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Phil knows that someday, when he’s had enough time to get some distance from this clusterfuck, when he can look back at it rationally because the hurt has finally sheared away to the smooth slope of long ago memory, he’ll forget the way Clint’s voice sounded when he woke up. He’ll forget the color of the bruise high on his cheekbone, the way the stubble had been uneven on his jaw, the way his hands had shaken in a way Clint’s hands never shook. He’ll forget the way the sun came down over Clint’s face and cheek and shoulder.
What he won’t forget, for the rest of his life, are his eyes. Not the way they’d looked when he begged Phil for his forgiveness, when he’d asked Phil, so softly, It’s okay, if you don’t. I can prove it to you again. I can prove I’m worth it, if you let me.
No. That pain, hard and sharp under his chest, twisted and buried in the healing muscle and bone, will never go away. He doesn’t want it to. It’s penance for what he did, for breaking the thousand promises he’d kissed into Clint’s skin, for the role he played in taking the safety and peace Clint had so painstakingly built and crushing it into powder under his feet. For getting himself killed, and then living to see what it had done to the person he loved most in this world.
The pain comes and goes, with the way Clint startles sometimes when he sees him, the way he’s unmoored and circles Phil like a restless bird circling their nest. The way he won’t talk to Phil some days, anger lining every tense muscle of his body, and the way he wakes up in the middle of the night and cries for him, low and deep and strangled, when he thinks Phil is asleep.
The pain comes and goes, and Phil is different in the face of it. He says, “I love you,” so easily now, and doesn’t understand why it was so hard before. He says it in the kisses he shares with Clint in the morning, waiting for the coffee while Steve blushes at the kitchen island. He says it in the fingers he runs through Clint’s hair sometimes just to see that wild mop stick up in the back, to see Clint blush and scowl and finger-comb it down like a ruffled cat. It’s so easy, to press his lips there to Clint’s temple, to the edge of his jaw, to his lips. To show his damaged heart.
“You’re thinking again.”
He’s beautiful in the soft, warm glow of their living room lamps, with New York City is spread out beneath Avenger’s Tower like a jewel, city lights glowing under the cloak of a slipper moon. Clint’s tucked against him, still in his armor, boots flaking mud all over their floor, but swaying, swaying as has become their routine.
“Just trying to pin-point where I’ve smelled this particular smell before. Gassy dog? Garbage dump? Fish wife’s shoes?”
“Awe babe, you say the nicest things,” Clint says, and Phil can just feel the smile there against his neck. “I may or may not have taken a little swim in the Hudson.”
“I knew I smelled a hint of Eau de Carcinogen.”
Clint shakes against him with laughter and Phil smiles there against the shell of Clint’s ear.
Phil doesn’t know why Clint needs it. When Clint had asked that first time, not quite meeting his eyes, it had been as if Clint expected him to say no. To tease him, maybe. Not to take his hand, to pull him close in the way they always fit together, their fingers laced between them and Clint’s head on his shoulder. He’d been to tense, trembling. He’d fallen apart against Phil’s shoulder, gasped out things Phil didn’t understand, and that had been okay because Phil had fallen apart, too.
They dance because Clint needs it, though he’s never said why, and because Phil needs it too. They dance to Rosemary Clooney, and Tony Bennett, and Billie Holiday on the old turntable Phil bought twenty years ago in Queens, and Phil kisses Clint’s cheek and throat and jaw and ear, his eyes and his lips and the tip of his chin, kisses Clint until he sighs against Phil and goes loose and relaxed. Kisses him some more, just because he can. Because he almost lost this.
“I was thinking about you,” Phil murmurs.
“Mmm?”
“About how much I love you.”
Clint hums against his throat, there at the edge of Phil’s collar. “I like it when you think about loving me.”
“I know.” Phil rubs his fingers up to the nape of Clint’s neck, where his hair is prickly and in need of a cut. He strokes right there so Clint will shiver, presses a soft kiss to his cheek, near his ear. “I like telling you.”
“I know you do. When you can get Tony Stark to yell ‘Get a room!’,” Clint says, in a passable imitation of Tony’s voice, though perhaps unfairly nasal, “I feel like that’s it. We’ve made it. We are at the height of unbearable coupleness.”
Etta James sings, I found a thrill to press my cheek to, and Phil smiles there against Clint’s, just because he can. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry.”
Clint snorts, loudly, and Phil tugs gently at the hair at his nape. “That is the least sorry I’ve ever heard you be, and I’ve heard some whoppers come out of that mouth.”
“Stark annoys me. If he didn’t want to see my hands on your ass he shouldn’t have come bothered me when I explicitly told him I was occupied,” Phil says again, and noses down low under Clint’s ear. “You smell awful,” he adds, and licks the flat of his tongue there over the Hudson pollution until all he can taste is the salt of Clint’s skin.
“Hey, no hanky panky,” Clint mumbles, and Phil thinks he’d sound a lot more convincing if he wasn’t smiling, wasn’t stirring there against Phil’s thigh. “Also, okay, fair point to Tony, he probably wasn’t expecting you to have your hands on my ass and your tongue in my mouth when he opened the door to the ops van.”
“He blushed like a Victorian virgin,” and he can’t help it, he smiles against Clint’s neck. “I’ll be honest Clint, that was easily the highlight of my week.”
The song switches over to Vic Damone, It Had To Be You, and Clint sighs, something easing in his frame, like he was just waiting for Vic to start crooning before he could relax. They dance together in the quiet, sway slow together in the warm glow of their living room, and no, Phil will never forget that hard pain in his ruined chest, but sometimes it’ll ease. In these moments, he can almost forget the hurt and guilt and rage. In these moments he can remember the delight on Clint’s face when Dad gave Clint the cello, the helpless joy when Phil had slid the ring onto his finger and promised to love him for the rest of his life. A thousand nights, meals shared and jokes traded, shoulder to shoulder against the enemy and so open with one another.
Phil’s always been helpless in the face of everything that was Clinton Francis Barton, and that he fought it for so long, that he almost didn’t get to have this, is warning enough.
“I love you.”
“Yeah? Tell me how much.”
“Rude. The correct answer is, ‘Take me now you large hunk of man’,” he says, just so he’ll get to feel the way Clint shakes when the laughter turns into those ridiculous, infectious giggles of his, the way his eyes crinkle against Phil’s throat. When he pulls back, just enough, Clint’s eyes are bright, his grin wide and open and beautiful as sunshine. “And then I get down on my knees and you hike your leg onto my shoulder and throw your shoulders back until your bosom heaves.”
“Chest hair rustling majestically,” Clint laughs, running his big hands over Phil’s shoulders, warm over the thin cotton of his dress shirt. “Babe, I would pay money to see that.”
“Did I ever tell you I used to read them as a child?”
“You liar.”
“I spent three very educational summers with my matronly, romance-writing Aunt Cecelia when I was a kid. She kept the books she’d written locked in her safe, but I was always the kind of kid who took locks as more of a suggestion than a clear ‘keep out’.”
Clint is shaking with laughter. “No, don’t say it.”
“Oh yes. I learned about the clitoris from Aunt Cecelia’s very filthy, very successful romance novels.”
Clint howls, burying his face in Phil’s shoulder and Phil is laughing too, louder than he lets himself, freer than he can remember. “I was traumatized that first summer, Clint. Talk about something that can’t be unseen. I walked around in a daze for weeks. And I was a smart kid, so of course the first thing I did when I got back to Portland was go to the library. I basically learned sex education from the Ceder Hill Community librarian who, oh yes, was a close friend of our rabbi.”
“Awe Phil, no,” Clint squeaks, tears of laughter running down his cheeks, and Phil grins to see it, overjoyed.
“You haven’t really experienced humiliation until you have an 80-year-old telling you to keep your schmeckel to yourself until you’re married.”
Clint can’t even speak and Phil decides it’s a job well done, to see that so-loved face pink with laughter, eyes squeezed shut and wet at the lash line. He cups Clint’s face in both hands and kisses him, and Clint can’t even kiss back he’s laughing so hard, and Phil thinks he has a lot to be sorry for, a lot to ask forgiveness for, but these moments are good too, the balance to the sadness and pain. Clint hugs him, arms around his shoulders, and Phil presses his love into every inch they're touching, and kisses him until Clint kisses back.