Fill in the Blank - Clintasha

5

Clint woke to a sudden deluge of icy water being poured over his head.

His eyes shot open, a yelp of shock leaving his mouth as he flailed, trying to get away from the unholy spray. The surface he lay on was smooth and slippery, he couldn't get a grip on it, and that only made him panic further.

To his surprise a pair of hands clamped around his wrists and stopped him from struggling, the water cutting off before he could shout any more. Clint looked up to see Natasha hovering over him, a concerned expression on her pretty face. A series of colourful curses left his mouth in a rush, but Clint couldn't hear them. No hearing aids, then. One of his eyes was swollen shut but he tried to look around; dizzy and nauseous and really fucking cold.

He was in a bath tub without a shirt on, shuddering as the shower above his head dripped several more freezing droplets down his back. The room itself was tiny, more an en-suite than a bathroom. The once white tiles were stained an ugly moss green.

"Jesus fuck, why would you do that?!" he spluttered, hoping he sounded just as affronted as he felt.

"You [---] [dirty?]," she replied with a casual shrug; any worry wiped clean from her expression in the blink of an eye. She looked a little paler than usual, but cleaner than before, her hair hanging limply around her face, a frown on her lips. For a second Clint had the crazy idea to ask her what was wrong until he remembered they didn't exactly do that.

Instead, he nodded slowly, his head a great deal heavier than he remembered. A headache began to thud dully behind his temples but everything else hurt twice as bad so Clint wasn't worried. He shook his head, sending droplets of water everywhere. "'Course I was."

Natasha poked him a few times, asking him a few disjointed questions. The date, the president, what was 2+2. Clint answered as best he could, but judging by the look on her face, his answers were less than satisfactory. How comforting.

Everything that happened in that base was slowly coming back to him as he shivered in that unhygienic little bathroom. He remembered Natasha's blood spewing across the ground, the vivid red stark against the grey stone. Clint frowned up at her, noticing little things.

How she held herself differently now, how heavily she leaned against the edge of the bathtub, how all the blood drained from her face when she moved a certain way. There was a pale blue bruise forming around her eye and another at her jaw, her lip split in two places and her movements sluggish with exhaustion.

Despite all this, Natasha began pressing a small bag of ice against Clint's head, her face expressionless. He winced when she pressed a little too hard on a sore spot. "Hey, hey watch it," he murmured, bringing a hand up to do it himself before she batted it away impatiently.

"Idiot, American," she muttered in irritation, but stopped pressing so hard. "[---] could h-[ave? alf?] died."

Clint snorted, a smirk tugging at his lips as another shudder ran through his body. "Yeah, but you should've seen the other guy."

She shook her head at him and he grinned back, still a little woozy from what he was sure had been another breathtaking concussion. They sat for a while in a comfortable silence. Clint could feel himself begin to warm up again, his jeans drying off and the unforgiving summer heat seeping into his bones like it had never left.

"Hey, didn't see Bucky in there, did you?" he found himself asking when he couldn't stand the silence any longer. She shook her head, not meeting his eyes.

"Fuckin' knew it," he groaned, his head thudding against the edge of bath, exhausted. "He was never there to begin with, was he?" Clint let out a long breath. "You lied."