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He had been dead. Phil knew he had been dead. He distinctly remembered being stabbed straight through the chest with a demi-god’s magical scepter and that didn’t seem like the kind of thing one just bounced back from.
Nevertheless, he was alive. Probably. His eyes were still closed, but he could see light through his eyelids. That wouldn’t rule out some kind of heavenly afterlife, but Phil hadn’t been a practicing Lutheran in over two decades and had never put too much credence in the idea anyway. The familiar beeping of a heart monitor, however, put him firmly in some kind of hospital, though not SHIELD medical, based on the mattress. It was far too comfortable. Medical prided itself on walking the thin line between making agents comfortable enough to entice them into medical treatment, but not nearly comfortable enough to stay and take up valuable real estate.
Phil listened for a minute, but he couldn’t hear the tell-tale sound of breathing or fidgeting nearby, so he surmised he was alone in the room. Blinking his eyes open groggily verified the fact, as well as confirming that he was not in the familiar SHIELD hospital. There was no sign that he had had any visitors. Either his partner had been called out on an emergency mission, or Phil had been unconscious much longer than he thought. (Phil refused to contemplate that Clint was still under Loki’s thrall.) He shifted ever so slightly on the bed to judge the damage and immediately regretted the decision. A sharp pain cut through his chest, stilling the breath in his lungs as the beeping of the heart monitor picked up.
Phil gritted his teeth and forced several short breaths in and out until the pain receded to a manageable level and the heart monitor had calmed down. He gently wiggled his extremities and confirmed that his chest was his only major injury, though there was a slight twinge in his right shoulder, which he attributed to the Destroyer gun he had liberated from R&D for an impromptu field test. So not a long time since his impalement, then. He clenched his teeth and felt for the button to raise the head of the bed. The pain wasn’t quite as bad this time, and once he was settled at the higher elevation, he was able to ignore it for the most part.
The door to his room opened, and a nurse stepped in with a smile. “Good afternoon, Mr. Evans.” Phil didn’t visibly startle at the alias, but it was a close thing. Patrick Evans was one of Phil’s more obscure covers and Fury was the only other person who knew the name. He had kept Patrick an active identity, borrowing ebooks on his library card and using a credit card in his name occasionally when he bought subway fare.
Phil absently greeted the nurse in response and submitted without complaint to her inspection of the various monitors hooked up to him. He had always intended to use Patrick Evans in the event he ever had to fake his own death. That Fury had pulled it out now could only mean bad things.
He immediately revised his list of possible reasons for Clint’s absence to (in order): 1) believing Phil was dead, 2) not knowing where Phil was, 3) on an emergency mission, 27) still captured by Loki. He would think up reasons 4 through 26 in the event the first three were disproven.
He registered the nurse asking him a question. “Hmm?”
“I was asking if there was anything I could get for you?”
“A crossword puzzle and a pen would be great.” He gave her his best disarming smile. “I like to live on the edge.”
This earned him a huff of laughter and a promise to fetch the requested items. Twenty minutes later, he was squinting at a “Fiendish” crossword that must have been mislabeled “Intermediate,” because there was no way a senior SHIELD agent should be this flummoxed by a word puzzle. Once he was certain the nurse was gone, he carefully curled the hand holding the pen around the edge of the folded newspaper and slowly managed to draw a curved line in the shape of a sideways “U” on the side of his middle finger. There. Phil knew the ink would have simultaneously appeared on Clint’s finger and it was only a matter of time until he got a response. Until then, he had an unfortunately high number of clues to unravel.
--
Sweat dripped off the end of his nose an instant before he found himself flat on his back again.
Natasha took pity on him and straddled his hips, easily pinning his forearms above his head. “Really, yastreben’ka. And you call yourself mission-ready?” She scoffed. “I know you are out of practice, but this is ridiculous.”
“Fuck off, Nat,” Clint said tiredly.
“No,” she growled, grabbing him roughly by the ear. “You won’t stay in the Tower like any sensible agent on medical leave, and I refuse to watch you die like this, no matter how much you might want to.” She shoved him down into the mat before getting off him and stalking out of the room, leaving Clint staring after her with his mouth open.
After a moment, Clint scrambled to get off the mat and hurry after her. “Wait, Nat! Natasha! It’s not like that.”
Natasha didn’t stop or noticeably slow down, but she didn’t speed up or put him in a choke-hold either, which was implicit permission to continue the conversation.
If he had been slightly more suicidal (ha, Nat!), he would have grabbed her arm to slow her. As it was, he kept pace with her down the hallway to the elevator. Once they were in the elevator car, Clint opened his mouth to tell her all the ways in which she was wrong, but had trouble figuring out how to articulate the ball of grief in his chest in a way that didn’t make him sound like he was waiting for the opportunity to take a header off a skyscraper.
When he didn’t say anything, Natasha just raised an eyebrow at him.
Clint ran a hand through his hair in frustration and was about to try again when he froze. There was a mark on his finger that he hadn’t put there. On the middle finger of his left hand, just between the first and second knuckles, was a flattened “C”.
For a moment, he could only stare at it.
“Pen.” His throat was dry and the word was more of a squeak than a recognizable syllable. “Pen,” he rasped more urgently. “I need a pen.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the line blurring on his finger as he struggled to focus on it through gathering tears and shaking.
Natasha was in front of him in an instant, her small hands gripping his tightly. “Clint. Clint, look at me.”
He tilted his head up, but only pulled his eyes away from the mark at the last possible moment.
“We will find you a pen. Right now. And then we can talk about your soulmate.”
Jarvis must have been paying attention, because the doors to the elevator dinged and flew open, revealing DUM-E with a pen held in his claws. Clint tore himself away from Natasha and grabbed the pen with shaking fingers. He took a deep breath and held it, trying to steady his hands enough to reply. It was jagged, but he did manage to draw a vertical line across his finger, crossing the legs of the “C”.
Once it was done, Clint let out his breath in a gasp. He found himself on the ground, back to a wall and head curled over his knees as he was caught somewhere between hyperventilating and outright sobbing. He dimly registered that Natasha must have moved him, but his eyes were still focused on the lines on his skin.
There were voices over his head. Natasha’s and a lower one that sounded like Tony. Right. Jarvis must have taken them to the workshop. That made sense; DUM-E had been there with the pen that was still clutched tightly in Clint’s fist. Right.
After what felt like an instant and forever, but was probably more like fifteen minutes, Clint became aware of an easy warm pressure on either side of him. When he lifted his head, he realized he was still backed against the wall, and Natasha and Tony were sitting on either side of him.
“Hey, Katniss,” Tony started, his voice casual. “Not to sound completely insensitive, but are you going to be cluttering up my hallway for much longer? It’s bringing down the tone of the neighborhood.”
Clint snorted a laugh, which must have been Tony’s aim, because he looked a little smug. “Nah,” he responded, “I’d hate to ruin the whole barely-organized-chaos thing you’ve got going on here.”
Clint leaned his head back against the wall and just breathed for a couple minutes, trying to bring himself back to equilibrium. “Sorry,” he offered.
That earned him a solid punch on his arm from Natasha. “Don’t be an idiot,” she scolded.
Tony must have decided it was time to actually talk about the elephant in the hallway. “Just so we’re all on the same page, please remember that I do have the most advanced technology this side of science fiction, and Jarvis can probably track down whoever’s scribbling on your skin—” he gestured at Clint’s hand “—in a matter of minutes. Hours, at most.” He paused. “You know, in case you actually want to meet your soulmate at some point.”
Natasha didn’t say anything, but the side of her body pressed a little harder against Clint’s, and he knew she was thinking about Coulson.
That was when it dawned on Clint that they didn’t know what was going on. Natasha knew that he and Phil were a Thing. Like, a long-term, live-together, joint-finances, mutual-power-of-attorney, maybe-someday-we’ll-get-married kind of thing. Because they were that. But they were also soulmates. Like the write-on-your-skin-and-the-other-person-can-see-it kind of soulmates. Everyone had one and most people were even lucky enough to meet them and be around the same age as each other.
Clint had been in second grade when Poli Sci notes had shown up on his arm. Phil had been in his third year of undergrad when a childish scrawl had misspelled a confused question about his “solmat”. The circus-and-Army-Ranger-and-assassin-and-secret-agent thing had caused about ten years of anger and silence and hurt, but they had eventually worked it out around the same time they stopped dancing around the unresolved-mutual-sexual-attraction thing and Clint stopped going by a pseudonym.
At first, they hadn’t told anyone else because of the aforementioned ten years of anger and silence and hurt, but once they’d started the long-term, maybe-someday-we’ll-get-married thing, it never seemed to come up in conversation. Everyone seemed confounded enough by Clint lying about his identity and the ex-mercenary and robot-agent dating that it seemed a little much to mention the soulmate thing as well. It had been their ace in the hole on missions (instantaneous secure communication between an agent and his handler turned out to be very useful on occasion), and by the time Clint and brought the Black Widow in from the cold, it had been second nature to hide their connection.
Tony thought Clint had never met his soulmate. Natasha thought he was freaking out about finding his soulmate so soon after his long-term, maybe-someday-we’ll-get-married had died.
“No, no, I’ve met my soulmate,” he hurried to clarify. “It’s just that until half an hour ago, I thought Loki had killed him.”
Natasha and Tony both froze, though Natasha recovered faster.
“Oh, yastrebeshka,” she murmured.
“Agent?” Tony yelped.
“Yeah. And unless this is all a figment of my imagination, I can send him a message.” He held the pen, now held tightly in his dominant hand, up over the skin of his right arm, hesitating over the space. He took a breath and seemed to register the dried sweat pulling at his skin for the first time. He wrinkled his nose. “Alright, maybe a shower first. I’m not going to want to wash this off for a while.”
--
Phil scowled at the half-dozen boxes that had remained stubbornly blank. Why was it that he knew the name of Laos’s Prime Minister from 1945 to 1946, but not the winner of last year’s Dancing with the Stars?
He sighed and set the puzzle down in his lap, glancing once more at his right arm, which had also remained stubbornly blank for the last half hour. It had only taken three long minutes for the curve on his finger to be crossed by a shaky line that had reminded Phil of the first marks he had seen on his skin apart from his own. Those had been equally as nervous, though that had been augmented by youth and semi-illiteracy. Phil suspected a different reason behind the jaggedness of this line.
The U and crossbar or C and intersection had been the result of a long weekend’s work, as well as the code that Phil was still waiting to see. By the time Phil knew who Clint was - Clint had apparently known the whole time - the pair were already one of SHIELD’s top strike teams. Soulmates weren’t allowed to work together on the same missions, but neither of them felt separation would be an acceptable solution. Everyone at SHIELD already knew Phil didn’t have a soulmate (at least not one who wanted to claim him, or even communicate with him), and no one had ever seen Clint so much as pick up a pen without threats from his handler, so it had seemed simple enough to keep under wraps.
A few missions later, it had become clear that the status quo was not going to cut it. Phil had been captured and backup had been three hours and way too long away. Clint had single-handedly mounted a rescue op, but he had needed to warn Phil about his somewhat...unorthodox approach, and had scribbled references to past missions down Phil’s shins in the hope that he would be able to see them. Since the first step of any competent bad guys is to confiscate anything that might be used as a writing implement, he hadn’t been able to respond (he had been tied to a chair in his boxers at the time anyway, but that was a minor detail), but he had still been able to brace himself three seconds before the wall to his right exploded. Unfortunately, the bad guys had seen that someone was communicating with him and had been prepared for a rescue attempt. Phil had escaped with electrical burns in uncomfortable places and a moderate concussion. He had needed to carry Clint out of the base with three bullets in him.
Needless to say, the pair had decided that a repeat was unacceptable. Once they were both cleared for more vigorous exercise, Phil had promptly whisked Clint out of the SHIELD base and back to his apartment for some much needed rest. They had spent four days pouring over the skin on their bodies (getting highly distracted several times) and crafting a series of dots, dashes, and other small symbols that could be strategically placed to convey messages. The arms were the easiest, but in event of capture, there were corresponding markers on thighs, calves, feet, hips, and ribs. They had discussed ways to signify there were other marks (especially since it was rare to see Phil with bare forearms, much less anything else) and had settled on a pair of dots carefully placed on the back of the hand.
Phil had thought their series of hidden messages supplemented by Morse code was adequate, but Clint had hemmed and hawed and blushed (and Phil had gotten them distracted again) and admitted that he wanted something else. Something a little more sentimental; something a little harder to accidentally overlook. Phil thought that had been one of the best things Clint had ever suggested (and there were a lot). They would have gotten distracted again, but it hadn’t been long since the last time they had gotten off track and neither of them were twenty-five anymore. There was a long break before discussion continued, though. After several suggestions, they decided on a call and response: an open loop with a crossbar.
It was this mark that Phil had put on the side of his finger and that Clint had responded to with a shaking pen-stroke. Possible reason 27 had been promptly crossed off his list, but Phil was still waiting on another message and an explanation for Clint’s absence. He hesitated and gently put his pen to his left forearm, two inches above the wrist. Before he could place the horizontal line for “sitrep?”, he caught a glimpse of a pair of dots on the back of his right hand that had not been there thirty seconds earlier. He watched with bated breath as ink dotted the skin of his right forearm.
The quarter-inch vertical line four centimeters to the left of his elbow was the “all-clear on my end”. The quarter-round between one of Clint’s freckles and one of Phil’s was a standard “what’s your position?” The dark dot just under it asked “extraction needed?” Just on the inside of his wrist was another tiny line. This one was too pinched to be a semi-circle and too long to be a dot foiled by a ball-point pen. It was another “I love you” waiting for its countersign.
Phil gave it quickly. He had spent the better part of the last thirty minutes glancing around the room at strategic intervals. While it was best not to let his guard down, if there were cameras, they were too small or too well-hidden for him to see. Once he had made the tiny mark on his right wrist to reassure his partner, he swapped the hand holding the pen and hesitated over his left arm. Did he need a rescue?
It was either an extremely impressive reproduction (and he didn’t know of any) or an actual civilian hospital. He’d been keeping a careful watch in the hour since he’d woken up, and from the room and the glimpses he could see through the window in the door, it didn’t look like any SHIELD facility he knew, even the more top-secret ones. If it was a replica, it was a far more authentic facsimile than the one SHIELD researchers had cooked up for Steve Rogers.
Mirroring the “extraction needed?” dot, Phil drew a short line that sloped down towards his wrist. If it had tilted the other way, it would have been a “no”. As it was, it indicated that yes, an extraction would be nice, please and thank you. He added a small hook on the end as well: “not urgent”. No need to worry Clint if he could help it.
Across from “what’s your position?”, he drew a semicircle facing downward: “position unknown”. Under that, a bastardization of Morse code and stenographer’s shorthand spelled out what he knew: Hosp. Eng. Phil? He was in an English-speaking hospital, probably Philadelphia, based on the newspaper he had been given. Between that and JARVIS, he was pretty confident they could find him. Just to be sure, he laid out a series of dashes and dots along the smooth underside of his arm. Patrick Joseph Evans. Now they really had no excuse.
When security was an absolute priority, they had a code of squares and triangles that was paired with a shift cipher that adjusted the alphabet at various intervals forward or backward different distances. It was based on pi and the Fibonacci sequence and took several minutes of puzzling to completely decipher. For the most part, Morse code served their purposes just fine, and Clint should be able to read the name easily.
On the front edge of his arm, about two inches to the left of his wrist, in line with his thumb, he put a circle for “medical attention required” with a single tally to the right of it and three to the left, indicating his condition wasn’t urgent, but he would need a serious amount of care.
His arm was littered with spots of ink and his chest was starting to protest the movement of his arm, but he wasn’t quite done yet. Phil smiled as he drew the final symbol, an angled line with a horizontal arm off of it, like the left two strokes of a capital A, four inches to the right of his elbow, high on the top edge of his forearm. See you soon. In actuality, it meant “approaching rendezvous”, but the sentiment was the same.