"It rained earlier," Clint said grumpily. "Welcome to the Ritz. Give me that pie before I gnaw off your arm."
Tony handed over the food and, because he was hungry too, settled on the floor to eat a slice or two himself. He was no fan of seeing his own breath frost in the air, nor of watching Clint shiver, so he bled some heat out of the suit and said, "Get over here, will you? I'm not explaining to Coulson how I let his favorite guy turn into a popsicle."
"I've never fallen in love with a fusion reactor before, but there's a first time for everything." Clint scooted up beside him, back to the wall. "I owe you."
"Considering you saved my life twice last month, I think the ledger's still unbalanced. So who's your chickenshit handler? I saw the bad guys parked in a truck down the block, and it looks like a Boy Scout troop could take them out."
Clint spoke around a mouth full of pizza. "Doesn't matter. Won't kill me to stay put until morning."
"I think Coulson would have an opinion on that. Let's call him."
"Absolutely not," Clint said, a hand on Tony's arm. "Don't."
Tony squinted at him. "Why not?"
"Because it's like you said." Clint looked away. "I'm his favorite guy."
"I'm a genius, Legolas, but I'm feeling slow on the uptake here."
Clint put a half-eaten slice back in the box. "SHIELD gossip puts your average high school cafeteria to shame. I don't want people saying I pulled strings to get out of an uncomfortable situation. That because Phil and I sleep together, I can ask for special favors."
Tony hadn't spent years in therapy without picking up the ability to unpack statements like that. He could think of a dozen ways Katniss was wrong, and another dozen arguments that would utterly fail to persuade him to see things more clearly. He'd once promised Pepper that he wouldn't try to fix any of his fellow Avengers, who were each a little bit dysfunctional in their own unique ways, but some days were harder than others.
Well, Clint was cold, wet, and miserable, but with Tony around at least he was getting warmer and had a belly full of excellent German pizza. Despite the round-the-clock demands of being a billionaire inventor superhero, Tony had nowhere better to be than right here, right now.
"Guess what Jarvis and I installed," Tony said, aiming his right glove at the wall. A bright blue square flickered to life. "Blu-Ray. Got any requests? I've got the new Tarantino."
Clint gazed at the wall speculatively. "Can you get cable? I've missed all season of Love It or List It."
"Do I get cable," Tony muttered. "I'll excuse that because you're having a shitty day, but try not to insult me in the future, got it?"
"Got it," Clint said, and happily picked up that half-eaten slice again along with one of the water bottles Tony had snagged from the pizza joint's coolers.
Within a half hour Clint was asleep against Tony's shoulder and Tony was composing an offer of employment to co-host Hilary Farr, an interior designer who could really kick some ass. Clint's nap lasted through three more episodes before Ronald Slater's voice over the comms woke him. By dawn Clint was moving out and Tony was zooming across the Atlantic, belly full of pepperoni and mushrooms.
He mentioned the Hilary thing to Pepper the next time their hectic schedules crossed, which was in the common kitchen. Natasha and Bruce were there, too. Bruce was trying to teach Natasha how to cook rice without burning it and Natasha was explaining all the places in the city that would deliver rice free with Chinese or Indian food.
"Since when do you watch HGTV?" Pepper asked.
"Pizza date with Barton," Tony said, slapping mustard on a sandwich he was making for himself. "I brought the pies, and he introduced me to the wonders of Canadian home rehab."
Natasha asked, "Why did you bring Clint pizza? Everyone delivers."
"Not to Antwerp," Tony said proudly.
A few more questions later, Natasha slipped out of the room. Tony returned to the topic of hiring Hilary and never did ask where Natasha went.