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"Fuck, Tasha!" Clint rasped, as her arm tightened around his throat. She'd moved so fast that it took him a moment to catch up. She'd launched herself from the infirmary bed and ended up behind him. She had a good choke on him, and he was bent backward to her level, uncomfortably trying to keep his balance.
He vaguely heard the panicky babbling of the male nurse who had somehow set off this... whatever it was, in Natasha. Good thing she grabbed me instead of that guy, Clint thought distantly as she began to drag him back with her. He thought he could at least stay calm and cooperative enough that she wouldn't snap his neck.
He saw the nurse reach for the alarm.
"No! Get.. Coulson," he managed to force out.
Natasha made a harsh shushing sound, and he concentrated on moving with her, through a set of doors. The busy infirmary fell silent as people noticed them, and he could see people edge away. She was using his body as a shield, and he could feel the tremors running through her, the fast, flat breathing.
He still wasn't sure exactly what had just happened. He'd been visiting her in the Helicarrier infirmary, just chilling with a book. She'd been knocked out by some kind of gas during the mission early that morning, and was still pretty out of it. The nurse had come in to inject her scheduled dose of medication into her IV line, and then -
Well, then this. There was blood dripping from the arm around his throat, where she'd ripped out the IV needle. She was in flannel pyjama pants (with little flying robots on them, a present from Stark) and the most embarrassing T-shirt he'd been able to find in her quarters (a batman tshirt so faded from wear and washing that it was grey) and on bare feet. From the way she was looking around he thought she was pretty disoriented, but he wouldn't make the mistake of underestimating her.
Desperate Natasha was if possible even more dangerous than Agent Romanov. There would be no carefully controlled and dosed violence. Desperate Natasha went straight for overkill.
He'd only met that version of his partner once, not long after they'd started working together. She'd been convinced he'd - "finally" - betrayed her, and had cut a swath through a Chechen rebel base that even now still overshadowed his entire kill count.
The next doorway they passed through went into a hallway that was normally busy, but completely empty now. Clint felt a small burst of relief - that meant that Coulson was here, that he was controlling their environment, containing the situation. There would be no bystanders to set off Natasha, or to delude themselves into thinking they could overwhelm her.
He felt her turn to look around, then she pressed close to hiss something in his ear. It took him a moment to parse it as Russian. Where is the exit?!
He had a solid enough passive understanding of Russian, but didn't speak much. Maybe that didn't matter.
"This is," he rasped painfully, and she eased off just enough that he could speak, "this is a ship."
He felt her momentarily freeze at the news that there wasn't a way out.
"Tasha," he said painfully. "You're safe. Nobody is after you. This is your home."
Her arm tightened around his throat, and he stilled. If he provoked her into harming him, she would never, ever forgive herself.
"Agent Romanov."
Coulson was at the other end of the hallway, a familiar, rock steady shape in a suit, a resting point for Clint's eyes when Natasha spun them around. Coulson was here. Coulson was going to make it okay.
Their handler had apparently seen the wild look in Natasha's eyes, because the strict tone immediately gentled.
"Natasha. Are you all right?"
In his peripheral vision he saw her shake her head and blink, as if she was trying - and failing - to make sense of the auditory input. She began to back away in the direction they'd come from, keeping Clint between herself and Coulson.
"You can't go this way," somebody said, calm and almost gentle.
Cap, Clint thought with some relief. Tony was also on board, but hadn't come, thank fuck. Of all of the team, Clint thought Cap was the one who had a hope in hell of understanding Tasha's state of mind, and probably wouldn't exacerbate the situation.
Natasha made a low sound of distress, and backed them both into a corner next to the door, using his body as a shield. He could feel her body tremble. That was the problem, really. Nothing was ever simple with Natasha. She couldn't just be scared, it was fear and desperation and anger all muddled together, making her more dangerous than anybody he knew.
"Natasha, do you know who I am?" Cap asked, voice pitched low. Clint wasn't surprised that he was the one talking; she hadn't known him for long, so his presence had more chance of anchoring her to the present than Coulson or Clint himself. "I'm Steve. We watched Firefly together last night, remember? You complained I ate all the popcorn."
Clint could feel how cold she was, and he thought she might be using the arm around his throat as much for balance as for controlling him. Not that she couldn't still snap his neck inside of a heartbeat.
"...last night, and you flew the Quinjet to Russia, remember that? You and I stayed on the ground to infiltrate that lab, and you were just telling me you thought it looked familiar, and then there was some kind of gas..." Steve was still talking, low and soothing. "I went out too, but I woke up pretty quickly. Hulk carried you out of the building, that's why you're a little bruised. Bruce says sorry about that."
"I know the last thing you remember is being there," Coulson said. He'd been talking quietly on the radio, probably arranging for the space to be cleared. "But we took you home. You're on the carrier."
Clint wasn't sure if any of this was getting through to her, but he was pretty sure that it wouldn't take long until it didn't matter. Her arm was heavy around his neck, and he thought it was the only thing holding her upright.
"Tasha?"
She made a sound low in her throat, and he felt her knees buckle.
"Tasha!"
He turned around into her grip, and that would have been suicidal if she hadn't been on her way to the floor, crumpling as whatever adrenaline had kept her going, gave out.
He caught her before she could hit the ground, slid an arm around her back and lifted her up.
"Thank fuck for that," Coulson muttered, rattled. Yeah, Clint was too. It was one thing to know about Natasha's past. It was another to watch her relive it right in front of their eyes.
"She thought she was.. there?" Steve said, reaching a hand out to stroke her temple with the back of his fingers, as if to make sure she was real.
Clint grunted, and began to walk back to the infirmary. The medical staff was beginning to trickle back into the hallways.
"Doctor Bryans says it's probably medication interacting with that gas," Coulson said after a quiet discussion with whoever was on the other side of his radio. "If she sleeps a few hours, it should have worn off."
***
They installed Natasha back into her hospital bed, and Clint glared at the doctor until the subject of restraints was dropped while Coulson went to her quarters. He returned with the novel she was reading - something with dragons on the cover - and a very fancy scented candle.
"Might help her orient herself," Clint shrugged at Steve's surprised look. Scented candles were her one indulgence.
The other man was pacing the room.
Clint settled into the chair next to her bed and opened the book, which according to the blurb was about dragons in the Napoleonic Wars. There was a bookmark in chapter four, but he hated starting in the middle and began reading the opening paragraph to Natasha.
"Please sit down," he interrupted himself after a few minutes. "The idea is to make her feel safe when she wakes. Prowling doesn't help."
"Right. I know." The words came out tight and frustrated. Cap really was prowling, Clint realised. His hands were clenching and unclenching, and he had the measured pace of somebody who was working hard to contain himself.
For all his wholesomeness, Cap wasn't nearly the goody-two-shoes some people (ie, Tony) made him out to be. He had a temper on him. Granted, a well-contained and tightly focused temper, but people forgot about the amount of sand bags the man went through.
Clint watched him for a moment, then put the book down and jerked his chin at the door. Steve nodded and followed him out.
"I know that expression," Clint barged right in, because fuck knew he wasn't the right person to handle this with any kind of subtlety. Steve stilled, unclenching his fists. "Hell, I've worn that expression. So let me give you some advice."
Steve sucked in a breath.
"Okay."
"You can't fix this. You can't fix her."
Steve startled a little, and Christ, sometimes Clint forgot how young Cap was.
"You're a fix-it guy, I get that. We all are, or we wouldn't do what we do. But you can't fix this situation." He held up his hand to stop Steve from interrupting. "For one, every single person who is responsible for what happened to her is already dead. Three guesses as to how they got that way."
Cap nodded tightly.
"And if she sees you looking at her like... like she's a damsel in distress you're looking to avenge, she is going to kick your ass."
"It's just - there's - I hate feeling this powerless," Steve said after a long moment of silence.
"That's reality," Clint said mercilessly. "You don't get to swoop in and make everything all right. If it was that simple, she would have done it herself by now, yeah?"
Steve seemed to think that over for a moment, then nodded tightly.
Clint thought about the tension between his partner and the Cap, the glances he'd seen them throw. There was definitely a Thing in the air. That nothing had happened was probably testament to there being actual Feelings involved. If it wasn't serious, Natasha would have made a move ages ago.
He sighed, and told himself that they were going to owe him in a big way.
"Doesn't mean you can't do anything to make her feel better," he said, amused at Cap's immediate interest. Oh yeah, he wasn't wrong about that Thing. "She really enjoyed your little expedition to the Film Forum last week. She talked about it for days."
That was a lie, but she'd mentioned it to him, apropos of nothing. For Natasha, who almost never volunteered information even to him, that was practically equivalent to gushing.
Cap's eyes lit up with understanding, and he nodded.
"Okay. Thank you."
"Better go in before she wakes up," Clint grunted.
***
A couple of hours later Natasha woke to scent of home and the sound of Clint's voice reading one of her favourite books. He was doing the voices. Steve was sitting on the other side of her bed, listening with rapt attention and a smile on his face.
She closed her eyes again, knowing she was safe, and listened.