Chapter Text
Before long, there's another mission, one of the first in which both the Maximoff twins are fighting in. With all the problems that come up, it's not uncommon for the team to split into several groups, and Pietro went through far more SHIELD channels than his sister due to the whole almost dying thing. Once the dust settled, he wasted no time with sitting around, and Clint's gotten used to having someone fast enough to always have his back.
Well, almost always, Clint thinks as he dives off the side of a building. He doesn't have a grappling arrow because he forgot to grab one, so he's mostly relying on an exploding arrow to take out the window in the building across from him before the archer hits it himself. Fortunately the arrows work, but not-so-fortunately, he lands among the glass and butchers the landing. Clint curses at the top of his lungs as glass shards puncture his shoulders and back in a hundred different places.
“Clint!” shouts a panicked voice over the comms.
“Ow,” he moans back eloquently. “Ngh.”
“Hawkeye?” Natasha asks. And okay, that makes him feel bad.
“I'm fine. Bad landing.”
“Did you jump off a building again, Barton?” Tony asks, and he sounds amused more than anything when Clint mutters a 'shaddup Stark'.
He doesn't have time to say anything else because a blue-and-silver blur whips him away. Clint screeches in protest, and is later reliably informed that he sounded like a panicked dinosaur. But Pietro is clearly having none of his protests, and sets Clint down closer to the rest of the team. After a boop to his nose – and seriously, who does that any more? Well, his super cute boyfriend apparently – Pietro dashes back into battle.
Clint yells at him for taking chances, especially when Pietro shows back up at the end of the mission with bloody tears in his suit from bullet holes. They mother hen the shit out of each other over the slightest injury, and on missions, it's no different. Wanda is a bit of a mother to her brother, just because of the way they always had to look out for each other, but nobody is worse than Clint and Pietro.
“Look at this,” Pietro says, his voice fond and exasperated at the same time. “You're lucky you don't heal quickly. We'd have an even harder time getting the glass out.” He comes around from where he'd been standing at his boyfriend's back and cups his chin in his hands to kiss him, the touch soft and lingering.
“I know,” Clint replies, having heard this a million times before. “But I make up for it by being cute.”
“That you do.” Pietro kneels between his legs, because Clint has to stay hunched over to let Natasha pull pieces of glass out of his back. He braces his elbows on the archer's knees and smiles at him, not minding in the least when Clint reaches forward to kiss him again. Clint whimpers under his breath several times, but Pietro is there to comfort him through all of it. By the time they get back to the Tower and its medical bay, nearly all the pieces are gone, but Pietro insists that Clint get checked out and bandaged by the doctors there anyway.
“So unnecessary,” Clint complains, because that's all he ever does when he's in the medbay. “Annoying and stupid and weird and why even.”
“Because you're reckless and self-endangering and you would never admit if you were hurt. So I have to make sure you're okay.” Pietro buries both hands in Clint's hair, and the archer faceplants into his stomach with a huff. The Sokovian chuckles when his boyfriend says something and scratches a little harder at his scalp. “I can't understand you.”
Clint pulls back enough to prop his chin on Pietro's stomach. “You are evil for making me sit here in a hospital when we could be cuddling. But I really, really love you.”
Something hot and vibrant flares up in Pietro's spine at the words, unfurling from the base to his heart. “I really, really love you too.” Clint smiles, bright and happy despite the fact they're due to stay here for almost another hour, and Pietro can't help smiling back.