Chapter 7
Jumping felt like someone was unstitching Clint at the seams. His first thought when they arrived was how much he hated that sensation. His second thought was that Natasha’s hand was too limp in his. His eyes opened. The Ops room was in chaos. In Natasha’s delusional, weakened state, she had jumped them right into the middle of an Operations Room trying to deal with multiple ops going on worldwide. Their dirty, blown apart, and bloodied team had collided with people who were shouting and cursing. Clint inhaled sharply and found Coulson wading through at the precise moment that people began to realize how badly hurt the entire team was. Then shouts for medics and doctors began. Coulson was pale, thin-lipped. He mouthed across the room, Tasha?
Clint looked down at the red-headed woman sprawled on the floor. She was paler than snow, and her body covered in blood, dark and sticky, glistening on top of her clothes. She was still bleeding. He yelled for a doctor and pressed his hands to Natasha’s wounds, his heart slamming into his palms. Coulson appeared at his side, crouching and reaching forward with two fingers towards Natasha’s neck to take her pulse.
“She’s alive!” snapped Clint, though he wasn’t sure, though the idea of her not being alive made him want to leap off the nearest building. Na-tasha, Na-tasha, Na-tasha, his heart whispered to her, speaking through his palms against her trickling wounds.
Coulson closed his eyes, his fingers on her neck, and then opened them. “Barely.”
A medic showed up next to them, pushing Clint away from her. “We need an OR stat.”
“She has special blood,” Coulson said suddenly. “She has blood on supply but not here. It’s at the helicarrier.”
“Why the fuck is it on the motherfucking helicarrier?” yelled Clint at the top of his lungs. “That’s not where she is.”
“I think we’re aware of that, Clint,” Coulson replied, but even his normally calm façade was shaken. “Can she be prepped without the blood?”
“She’s lost too much. She take O negative?” The medic was joined by his colleagues as they loaded Natasha’s limp body onto a stretcher.
“It’ll kill her.” Coulson’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“So will the blood loss,” the medic replied. “What do you want us to do, sir?”
Clint’s blood shivered in his veins. He looked up at Coulson, a mixture of dawning horror and delight crawling over him. “Me. I’m her blood donor.”
They set him up behind a curtain, in the OR, a needle in his arm taking blood straight from his body through some sort of plasma machine that spun it out and into Natasha. A continuous flow from him to Natasha, just like she set up, without the machine, in a safe house a year ago. Just like she saved him with her strange, mutant blood a year ago, he would save her now with her own blood. They told him that she’d need more than he had to give in his body. They let him give as much as he could, and then he fell asleep there, in that bed, with Coulson pacing between them. When he woke, his body had bounced back enough for him to donate more blood.
He smiled weakly at Coulson. “Guess it was a little contagious.”
Coulson shook his head. “She’s lucky. You’re lucky. God, you two.”
Clint closed his eyes. “Can I see her?”
“In a bit. You need to rest.” Coulson said it, and Clint fell asleep, like it was nothing. Like he always slept. Like he didn’t just ask to see her.
When he woke for the second time, it was morning, and they were both in the same room, somewhere on the recovery ward. Natasha was hooked up to a dozen machines, all beeping and whirring their content with her vital signs. Clint stared at them for a moment, watching her blood pressure and her heart rate remain steady, for minutes. He exhaled and swung his legs out of bed, shuffling over in his hospital pajamas to her bedside. Another time, he would have sat on the edge of the bed and taken her hand. Now, he only wavered, then sat in the cold plastic chair. He covered his mouth with his hands and watched her sleep.
“They said you might be waking up,” Rick said, knocking on the doorframe. He nodded to Natasha. “How’s she doing?”
Clint shrugged. “She’s alive.”
Rick made a murmuring noise of acknowledgement and then grabbed a chair, dragging it over to Natasha’s side. He rested his chin on his arms, studying her. “What happened?”
He wasn’t asking about the last mission. He was asking about the last mission before that one. Clint closed his eyes. “I was shot. Silencer in an alley, they got the jump on me. I lost a lot of blood before Natasha got to me. She jumped me to a safe house, and then set up a transfusion line. She jumped me again home, once I was stable, once she thought that I would survive.”
“You didn’t know, before then.” It wasn’t a question.
Clint shook his head. “No.”
Rick blew out hard and shook his head. “You, the person who hates surprises, revels in routine, and likes to think your problems through.”
“Blindsided,” agreed Clint quietly, not taking his eyes off Natasha. “I may have overreacted.”
“Yeah,” Rick smiled a bit. “You may have. But it’s not over yet, mate.”
Clint slumped in his seat and reached for her hand. It was cold and did not react when he squeezed it. “She hasn’t woken up yet.”