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They were sitting in his motel room with the curtains still drawn to keep out the morning sun and heat. The Price Is Right was on the TV with the sound on low as Drew Carey called people to come on down.
Clint and Darcy sat on one end of the loveseat, pressed together from shoulder to knee.
"Why do you like this show again?" he asked, frowning at the TV.
"I just love how amped everyone gets," she said. "I mean, look at that old man dancing. He's gonna break his hip and he could give a shit, because he's on The Price Is Right and he's going home with a new stove and a trip to the French Riviera."
They watched in silence for a little while.
"You leaving soon?" Darcy asked, watching an old lady spin the big wheel for 80 cents. Tough break for her.
"Yeah," said Clint. "Got shit to do at HQ. Gotta file my last few sitreps from this thing. Can't hang around here and get in the way."
There went all the dreams of making him do her plots while she worked on her tan and Facebooked. "Are you gonna come back once in a while?" she asked, and tiny voices in her head warred between desperate hope that he wasn't just bailing, and shouting at herself that A) she wasn't fourteen anymore and B) anyone who hung around as much as Clint had since they met wasn't going anywhere.
He reached for the remote and turned up the TV a notch; she suspected a secret love for the yodeler game. "I'm sure I'll get sent back on assignments," he said, and turned to look at her. "And I do get downtime."
"Cool," she said, trying for nonchalant. Her inner fourteen-year-old seemed satisfied. She settled against him, enjoying the warmth at least until it cranked up to scorching outside and she'd have to establish a perimeter around herself that no one dare cross.
Eventually, her mind started wandering. "I want a codename," she said suddenly.
"What?"
"I want a codename. I may not be a ripped superhero but dammit, I do things. Fuck being an Avenger, I'd like to see forty, but I want a codename." She considered it. "Maybe like, an animal? Since I have no powers to name myself after."
"Mongoose," said Clint way too immediately. It was like he'd been thinking about it.
Darcy thought back to all that time in freshman year she'd spent getting high and watching nature programs. "That is either a bird or a rodent." She was pretty sure it was a rodent but she wasn't going to abandon a clue like 'goose'.
"Rodent," said Clint, and before she could kick his ass off the loveseat he said, "It's a little weasel kinda thing and it looks cute and harmless but it actually kills cobras like it's a hobby."
Darcy shifted a little to stare up at him; he was watching the TV maybe a little too closely. She turned what he'd said over in her mind and was cautiously prepared to call it the best compliment she'd ever received in her life. But she wasn't going to tell him that. "Are you calling me weaselly?"
"What? No! Well."
She punched him in the arm, hard, and he recoiled before he burst out laughing. "Don't murder me with your tiny, angry fists. It just so happens I think weasels are cute. They're just also kind of scary." He leaned back and put an arm around her shoulders.
Darcy decided he was appropriately wary and leaned her head back against his enormous bicep. "Smooth talker."
***
Turned out that even if Clint had been trying to blow her off when he left town, it was a shitty plan because Jane's lab pretty much seemed to be a crazy magnet. They only lasted a month before some other maniac in a costume with a stupid name came to try and either kill them, take them hostage, steal from the lab or just outright destroy it (Darcy wasn't clear on their goals), which meant the Avengers came out in force, which meant Clint and his bow coming out to murder things or at least send them packing.
The whole run-in was really stupid and two SHIELD vans packing arsenal blew up about a mile out in the desert during a rumble; Darcy and Jane peered through the window at the Hulk, running away from the aftermath of the scene with Clint hanging onto his neck and Iron Man flying overhead on their tail. A SHIELD med team was running to meet them from their own van.
"I think they're all in one piece," said Jane, who was shading her eyes with a hand as she peered out at them.
Darcy turned around in a huff and dropped into her chair to glare at her black computer screen. "I hate this job."
Jane gave her shoulder a squeeze on the way past. "He's okay."
"Did I indicate that I cared? I said I hate my job." Darcy thought, in the back of her mind, behind all the rage, that maybe she was being a little snappy and PMS-y and whatever but she couldn't bring herself to care right then.
"You don't need to indicate," said Jane airily as she walked to the door and yanked it open. "You care."
Jane was too far away to throw things at, and then Iron Man was at the door and they were talking to each other.
"Hey," said Clint when he ambled in fifteen minutes later, going straight for the 70s-era office chair he liked best and collapsing into it.
"Hey yourself," Darcy muttered, and then rolled her chair across the floor to him anyway. There was gauze peeking out from under his sleeve. "Is that a bandage? Did you get hurt?" she asked. He was wearing a clean t-shirt, too, and she wondered if the one he'd taken off had been torn and bloodstained.
He glanced down at his arm like he'd forgotten it was there. "Oh yeah, just a cut." He shrugged. "No big deal."
"Yeah, yeah, I should see the other guy, I get it," she said, reaching to poke at the gauze.
Clint flinched. "Jesus, do you mind?" he asked, trying to bat her away. But Darcy had a grip on his arm and was running her thumb gently over the top of the gauze.
"I feel stitches," she said, hearing her voice come out flat. "You have stitches. Little cuts don't need those."
He shrugged her hand off. "The SHIELD medic got me before I could get away. They like to overreact."
Darcy's bullshit detector was finely tuned, and it was going off with the big red sirens.
Clint got wigged out by her staring pretty fast and got up, letting the chair roll back. "Stark'll do the report," he said. "Come on, let's get some pancakes before they make me hit the road."
He put out his hand (the good hand, Darcy noticed) and she looked at it sadly for a second before taking it and being hauled to her feet.
"Pancakes are good for healing," she said as she went to get her bag and wave at Jane.
"Pancakes and the love of a good woman," agreed Clint, wrapping his hot, dusty arm around her shoulder to usher her out the door. She thought maybe she should try and get him into a shower before food. Maybe she'd even get a look at his arm.
"I guess you're just hypothesizing on that last one," said Darcy.
"Pretty much."
***
Clint had left town that same afternoon before Darcy had even gotten to inspect his stitches for macho bullshit, and weeks passed without him coming back. At first he texted her sometimes (whoever had given him an iPhone was a bad person, the typos and mangled autocorrections were hilarious and awful) but by week five that stopped.
"You're not worried he's dead, are you?" Jane asked, and wow, Darcy had just been worried he'd hooked up with the Black Widow or something and ditched her, but that was a whole new thing to lose sleep over.
"I'm worried I'm going to kill him," she answered in a sing-song voice, and then she logged off her computer and kicked off early for the day. She was going to spend the afternoon in the used bookstore feeling sorry for herself.
At the two-month mark (two months and six days) she was basically over it and moving on with her life, lamenting the lack of single men in town who weren't possibly inbred or hopelessly Republican and actually doing some work for a change (reading books by Feynman, which had Jane in transports of only-slightly-concerned-for-her-welfare delight). So naturally, Jane traipsed back into the lab after her dinner break with a bag from Burger King for Darcy and an annoyingly bright look in her eyes.
"Guess who I saw driving up," she said, dropping the bag on the end of Darcy's desk.
Darcy snatched the bag and peered inside at her fries. Still hot. "Santa?"
The door creaked open. "Not quite," said Jane, and grabbed her notebook off her desk before slipping past Clint out the door.
"Oh," said Darcy. "The Santa thing got my hopes up."
"Sorry," said Clint, crossing the room while unnervingly never taking his eyes off her. Nine weeks ago, that might have gotten her kind of hot but now her fingers itched to open her desk drawer.
"Have you come to explain that insurgents stole your phone and inform me that you've switched to email or letter-writing?"
Clint stopped at the edge of her desk and winced. "Uh. No. Sorry. I was on a mission."
Darcy leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. "Yeah?"
"A long one. We were--I'm not sure I can tell you where we were, or that you even want to know. But it was weird and it sucked and I didn't have cell phone service."
"How long ago did you get back, though?" Darcy asked, still stoking her righteous indignation.
Clint looked at his watch and her heart sank.
"About... yeah, eight hours." He shrugged. "Thought I'd surprise you."
"Mission accomplished," she said. "I'm pretty surprised to see you."
"I kind of expected this," he said. "I was planning to apologize some more and I have something for you." He put his hand in his jacket pocket, rooting around.
Darcy tipped forward again and put her feet on the floor, looking between his pocket and his face a couple times. "You do?" She sounded hopeful to her own ears. Dammit, her voice was a traitor.
Clint gave her the shit-eating grin that always made the hair prickle at the back of her neck and moved to stand in front of her chair, hand still in his pocket. Then he got down on one knee. Darcy grabbed the arms of her chair, fighting her instinct to run.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
Clint, still grinning like an asshole, produced the thing from his pocket with a flourish. Darcy's heart calmed down when she saw that it wasn't any kind of box. It was an orange iPod with headphones wrapped around it. The headphone cord had turned that grimy grey that she remembered well, and her eyes went wide as she reached for it.
"Is this my iPod?" she breathed, staring at it. She turned it over in her hands. It still had (most of) the sticker on the back. "Holy fuck, where did you find it?"
Clint stood up again, brushing the dust off of his knee. "Evidence locker at SHIELD," he said. "I was in there for something else and saw it just sitting in a baggie on a shelf, but I wasn't sure it was yours until I saw the Happy Bunny sticker on the back of it."
"You know Happy Bunny?" she asked, still giving her long-lost iPod loving looks. She may have been stroking it reverently but she'd deny it under interrogation.
"My sister was into that shit when she was a teenager," he said.
Darcy smiled at that and then took her attention off her iPod long enough to actually think. "Wait," she said. "You found it in an evidence locker randomly but you've only been back from Operation It's a Secret for eight hours." She looked up at him and narrowed her eyes; he stopped grinning. "How long have you been hanging onto it?"
Clint looked away and she jumped to her feet. "You've been bogarting my iPod!"
"It may have come to Parts Unknown with me, in my pack," he said, still looking studiously out the window. "No big deal."
Darcy grabbed his chin and turned his face back to her. Then she raised her eyebrow.
Clint smirked. "You have a lot of Justin Timberlake on there."
Darcy wasn't taking the bait. "Did you listen to all my Justin Timberlake songs on a loop?"
"No," he said very seriously. "That did not happen."
"You're a liar. Your pants are on fire and it's because of your dishonesty."
"It's because my ass is hot," he countered, and leaned down to kiss her. She allowed it, even if it might have been encouraging his ego.
"Thanks for stealing my iPod back from the government," she said when he straightened up again, although his hands stayed on her hips. "All your transgressions to date are hereby forgiven."
"Good," said Clint. "I'm going to go check into the roach motel and then I'm taking you out to dinner."
"I think you're trying to get laid," she said.
"I haven't seen you in two months. And I'm trying to bank good deeds against the fuck-ups I'm probably going to commit in the future."
Darcy chased him out before she could do something embarrassing that he'd be able to hold over her head later.
"Be ready in an hour," he called from the door as she sat back down at her computer. She waved that she'd heard him and then looked up at the door sharply, because Clint (that lying ass) had just walked out the door singing 'Cry Me a River', and he'd been annoyingly on-key.
She just hoped Jane hadn't heard from the roof.
***
Clint picked her up in the rental and they went to the nicest restaurant a one-horse town could offer: Tony's (no affiliation), which admittedly had pretty good steak.
"Milady," he said, offering his arm when Darcy had shut her door and joined him on the sidewalk.
It was usually better just to humour him, so she took the arm and allowed herself to be escorted into the place and to a booth. It was quiet, being a Tuesday, which at least meant that the steak was ready quickly.
Their plates were half-empty, the place was filling up some more, and they were well into the latest round of the Why Doesn't Clint Have a Facebook Account debate when the hostess audibly called somebody an asshole. Clint had a thing about sitting with a line of sight to the door and Darcy saw him glance up and frown before she twisted in her seat to get a look for herself.
The man standing in the entrance to Tony's was wearing standard-issue criminal blacks with a green domino mask and carrying a really big gun. He pushed the hostess back behind her podium and swaggered into the restaurant with the gun held up. "Everybody, get your wallets out. You," he pointed at a waiter with the gun, "go empty the till and safe."
Darcy turned back to Clint, who was sitting back in the bench seat. 'Taser,' he mouthed at her.
She nodded a little frantically, digging into her bag and hoping the douche in the cape would think she was looking for her wallet. Clint was making 'gimme' motions behind his water glass when she hauled the taser out of her bag and into her lap, and she hesitated a second before deciding he could have it. He took it from her under the table and hopefully went back to working on a plan that wouldn't get anyone shot who didn't deserve it.
"Do you think there's more than one of them?" she said quietly.
"Yes," said Clint, still casing the room. "Probably one in a car. Maybe one more on the door. The driver won't be a problem."
The green mask was working his way around the tables with an open backpack and had gotten to half of the ten or so couples in the place as well as two waiters. Clint said, "When he gets here, you distract him."
Darcy glared. He'd taken her taser and made her the bait; that was not gentlemanly. "How?" she asked.
"Think of something," he said, and then the guy was approaching them.
"Wallets in the--Darcy?" he said, and Darcy cursed her life.
"I'm not wearing a nametag or something, am I?" she asked, looking down at herself.
"No, I--it's--don't you remember me?" he asked, and then he took off the mask and it was her ex-boyfriend from senior year of high school. She tried to think of his name.
"Chris?" she tried.
He beamed at her, and she was glad he'd gotten it right because she didn't want to think about the gun hanging in his right hand and the possibility of her not remembering this loser's name. "What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Eating dinner. Getting robbed." She shot a look at Clint, who instead of being Action Man was sitting back and looking bemused.
"I mean in town."
"Work. I do research." She looked him up and down. "You've made interesting career choices."
"I joined a gang," Chris said excitedly. "I get dental benefits and everything. We're on our way to Phoenix to blow up a laboratory, this is just a pit stop."
"I'm so happy for you," said Darcy awkwardly. "Um, this is my, uh, friend, Clint."
Chris smiled at Clint. Clint smiled back tightly and then fired the taser under the table, hitting him in the thigh. Chris made a weird noise and collapsed.
"Nice work, Mongoose." Clint grabbed the gun that Chris had dropped on the floor and handed her back the taser. "You round up the other people and head for the back; I'll cover you."
Darcy shot him a quick glare that he winked at before she grabbed the backpack full of wallets and started herding other diners to the back of the restaurant. She heard shouts behind her and glanced back to see two other guys in masks rush in as Clint pulled down another table to use as a shield.
"Go, go, let's go, come on, move it," she snapped, resisting the urge to smack the ass of the lady in front of her just to see if she'd hustle faster. "I hope one of you called the cops already."
There were two shots behind her, punctuating the silence, and Darcy risked another look back. Clint was standing up from behind the toppled table, still holding up the gun, and the two other guys in masks were sprawled on the floor. "Never mind," she said.
After the cops showed up and they gave statements and Clint called Agent Coulson so they could actually leave the scene without being arrested, Darcy and Clint ambled out into the street and stopped. Darcy peered up at the sky; the sun had set not long ago and it was wild with colours.
"I'm actually still hungry," she said. "I didn't get to finish my steak."
"Well, you got half a free steak."
"Good point." She looked up at him. "Fries."
He looked down at her and raised an eyebrow. "Fries?"
"I want some."
Clint dug out his keys and twirled them on his finger. "We can get drive-through and then go back to my room."
"The excitement wore you out?" Darcy asked with a grin.
He grinned back over the roof of the car as they opened the doors. "Nope. I'm actually rocking a nice adrenaline rush that I have to wait out now. And I have a new respect for tasers."
"Tasers are awesome," Darcy agreed, and she couldn't wipe the smirk off her face as she got into the car.
But when Clint started the engine and said, "Tell me all about Chris," she wondered if she could dive out onto the sidewalk again and run before he caught up.
***
In October, when Darcy was starting to hate the wind that blew in from the mountains, Clint blew back into town.
"Hey," he said to Jane when he strolled into the lab. Jane gave him a tight smile and waved vaguely before wandering outside with her face stuck in her notebook.
Darcy frowned after her, because she'd forgotten her scarf and in five minutes she'd either be back inside to toss the whole lab for it or she'd just get frostbite.
Clint frowned after her because it was the first time Jane had ever given him the brush-off.
"What's with her?" he asked. "Did I do something?"
"No," said Darcy, saving some data. "That's the first time you've ever seen Dr. Foster, or the Jane that has a lot of degrees in physics. Normally you just see Jane the crazy hot person. It's a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing." Or a Dr. Banner and the Hulk kind of thing; Darcy's life resembled science fiction more often than she liked to think about.
"So Jane drank a crazy potion that turned her into Dr. Foster?"
Darcy nodded her appreciation that he had at the very least seen the relevant Bugs Bunny episode. "You might think that to look at her, because Dr. Foster has minimal social skills like normal scientists, but she thinks she's actually about to make a breakthrough."
"With the, uh?" He stopped.
"The rainbow bridge, the wormhole. Yeah, that." Darcy grinned. "I'll distract her with food later and she might find the ability to say hi for real. But don't get your hopes up."
Clint rolled his favourite chair over to Darcy's desk and dropped into it. "So is she actually close to a breakthrough?"
Darcy made a face at him. "Do I look like a physicist? I have part of one degree. In poli sci."
"Yeah, you're right. You just do half the work of a physicist for a living," Clint drawled, leaning back in his chair and grinning.
"I don't have to get the numbers to do all the boring work with them," said Darcy, which was true. "But if she thinks she's onto something, then I believe she's onto something. Anyway, I've spent more time than anyone needs to talking about the rainbow bridge. What's up with you?"
"Well," he said, still utterly relaxed in the chair, "I'm thinking about taking some of my holidays."
"Lucky bastard," Darcy sighed. "Where are you gonna go?"
"Where do you want to go?"
She spent a minute processing that. Then she just blinked at him.
"You get two weeks a year; don't pretend you don't," Clint said airily. "Take some and go somewhere with me. If you can get away from the lab, I guess."
Darcy licked her lips. "Yeah, no, I'm just throwing stuff together for another paper. She's doing all the hard work right now. She could spare me for a bit."
Clint gave her a full-wattage smile, the kind that made her glad she was sitting down (because that kind made her knees turn to jelly, and she used to think that was something that only happened to heroines of trashy romance novels). "Great. Where do you want to go?"
"I can't afford to go anywhere," she managed, and it was a relief to have a good excuse come to mind so easily. Mostly a relief.
"I can cover it." He spun the chair back and forth lazily with the heel of one boot.
She eyed him. "I thought SHIELD didn't pay you shit."
"Yeah, well, hazard pay is pretty good, at least until you think about why you're getting it. And I have a bunch of that sitting in an account from my military days." Clint stopped spinning his chair. "Any more excuses, or do you give up?"
She fought back a blush. "Well, everywhere you go, some jackass in a cape shows up and tries to mug or kill or kidnap someone. Who says that won't happen on vacation somewhere, too?"
"But it'd be such a nice change of pace to run into a jackass in a cape somewhere besides fucking New Mexico," he said.
Darcy sighed.
Clint stared at her.
"Fine," she blurted out, throwing her hands in the air. "How about...." She pondered. "Las Vegas?"
He winced. "I was hoping for somewhere not in the desert."
"Like where?"
"Uh. New York is nice."
"New York is Jackass-in-Cape Central! Fuck that. Pick somewhere else."
He squinted at her for a second, clearly wracking his brain. "Do you ski?"
"I can snowboard."
"Some of the mountains should be open soon. Colorado? Tahoe?"
Snow. More cold. Opportunity for horrible injuries. But also no big cities, which meant less potential for caped jackasses. And ski lodges with fireplaces and booze and attending medics. "Okay," she said. "You make arrangements and I'll get time off."
She got another killer smile for that one, and couldn't help adding, "Maybe we can swing through Utah and see my mom, too."
The smile faded. "I thought you were from Texas," he accused.
"Do I have a Texas accent? No, I do not. I didn't say I was from Texas, I said I used to live in Texas. I went to Texas A&M, Class of possibly never, bitch."
She enjoyed the way he kind of went pale and rubbed at his face.
"So your mom lives in Utah?"
"Yep. She misses me. And she'd like to meet you." Darcy tilted her head, taking it all in.
"Okay, so we'll take a couple extra days and do that," he said after a moment.
Darcy beamed. "She's a great fucking cook."
"I'll see if we can get into somewhere in Tahoe when the hills open up. We could fly out and drive back."
"Great," said Darcy, already tuning out the boring detail planning. He got a thrill out of planning things. She'd just plot how to get her taser onto a plane, because she'd be damned if she was going anywhere without it. Especially after finding out in the wake of that incident at Tony's Ristorante that Clint almost never carried a gun, because he 'didn't like them much'. Worst-case, she figured she could use his insane security clearance to smuggle the taser onto the plane. Pretend he was a plainclothes Air Marshal or something.
Clint was still talking, possibly muttering to himself about ski lodges, and Darcy looked over his shoulder to see Jane coming back, probably missing her scarf. Jane realizing that she was cold was a good sign of her general mental health, which meant that Darcy could put off food-based rescues until later. It also meant that Jane was going to toss the lab for her scarf until she eventually found it hanging on the coat rack by the door. Darcy stood up quickly.
"Dr. Hyde's coming back," she said.
Clint looked over his shoulder and got up.
"Pancakes?" he asked, because he was well-trained.
"Yes," she said, grabbing her bag, her hat and her own scarf and aiming for the door.
"You're gonna ask her for time off when she gets uncrazy and we're gonna go skiing?" he asked.
"Yes, Clint." She tugged at his arm and he got the message, coming along and throwing an arm over her shoulders.
"And you only told your mom nice things about me so she won't murder me?"
"She thinks you're sweet and chivalrous. I told her nothing but lies about you." Darcy pushed open the door to the lab and squinted against the gritty, dry wind that had threats of snow behind it. Clint caught the door and held it while she scurried out, then watched silently as Jane marched past them without a word of acknowledgement and went straight for her desk to start shoving papers around.
"Lewis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"Barton, I swear to God I'm willing to taser you again."
THE END