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The intel they received was wrong. That was the only way to explain how what was supposed to have been only a “smattering” amount of enemy officers had turned into far greater numbers that seemed to spill from the crevasses of the compound. The compound had been acting under the guise of a therapeutic psychiatric treatment facility nestled in the wilds of nature, but really, there was only one “patient.” Bucky Barnes had been kidnapped by Zemo some time ago, and now Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers, and Barnes’ boyfriend, Clint Barton, had come in for the extraction.
Natasha spun in a roundhouse kick and took down two HYDRA agents coming at her side by side; she delivered a shock with her widow’s bites to further incapacitate them. She felt arms wrap around her neck and chest, and she quickly fell to her knees while pulling the offender forward, over her head, and onto his back on the ground in front of her. His head smacked the pavement with a slap, and he was sprawled out next to his two companions. She took the brief respite she was given to find Steve up on the roof of the facility fighting his own set of enemies. The two of them were buying time for Clint to enter the building and seek out Bucky.
The relief she felt that Steve seemed to be doing alright taking on multiple HYDRA coming his way splintered as an explosion went off right in his face. Natasha’s mouth fell open in a gasp, and her eyes widened as Steve careened right off the edge of the eight story structure into the courtyard landing a few feet from her. He was briefly still; Natasha ran toward him just as he roused himself. Overhead, a quinjet fired upon what was left of the rooftop HYDRA agents. Their surroundings seemed to have cleared of the enemy, the rest having fled and been rescued by their own teammates when bullets began raining down.
“Maria, we need to get Steve out of the field; HYDRA set off a blast right in front of him, and he lost consciousness after being knocked from the building. He’s conscious now but needs to be assessed for a head injury. Also has some facial burns, but those seem surprisingly minor considering that blast looked like it could’ve melted his face.”
“Bet they won’t even scar,” Steve slurred slightly. “But, Romanoff, I’m good, I can stay, I’m—”
He was cut off by swaying a bit on his knees as he was trying to get up. He paused and blinked to try and get his bearings, but, instead, doubled over, turned away from where Natasha was crouching in front of him, and vomited.
“Sure, Steve,” she muttered. She addressed Agent Hill over the comms again. “Definite head injury, Maria.”
“Alright, sending a team your way to get him.” Hill turned her attention to the third person their team had on the ground. “Barton, are you in?”
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Clint moved through the corridors of the facility quickly and stealthily, arrow nocked and ready to pierce whatever got in the way of his objective. He felt blood trickle along the contours of his face and aches along his torso that indicated he was probably going to have some impressive bruises. He’d fought through his own gauntlet of HYDRA to get in.
“Yeah, searching for him now,” he said, his voice quiet.
Clint methodically checked each room he came across. The first rooms he encountered at the entrance of the building looked like typical rooms he’d seen in doctors’ offices. There was an intake room complete with a receptionist desk that took up a corner of the room and opened up into a new hallway that took him further in. There were several identical rooms made to look like exam rooms with a table for the patient to lie on to be examined, and instruments used to look into eyes and ears hung on the wall next to stethescopes. Sink areas with jars containing tongue depressors and cotton balls, and a small area with a computer for nurses to enter in patient information. But the further Clint went into the bowels of the building, the rooms became darker in nature.
He’d come across a lab straight out of an old horror film; he half expected Vincent Price as a lunatic scientist to make an appearance. It’d been abandoned with such haste that differently shaped glass flasks still bubbled and roiled with their contents. Weigh stations had been abandoned and assorted powdered chemicals lay spilled on the balances and tables. Clint had no way of knowing if any of these things could cause a fire or explosion just by accidentally being mixed together or heated to temperatures that were too high; he just wanted to find Bucky and get the hell out of the place. His attention was pulled towards a room further down where he could now hear small thuds and the squeaks of leather rubbing against metal.
“I’m heading your way, Clint,” Natasha suddenly said through the tiny speaker in his ear. “The team has Steve safely in the quinjet.”
“Roger that,” Clint acknowledged cautiously walking toward the sounds.
When Clint slid the door open to the room at the end of the hall, he stopped at the threshold and stared. He stood immobile. Bucky, eyes closed, was strapped at his wrists, ankles, and across his chest to a reclined dentist’s chair, a serpentine IV line ran from a bag of cloudy, jaundiced liquid into his inner elbow. Clint knew by looking at the contents of the bag that whatever mad scientists produced this concoction couldn’t be bothered to attempt to purify it in any way. Bucky weakly tugged at his restrained wrists and bicycled his feet in their bonds.
Bucky mumbled something incoherent, but then suddenly shouted, “Clint, no!” He began to thrash and yank ferociously at the straps tethering him to the chair, but he was unable to move very much as the straps were pulled as tight as they could go. Clint jolted from his stupor and rushed to his partner. He could see where the thin, delicate skin of Bucky’s wrists was raw and flayed where he’d struggled.
“I’m here, Buck! I’m gonna get you loose!”
Natasha followed the sound of Clint’s voice and the ensuing commotion.
Clint found himself fighting against Bucky’s hysteria, trying to get a grip on the restraints to undo them. He’d grasp the straps and buckles to undo them only to find them snatched out of his grasp when Bucky fought to free himself.
“Buck, babe, it’s me; it’s Clint! Babe, you gotta be still, so I can get you outta these things,” Clint said trying to break through his companion’s delirium. “You’re hurting yourself; that leather rubbing on your wrists is making them bleed.”
Natasha burst into the room and immediately went to help Clint free their teammate. While she finally latched onto a flailing wrist, Clint grabbed Bucky on either side of his face to still his head which tossed from side to side.
“Bucky, open your eyes! It’s Clint! Look at me! I’m here; I’ve got you!”
The desperation in his voice finally smashed through Bucky’s frenzy because his sweetheart popped his eyes open. Clint met Bucky’s wild and teary blue eyes for a split second before Bucky abruptly went limp. He placed his fingers to the side of Bucky’s neck and felt a rapid but strong heartbeat. Clint took a deep breath, held it for five seconds, and slowly let it out in an effort to lower his own heart rate.
“Alright, let’s get him out of this chair and onto the jet.”
After he and Natasha freed Bucky, Clint hauled him up into his arms, one arm supporting his boyfriend’s knees, the other around his back. He hugged Bucky to his chest, and he and Natasha made their way out to where Maria, the other agents, and Steve were waiting in the quinjet sitting in the courtyard.
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“Romanoff, you don’t have to stay,” Steve said, trying to convince Natasha to go home and get some much needed sleep in her own bed in the comfort of her own home.
“You have a concussion, Steve; somebody has to wake you up every so often to make sure your brain doesn’t leak out your ears or something.” She smirked.
“There are nurses for that.”
“You’re not gonna talk me out of it.” She turned toward the doorway of his room where she knew Clint and Bucky were across the hall. “I’ve got three hurt friends in here; I’m staying until I know they’re safe and sound.”
Steve gave her a small smile when she turned back to face him. She settled into the hospital bed she’d pushed from the opposite side of the room.
“Steve, when I saw that explosion go off right in front of you, and you fell from the roof onto the ground, and then you didn’t get up? I was—” Natasha stopped and looked down, blinking quickly. She swallowed thickly.
“Hey, thank goodness for Super Soldier Serum, right? One of those times that makes me glad to be a lab rat,” Steve joked trying to break the heaviness that had begun to fall over the room. He then gestured to the side of his face. “And like I said, these burns aren’t even gonna scar.”
“Well, that’s the real miracle of the serum. Can’t have anything happen to that beautiful face.”
Steve flashed a toothy, cheesy, model-like grin in jest and succeeded in making Natasha laugh.
“Why is it so cold in hospitals?” She then pondered. “Can you spare one of those hundreds of blankets they gave you?”
“Hundreds or three, what’s the difference?” Steve asked rhetorically with a chuckle, handing her a navy blue hospital blanket. “I guess you rounded up.”
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It turned out that Clint suffered a couple of cracked ribs and needed a few stitches along one of his temples. As soon as the doctor left the room, Clint climbed out of his hospital bed and into Bucky’s. Clint insisted they wheel his bed into Bucky’s room, so he could keep watch over his partner and be there when Bucky woke up. The doctor tried to convince Clint that the nurses on the floor were more than capable of keeping an eye on the both of them, and that he need not fret over Bucky, but after losing Bucky for the months he was held by Zemo and HYDRA, Clint was having none of it.
He held Bucky, who still hadn’t woken up, close to his body and threaded his fingers through his long hair. Both he and Bucky enjoyed it when the other gently massaged their head and their brows. Often it would lull whomever was getting the rubdown into a peaceful slumber. Clint hoped he was providing Bucky with some peace after the mania he’d experienced earlier.
It was cramped, to say the least, with two grown, muscular men in the small hospital bed, but right now, Clint couldn’t imagine letting him go. If he let go, then Bucky could be taken from him again. He let out a sigh into his beau’s hair, but the next thing he knew, he was violently shoved away. Clint would’ve gone off the side of the bed if it hadn’t been for the plastic guard rails up.
“Get away!”
Clint’s eyes grew large, and he looked at his companion. Bucky was feral.
“Buck, it’s me!”
Bucky landed a right hook to Clint’s mouth, and Clint’s lip immediately bloomed with blood where his bottom teeth cut it. He licked it away as he fought off more blows delivered. He winced as he felt strong twinges of pain along his injured ribs as he and Bucky grappled.
“Bucky, stop! Hey, hey, hey, easy!”
Bucky’s chest heaved, his mouth was open and he gulped air, but he still attacked. Clint grasped Bucky’s hands; Bucky tried to wrench them from his hold, but Clint held fast. He threaded his fingers through Bucky’s; Bucky tried to breathe, but his breaths were shallow; his chest tightened as a vice of panic gripped his chest. He couldn’t breathe, and he felt like his heart would erupt right out of his chest. Clint recognized what was happening.
“Look at me,” Clint instructed.
“You’re - you’re - you’re not,” Bucky gasped. “Not real!”
Clint tightened his clutch on his beloved’s hands. If he didn’t help Bucky calm down, he was going to pass out again just as soon as he’d woken up. Clint hadn’t seen Steve and Natasha, who stood in the doorway, come over at the sound of the ruckus the two men were causing. Natasha moved to help, but Steve held her arm and shook his head slightly. More people getting involved would not help the situation.
“Look at me; look at me,” Clint said until Bucky acknowledged him by meeting his stare. “Feel that pressure? That’s me; I’m real, and I’m not letting go. I need you to breathe with me, okay? Let me know you’re hearin’ me.”
Bucky returned Clint’s tightened grip with his own.
“Good, real good,” Clint encouraged. “Alright, you’re gonna take a deep breath with me, and we’re going to hold it for five seconds, then we’re going to let it out slowly, okay?”
Bucky frantically nodded his head, still taking small, rapid wheezes, but he focused on Clint.
“In,” Clint said before taking a slow, deep breath. “Hold, two, three, four, five, and out.”
They repeated this sequence together a few times until Bucky’s breathing evened out. He slumped against Clint, their foreheads meeting, as the fight left him along with the adrenaline that had surged within him. They sat like that quietly for a moment; Clint smelled the sweat and dirt and stink that emanated from Bucky. He was probably part of that smell too.
“How about a shower, hm?” Clint suggested. “It’d make you feel a bit better.”
“Okay, but stay with me,” Bucky said softly.
“Oh, I’m joining you; I could use one too. I was serious, Buck; I’m real, I’m here, and I’m not leaving you.” Clint laid a gentle kiss to Bucky’s forehead, and leaned down to meet his eyes. A lop-sided grin crossed Clint’s face, and his lip stung where it cracked open again slightly. “Not real, huh? That mean hook you landed felt mighty real to me.”
Bucky’s face was down, his chin to his chest, but Clint thought he saw the tiniest of smiles on his lover’s face.
Natasha and Steve softly cleared their throats, and Clint turned to them, aware of them for the first time.
“I’ll get some soap and shampoo and things from the nurses for you,” Natasha said before she turned and left.
“And I’ll let ‘em know to have some hot food for you ready when you two finish; maybe a bit of soup and some crackers?” Steve asked.
“That’d be great; thanks,” Clint told him.
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Bucky stood under the gentle rain of heated water, his back to Clint’s front. His hands reached behind him as he held onto the sides of Clint’s thighs while Clint massaged the shampoo into his locks. The whole time they’ve been in the shower, Bucky has always had a hand on him. While Clint washed Bucky’s body, Bucky always kept a hand on his arm, or his back, or around the nape of his neck. Bucky was afraid if he let go, Clint would disappear, and Clint didn’t mind at all because as long as he felt Bucky’s touch, he knew Bucky was with him and he was safe.
Once Clint had washed all the soap out of Bucky’s hair and the water ran clear, Bucky turned and put his face in Clint’s chest.
“They convinced me you weren’t real. I let them convince me.”
Bucky sounded so disappointed in himself and so broken and so small. Clint held him tight.
“They were pumping you full of that shit, Buck; you didn’t do anything wrong, and you’re not weak. Fuck, you’re the strongest fucking person I know.”
“Doesn’t feel that way,” Bucky mumbled. “And I still feel like you could disappear on me.”
“Nope, not going anywhere,” Clint whispered in his ear. “Staying right here until you’re safe and sound.”
Clint reached a finger under Bucky’s chin to raise his face towards his and placed a kiss on his lips that lasted several seconds, a reassurance they were both really reunited together again.
“And even beyond that.”