Fever All Through the Night
Clint is too hot. He’s boiling. He kicks the blanket off.
He starts shivering.
His head is thumping like the bass beat don’t stop and there’s a furious ache right behind his eyes that makes him want to scream. But that would be noise and noise would be bad.
His teeth start to chatter, adding a rat-a-tat-tattle to the thwum thwum thwum of his headache.
He is too cold. He gropes for the blanket with a heavy arm and rolls himself up into it, tighter and tighter until he’s just a blanket caterpillar with a Clint face sticking out the top.
The shaking doesn’t stop.
He’s sweating, sticky and disgusting all over, but he’s shivering with the cold.
Thwum thwum thwum
Rat-a-tat-tattle
His mouth is so dry. Dry like a dust cloud. Or a… or a… a very dry thing.
Lucky whines and the sound pierces through him. His hearing aids are still in. But his hands are all bound up in the blanket roll so he can’t take them out.
He wants to take them out. Now he’s remembered them, they itch and it’s like they don’t fit right. He can feel all the edges clogging up his ears. Is it possible for the insides of your ears to sweat? He wants them out, out, out.
Clint’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
Water.
Water is in the tap. The tap is in the kitchen.
A yawning chasm of open space lies between him and the kitchen. It is insurmountable, unpassable.
He would have to walk. Which would require him to be upright and to carry his heavy pounding head over there.
His legs have merged into one blanket tail anyway, he cannot walk.
Lucky whines again, then jumps off the bed.
Clint tries not to feel upset. But Lucky had been warm and he is so cold.
Shivering in his own sweat.
He can’t get comfortable.
The blankets are too tight. His arm is caught beneath him. Are his arms always like this? Getting in his way? How does he usually have his arms?
He can feel the vibrations of Lucky’s footsteps as he comes back in and he turns towards the door.
Everything’s a bit blurry, but Lucky isn’t alone. There’s a dark figure following him. A shadow person.
Clint tries to sit up.
He’s caught, tied up. He can’t get his arms free. He needs his bow. Who tied him up?
The shadow person comes closer and raises a hand.
Clint tries to twist away, but he’s all bound up, like Frodo in the spider’s web. He has to get free.
Cool fingers touch his forehead and the tension slumps right out of him.
The blessed, blessed cold of those fingers. He blinks crusty eyelids and the shadow person’s features resolve into a face.
A Bucky face.
“Bucky?” Clint croaks. Bucky shushes him. Clint opens his mouth to protest.
“Shh,” Bucky says again, brushing cool, hard fingers across Clint’s face so very carefully. “I’ll get you some water and a thermometer, okay.” He stands up, but Clint doesn’t want him to go. He doesn’t want to be alone, shivering, with the thumping in his head.
Bucky reads his mind, turns back and leans down.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Promise?” Clint asks, because people say things. People can say anything.
“Promise,” Bucky says.
He doesn’t really know how long Bucky is gone for. It feels like no time at all, it feels like days. But then he’s back and there’s ice water and a terrible, hard thermometer stuck in his mouth. It beeps and Bucky frowns.
The blankets are unwound from around him, though Clint clings onto them desperately.
“We need to get your temperature down, doll. Just let me help you.”
Clint loses time, then. The world stabs into him in bits and pieces, little shards of reality that pierce his blanket of pain and fever.
He remembers being propped up against Bucky’s chest, being fed soup. He remembers being lowered into something cold. He remembers Buck Chisholm, looming in the corner, making him shoot again and again and again. His father’s voice tells him he will never amount to anything. Barney tells him to stop being such a wimp. You have to pull your weight Clint. We all have to do our part.
He struggles to his feet. He remembers voices shouting his name.
Captain America tells him to get well and listen to Bucky – in sign language. Clint says he will; he always listens to Bucky. Bucky has a nice voice. Sometimes Clint only puts his hearing aids in so he can hear Bucky’s voice.
Captain America laughs. He looks a bit like he did in the comics, his head thrown back.
Clint remembers dancing with a dinosaur.
And the marching elephants. He remembers them too, stamping so loudly the whole world had shaken with it.
Gradually, the world returns to itself again, and time pieces itself together into one line, rather than a thousand higgledy-piggledy jigsaw pieces. He wakes up groggy and grimy, his head full of cotton wool, his mouth included. He can’t hear, so his aids must have been taken out at some point, but something is making the bed vibrate, and there’s a hard, heavy weight over his feet.
Clint stretches his head up, every muscle in his body protesting, and sees Bucky passed out, face down on the bed, his left arm over Clint’s calves.
Clint smiles to himself and lets himself drift back to sleep.
The next time he wakes up, Bucky is gone, but Lucky, who took his place, bounds to his feet and runs out of the door as soon as Clint’s awake.
He comes back a few seconds later with Bucky, who’s carrying a tray with a tantalising smell wafting from it.
“Hey. You with me?” Bucky asks. He looks softer than usual. Sort of rumpled. It’s a good look on him. It makes Clint think of lazy mornings and rumpled sheets.
“I think so,” Clint says after a second. He shuffles uncomfortably, because Bucky might look good, but Clint doesn’t like people seeing him like this.
Strangely, he doesn’t feel as disgusting as he should. Last time he got sick, he holed himself up in his room and he woke up stewing in his own sweat and saliva.
He remembers water and gentle cool hands wiping at him. Aw hell. He doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or annoyed that apparently Bucky Barnes bathed him and Clint remembers shit about it. Embarrassed, he decides in the end. He’s definitely embarrassed.
“You still look a little flushed,” Bucky says with a frown. “I thought your temperature was back down, but…”
“I’m good,” Clint says hastily, holding up a hand. He doesn’t want to have to explain that he’s ashamed. Not of his body – Clint got over any problems he might have had with nudity a long time ago – but the fact that he had to be helped to bathe. He’s a grown-ass man. He should be capable of taking care of himself. That is was Bucky who saw him like that just makes it worse. Sure, Bucky’s dating a fucking superhero, but Clint’s been hoping that he maybe doesn’t think Clint’s a complete trash fire of a human being.
There’s only so much you can do to hide the truth, though.
He pulls himself up into a sitting position, forcing his breathing to stay even. He shouldn’t get winded just from sitting up.
Clint thinks he’s done a decent job of keeping his hand steady as it picks up the spoon, but as he dips it into the soup it taps an irregular rhythm against the side of the bowl.
“Do you want me to–” Bucky starts.
“I think I can manage to feed myself,” Clint says. But after the first three spoonfuls end up back in the bowl again, he’s starting to rethink that.
Bucky makes a thoughtful sound and disappeared back beyond the door, leaving Clint to humiliate himself in private, thank god.
The third spoonful makes it almost to his mouth before his hand wobbles a bit more and it slops right down his front.
Clint looks down at his t-shirt in resigned dismay.
Of course Bucky chooses that moment to come back in. He doesn’t seem bothered by Clint’s newest stain, just crosses to the bed, plops a mug down on the bedside table, scoops up the bowl and transfers the soup from one to the other.
“Here,” he says, holding out the mug. Clint takes it, wrapping his hands around it. The trembling barely makes the soup move at all, and he lifts it to his mouth to take a gulp.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Shoulda thought,” Bucky says with a shake of his head. He hovers there by the bed, his hand lifting slightly, then pulling back as he folds his arms across his chest.
“You can go,” Clint says. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for…” he shrugs.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m good. You’ve definitely got better things to do than babysit me.” Buck frowns and doesn’t move, so Clint repeats: “I’m good.”
“Hmm,” Bucky agrees finally. “You call if you need anything.”
“Sure,” Clint says, lying through his teeth. Bucky’s done enough. How long was Clint even sick for? His memories, full of Captain America and dinosaurs are erratic and nonsensical. He could have been holed up for a week, or less than 24 hours. He doesn’t ask.
Bucky lingers another long moment, staring at Clint with sharp eyes that seem to see straight through him. Then he nods and turns on his heel out of the door.
Clint feels the phantom press of lips against his forehead and wrinkles it experimentally. There’s no way that memory is real. He must have been so out of it. He was hallucinating Captain America after all.
Lucky curls up next to him and rests his big soppy head on Clint’s lap, staring up with his huge doggy eye.
“Good boy,” Clint tells him and gets a tail wag in response.
*