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It all begins with a mission and an avocado, so of course it was doomed from the start.
Clint’s called in over his lunch break (okay, it’s 2pm. Sue him; he doesn’t exactly work regular hours here, okay?), which means that he’s half way through an avocado. Tash swears that it’s a super food, and she would know, so he dutifully eats them even though they taste like butter’s homeless cousin.
He spends a split second imagining it slowly browning in the trash, a tiny ready-made bowl of expensive regret as he quinjet-sets off for Middleofnowhere, Ohio (world edition). He shoves it and a spoon into his pocket before trotting off with his go bag (owfuck. Right, avoid, avoid the bruises).
Natasha’s in the bullpen already (wait, what?) and standing at parade-ready despite her recent encounter with a 50-foot drop (”It was controlled, Clint! Also: pot, kettle.”).
He splutters and promptly chokes on the chunk of avocado still in his mouth (ow), which (of course) ends up sprayed in a fine greenish-yellowish-brownish (fine, it would’ve gone browner, okay?) shower of chunks all over her pristine white shirt. Nothing in her expression changes, although the hum of ambient conversations all around her freeze for a precious few seconds before starting up again. Awkwardly, and at a higher pitch.
She levels a bored look at him and looks down at her shirt. He instinctively begins unbuttoning his own, before realizing he’s got actual clean ones in his go bag which she’d probably prefer, and then realizing that she’s obviously got her own go bag, with shirts that actually fit her and don’t smell like his own brand of “circus fresh.” (Yeah, okay sue him. The little lemons decorating the box made that typo pure gold, and he may or may not have spent a few hours drawing in a full circus set-up to make those little suckers acrobatic lemons).
This train wreck of a thought culminates in Phil Coulson, god of competence and all things amazing and unreachable, striding into his ready room and stopping to take in the baby agents, discussing inane things with the whites of their eyes showing. His eyes travel over the stock-still figure of the Black Widow contemplating her new fashion accessories and finally land on Clint, who is now, in addition to choking on his lunch and afraid of waking up without his kidney, half dressed. Clint instinctively cowers a little under Coulson’s eye.
He’s got his hearing aids turned up to JARVIS, though, which is why he hears the tiny sigh that escapes before Coulson reaches the front of the room and everyone shuts the hell up. Coulson always manages to stand so that those ceiling pot light things aren’t casting his face into shadow. Clint’s not sure about the physics of that, actually, because everyone else always looks like they’re about to break into campfire horror stories; seriously, those lights are from hell and belong in a restaurant trying too eagerly to “set the mood” (maybe for an unexpected viewing of The Blair Witch Project).
But, apparently becoming a newly-disavowed renegade spy agency operating out of a tiny top secret bunker (seriously, he’s hot bunking with at least six guys and the room’s only made for two) has cut a swathe through their annual budget, and he’s got the email train to confirm that. Anyway, it means that, magical-and-possibly-physics-defying head tilt aside, Coulson’s words are always crystal clear from the point of view of a lipreader.
Not that Clint really needs to be lipreading (again: JARVIS), but it’s the thought that counts. Sometimes Clint does turn up to these things between sets (Tony has them shipped out to him every time they break, complaining non-stop and at the speed of light about all the “top secret spy mumbo jumbo postal service voodoo magic” protocols they have in place to protect the locations and responsibilities of all involved). He appreciates Coulson’s thoughtfulness, though, the easy inclusion that pervades every aspect of Clint’s interactions with the Director of SHIELD. Shit, what is he even thinking? He spends the duration studying those lips and pretending to himself that he isn’t.
When the briefing’s over, Clint has no idea what’s happened. Sadly, this is not unusual and only occasionally affects his performance. When all is said and done, Clint’s role is usually lay still, shut up, bang bang, and hoof it, Barton, hurry up. Natasha turns around and is somehow perfectly pristine again. He blinks at her, and gets a split-second of whatthefuckamIdoinghere vertigo, seriously: he grew up in the goddamn circus. He is (almost) literally a trained monkey. Oh, yeah, and thanks to that shitstorm last year, he’s also 85% deaf in both ears, not to mention more recent events. How did he end up here with these hyper competent, super suave teammates doing super cool shit and making things go boom?
Tasha nudges him and tilts her head toward the hangar. Aw, Black Widow silent treatment, no.
He tries to convey his existential angst to her by way of a profuse apology for his appearance, conduct, and general existence. What comes out is a gummy “Nat—” before she cuts him off with a look, and sighs.
“Clint, you dummy.” She, on the other hand, has always been hell to lipread. He thinks she does it on purpose to fuck with his head. She looks at him with something flickering, deep in her eyes, but she says nothing more.
They climb aboard the quin, and it’s one of those tiny ones that optimistically fits six agents and a two-man flight crew. Two-person flight crew. Whatever. There’s no point in speaking once in flight—not even a superhero called Mothear (seriously, moths were recently voted best hearing in the animal kingdom, Clint read it on the Internet) would be able to hear over the engine—but Tasha nudges him again and begins to sign in short, crisp bursts.
You / okay? I / worried / you / not / ready.
Clint can feel his forehead creasing. Shit, okay, yeah. The last one had really thrown him for a loop, but Phi—Coulson, Coulson had definitely fixed it. And okay, his jaw’s still mostly wired shut, he can see why she’d think he’s not field ready, but honestly—
Her hands are moving again, not giving him a chance to respond.
You / don’t / do / everything. Pause. Rest / okay
He’s emphatically shaking his head, the urgency making him sweat (okay, maybe he shoulda taken more than two aspirins). No, he’s already the weakest link in the chain. Any weaker, and they’ll cut him out entirely, and then where will he be?
No. I / fine. I / work. I / help.
“Clint.” Her lips form the tiny, familiar word. It was once so precious, so wonderful to see it there, to know that she loved him, and trusted him, and welcomed him as a partner (sometimes in crime, sometimes not. Eh, depended how they were feeling).
He turns his head away, suddenly swamped by memories of a figure hanging by his arms, a sledgehammer, and the screaming—
Actually, he’ll take the silent treatment, please.
He keeps his eyes closed despite her increasingly painful attempts to gain his attention. The last one draws blood (just a little), before he feels her hand gentle, smoothing over his arm with resignation, before withdrawing entirely.
###
The mission is shit. It’s a record-setting 100 degrees in the shade, and they’re chasing some kind of freaking global warming possible-mutant-slash-alien-slash-Inhuman. They’ve kind of penned her in against the unforgiving concrete wall of Brasilia, slum dwellers scattering like their anthill’s been kicked (which it has, Clint reflects). She is unexpectedly tiny and keening, and even from a distance Clint can see her overwhelmingly distressed body language. It turns out not being able to talk for five-and-a-half weeks has given him a real insight into body language, and also an inclination toward pity. Shit.
Agent Asshole is nattering into the comms about putting the poor thing down because of the dangerous spike in ambient temperature, but frankly, Clint’s got the Icer version of a long distance rifle. They need to respond with kindness and curiosity, not overwhelming force, haven’t they learned anything for fuck’s sake? He’s no stranger to insubordination, but without words to plead his case, he’s not sure how Coulson’s—the Director’s going to take it. What the hell. He’s already on the chopping block—might as well be for the full Monty.
He takes the shot and doesn’t miss, which he immediately regrets when the super-jumbo version of little girl green flies (flies! Can he never catch a break??) directly overhead and fixes glowing murdereyes directly on one Clinton Francis Barton, may he rest in peace.
The bird-man-fury-probably-father jerks his head and both of Clint’s rifles, as well as his back-up bow and quiver, twitch strangely before smoking gently and, well, melting. Yeah, that’s probably the best word to describe it. That’s not good—all the others (Natasha included, shit) are at least 300 feet away, and he is fresh out of options. Even the usual “who, little old ordinance-carrying harmless me?” bit isn’t going to work, because again: wires, jaw, ow, no.
He scrabbles around him for anything, rock, stick—he’ll take literally anything at this point—without taking his eyes off the target. Nothing. Of course not, he cleared the area himself in order to set up a secure nest. Shit, shit, shit. He’s gonna die out here in the jungle, he’ll never have a chance to look Phil in the eye and tell him—tell him—
###
Clint’s always known that he’d eventually bite it out in the field. He’s made promises to himself that when the time came, he would go to his death steady, and with eyes wide open. The tension seeps out of him, and he keeps his eyes wide open as Daddy Furybird (he’s about to die, okay, he can name the creature in his mind if he wants to) closes the final ten foot gap, and then unexpectedly backwings to land awkwardly in front of Clint’s prone figure. Actually, he’s practically sitting on Clint, what the fuck. He is pressed up right against Clint’s chest, what the fuck. He’s gonna pass out from the sickly-sweet rotted-flesh aroma coming from this thing. He can hear Tasha shouting in his ear (thank god that hadn’t melted), but he’s busy trying not to gag. He can even taste it and his mouth’s not even open. His hands drift to his sides, where he becomes aware of the two options left to him. He takes exactly one step back, twelve perfect inches (that’s what he said), enacts them both, and learns two lessons. Okay, two and a half.
One: half-eaten avocados, while not exactly the best weapons known to spycraft, are a half-decent (heh) distraction.
Two: dendrotoxin delivery system arrowheads are cool. Really, really cool.
The half doesn’t get properly learned until later on, but you know.
The unexpected side effects of this otherwise highly successful plan (Clint wins at in-field adaptations) are twofold: the latter results in the armoury division of R&D having an impromptu party for Fitzsimmons (because Clint never gets the credit he deserves) and the excited drunk-geek chatter centers around dendrotoxin smoke bombs, dendrotoxin hand grenades, dendrotoxin USB drives, wtf, seriously, those guys have a shtick.
Unfortunately, the latter is only deployed successfully because it turns out that avocado pits, lobbed into the air with extreme force and from a short distance away, plus above-average humidity and the presence of a raging Daddy Furybird whose powers are as yet uncategorized, equals a rapidly growing avocado tree. Clint now knows that it is not fun but also not absolutely fatal to have one of those dropped on your head. Yay, Clint is a life long learner.
###
Anyway, in the meantime Daddy Furybird goes down in a bizarrely delicate twirl on top of Clint, which is why the tree incident becomes non-fatal. In a classic example of life kicking you in the teeth when you’re already down, his hearing aids finally give up and fall out. Fast forward a bit, because Clint has some new holes poked into his old skin, and he’s not really in the mood to appreciate them. Fast forward a bit more, and they’re back in the quinjet, where four agents, including Agent in Charge What’s-His-Face, looking like he’s sucked a rotten lemon, are crammed onto one bench because Clint’s laid up on the other and trying to keep his insides, you know, on the inside. The pilot and copilot are, uh, tense, because of the unexpected weight of two adamantium carriers dangling like wind chimes from the quinjet’s underbelly. Seriously, even the deaf guy can hear them bitching.
Tasha hasn’t looked away from his face or blinked for about two hours, so. That’s bad news.
And...yep, it gets worse when they land. Yes, he’s Agent Clint Barton, Level 8, a sometimes-Avenger code-named Hawkeye. He’s got a hundred other aliases and a thousand defeated enemies, but he challenges anyone to be immune to Phil’s—the Director’s—disappointed look. It’s just a suggestion of a frown about the lips, and a there-and-gone-again crease at the brow, but the lines around his eyes deepen, and shit, irony aside, Clint can even hear the disappointment. He turns his face away and closes his eyes, because even under the influence of morphine, Clint knows the danger of crying.
He doesn’t want to see the words rendered in perfect clarity by those lips. Yes, he knows. He’s a fuck-up and there’s the door. Once the meds wear off and he’s got bandages around the most important holes, he’s out of here.
###
When Clint wakes up in Medical, he knows he’s been out for too long, and his chances of escape have dwindled down to zero. On one side, he’s got Natasha, glaring actual Soviet daggers in his direction. On the other, he’s got the Director—Coulson—fuck, Phil—frowning and actually looking worried.
“I didn’t do it,” he croaks reflexively. His ears are back on, that’s good, he can hear himself. Then he gets distracted because, hey, they took the wires out! He reaches up to prod his jaw, and, oh, hey, handcuffs.
Clint considers and immediately discards a handful of inappropriate responses to this. Actually, he’s not sure he can make himself speak. Out of morbid curiosity, and because no one has ever accused Clint of having any kind of a survival instinct, he opens his mouth.
“Barton, shut up,” comes Phil’s measured voice. “It’s our turn to talk.”
Clint gulps, and revises his options, but he was never gonna win any kind of a contest if both Tasha and Phil are on the other side.
“Clint. You are not a fuck-up.” Natasha’s voice is irritated, because she hates two things: worrying and having to talk about emotions.
Clint scoffs and tries to turn away, but there’s really no direction that doesn’t offer him a looming guilt trip.
“We need you around,” she continues. “You see what we don’t—and that’s not just calling tactical moves, okay? You saw that the two Karura were in pain, and you tried to help them. You made it possible for for us to actually help them. That was you, okay?”
“Karururu-whasits?” Oh, hey. Hello mouth. Welcome back to the party. Now please, sit down and shut up.
“Oh, the 084s in Brasil. They call themselves the Karura. Turns out the poor family just got lost en route to Japan, which is apparently the gateway to their ancestral and otherworldly world. Apparently they were just doing the tourist thing, you know, and the kid got lost, and Daddy got anxious—you know how it is.” All of this is said in Phil’s calm voice, like he’s talking about the weather, what the fuck.
“What the fuck.”
Natasha snorts. “You’re not off the hook. Look, we know the thing in Greenland was really—”
Clint blinks and he’s back in that awful compound, watching them interrogate Phil, watching them heft the sledgehammer over Tasha’s prone figure, thinking shit, it’s my fault that we’re caught, no, no, and then just giving up the ghost.
He opened his mouth and told them what they wanted to hear. And yeah, he’d given into whatever flight of fancy occurred to him, enough to marr the intel, but at its root, Clint had been afraid, and he’d let his fear rule him. After they smashed his jaw in a fit of ironic what-the-fuckery, Tasha’d slipped out of her bonds and cut Phil down. Clint watched from his own awkward hang, waves of black-out pain making his vision swim in and out, as they’d efficiently taken down the whole crew, erased the data, and set fire to everything before grabbing him. They made like a missile and cruised. Yeah, they did kind of cruise directly through a window on the fortieth floor, but Natasha had taken the brunt of that and spent five-and-a-half parallel weeks on crutches. (The crutches are for a broken tibia, she’s still the Black Widow).
In retrospect, five-and-a-half weeks of golden, golden silence hadn’t been too bad. They couldn’t find a non-Hydra currently-SHIELD counselor with fluent enough ASL, so he’d ducked the psych eval for so long he’d sorta convinced himself they’d forgotten.
“Of course we haven’t forgotten, you dummy.” Tasha’s voice is acidic. “Do you think that we’d just forget how you, you—” her voice cracks in a supremely un-Widowish show of emotion. Clint feels like a cat caught out by the sprinkler. What is happening. What. Is. Happening.
“You saved our lives,” Phil takes over, because he’s a smooth asshole. “I don’t know what kind of guilt you’ve been holding onto; honestly, Clint, your brain is a complete mystery to me, and do you know how fucking annoying that is? Anyway,” he catches himself, “the point is, you have nothing to be ashamed of. We were both there. You were distracting them so that we could back you up. You weren’t being weak. You didn’t even say anything actionable, my god. We were there! We were listening! You told them the Director of SHIELD was a fire-breathing bird-man who ate worms! Or wyrms, as it turns out! We didn’t even know those existed yet! If you’d told them anything worth knowing, they wouldn’t have broken your jaw, that’s for damn sure. They were sick of hearing your bullshit, and to tell you the truth, Clint, so am I. Stop it. Just, stop it.”
He punctuates this by leaning in and pressing his perfect lips to Clint’s cheek. Said lips then kind of skitter until they’re on his lips. Clint’s lips. And Phil’s lips. Like, together.
Needless to say, Clint’s brain shorts out. His cortex sends out a final what the fuck along all previously developed synapses and then fucks off to god knows where, leaving Clint completely defenseless.
“What?”It comes out as a gasp as Phil leans back, looking just as stunned as he feels.
Natasha takes a step back into the shadows, although she doesn’t leave. They’re Strike Team Delta, once and always. They have no secrets.
Clint watches wide-eyed, as Phil reassembles some of the G-man in his face, but honestly, there’s so much left cracked open and shining that it hurts a little to look at, but he hopes he’ll never have to look away.
“Coulson. Phil. Sir. What?”
Phil takes a most un-Phil-like breath, and then visibly squares his shoulders.
“Barton. Clint. You know that you have my utmost respect. I just…needed to…no, I wanted to. Let you know. That. You could have…” his voice trails away, and he takes a deep breath. “You could have, uh, more. If you wanted to. I, uh.”
Clint can feel the beginning of a smile pulling at the edges of his lips, and it doesn’t even hurt.
“Yeah, boss. Phil. Okay, yeah.”