Chapter 6
Clint glares.
He’d demanded that if they were indeed going to make contact with the Red Room then he was going to be there.
He wanted to know everything, whatever demands they made, whatever information they had. He was going to find out.
Tony sets up the video link.
Clint can’t help but wring his hands together. They shake when he’s not got hold of his arrow head, the one the usually lives in his pocket.
He knows he’s anxious, scared even.
They’ve been Natasha’s big bad wolf for so long, it’s like he’s meeting the devil to make a bargain.
He twirls the arrow through his fingers, concentrating on not dropping it, willing his hands to stop shaking, lowering his breath rate and forcing himself to concentrate.
He puts Natasha out of his mind, thinks of this as a hostage negotiation.
He can’t think of her, it makes it too personal.
Tony looks aloof, his quick wit annoying Clint; even though he cognitively knows is protective.
“Shut up,” Clint tells him, and Tony sticks out his tongue.
“How long?”
“Five minutes.”
The screens light up and a tracking programs alights on one.
Tony sees him looking.
He nods to the other screen which holds a GPS.
The screen goes black and they wait.
There’s silence, until… two men appear on the screen, clearly Russian judging by their uniforms and the way they’re sitting.
“You’ve contacted us about a program you should not know about, but since you do, let’s drop all pretense about what this is,” one man says.
“You have one of our defectors,” the other states.
“We’d like her back.”
Jarvis translates with subtitles, but Clint replies in Russian, much to Tony’s surprise.
“She’s not a defector, she’s not yours, she’s American. And she’s sick from something you did.”
They both stare down the camera.
“She was once ours, she is always ours, we will fix her,” the other one states.
“How can you fix her, if you don’t even know what’s wrong?” Tony says, and to Clint’s surprise it translates automatically.
There’s a pause, and then the smaller of the two men answer.
“Seizures, her body is failing her.”
He clicks something and it brings up a scan that looks like Natashas.
“The nanites are attacking her body,” he starts, “they’re old technology, and even you, the genius can’t figure it out.”
Tony snarls inaudibly, and Clint can feel his whole body tense.
The man smiles, “we know who you are Mr. Stark, and you Mr. Barton.”
He continues on.
“If you’ve given her medication to stop the seizures, she will enter states of fatigue, and her body will start to shut down, run only the basic functions, she will start to see things, hallucinate.”
He pauses.
“The medication will not hold, and the electrical impulses in her body will surpass the strongest of medications. If you had not given her anything, she would already be dead, and we would not be talking. Once it starts, there’s only a certain amount of time before we can reverse what’s being done.”
He frowns.
“The Black Widow is our property. Give her back and we will fix her.”
Clint clutches the arrow head so hard, the point digs into his hand, drawing blood.
“How can we trust what you’re saying?” he questions, “how do we know what you say is the truth?”
The larger man smiles.
“Is it a risk you’re willing to take? Her life, over our truths?”
Tony nudges Clint, willing him to calm down.
“What do you want in exchange for an antidote?”
Both men laugh.
“There is no exchange, give her back.”
Shrinking into his seat, Tony glances at the gps tracking that’s almost got their location.
“How?” he asks.
.
They demand for Natasha to be returned in Georgia, in the small village of Resi near the Terek river. Three days from now.
They send a video, to further prove their point. It’s of a girl, seizing, she’s no older than ten.
Tony watches it in horror.
Clint watches in resignation.
They restrain her and inject her. Body stilling, they can see as she sinks into unconsciousness.
The time stamp changes, it’s hours later if they believe it; she’s up and walking, like it never happened.
Dread fills Clint.
There is no way that this can go well.
He stays in the room long after the Russians are gone, trying to figure out just how this will go, how to account for all scenarios and get Natasha back to them safely.
Tony offers fo stay but Clint wants to be alone.
They have two geniuses, a hulk, a super soldier and him. Surely, they can do this.
He can feel the panic rising.
They’re sending her back to a house of horrors, the place that broke her, and tortured her.
He can’t catch a breath.
No matter how hard he tries to ground himself, it doesn’t work.
Clint’s face feels hot, and he curls in on himself.
“Agent Barton?” The AI feels far away but it breaks through his panic. “Your heart rate is skyrocketing, can I get someone for you?”
Clint groans out a no, trying again to stop visions of Natasha being held down, tortured. He counts his breath in and out until his mind wanders again.
He’s not sure how long he’s in there but somehow he’s on the floor, more cognizant of the world around him.
They’re sending her back with no clear plan to help her home.
“Where’s Natasha?” he says out loud, knowing the omnipresent computer will tell him.
“She’s on the medical level, she seems to be asleep,” is the response.
Clint stands, makes his way to the door and takes another deep breath.
Tony better have a plan about this, because the only one in his head is to get them to fix her, and then he’s going to kill them all.
.
Steve is asleep next to her as Clint enters, though he wakes as soon as the door moves.
“They gave her something to make her sleep,” he whispers.
Clint nods, she’d been pretending to sleep, but he doesn’t know if it’s fear of the constant nightmares she’d been having or pain.
Perhaps it was both, he hadn’t asked.
To think that this time a week ago, everything had been fine, they’d been sparring in the gym, eating dinner together and planning their trip to Barbados.
Natasha had laughed and said she wanted to wear her new striped bikini that she’d bought in Australia last year.
He’d kissed her then, and they’d both grinned at the thought of a holiday.
He shakes his head.
They’ll get there. They have to.
He thanks Steve and says he can go, tells him to have a talk to Tony about upcoming events but doesn’t elaborate. Steve nods.
“Do you need anything?” he asks, taking in his friend.
“No,” Clint says bluntly. “Just figure something out with Tony.”
He sits by Natasha’s bed and watches her carefully.
Dark circles under eyes, iv’s now in each arm. So small in a big bed.
They’re trying so desperately to keep her here. The Red Room better want the same thing.
Dozing, he sleeps lightly holding onto her hand.
.
Natasha watches him.
She knows when he wakes up the news he will bring, so she stays in this bubble of blissful ignorance, rubbing her thumb over his knuckles.
She sees when he realises, hand grasping a little harder, eyes orienting up to meet hers.
“Hey,” she whispers.
“Hey,” he whispers back.
“What’s the time?”
Clint looks at his watch.
“It’s just past 7.30 in the morning,” he nods.
“Move over.”
Clint climbs into the bed, minding her wires and lines. It feels like it’s been a lifetime since he touched her, held her.
The silence has them both thinking until she can’t take it.
“Tell me,” she requests.
He sighs.
“Three days. Resi in Georgia. They want you sedated on transfer.”
He can feel her body tense.
“You can say no,” he offers.
“No I cant,” she replies.
Pauses.
“I don’t want to go,” she tells him burying herself into his body.
“We’ll protect you, set up safe guards. Tony and Steve, they’re working on some ideas now.”
He hugs her close, hoping she believes his lies.
“I won’t come back the same,” she confesses, the thing that’s worrying her most, as tears drip down her face.
Clint wishes he could be strong, but his heart hurts and he feels tears on his face too.
“I don’t want to do it, Clint. I don’t want to go to that place,” she clenched her fists in his clothes.
He can feel her body shake, shuddering breaths as they hold each other for dear life. When she can access words, her breath slows.
“What do you think death is like?”
His answer is harsh, quick to rebuke it.
“No one is going to die.”
This is a truth he knows.
“We do this, and they fix you, then we will come and get you. We do this and they fix what they broke inside okay?”
Natasha looks away. He can’t know the future, and she doesn’t believe his words.
“There’s a story the older girls used to tell; we’d just come back from the tundra; and they knew what had happened. 12 of us left and 4 came back. They’d been through the same. I think they tried to make us feel better, so they told us stories. One of them, she said that death was like being carried to your bedroom by your parents, loved; held.”
She suppresses a groan as she adjusts her position.
He hugs her tighter.
“For those of us that had experience with home, parents, love.”
“Ruthie died calling out for her mother, for someone to carry her to her bed,” she pauses, swallows.
“I’m scared,” she admits, “that that will be me too, but I’ll be calling out for you.”
He squeezes her then, ignoring the shudder that runs under her skin. Clint tries to convey everything in it, kissing her head, her face, her lips.
“Soon, this will all be a bad dream. A memory, just like Budapest, and Moscow and Trinidad.”
Hand under her chin, he kisses her again, lips soft like a long kiss goodnight.
.