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Fingers, warm and strong, wrapped closely around his. A soft weight leaned against his shoulder and a waft of sandalwood tempered by a hint of spice touched his face. He knew that scent almost better than the one he liked to wear when he wasn’t on a job. Warm and masculine, the memory of Phil Coulson’s cologne was sometimes all Clint had to comfort himself with when he was stuck on a roof in freezing temperatures or wet to the skin while hiding in a tree. Having it close now could only mean that Phil was here with him. Clint didn’t care where ‘here’ was, he was just grateful that he wasn’t alone. His body hurt. Hell, every hair on his head was hurting – even when he lay still! He wasn’t brave enough to try to move yet. Well, maybe his eyelids – they only needed two muscles to move and then he could see if he was imagining things or if Coulson was actually there.
Blinking his eyes open was hard work. Judging by the way his temples throbbed, he’d used more than just two muscles to move his heavy lids. Or maybe it was the way he was squinting against the bright light that shone right into his eyes that made his head hurt.
“Lights!” a voice hissed and Clint tried a careful smile before he attempted to turn his head to the sound. Natasha was somewhere close by, too.
“Don’t move,” she admonished and the warm weight leaning against Clint’s shoulder disappeared.
“Barton, welcome back.” Phil Coulson leaned over him, his eyes warm and his smile welcoming. “I really wish you’d stop with the near-death experiences.”
“Me, too,” Clint tried to say, but his voice wasn’t cooperating. He suddenly noticed how dry and sore his throat was and how much the simple act of drawing breath was hurting him. Before he could say anything, Phil held a cup of water to his lips.
“Yes, you’ve been intubated,” he said while Clint swallowed cold water as if it was nectar. “And yes, they had to resuscitate you.”
That explained both the sore throat and the sore ribs.
“Did they break any?” Clint whispered when Coulson set the cup on the nightstand.
“They think not. But you’re bound to be sore. Keeping you with us took some doing.”
Coulson looked uncharacteristically rumpled. His jacket was gone, the top buttons of his shirt were open and the tie – smooth silk crushed and knot mangled beyond repair – looked more like a hastily settled noose than the elegant neckwear it should have been. There were dark shadows at the back of Coulson’s gaze, too, and when Natasha’s hand slipped into Clint’s and clung he returned the tight grip.
“Why?” he queried.
“Lack of oxygen.” Nat answered. He couldn’t see her face, but he heard the fine tremor in her voice and squeezed her hand. “You’d hung on for so long with so little...”
Clint wanted to reassure her, wanted to ask questions, wanted to know if they’d identified the drug he’d been injected with, wanted to... His body had other ideas. Just drinking a few sips of water had exhausted him and before he fully realised that there was still a drip in his arm and an oxygen line under his nose, he had drifted off to sleep once more.
ooO xXx Ooo
He felt better when he woke. He was still sore, but the throbbing in his head had subsided and the lack of nausea was a distinct bonus. Though when Clint saw the deep shadows under Coulson’s eyes and the gaunt look to the man’s cheeks he wondered who had actually paid the price for his recovery. Judging by the state of Coulson’s wardrobe, Clint had been out for a while. Phil had shed the omnipresent suit and was riding herd on a mountain of SHIELD paperwork dressed in jeans and a white tee, with a deep blue hoodie keeping off the chill that was the norm in Medical. The sight was so unexpected that Clint chuckled.
Which turned out to be a thoroughly bad idea. The coughing fit morphed into a bout of wheezing and gasping that sent machines beeping and doctors running. Worst of all, though, it removed Phil Coulson from Clint’s sight. The man had stepped out of the way at the first sign of the white-gowned invasion and now, after long minutes of eucalyptus-scented mist, injections and oxygen, Clint could no longer tell where Coulson was. Or if he was even still in the room.
Why that sent Clint spiralling into an honest-to-god flashback, he’d never be able to explain to himself or anyone else, but while he was gasping for breath and every cell in his body started to burn his mind went back into the cellar. And stayed for a long time.
He surfaced at the sound of his name and found the room dim and quiet, with only Coulson and Natasha by his side.
“It’s a trap,” he said softly, before his body decided that being awake was a bad idea. “I’m a trap.” He got his hands under him and pushed himself upright by degrees, stopping every time his chest started to tighten. It took some time before he had managed to manoeuvre himself the way he wanted. But at least he could see Phil and Nat without giving away how good it felt that he wasn’t alone.
“We’re aware.”
“You’ve been doing your damnest to tell us ever since we found you.”
“I have?”
“Yes,” Natasha nodded from her position at the foot of the bed. She was wrapped in a deep purple blanket and held a tablet in her hand. “They’ve isolated the drug they pumped into you.”
“It’s something that binds to my red blood cells, right?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The fact that I’m wheezing like a ninety-year-old asthmatic grandmother should be a clue,” Clint said bitterly. Enforced idleness never sat well with him. Enforced idleness and the inability to breathe as soon as he lifted a finger... that was worse than some of his worst nightmares. He rubbed both hands over his face. Slowly. “I hate being weak.”
“You’re not weak, Barton. You’ve been poisoned. Get it right!”
There was a surprising amount of bite in Phil Coulson’s tone. Clint grinned sheepishly when he realised how whiny he must have sounded. “Sorry.”
“Are you up for answering questions?”
“Sure.”
“What is the significance of the colour purple?”
“What?” Clint had noticed that only the walls in his room were the non-descript off-white all of SHIELD Medical was decked out in. Everything else – his sweats and tee, the bedding and even the chair covers – came in shades of purple. From the pale amethyst tee he wore to the deep maroon of the pillows and quilt on his bed. In his years with SHIELD, Clint had spent many hours in Medical, but the only colour he’d ever seen down here was the bright purple plaster the doctor liked to use for casts.
“Focus.” Natasha smacked him on the leg, indicating he’d zoned out.
“You know I like purple,” Clint stopped the shrug before he’d properly started. Best not to move. “It’s my favourite colour.”
“You’re restless even when you’re not conscious. You keep talking about purple, more specifically you’ve been saying that,” Nat looked down at the tablet she held, “only purple will save you.”
“Oh,” Clint managed a very small nod without any ill effects. “He kept saying that. And then he’d laugh. He had a really creepy, high-pitched cackle. Like a witch, you know?”
Phil suddenly leaned forward, intent in every line of his body. “You’re talking about the man who tortured you?”
“Yeah. I had no idea I even remembered that.”
“What else do you remember?”
“Pain,” Clint said and then wanted to take it right back. The sudden anguish in Phil’s eyes was hard to handle. “Burning pain, to be precise,” he continued, talking quickly in his best colourless mission-debrief voice. “The cellar was cold and I could see my breath like steam rising off me. It was surreal. Lights were bright, so I’m not sure how many people there were. Two, maybe? The main guy was very tall, and skinny as a slat.”
“Hair colour? Eyes?”
“Nothing, sorry,” Clint said after a moment. “He had long, thin fingers, the nails bitten right down. And he talked continuously. Just spouting venom, you know?”
He was starting to fight for breath when Natasha uncoiled herself from the foot of the bed. She spread the purple blanket across his quilt and leaned to place a soft kiss on his cheek. “Try to remember what he said,” she breathed in his ear. “He sounds like he loves to monologue.”
Clint nodded obediently and tried to catch a last glimpse of Phil Coulson’s face before fatigue dragged him under again.
ooO xXx Ooo
A week later Clint had reached the end of his tether. Flashbacks he could handle. Injuries he could deal with. But this debilitating weakness that forced him to rest for two hours after a simple trip to the bathroom... that he couldn’t take. He felt so cut off from everything going on at SHIELD, he might as well be back out on the streets by himself.
Phil Coulson came by with coffee and news twice a day. Natasha had been buried in a lab for the last two days. Clint saw doctors and nurses. He had a daily blood transfusion. He was poked and prodded and injected with this and that. His every breath and heartbeat was monitored... but his condition didn’t improve. Physical exertion immediately led to shortness of breath and if he pushed it his body shut down. And now someone had thought it a good idea to have a psychologist annoy the crap out of him. The woman was pale-haired and softly spoken, and she really didn’t know when to take no for an answer and shut up.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake – give it a rest!” Clint jumped up so abruptly the woman took a hasty step back and almost tripped over her chair.
“Agent Barton,” she huffed. “The treatment protocol-“
“I don’t give a flying fuck about the treatment protocol,” Clint roared. “I want you to stop bugging me!” He crossed the room, desperate to get away. “There’s no earthly reason why you have to keep harping on about it,” he continued his tirade. “Is there a law against liking purple all of a sudden?”
He spun and fixed a glare on her.
“Of course not.”
The soft placating voice, pitched low to soothe the hysterical or stupid, pushed Clint’s ire up a few notches. On a normal day he could sit hours without twitching a muscle. Right then, he just couldn’t keep still. Agitated and irate, he paced up and down the small room. “Then would you explain to me,” he grated through his teeth, “why the fuck this even matters?”
He spun when no answer came, and it was only when he saw the woman’s wide eyes that he realised he was moving – marching! – up and down his hospital room without any trouble breathing. It was also the moment he realised he was warm and getting more uncomfortable by the moment. His skin grew tight and hot, shivers flashed through him like discharges of static electricity, and then the burn started deep inside his body.
It was a pain he remembered. It grew along with his memory until he wanted to claw his skin off, open his veins and shed the blood that was boiling inside him. He gritted his teeth against the agony, desperate to keep all sounds locked deep in his throat. His mind supplied a soundtrack of high-pitched cackling laughter to accompany the pain and Clint threw himself onto his bed.
“Get Coulson,” he gasped before he buried his face in the pillow to muffle his screams and tried to lose himself in an ocean of purple.
ooO xXx Ooo
Fingers, warm and strong, wrapped closely around his and the smell of sandalwood surrounded him once more. Clint came back from where he’d hidden from the agony and found a smile for the man sitting beside his bed.
“Thank you for bringing me back.”
“I will always bring you back, Clint. You know that, right?”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
The fingers that had gripped his so tightly slid loose, but they weren’t withdrawn. Instead, Phil’s thumb rubbed circles over the inside of Clint’s wrist until warmth bloomed in Clint’s chest and he blinked up curiously at the other man.
“Do you think you can move?”
Clint would have done anything to have Phil Coulson continue to look at him like that. Like he mattered. He was about to answer, but all that came out was a sigh as the door of his room opened and a very angry pale-haired woman marched in.
“Agent Coulson.”
Going by the glare, the woman wished Coulson to the antipodes.
“What are you doing here?”
“I am relocating Agent Barton.”
“You cannot. I have not yet completed my assignment.”
“He won’t tell you, doctor,” Coulson said in his most reasonable voice. “But being a woman, you should be able to guess.”
“I should?” Her brow wrinkled and she scrunched up her eyes. If she had suddenly sprouted whiskers, she’d have looked like a cat just before it yawned. Clint couldn’t look away, so he saw her eyes widen and her cheeks flush. “Women like it?”
Coulson shrugged and grabbed Clint’s pack from where it rested by the foot of the bed. “It makes his eyes pop,” he said, smiling. “Women like it a lot.” Then his voice turned brisk and professional. “I’m taking charge of Agent Barton, doctor. I need to take him offsite to debrief, but I assure you that he will be attending his next scheduled assessment session.”
Clint didn’t argue when Coulson held out a hand and helped him to his feet. He merely stood and turned towards the door. He wasn’t looking forward to further questioning, but right now he’d take it if it got him out of medical.
“How are you holding up?” Phil wanted to know as Clint slumped against the elevator wall.
“’s ok,” he mumbled, wrapping his arms around himself. He wore nothing but sweats and a long-sleeved t-shirt and the chill was getting to him.
“I have your winter clothes in my office,” Coulson said. “Nat warned me that you’d be feeling cold after this attack.”
“Was it bad?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I remember getting angry, then pain, then... nothing.”
Coulson was silent for a long time, then he suddenly reached and gripped Clint’s wrist. “It was bad. But you’re unbelievably strong. They all said you wouldn’t make it. But you did.”
Clint had never seen Phil Coulson’s eyes look so soft, heard his voice so full of conviction. It chased a little of the cold from his mind and out of his soul. “What did I do?”
“You calmed down.”
ooO xXx Ooo
When Clint woke in Coulson’s apartment, Natasha had joined them amidst a flurry of papers and printouts.
“Have they found something useful?” Clint yawned. He leaned on one hand to push himself upright, while he rubbed sleep out of his eyes with the other. Just that small bit of exertion made breathing a little more of a chore. Clint was tuned to it now, the way his brain struggled to make sense of his even breathing and the continued lack of oxygen.
“They found something,” Natasha confirmed, lips turned down at the corners.
“Wanna share?”
“No.”
Natasha sounded unusually disgruntled and it drew a smile from Clint. “You’re gonna tell me I was right. Right?”
She sighed. “Yes, you were right. The compound binds to your red blood cells and prevents them from carrying oxygen. Or rather, enough oxygen.”
She fell silent again and Clint felt a frown beginning to tug on his brow. It wasn’t like Nat to make him beg. Not about something as serious as this.
“What else?” He asked when neither Nat nor Coulson made any attempt to explain further. “What about when I got angry? Does the compound react with adrenaline?”
“Yes. But not the way we thought.” She picked up her tablet and stared down at it as if it held the secrets of the universe. Without looking up, she continued: “As you thought, the compound reacting with the adrenaline in your bloodstream creates that burning sensation. But the adrenaline is not neutralising the compound or dissolving it or anything. The results say the two combine to create a very powerful electromagnetic field. Clint,” Natasha’s voice was very soft, almost apologetic, “they turned you into a bomb.”
Clint was aware that both Natasha and Coulson were holding their breath, waiting for a reaction. He sat still, looked straight ahead and took one slow breath after another. It wasn’t a hard thing to do. He didn’t even need to focus on anything purple. Deep down, in some corner of his soul he’d not dared to look into before, he’d already known what had been done to him. He’d already decided that he would fight. And win. After all, there was a perfectly good reason why Clint loved purple – and it wasn’t the fact that it made his eyes pop. Whatever that meant.