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Phil knew it was risky doing this, coming back to Clint after so damn long, but there wasn’t time before and then, well… it seemed like he was ok. Phil looks at his hand where it’s poised to knock on Clint’s door and breathes in and out. He’s faced down gods and monsters; he can do this.
He exhales slowly and then —
The door slams open and there’s a gun pointed in his face, with a stock-still, furious looking Clint Barton behind it.
“Give me one good reason not to shoot you in the goddamn head.”
Phil slowly raises his other hand to join the one still poised to knock, spreading his fingers in a show of surrender. “Clint?”
The gun trembles, and oh, that’s actually terrifying, because Clint Barton doesn’t tremble unless he’s really in a bad way, and even then…
“Clint, I can explain.”
“I thought you were dead. You ARE dead. You’re… you were…” The gun trembles some more, and Phil looks at the man’s face properly for the first time in months. He looks older, worn down and tired. And furious.
The gun shakes more as Clint pants through gritted teeth, and his eyes are wide like a frightened animal. In all the years they’ve worked together, Phil’s never seen him like this, and a wave of guilt crashes over him. This is all his fault.
“Clint, look at me - Just breathe, okay? Please? Can you do that for me?”
Clint’s trembling calms as he does as he’s asked, but the gun stays where it is. “You can’t be him, I saw you- him- I saw…. Phil Coulson’s dead.”
“I was,” Phil replies, nodding his head. “For a while. But they brought me back and. Please let me explain? Please.”
Clint looks so lost, and Phil wants nothing more than to reach out and touch him, make him feel that he’s real, that this isn’t another mind game. “Can you put the gun down, Clint?”
Instead of putting it down, Clint backs away into the apartment, letting Phil follow without taking his eyes off him, gun still drawn. He uses it to gesture towards one of the fleabitten armchairs, and Phil sits as he hears the door being locked and bolted.
“I’m not armed, you can check,” he offers, but Clint snorts, sitting in the chair opposite him, gun still in hand.
“If you’re really Phil Coulson you don’t need a fucking gun to be armed.”
“If you’re Clint Barton you know you’ve been beating my combat scores for nearly a decade. Please put the gun down.”
A deafening bang shatters the slience of the apartment, and Phil dives for the floor. He looks up wide-eyed to see Clint sitting as calm as can be, holding the smoking gun. There’s a hole in the back of the armchair Phil was sitting in not five seconds ago, and tiny bits of feather stuffing floating around in the dusty air.
“What the fuck was that!?” Phil yells. He casts around for something he could use as a weapon if he needs to, shocked that he has to consider the possibility at all. There are a couple of empty beer bottles on the table between them, and Phil calculates the trajectory he’d have to attempt if things came to that. “Please, put it down.”
Clint narrows his eyes and he lowers the gun, running the pads of his fingers over the hot metal of the barrel. “That an order?”
“I’m not your superior anymore, Clint. SHIELD’s gone, mostly. Disbanded except for a handful of us.”
“Then why the fuck are you here?” He snaps, meeting Phil’s eyes as he places the gun on the arm of his chair, thankfully pointing away from either of them.
“Because I was worried about you, and because I needed to see you. I needed to know you were alright.”
“Why now? Why not six months ago? I only found out you were alive thanks to Stark. Would you just have let me go on thinking you were dead? Just let me have that shit on my tab forever?”
“Because I thought you’d be alright -“
He presses on when Clint looks like he’s about to argue, because he has to say this, has to admit his mistake. “I thought - I believed SHIELD would take care of you. I always believed that, but now it’s gone and…”
Clint’s face goes through a variety of different expressions: surprise, disbelief, then anger again, before settling into a stony blankness that Phil hasn’t seen in nearly a decade.
“So I was just a project,” he says in a quiet, flat voice. “Just a part of the job.”
“No-“
“You let me fall in- you let me care about you, made me think you cared about me just so I’d be a good soldier, fall in line like everyone else.”
“No, Clint, never-“
“Anything for SHIELD, right, sir?” Clint’s eyes flash with fire, and it’s a twisted bitterness that he speaks with that frightens Phil. “Were you fucking all of your agents or just me?”
Phil shakes his head, because no, this isn’t at all what he meant to happen. “No, Clint. No one else, you were never just a part of the job for me. I meant everything I said, everything we did together. I-“
“Well, I’m just fine,” Clint cuts in, looking around at the empty beer bottles and stacks of pizza boxes that litter his dusty apartment. “So you can tick me off your list.” He stands up, leaving the gun where it is, and Phil stands up too.
“There is no list, Clint. There’s no list, there’s no conspiracy. It was classified, I was classified. I couldn’t tell you anything even if I’d wanted to, you know how it is.”
“Was. How it was.”
Phil closes his eyes and sighs. “I miss you so much,” he says. “I’ve missed you every single day since everything happened.”
He catches the tiniest bit of vulnerability on Clint’s face before his expression shuts down again. It’s not much, not much at all, but it’s something. Even if it’s just making Clint believe in him again, that’s worth more than anything.
“You should go,” Clint says, looking away.
Phil nods and walks to the door. “If that’s what you want.” He holds out his hand, and Clint looks at it for a long moment before taking it and reeling him in for a tight, if brief, hug, over as soon as it’s begun.
“Can I come see you again?” Phil asks, hopeful.
Clint licks his lips and seems to come to a decision. “Maybe. I just… really need space right now."
“Whatever you need,” Phil promises, before he’s pushed into the hallway listening to the door being locked behind him followed by a thump noise which is either Clint kicking the door or slumping down on the other side of it. Phil touches it briefly before slipping out into the world. What a goddamn mess.
-
Phil gets an email a few days later, when he’s back on the bus trying not to brood too hard. It’s from Clint, from his SHIELD email account.
If this even works, I’m writing to say I’m leaving. I have some shit to do. I’m not gonna do anything weird or dumb so stop worrying about it already. I can totally see you doing that thing where you grind your teeth and pretend you aren’t. I’m sick of feeling so fucking USELESS. So I’m gonna do some good stuff if I can figure out how.
See you around, Coulson.
The Amazing Hawkeye
PS no hard feelings - I knew you were a jackass when I got into this shit
Of course, Phil does worry, and he does grind his teeth, and he does look up exactly where Clint might be off to, checking in with Tony Stark and Maria Hill and, when he eventually gets through to her, Natasha Romanoff. They all help in their own ways, and Phil has some idea that Clint’s gone north, on the North American walkabout he used to talk about sometimes whenever he was hiding in some desert bluff or baking on a roof. “Gonna trek through the snow up to Alaska,” he would say, before regaling an equally sweaty Phil with the epic one-eyed snow-Furies they’d build, the holes in the ice they’d fish through, the bears they’d fight. It was always ‘them’, even before ‘they’ were a thing. And now Clint’s doing it on his own and Phil feels as spited as he’s supposed to.
He has Skye look out for anything in the area, but without specifics, it’s a little difficult to do much more than look out for emergency beacons and avalanche warnings. Still, Phil finds himself gazing out of the window at the ocean or whatever landmass they’re flying over, as if he might be able to see Clint far off in the distance if he only looks hard enough.
It’s ten days after Phil’s visit to Clint’s apartment that he wakes up in the dark to a silent cabin, alarm clock telling him he’s had seven hours even if it is still dark. They’re somewhere over the Indian Ocean, midnight by local time but early morning by Phil’s internal clock.
He grabs for his phone to check through the news and any new emails that’ve come in whilst he was sleeping, only to find an alert for a new voicemail from an unknown number.
“Phil,” says Clint’s voice when he presses play. He sounds drunk, slurring his words but happy. “God, miss you. The cold fucking sucks. Can’ believe I ever bitched about the heat. S’no fun makin’ snow-Furies on my own. ‘M sorry I shot at you like I did… sorry I was such a dick in general. Shit, that should be on my gravestone.” He sighs loudly, and then Phil thinks he hears the sound of Clint swigging something from a bottle.
“Found a cabin, s’fuckin’ lonely, man. Where are you, Phil? You should be here. I just… really need to have you here right now. Why you gotta be such an asshole huh? This was suppose’t’ be our trip, y’know? What are we even fighting about?”
Phil calls the number, but it rings out. Still, he gives it to Skye (once he’s shaken her awake) and she grumblingly taps a few strings of code into her laptop before shoving it at Phil and going back to sleep. Phil carries the thing to Trip in the cockpit, who looks at him like he’s crazy when he asks to change course. “I’m man enough to admit I’m way too scared of May to mess around with her settings and reroute this plane, sir.”
Phil works his jaw for a moment before being shoved out of the way by the woman herself, who rolls her eyes affectionately as she leans over Trip to flick a half-dozen switches and press some buttons that make the plane begin to turn portwise.
She cracks her neck and takes the pilot’s seat once Trip has made himself scarce. “I don’t want to know, Phil,” she says when he starts trying to explain.
-
They touch down long enough for Phil to depart before the Bus and its crew leave him with his arctic gear and not a lot else. It doesn’t take him long to find the cabin, and Phil’s more relieved than anything to find Clint still there, sitting on the bright morning sunlit steps in overalls and a thick puffy jacket, eyes bright and satisfied, as if he’s been waiting here for Phil this whole time.
“Clint,” Phil starts once he’s reached the bottom of the steps and thrown his bag at the foot of the steps leading up to Clint. He has the makings of a whole speech in his head, jumbled up phrases and promises and words of love that he’s been going over and over since the call. Now they seem trite and meaningless in the face of Clint, here in the plain light of day.
“Your plane woke me up,” Clint grouses, coming down to grab Phil’s bag and throw it into the cabin. He turns back and crosses his arms, and Phil just stands there, looking at him. He looks better out here than he did in the apartment back in the city - young and beautiful again, or more beautiful, anyway. He steps closer, to stand a foot away from Phil, arms crossed in front of him.
“You were never a project,” Phil says in the end, when he can’t think what else to say. It’s important that Clint knows that, if nothing else. “And-“
But Clint butts in. “Shh, c'mere..." he says, before grabbing the front of Phil’s jacket and hauling him in for a kiss.
Phil grunts in surprise, but regains his composure enough to kiss back, and kiss back hard. It’s like a limb he’d lost is back, tingling with pins and needles as he remembers exactly how right it is to have Clint’s lips on his, to have his arms wrapping around him, holding him tight.
“You’re an asshole,” Clint murmurs between kisses, “And you owe me.”
“I know,” Phil replies, helpless. “I know and I’m sorry, and I love you so much.”
-
Clint makes them coffee, and later, the MRE equivalent of breakfast. It really is cosy in the tiny cabin, as basic as it is. Phil keeps catching Clint looking at him, and each time it fills a vessel inside him with warmth.
They don’t talk about things, not really, at least not yet. They will, of that Phil’s more than certain, but right now they just bask in each others presence. There’s not much space, but enough for Phil to lay down where Clint pulls him, and they gaze at each other dreamily for an embarrassingly long time between kisses that ebb and flow between sweetness and heavy desire.
When Phil gets his hands under the seemingly endless layers of Clint’s clothing to get his fingers on Clint’s cock, it’s as perfect and hot as he remembers. Clint moans and tips his head back, and Phil takes the opportunity to kiss his way up his throat as he slowly jacks him off.
Clint clutches at him and rocks his hips, getting louder and louder as he nears orgasm. Phil watches him as he works his hand, writing over memories of hushed times on missions and in their varied quarters with Clint truly letting go. He shivers and comes with an “Oh fuck, oh FUCK!” that Phil kisses out of his mouth.
Clint clings as he slides through Phil’s slick fist a few last times, opening his eyes and fixing Phil with them before laughing and pulling him down for more kisses.
They’ll talk soon enough, because so much has changed, but for now, this is all there is in the world, and nothing else really matters.