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Clint hated hospital rooms. Even ones that weren’t meant to look like a hospital room. They still had that same sterile, cold feel about them, the kind of atmosphere that just gave him the creeps. Then again, he’d landed himself in enough hospital beds over the years to justify his dislike of the place.

Fortunately for him, this wasn’t one of those times. No, he was here purely for the poor bastard lying all too still in the bed beside his chair. The man was scarred and scruffy and looked pale in the fluorescent lighting overhead. A single sheet covered his body, wrapped up in a standard-issue hospital gown. The one that let you moon the entire world when you got up if you weren’t careful. The man was hooked up to half a dozen machines clustered around the head of the bed, monitoring everything from heartbeat to temperature to the acidity of the man’s piss, for all Clint knew. The scientists had gone a little nuts when he and Natasha had brought this one in. Some high security top secret trade with Russia that Clint still didn’t understand, but it had made Tasha go tight-lipped and cold with some reaction he hadn’t been able to pester out of her yet. She knew more than she was telling, but that was typical with his partner. Tasha always kept a lot of secrets.

Still, all Clint knew about the guy he was here babysitting was that the order to retrieve him had come from the top, straight down from Nick Fury himself and when they’d shown up at the exchange location, the Russian diplomat had rolled out this giant test-tube thing with a body inside and Clint had been certain that they were getting duped out of whoever this Winter Soldier was supposed to be. Only Natasha hadn’t seemed at all surprised and went on as if everything was business as usual, so he’d followed along after her, which was normally what he was good at. He was an enforcer, the sharpshooter. He left all the political wrangling and espionage in Tasha’s very capable hands and everything usually went smoothly.

Until, of course, they got back to headquarters and Tasha got called to Fury’s office for briefing while he got sent here to babysit a corpse. Or something. He had no idea what was with the body they’d retrieve, other than the guy’s birthdate on his chart – which Clint had read in a fit of sheer boredom – made him almost as old as his grandfather. Which made no sense, since the guy looked barely older than Clint himself. Impressive genes there.

Of course, there was only so much one could do while sitting in an empty hospital room with beeping monitors and a guy that might as well be dead. The chart had been a quick read. The tiny tiles in the ceiling had taken him all of ten minutes to count. Then his imagination had started kicking in to help with the fidgety boredom and he started picturing all the things that could go terribly wrong in this situation.

Like Clint sneezing and the guy suddenly crumbling into mummy dust. Or the dude was a vampire and Clint would end up dinner at sundown. Not that Clint would mind a vampire, exactly, but if he was gonna get sucked on, he much preferred it to be a hot chick with better curves and considerably less stubble. Or… no, he was stopping there, because one of the monitors gave an alarming sort of beep that was not at all usual and Clint found himself sitting straight up in his chair with a concerned look, eying the safety restraints on the man’s arms and ankles skeptically just in case.