Chapter Text
Luis is nodding off when the floor to ceiling curtain bordering Clint's "hospital room" jostles him from almost-sleep. The oval of aluminum tubing suspended from the ceiling makes the most godawful noise when the hooks looped through the top of the fabric are slid along it. He knows it's Natasha immediately because she's stealthy. The curtain makes only the faintest sound, versus the metal-on-metal rattlescreech that has him clenching his teeth and jolting up when the medical staff whip it open in the middle of the night.
He can't blame them for not giving a fuck anymore. They were working round the clock for a week after the battle and even a few weeks later they still have a lot of patients - mostly people Red couldn't fully heal with max allotments of his blood, whose injuries are too serious not to be monitored. It's a waiting game for when it's safe for follow up treatments; most have already had a second and will need a third. A select few didn't react well to the Soldier blood and are left to what conventional medicine can provide, for fear they won't survive another round.
As the only Soldier with unpolluted blood, the big ginger had saved so many after the battle, Banner as well with the stockpile they'd drawn from Buck and the others before Zola's arrival. The doctor looks like the walking dead these days, his eternally unruly hair taking on a life of its own - Luis can't help but think that he needs a good hair oil. Despite everyone's best efforts, many had been beyond help. All in all, they'd lost over a third of the population. It would have been over half without the Soldier blood, total decimation without the Soldiers themselves to fight.
Every single one of the grays had nearly died in the battle. Many of the townspeople, even those who had been afraid or distrusting of them before, now venerate them as heroes. It makes Winter uncomfortable when they thank him, or offer him gifts, especially their blood. It reminds the Soldier of the drinkers worshipping Crossbones, of the fanatic with the ten scratches on his face who had carried Steve to Zola. The kid had been publicly defiled by the creature in return for his loyalty and Luis thinks after seeing it he'll never be able to finish in someone's mouth ever again.
Winter is treated like the emissary of his kind, the other Soldiers blank-faced (not acclimated yet, is the excuse they use for their odd behavior, still hiding the Soldiers' limiters from the town, Red hiding his absence of one from all who know about them save Luis). Luis tries to tell Winter he did a good thing, a brave thing, that he saved Claptrap, and it's okay for people to be grateful. There were people the Soldier - and Luis for that matter - couldn't save though. Some of the people who meant the most. Nothing can change that, but the younger man is trying to hold it together for everyone else, like always, offering support and comfort as much as he can to anyone he can. Winter on the other hand just silently does the tasks given him, on the road more than not lately in pursuit of the enemy.
"Wasn't expecting you back from your run til the morning," Luis half-whispers to Nat, trying not to wake Wanda in the next "room," which is just another curtain enclosure a few feet away.
He's been visiting the former professor a lot too since she's right "next door." She's awake here and there, lucid, bright, even funny. But sometimes she just talks nonsense or goes into fits - he wonders if the red is to blame for her condition, since her wounds are long healed. Fucking wreckless Steve. She was alive though, and he doesn't know what part the serum played in that.
Occasionally, she calls for Simon. They'd buried him, glasses still on and speckled in his own blood, with all the others. The Claptrappers laid their family, friends and neighbors out in the bottom of the moat once the Soldiers cleared it of debris. They'd had to do the same with the enemy - there just wasn't enough kindling or fuel to burn so many bodies, or the time and labor to expend on digging real graves. Their own people went face up, head to feet, arms crossed over their chests, in a single layer. A piece of the shattered wall was placed on each of their foreheads, to memorialize their bravery, to symbolize that - like the wall and its inventor - they were destroyed protecting their community.
There had been so many bodies that some of the enemy were double-stacked and there was not one foot of the entire moat floor without a corpse laid out on it. The Xers and cannibals were put in face down. Looking in the direction they're headed, one of the older people had said as she started to place them that way, and the others had nodded and followed suit. Luis cursed himself because he still felt bad in a way for the Xer dead, the ones who probably didn't want this, who just went along to survive. He'd been them. The dead were covered with a few feet of soil so the trench was still deep enough to protect the community, especially necessary with the wall partially collapsed and the gate just blocked with trailers. There was little fear of the corpses being dug up by animals - nothing big survived the nearly decade-long drought in this area.
Luis yawns, gives Nat a tired smile, trying to push away his melancholy or at least pretend.
"It is morning, technically," Nat retorts. "It's four. You look like shit. Well, as much like shit as you can look, pretty boy." Nat smirks, grips his chin and tilts his head back, eyeing him as she turns a bit more serious. "When was the last time you slept? I could turn those bags under your eyes into two lovely change purses, if money were still a thing."
The assassin releases him and moves to soundlessly reposition a chair from the foot of the bed next to the one the green-eyed man is using. She glances at his hand, tangled with Clint's, gives the faintest frown at the archer's limp fingers. As far as Luis is concerned, this is all Fury's fault. Rumlow - or one of his associates - would have inevitably come looking for the crate whether Winter and Steve were in Claptrap or not. Nick signed his people's death warrants when he brought the box here.
Luis will be more than happy to blame Fury for them handing out the blue in those tasty little margaritas when the time comes to own up to that. And he's sure it will. As Zola found out the hard way, there are consequences to playing God. He notes how Nat looks near perfect, despite being filthy. You'd never guess she's been on run after run for several weeks, hunting down and killing the smaller bands of Xers and Reavers still lingering in the area, that her husband was in a coma, that her girlfriend and one of her closest friends had been killed. Luis wants to ask her how she's feeling, physically. Better, faster, stronger? He hasn't seen so much as one yawn from her in weeks.
"I was sleeping, before you so rudely and thoughtlessly came to check on your husband," he jests instead, one side of his mouth quirking up in a grin as he tries to push down his constant guilt and fear about handing out super serum to an entire unwitting town.
They'd already had a rash of people who showed up at the med facility nearly two weeks after the battle ended with mysterious symptoms. Some had minor injuries left untreated, either because they were unwilling to take help away from someone more in need or because wounds remained after receiving the max of blood for more serious things. They didn't have infections but seemed feverish, out of it. Some who showed up in this condition had no injury at all. A few from both groups had slipped into comas but came out. If only Clint would get the hint - naptime is over!
Even Paul had been admitted briefly. He had been an accountant before the Collapse, was good with numbers and spreadsheets, so he'd been put in charge of Jasper's old job keeping inventory. A couple of long-term residents complained - how could they trust this outsider?! - so they were assigned to assist. Paul could be charming as hell when he wanted to. He won them over pretty fast and they stayed on as muscle (sometimes people didn't like to hear "no" to their requests for supplies), happy to be putting boxes on shelves instead of hauling bodies. Paul and Jasper were reviewing some numbers when the petite man had just fallen over. It was scary at the time when Luis was drawn from Clint's "room" by Jasper's yelling, but in retrospect it was sort of adorable how frantic he'd been. Paul is still doing the whole "we're just staying friends" thing, even after his stay at the med facility - like anyone believes that except Jasper.
Luis has more than a suspicion about the cause of these medical phenomena, but there's no reason to alarm anyone yet. Keeping the blue a secret is what Jasper and Nat think is best and he agrees. For now. Though he's tried to at least get them to bring Banner into the loop. He was a medical genius after all - Luis had seen him on magazine covers before the collapse. Ultimately those with the mysterious symptoms all recovered and the doctor had chalked it up to shock, exhaustion, or maybe ingesting something contaminated.
"Doc tells me you're here every night," Nat says almost like an accusation, almost like she knows he's thinking about Bruce. "He also says Clint's vitals are stable. You could sleep at home. There's nothing to do but wait. Stop being so fucking dutiful. You're making me look bad."
She grins and bumps his shoulder with her own. They've fucked a good number of times since the battle but that doesn't mean they fall asleep in each other's arms or kiss in public or take windy walks together. Little gestures like this have become their thing, this modicum of affection disguised as playfulness.
"Home. Greta's you mean? There's twelve displaced people piled in there right now. My stuff's at Ste...at Buck's. "
"Sleep there then. The place is just empty when he's not here."
That wasn't entirely true. The Soldiers were staying there too. Not that they were given more than the briefest respite from their duties. Luis worries about 21, about the toll it would take mentally to not have more than an hour or two of sleep a day with no limiter to keep the exhaustion at bay. He pushes away thoughts of what the chronic fatigue is doing to himself.
"I think Clint'll wake up soon. One of us should be here to answer his questions when he does," Luis offers.
She gives him a look - your optimism is touching but ultimately foolhardy.
"No really," he continues. "He mumbles a lot lately, calls for you. And me. And..." Luis breaks off - they don't talk about Win; it's an unwritten rule of their...he's not sure relationship is the right word. "Tommy even. And somebody named Barney. Like the kids' show."
"Wouldn't put it past him to have nightmares about it. He's afraid of people in those big costumes. Like sports mascots."
"Really? Mascots and possums."
"And when twins speak in unison. And water too deep to see the bottom. He told me once," she changes her voice, imitating the archer, "there could be a loch ness down there!"
Luis laughs, sudden and genuine, and she gives a little smile. He puts a hand over his mouth not to wake Wanda. Nat makes a show of picking lint off Clint's arm and gown, smoothing wrinkles in his blanket as if annoyed by them rather than looking for an excuse to touch him.
"How is he?" Luis finally asks after a long silence.
Natasha sighs, the you already know so why are you even asking, dumbass sigh. He's learned the meaning behind most of her sound effects. The blessing of having a photographic memory is he remembers every time she's done a thing and the surrounding context so eventually he can see patterns. The curse is he can't pretend she means something else, something more palatable. She had made that sound to Clint a lot - he didn't care for that.
Luis doesn't think the archer asked things because he didn't remember the answer or couldn't figure it out - he just didn't trust his own judgment to be accurate. Working on Clint's self-esteem is at the top of his to-do list when (not if, he reminds himself forcefully, when) the man wakes up. Right after telling him their girlfriend and his best friend (baby brother) didn't make it. He really should have a fat blunt ready for the occasion. They'll both need it.
And after that, Clint will need Nat, need her to really be there emotionally. He's working on that, picking his way forward slowly like walking through a minefield. Luis releases the archer, reaches over and takes Nat's hand very carefully from where she's fiddling with the sheet, moves it to rest on Clint's. She makes a face, then turns her expression off completely, but she leaves her hand. Luis is so preoccupied with work, and Winter when he's in Claptrap, he just won't have as much time to give the archer as he'd like when he comes to. Clint already suffered from a huge deficit of affection, and with the loss he was about to have laid on him, it would become near bottomless.
"So Buck's the same," Luis follows up quickly, to not give Nat the satisfaction of saying it herself in that duh tone he knows she will.
"Sorry," she says.
She could just be apologizing about Winter's state, but there was something in her tone, like she had read the whole series of steps in his mind. Nat was now very familiar with his ability to preemptively strike before her knee-jerk reaction to be an asshole surfaced. He can tell she's regularly shocked at how good he is at reading her (partly because of not forgetting a single thing and partly because, no matter how much he tries not to, he pays attention), at how he somehow doesn't really take her shit but never actively starts a confrontation either. Luis had gotten the idea Clint would bottle up his displeasure until he blew, then come directly at her, boosting all her shields to max power. The green-eyed man is more circuitous, trying to never put her on the defensive.
"It's just..." Nat pauses. "Babysitting Buck is getting exhausting. He's supposed to be helping lead these missions and he's too caught up in slaughtering the poor bastards to be much use tactically. It's like he thinks every single one of them is personally responsible." For Steve and Win, being the implication. "He runs in all fanged out and makes a huge mess. It's starting to scare some of the others. I mean, look at me."
There's a lot of dried blood spatter on her, and what he thinks is brain matter in her hair.
"He do the thing where he double hand squeezes their head till it bursts like a ripe melon?"
Like a ripe cantaloupe, his brain supplies, flashing back to the concoction Red had mixed at the pub under his direction.
"You say that so nonchalantly. How many times have you seen him do that? This was my first time having the pleasure."
"That's what she said," Luis offers coyly, then hums thoughtfully. "Just the once. But the guy was probably going to rape me so..."
He doesn't mean to say it. It just slips out. He's so tired.
For just a second, Nat is giving him a look. It's similar to the one Winter had made that day after he'd killed the stranger. Concern, anger, fear, disgust, protectiveness. She stows it more quickly than the Soldier had, even more uncomfortable showing the depth of her emotion. Winter had grown though. Nat could too. Her hand is still on Clint's, after all.
"The longer you leave that shit in your hair, the more it will tangle," Luis changes the subject.
She gives a side smile, vaguely mocking. "My little hairdresser."
"Admit it, your curls have never had as much definition as since I started taking care of them."
"And you never realized you were a little gay?" she says shaking her head - this is what they usually do, joke and jab at each other so nothing important has the space to hold their attention, to be examined. "What about your hair?" she continues, grimacing. "You get a wash in at all while we were gone?" She gives one of his greasy strands a little tug. "Guessing not since these are the same clothes you were in when we left."
"We're putting in eighteen, maybe twenty hour days at the shop trying to get the bigger vehicles in order."
The first week for Luis, like most everyone, had been corpses - looting them, moving them, saying goodbye to them, covering them - along with centralizing supplies and arranging housing for the displaced (he'd offered Greta's up immediately and helped several families get settled there). The next week started the seemingly endless task of piecing together a fleet to pursue the supply caravan seen fleeing on the drone feed post-battle. The trucks had to be fast enough to catch up, in good enough condition to not break down in the process of doing so or coming back, but still big enough to carry all the supplies if the enemy's vehicles couldn't be used. There was a team of four of them who knew enough about vehicles to be useful; everyone else was handling security, doing runs, cleaning the place up or making glass block.
"You know how important it is you guys can go long-range soon," he continues. "Food gets lower every day."
The Claptrappers apparently had a lot in dry storage and preserved from the previous summer and fall in the kitchen pantry and root cellar beneath it, but it was nearly all gone. The messhall and its contents - save the few armfuls carried away by the kids as they fled with Muriel and what Hogan managed to get - had virtually all burnt up or burst from the heat. They'd had spring crops planted, but little ready to harvest yet. Some of the greenhouses were damaged too, and the smoke from the fires had sickened part of what was planted in the ag fields. Still, enough plants survived to get a good yield - in six to eight weeks or more.
They'd be out of public food in two.
Even with the lead gardener's "miraculous" full remission (and hadn't that started Luis' head spinning because if that tiny amount of blue could do that, what else could it do?) and return to running the ag crews, there was little to be done beyond cleaning up. The rest was weeding, watering and waiting. Things needed time to grow, a thing Luis is reminded of as Nat presses her arm into his almost reassuringly. Whatever has been between them since the hotel has changed so much, but it's still more a bud than a flower. He's not in the habit of deluding himself that it will blossom anytime soon, if ever, particularly once her husband is back in the picture. She'd never admit it, but right now she's lonely, and he's available. He can accept that. The sex is a good distraction. And she makes him laugh, something that's pretty rare these days.
"Sitwell works you too hard," Nat offers.
"We need that supply train," he counters, turning to look down at her, not that he has much height on her - four inches give or take.
Zola was a planner. Jasper reasoned, and the others helping make the decisions agreed, the doctor would have brought enough food to supply his people, possibly even through a protracted siege and the trip home. The Claptrappers need those supply trucks, or by the end of the month people will be left to totally fend for themselves - never good in Luis' experience. Almost no one has food at their residences beyond snacks and a bit of personal agriculture since the supply system had been stable a long time. So few went out for runs and what they gleaned, after their small personal cut was removed, was added to the public coffers, now destroyed.
Nat had said Jasper is very close to initiating an order for the ex-ops to go house to house and take whatever people may be squirreling away, but Sitwell is hoping between rationing and getting the caravan soon it won't come to that. Luis has been shocked by how well he's stepped into the leadership role, his past experience running Operations teams bubbling to the surface. People had questioned it - he wasn't exactly popular - but the ex-ops (especially Hogan and Nat) had backed him and he had Fury's last words on his side.
He'd proven very capable, mind turning instantly after the battle, planning, making lists, prioritizing tasks. Everyone had been busy under his direction within fifteen minutes of the last shot being fired. Of course he was a bit too practical sometimes. It had taken a cluster of them ten minutes (an eternity in the time crunch they were always under) to convince him to have a town-wide break from work for some kind of small ceremony before the dirt was shovelled over the dead.
Luis had mentioned Greta's secret basement to Winter since it had a lot he could contribute. The Soldier had been extremely adamant there was danger there - something in Steve's memories he couldn't quite make sense of. He'd made Luis promise he wouldn't go down there or tell anyone about the space until he decided what to do. The green-eyed man can only hope the auto-timers for the water and grow lights are still working or the whole crop will be dead. Least of his worries right now, he supposes, but these folks could all use a lot of weed in the near future. He's been sneaking over to refill the above ground reservoir tank that feeds the sprinklers at least.
"We'll get the supply train. Don't worry. We've got five inhumans and they've got zero. Plus," she winks, "I'm a badass."
Nat turns to smile at him and he's struck not for the first time by what a gorgeous woman she is, by what a set of lips she has, how much more acquainted with them, and with her, he's become. Not that he's dumb enough to let his sentimentality run away with him. Nat always has to be the one to instigate the kissing - another unspoken rule - usually right before sex. He'd felt guilty at first with their mutual lovers dead or comatose, Winter drowning in his loss, and the two of them going at it like teenagers. But they both need the release, the escape, the intimacy (though he knows she would never call it that). She doesn't kick him out immediately after and they usually lay not far apart in the bed talking for a while. It's something.
"Buck head to the usual place?" Luis asks, looking back at Clint, processing how he feels more guilty about wanting to kiss her with something like affection than he had about having virtually emotionless sex with her right in front of her husband at the hotel.
"Yeah. To make his offerings and have his... conversations." Nat almost, almost sounds a bit spooked under her mild judgment. Creeped out.
Luis gives Clint's arm a squeeze, leans and whispers te quiero to him, something he'd finally given in to the urge to do a week ago, then kisses his cheek and stands to go.
"I should..."
He doesn't need to finish his sentence - she knows where he's going. If she's become Buck's babysitter, Luis has went from just bestie to parent (and a sort of surrogate, sexless boyfriend according to Nat). It's another unspoken rule they don't directly talk about the toll it takes on Luis, or how unhealthy it probably is, but she still makes jokes, lets him know that she knows what's going on. She probably wants to call him an enabler, but he's also gathered she'd poured alcohol down Clint's throat for years at his behest and the archer had occasionally let her beat him raw so she could avoid dealing with any real emotions, so that would be opening a big, fat can of hypocrisy on her part.
Speaking of, the whippings will stop when Clint wakes up.
The bruises he'd found on Clint, on the road, he recognized as from a belt lashing. His sister had returned from her father's with one's like them just once when he was sixteen, because su padre caught her wearing lipstick. Luis' own father and uncles on his mother's side had been at the house that day and they'd drove to Brooklyn to beat the man senseless. Luis dragged the story of the marks out of the archer. Clint liked submission, sure, and he's a bit of a masochist who definitely enjoys a little spanking or choking. But Luis had been with him enough to know something that extreme wasn't needed to get him turned on or finished off.
Clint wasn't very shy - he'd offered and asked for all kinds of things, and outright beating him was never one of them. This is the other reason he's constantly hesitant with Nat - he knows he's only scratched the surface of how twisted up she is inside. In her core, he doesn't think she's a bad person, a sadist in the true sense, but that expression we only hurt the ones we love seemed quite true of the redhead. While he's been a doormat a lot of his life in a lot of ways, letting himself be abused physically or mentally or standing by while someone else is (save that once with the scum on the road and the old man, a thing that still haunts him) wasn't one of them, nor will it ever be.
As if hearing his thoughts, she surprises Luis when she grabs his hand for the briefest moment, squeezes quickly, lets go.
"Sitwell is giving the runners special bath time in a half hour. You should come with Buck. Join me. After you get him settled."
Settled. Like a parent with a small child. Luis resents the implication but it's not entirely wrong. He's already mentally preparing to acquiesce if the Soldier doesn't want to go, too exhausted to fight with him like a toddler to take his bath - they remind Winter of Steve, the mechanic's absence from the tub glaring. The town had at least never lost water service during all this, though it had taken the welder kids, Winter (using all the knowledge he had gleaned from Steve) and Luis some time to get the pumps hooked up to the normal water lines instead of just the hose couplings. The new pumps are so much bigger and more efficient; they're able to use only two to run the town's water and the third is left hooked to a fire hose, just in case.
"If Buck wants to go," Luis offers, not making promises he can't keep.
She nods and he walks out into the cool of the wee hours, the sounds of the crew just back from the run punctuating the otherwise quiet town.