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Anyone who says freezing to death is an easy way to go deserves a knife in the eye. A serrated one, because it’s not easy, it’s absolute fucking agony. At least until you get past a certain point where your brain is so compromised it starts thinking you’re pleasantly toasty, as opposed to actually freezing to death, and Clint isn’t there yet.
He gasps and coughs as another icy wave washes over his head in the darkness. Jesus fucking fuck. He’s been cold plenty of times in his life, lived on the streets, spent hours in the snow waiting for a mark, but this is something else, this is something much worse. He forgot how badly cold water hurts.
Natasha holds onto the front of his life jacket. Her ragged breath billows in the short, sharp flashes of strobe light from the beacon on his shoulder. With her pale skin, bluish lips and her dark-dyed hair plastered to her skull, she looks like a ghost.
”I’m so gl- glad I let you convince me to fly back with you tonight, Barton. Really.”
"You know me.” He tries to keep his teeth from chattering, but he can’t. “Always sharing the fun."
She makes a hitching, disgusted sound that lets him know exactly where he can shove this kind of fun.
He’s inclined to agree with her, because it’s almost midnight and they're twenty-five miles from the nearest shore. He has spotted the flashing light of Seismann’s life jacket a few times, so he knows the rookie is out there, but they’re further away from each other every time he sees it among the choppy waves. Other than that, he sees nothing but the massive darkness of the Baltic Sea.
"Reminds me of the f-first time I went swimming." Natasha's eyes are squeezed tightly shut. "Was dropped in a hole in the ice to see if I swam or sank. I swam."
"Not sure that qualifies as swimming. I got dunked an' tossed into a pond by a bunch of older kids." Clint blinks the freezing water from his eyes. They're starting to burn. The salt content isn’t all that high, but it's getting uncomfortable. "Sank like a rock. Didn't learn to swim until SHIELD."
"Word is Coulson had to drag you into the pool, that you were quaking in your little speedos."
"Please," he huffs.
Coulson had absolutely, unequivocally not had to resort to bribes to get him into the water that first time. Nope. Lies. Didn't happen. Only, it kinda did. Clint had been pretty much full-on phobic about putting his head under water back then. It’s not like it’s a problem these days, of course not, he learned how to swim, has taken all the classes and passed all the tests SHIELD requires of field operatives. So he swims just fine. He just... doesn't like it very much.
He catches another mouthful of frigid, brackish water and coughs. Christ. He’s never flying over open water again. Never. They’re going to have to tie him up and drag him onboard.
They’d been on their way back to the Gdansk base after having dispatched a pack of ruthless traffickers who shuttled refugees through Russia and up along the Finnish border with the promise of a better, safer life, only to leave them to die in the Karelian winter. With Natasha undercover as one of the refugees, SHIELD had been able to track their operation. The attack had been planned for tomorrow but had been pushed forward when the latest group of refugees, Natasha’s group, had been moved out of the base camp earlier than expected, and was being driven towards the remote logging road where SHIELD believed they would be ditched.
It had been a textbook ambush, over in a few seconds. Outmanned, outgunned, and unprepared, most of the traffickers had given up instantly. Only two had put up some resistance, and they had paid the ultimate price for it.
A group of seven adults and two children had arrived with Natasha, and Clint had taken one of the little girls, wrapped his arctic issue jacket around her, pulled the hood over her head and stuffed her ice cold hands into his gloves. She’d been unresponsive and limp as he’d carried her the through the snow to the waiting transporter.
In the rising twilight the teams that swept the area had found several bodies in the deep drifts that lined the road. Clint had looked away when they lifted the first little body from the snow. He had stood over the man that Seismann had shot, who had bled into the snow until there was no more red in him, and wished that the bastard had still been alive.
Natasha had stayed between him and the surviving traffickers until they had been taken away.
Clint, Seismann, and Natasha had left for Gdansk a few hours later with Gatlin as their pilot. Clint had commandeered a corner in the back of the jet as soon as they were airborne. He’d pulled his earbuds out of his bag, fired up his favorite playlist and closed his eyes. He had felt Natasha and Seismann’s eyes on him every now and then, but had pretended to sleep. He hadn’t had the energy to fake being okay.
He’d been on the brink of actual sleep, lulled by the monotone noise of the engines, when the jet had suddenly lurched, and the sound had changed into something dissonant and sharp. A few minutes later, Clint, Natasha, and Seismann had been treading water in the darkness, gasping and hyperventilating from cold shock as they watched the jet disappear under the dark surface, taking Gatlin with it.
There hadn't been anything they could do for him - Clint thinks he’d probably died on impact - and there had simply been no time to free him from the tangled metal and composite debris that had pinned him to the pilot’s seat.
Some newbies get puppies and rainbows and document drops on their first op. Seismann got dead children, a ditch into icy water, and a friend lost in its depths. Welcome to SHIELD, kid.
The icy water presses ruthlessly against every inch of Clint, and he's so cold, so fucking cold he can't remember what being warm feels like. By his estimate they've only been in the water maybe fifteen minutes, but as far as he's concerned that’s fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds too long, because he's shaking now. Not trembling, not shivering, shaking. He really, really hopes the emergency transmitters are working. SHIELD's Helsinki base is closest, but they're almost an hour out. An hour, then add a little time for the jet and the search and rescue crew to get flight-ready and airborne. He knows from the cold water survival training that with a water temperature in the high forties he's got maybe two hours before hypothermia kills him. He’ll be unconscious long before that, though. His life jacket will help keep his head above water, so he still has a chance. But Natasha, fuck, Natasha doesn’t have a life jacket, and that’s so very bad.
She’d been helping a freaked out Seismann get his on when they hit the water, and Clint knows he’s a hypocrite for being pissed off, because if he hadn’t been busy working through emergency checklists with Gatlin and giving a running update of their situation to the SHEILD air controllers, he would have done it himself.
The cold is already getting to her, he can see it, can hear it in the way her words are eroding around the edges. He makes sure her hands have a firm grip on him before he lets go and reaches down into the black water to the bottom buckle on his life jacket. She's smaller than he is, doesn't have the muscle mass he does, so hypothermia will hit her faster and harder. And without a life jacket she's forced to tread water, which is cooling her down even faster.
"What are you doing?" Her lips are trembling.
Clint swears as his clumsy fingers slip. He lifts them to his mouth and breathes on them, tries to get some dexterity back. Fuck. They ache so much. He tries again.
She catches on. "Forget it."
The buckle stubbornly refuses to open. "Not negotiable."
She grabs his hands, lifts them over the dark surface. "Y-you need to k-keep it."
"I’ll be fine."
"No, you won’t, and I won’t be able to h-hold on to you. Don't do that to m-m-me."
Clint knows she's right. He doesn't want her to be, but he’ll be able to stave off true hypothermia longer than her, and the tactically sound thing is for him to keep the life jacket. He wants so desperately to argue and fight her on this, because if the search and rescue team is just a little too late, he’ll be the one too compromised to keep her from disappearing under the dark surface. He struggles to find some other angle, something that will convince her to take the damn life vest, but he finds nothing.
"Fuck," he hisses. He doesn’t know what else to say.
Natasha nods her agreement to the sentiment.
"I’ll make you a deal," Clint says. He's pretty sure the words don't come out sounding quite the way they should, he can't make his lips move properly. "I’ll keep the life jacket and you don’t- you don't pull a Jack on me. You hear me, Romanoff?”
She squints at him. Her skin is impossibly pale. "Jack?"
"Come on. DiCaprio? Kate Winslet? I believe that my heart will go oooooon."
She gives a hoarse, shivery laugh. "Oh, god, my ears."
"Bite me. My Celine is fucking stellar." He shifts his grip on her jacket, tries to find a better one. "I'm a hit at Karaoke night." He has to keep her talking, because he knows this is prime dying conditions for both of them if they give into the siren song of lethargy that is closing in fast.
"You’ve never b-b-be--" She hisses when the word won't come out. Clint watches her take a deep, hitching breath before trying again. "You've never been on a Karaoke stage in your life."
"Not true."
"When?"
"Uh. Last year?" He slides his arms under hers, wraps her in an awkward hug. It’s difficult, his life jacket is bulky between them and her boots and clothes are pulling her down.
The darkness around them presses closer, disturbed only by the strobing flashes every few seconds. Clint is sure he can't possibly get any colder, but every endless minute proves him wrong. Talk, he reminds himself, but there's an iron band around his chest and it's so hard.
He does his best to keep up a somewhat coherent conversation with Natasha, making sure she contributes, even if it's just a word or two. All the while he scans the inky nothingness over her shoulder, strains his ears to hear anything over the sea and the howling wind that sends water crashing over their heads again and again. A few times he thinks he hears the distant roar of a jet, but it's wishful thinking, he knows that, because the recovery team won't be here for quite some time still.
He gets so focused on watching and listening for their rescue that it takes a while before he realizes that the conversation has turned into a stuttering monologue.
"Hey, no sleeping on the job." He tries patting her on the cheek, but he's so uncoordinated from the cold it ends up more of a slap.
She flinches in his grip, but doesn't open her eyes. “Cl’nt” Her fingers scrabble uselessly against his life jacket. "Don’ let go."
"I won’t. But you gotta talk to me." He presses his face against her wet, cold hair, feels the violent shivers under his cheek.
She goes perilously low in the water, but jerks when the water hits her mouth. She coughs and spits. He tries to hold her tighter, but his arms feel leaden. He can't feel his hands.
"Come on, Natasha. Keep talking."
"'Bout what?"
His brain goes curiously blank at her mumbled question, and it takes way too long for him to come up with something. With anything. He keeps running into dead ends.
-
-
Natasha keeps fading and Clint feels his own brain slow down. He can’t focus, his thoughts start straying more and more often into weird and circular patterns.
Keep talking, Barton, he reminds himself.
Keep talking.
Keep talking.
-
-
He jerks out of the fog he’s drifted into when his brain registers what he’s seeing.
Movement in the dark water.
“N‘tasha?” He has to say her name twice more before she reacts. “Are there sh-sharks here?“
"Whuh?"
"Sharks?" He has to know, because he's hit his head at some point. He can taste a hint of blood on his lips, and sharks can smell blood in the water miles away, right?
He flinches hard as something brushes up against his leg, and he squeezes his eyes shut. He holds onto Natasha and waits for the ripping pain. Please, let them find better prey. Juicier and fatter. Please, don't let them pull him down into the dark. He doesn't want to die like this. Not like this.
-
-
A white noise buzz is growing in his head, more of a sensation than an actual sound. Something must have gone sideways in a big way, but he can't remember what. Jesus Christ, he's cold. It hurts to hold on, but he mustn't let go. He’s not allowed to let go. Where's the extraction team? Did he fuck up the location? The time? He lifts his shaking arm above the surface and convinces his eyes to focus on his watch. He blinks at the jumble of small, backlit shapes.
He can't figure out what they mean.
-
-
Cold. Wind. Darkness. There isn't room for anything else in his head. He wants to curl up, wants to just close his eyes and go away for a little while, but if he does he might accidentally let go. He'll be in big trouble if he does. His face still hurts from the backhand he got when he came back without one of his mittens. He hadn't meant to lose it, honest.
-
-
Forget you're tired, Barton. Forget you're cold. Just get the goddamn job done. He has to hold on, it’s the most important thing in the world, but please turn off the light, it’s too bright, it’s hurting his eyes. He ducks his head against the glare and keeps holding on. For a short while he thinks he's got it under control, that he can do this, but suddenly he feels it slip out of his weakening grip. He grabs clumsily for it, for whatever it is he’s supposed to protect. He can’t lose it, he can’t. He thinks maybe he cries out, but the sound is snatched away by the furious roar that presses in from all sides. He tries to twist, tries to feel around in the water, but he's too numb. He's not sure he manages anything more than uncoordinated flailing.
The sky is white.
The water is frothing with rage over his failure.
He lost it. It's gone.
-
-
He’s in the water, then he’s not.
He’s in the air, then he’s not.
Careful hands cut him out of his wet clothes. Blankets, heat packs, warm air in a mask. He still shakes, shakes so hard his teeth hurt. A headset is placed over his ears, and he's asked questions that get lost in his brain before he can answer them. He keeps trying to tell them he lost something, something important, but they don’t seem to understand him, and when they do they don’t seem concerned. He gets frustrated and angry.
One of the crew pats his cheek to get his attention, and the headset comes alive with a crackle of static. "Your friend," the medic says in heavily accented English and points to the other side of the helicopter. "She’s here."
Clint blinks at him, confused, and the medic tells him again. Clint turns his head. Two other members of the helicopter crew are hunched over someone. Black hair, white skin – the lack of color throws him, and it takes him way too long to realize he's looking at Natasha.
Natasha. That was what was important.
How could he forget? How could he forget Natasha?
-
-
Fluorescent light fixtures pass above and Clint feels fall-down drunk. People around him. Rapid, clipped, no-nonsense voices. He doesn't understand what they're saying. He tries to look for Natasha, but he’s gently pushed back down.
He’s still cold to the core, but his skin feel like it’s being seared right off his body. Ice cold and burning. It’s a horrible sensation, painful and difficult to process, and he’s pretty sure he’s not very polite to the people who move around him, poke him, talk to him, because he just wants them to leave him alone. Go away, people.
He’s so damn tired.
Go. Away.
"What have I told you about threatening the medical staff, Barton?" Phil is suddenly standing at the foot of the bed in a heavy, unzipped winter parka.
Clint cracks his eyes open and looks around, sees a room he doesn’t remember being taken into. The lights are turned low, and there’s no one there but he and Coulson. Clint is covered with several blankets, and he’s hooked up to a slew of medical monitors. His skin still burns and stings fiercely.
His memory suddenly catches up with his groggy self and he struggles to sit up. He pulls at the oxygen tube on his face.
”Natasha?" His voice sounds scratchy and weirdly sleep-rough. He could have sworn he just blinked.
"She's here and awake,” Coulson reassures him. "Well, somewhat awake, at least. She’s been asking about you, but other than that it’s mostly been random curses." One side of his mouth twitches in amusement. "She's very creative. I've learned a couple of new ones."
"She okay?"
"They say she’ll be fine."
Clint slumps back down with relief. He flashes back to another face. He can't think of the name. "The rookie?"
"Agent Seismann is resting, too."
He closes his eyes. “Good. Okay, good."
God, he’s tired. And achy. His body feels like it weighs a ton. He licks his lips. They’re dry and chapped. He’s so thirsty.
Coulson can apparently both read minds and do magic, because a few seconds later Clint feels a gentle nudge and when when he opens his eyes, a glass of water has materialized in front of him. Coulson hovers close as he wraps his unsteady hands around it and drinks.
"How long?" he asks.
Coulson pulls a chair up next to the bed and sits down. "How long you were in the water?"
Clint nods.
"A little over an hour."
“Felt a lot longer.” He drains what’s left in the glass and hands it back to Coulson
His hands brush over the blanket, and he hisses at the pain. He lifts them and looks at them properly for the first time. The burning is so bad he almost expects the skin to be sloughing off, but his fingers look the same as usual, just red and a little swollen.
"Hurts," he says.
He blinks as he realizes he’s put his hands out to Coulson like he’s a kid wanting someone to kiss them better. He pulls them back, mortified. Why did he do that?
Coulson thankfully doesn’t say anything about it, just nods. "I know. Warming up is not pleasant."
Clint flexes his sore fingers, embarrassed. “Did they give me something? Pain killers?” That would explain why he’s so out of it.
"Just fluids and oxygen. Are you in pain?"
"Head feels like oatmeal, 's all."
"It’s the hypothermia." Coulson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a chocolate bar. He tears it open, breaks off a small piece for himself and hands the rest to Clint. "It’ll pass when your temperature is all the way back to normal and you’ve rested some."
Clint peels the wrapper back and takes a bite. Chocolate and coconut. Tastes wonderful, but Jesus, even chewing is an effort.
"Where exactly is 'here'?" he asks.
"Klaipeda, Lithuania. The local coast guard could get to you faster than we could. They pulled the three of you out." Coulson’s expression goes grim. "We’re still looking for Gatlin."
Oh, right. Gatlin. Something scratches at the edge of Clint’s memory, but he can’t get a hold of it. He knows the jet crashed, but it’s mostly just the memory of sounds and violent movement. It feels like trying to remember a dream, knowing that the details were crystal clear just a while ago, and now they’re beyond reach.
Coulson sits back. "The Mayday went out 23:38. You disappeared off the radar four minutes later. Do you remember what happened?"
Clint tries once again to get a hold of the slippery memories that float just beyond reach, but he can’t.
"That’s okay,” Cookson tells him. “We’ll find the flight recorders soon enough. Do you remember anything at all?"
"Yeah. Was cold."
"I bet. Anything else?”
"Sharks."
Coulson’s brows go up. "Sorry?"
"They were going to eat me." Clint pulls his feet up, suddenly wanting them close and safe. It’s so stupid, he knows it’s stupid, he’s in a goddamn bed now, not in the water, but his insides feel tight just thinking about rows of razor teeth and being pulled down into the icy darkness.
Coulson glances up at the heart rate monitor, then back. "It’s the Baltic Sea, Clint," he says gently. "There are no sharks here."
That’s not right. Clint saw them.
"The cold makes you confused, can make you hallucinate."
No, he'd seen them. Really. He had.
Hadn't he?
"Eat," Coulson reminds him. "It'll help."
Clint is too tired to keep arguing, so he obediently takes another small bite of almost-Almond Joy.
"When I get out of here I’m going somewhere hot as hell," he says through a mouthful of chocolate. "Vegas maybe. I'm gonna camp out in the desert during the day and in a sauna at the Bellagio at night." He rubs at his eyes with his sore fingers. "Think they'll bring a blackjack table up there if I pay enough?"
Coulson laughs quietly. "I'm pretty sure that would violate both Nevada state legislation and the house rules, but if you behave and don’t give me any more gray hairs, I’ll see what I can do to facilitate a short-term assignment somewhere warm."
Clint is ambushed by a yawn. “Sweet.”
"Rest. You’re exhausted."
Clint closes his eyes again. Amen ten thousand times to that.
A few seconds later he hears rustling and cracks one eye open. Coulson is on his feet.
"Leaving?”
"No, just making myself comfortable." Coulson shrugs out of the heavy parka and drapes it over the back of the chair with a wry smile. "Not everyone gets a bed and the royal treatment, you know." Something chirps and he extracts his phone from his pocket. "I will check up on Natasha and Seismann again in a while."
Clint watches him walk to the window on the other side of the room, phone to his ear. He still feels a strange kind of chill deep in his muscles, but he’s slowly getting warmer. Another yawn breaks through. His body is begging for rest.
Coulson’s quiet conversation soon turns from words to a soft blanket of sound. Clint is almost asleep when he feels what's left of the candy bar being carefully pried from his fingers, and then it’s lights out for real.
* * * *
He jerks half-awake during the early morning hours, reaching into the darkness for something that isn’t there, something he lost. But then there's a familiar voice that tells him it’s not gone, it’s safe, he did his job well. He can sleep now.
So he does.
~ The End ~