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There's a voice in everybody's head, and for as long as there have been people speaking, collective wisdom has said that it's the voice of your soulmate. You might grow up with them. You might never meet. You might meet, but find you have nothing in common. But, people say, that person is out there, somewhere.
Since Phil was small, since summer days lasted forever, since he spent more time reading books halfway up trees and collecting Captain America cards than playing baseball or riding bicycles, he's known his voice was different.
Sometimes, it's a husky, soft voice that speaks with long vowels and grammar that Phil's mother would reprimand him for if he ever mimicked it.
Sometimes, it's a loud, muffled thing that Phil has trouble deciphering, even when the world around him is quiet.
And sometimes, it's completely silent, and all Phil can sense is a flutter of movement, meaningful and foreign all at once.
Phil doesn't know why he's different, but he's always been shy, always been unconvinced that he'll find his soulmate, anyway, so he rides the changes like a swell, accepting the differences as they come.
*
He's a freshman in college, trying to find a classroom in a twisting maze of corridors, when he sees something that stops him in his tracks. Two girls, their hands flying between them, dancing, movement that's instantly familiar. It's like a thunderbolt.
He doesn't know how long he watches them, only that one girl notices, and that her face hardens into something like anger. Her hand shapes into something like a gun and points at her own forehead, something Phil recognises as stare at me without knowing how.
The other girl turns to look, her fingers twisting into an inverted 'okay' symbol against her chest, and yeah, Phil's immediately and crushingly embarrassed. He can't blame her for calling him an asshole.
He stammers out an apology and flees, forgetting that he was on his way to class in his need to leave.
It's only once he gets back to the safety of his dorm room that he realises that he didn't say the word sorry aloud. He'd rubbed the knuckles of his closed hand across his sternum, instead.
*
Phil joins SHIELD and finds his calling. He smoothly advances up the ranks, not through ruthlessness but through turning competence into something of an art form. He develops a rep for crafting flawless mission plans, salvaging blown operations, and always bringing his people home, even if they're in body bags. His co-workers respect him even if they don't like him.
He never gets up the nerve to go to actual sign language classes, but he looks at videos on the internet, tries to replicate the shapes the sign instructors make with his own clumsy hands.
He dates a little, but he's married to his work, and more than one partner tells him so as they walk out the door.
He gets used to solitude, and to silence.
*
When Fury orders him to the medical unit to debrief an asset after an op gone bad, he doesn't think anything of it. It's just another day. He gathers a clipboard, a legal pad and his favourite fountain pen, and rides the elevator down to the fourth floor.
“I'm here for Barton,” he tells the attending, and she points him to a corner room.
Barton is a man made of compact muscle. He's pale under his golden tan, and he's sporting a collection of casts and splints and bandages as testimony to how hard the doctors had to work to patch him back together. He's watching Phil with keen eyes of an almost silver-blue, and he seems alert and sharp despite the morphine.
“If you're here for my report,” he says before Phil can introduce himself, “you're gonna have to wait. I can't hear a damn thing.”
His voice is too-loud in the room, but husky-gentle all the same. There's a pair of hearing aids discarded on the cabinet beside the bed, and Phil can see a dried, bloody track from each ear that the medical staff haven't wiped away. He's a stranger to Phil, but Phil would know that voice anywhere.
“You,” Phil says aloud, his finger pointing at Barton. He raises his hand and strokes a line with one finger from his ear down his cheek. “Deaf?” he asks.
Barton's eyebrows rise. He nods. Deaf you? he asks, abandoning his voice in favour of his hands. When Phil shakes his head, his brow furrows. Sign why? he asks.
Phil's hand curls itself into a fist with his middle and index fingers outstretched, like a pair of scissors, and moves them between them. You and me. “Spirit voice,” he says and signs, though he's not sure that's the right phrase, or the right combination of signs, or that Barton will even understand what he means-
But Barton gasps, his eyes wide and startled. “I really, really wish I could hear you right now,” he says aloud in a rush, shifting a little like he wants to sit up, and Phil knows he really shouldn't be moving.
Phil crosses the room and presses his hand gently into the centre of Barton's chest, urging him to lie down and settle against the pillows again. Barton throws out heat like a furnace, and Phil lets his hand linger against that warmth for what's probably a moment too long.
“I never thought... I don't even know your name,” Barton whispers, his voice ragged and tight, his eyes glistening. His hands move, shaping, name you?
P-H-I-L, he slowly finger-spells, and Barton's lips curl up.
“Phil,” he repeats, and Phil nods in confirmation.
“I'm Clint,” he says, carefully finger-spelling it.
Phil spells it back, and Clint nods.
“You learned, for me?” Clint asks, his voice shaking, and Phil swallows hard.
“Yes,” Phil says, nodding. He can't help himself; he reaches out and cups Clint's bruised jaw gently.
Clint's eyes sink shut, and he lets out an unsteady breath. When he opens his eyes again, he seems a little calmer, a bit more himself.
Phil withdraws his hand enough to sign, you need? He doesn't know the sign for anything, but he hopes the interogative inflection of the sign and his expression is enough to make his meaning clear.
Clint smiles, and drags his hand the length of his torso, from his throat to his stomach. Hungry.
Your favourite food what? Phil asks.
The sign that Clint makes isn't one he's familiar with, his hand held flat and pointed towards his mouth. P-I-Z-Z-A, Clint finger-spells, when he sees that Phil doesn't understand.
Pizza, you like what-kind? Phil asks.
Pizza, Clint just signs more emphatically, followed by hungry and pizza pizza. The sparkle in his eyes is wicked.
Phil chokes on a laugh, and Clint reaches out a hand to feel it vibrating through Phil's chest. Phil slides his own hand up Clint's wrist, tugs Clint's hand up close enough that Phil can bend his head down to kiss his fingertips.
Clint's eyes dip closed again, but from the little restless wriggle his body makes, the reason's different this time around. Phil's breath catches in his throat, and Clint's eyes fly open to fix on his face again. It's like being pinned in place, and Phil's never felt so flung wide open, so known.
“Pizza,” he says aloud, the word buzzing against Clint's fingertips. When Phil dips into his pocket to get his phone to dial in the order, Clint's smile is adorably triumphant.