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It’s one of those days when everything’s going wrong and each new thing feels like a little bit of extra weight added to something that’s already too heavy to carry.
Clint wants to get to his rooms, order a pizza, crash on the couch with his dog, and not move for the entirety of the weekend, until his body is rested and his soul feels a little less like it’s dragging him down. It’s a mixture of his long-standing depression and some physical exhaustion and he ran out of energy for giving a fuck some time ago.
Which is specifically the problem now, because he’s sprawled on the fancy leather couch in the common room, and it hasn’t got the butt indent he so carefully made in his own beat up couch he had to sneak up through the freight elevator when Tony wasn’t looking. It hasn’t got springs digging like old friends into his lower back. It hasn’t got a whole history worth of stains proving that good days (and bad days) happened before and would happen again if he just got through this one.
Also, this couch smells like money and that smell’s always made him itch. On good days, his couch smells like fabreeze and that’s how he likes it.
But the energy it’s gonna take to peel himself up off this couch and stagger to the elevator… well, he just hasn’t got it.
So he sprawls there, growing more restless and agitated by the moment but lacking the self awareness it would take to fix it.
He drinks a beer and then another beer and eats stale doritos and thanks fuck that Steve, Tony, Nat and everyone else that matters is still out finishing up the mission he got sent home from.
Because no one should be around to see him like this and Jarvis is a bro who won’t comment on it, and maybe Clint just needs a nap and then he can go shower and feel marginally human again.
And then the elevator hisses open and Clint blinks, slow and disassociated but still vaguely aware that the elevator would only be opening if someone was coming to the common area and everyone should be away and --
Oh. Of course. Everyone but Bucky, the Winter Soldier recently rescued from 70 years of brainwashing and torture and murdering people, still not cleared for active duty if he ever is even gonna be.
It’s not Clint’s fault he forgot. Bucky likes to stick to his own rooms, or Steve’s side, and Clint can’t actually think of another time he’s seen Bucky on his own. It startles him enough to knock him out of his depressed funk and he sits up straight and blinks.
Bucky looks just as startled. He’s got a book -- a beat up copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- and his hair is pulled back and messy and he’s wearing a pair of Steve’s sweats and a long sleeved henley and he looks clean and wholesome and not at all like a man wanted in 27 countries for murder and assassination and other mayhem.
“Barton,” Bucky says, before shooting a quick look around. “I didn’t think -- is Steve back too?”
“No,” Clint says, rubbing at his hair. It’s greasy with alien guts and probably despair. He wonders how bad he looks -- he hadn’t managed to get the alien goo off as well as he probably should’ve, he hadn’t bothered to change, he’s got Dorito dust on his uniform. He’s suddenly so much more aware of his own funk than he was before. “They’re just cleaning up. Sent me home because I kept making the mess worse.”
“Oh.” There’s a beat of silence. Clint half expects him to turn and flee back into the elevator. Which Clint should probably do. He needs a shower and clean clothes and his couch and his dog.
He gets up and winces as he does because his shoulders hurt and his arms hurt and his back hurts and everything is too heavy and he is tired. And too old for this shit.
“You okay?” Bucky asks.
“Peachy.” Bucky just watches him, eyes dark and unreadable and really fucking pretty, so Clint elaborates. “Sore. Old. Tired.”
“You need to stretch,” Bucky tells him. And then his nose wrinkles, just the tiniest bit, and he adds, “Probably.”
Clint snorts, unable to help an amused, faint smile and he says, “Who are you, Coulson? I’m fine.”
Bucky shifts on his feet a little and shrugs and says, “Sometimes if I did a bit of yoga after tough missions, before my handlers showed up, I wouldn’t need to be recalibrated.”
It’s a horrifying thought but Clint gets hung up on one thing. “Yoga?” he says. “You know yoga?”
“Doesn’t every international assassin?” Bucky asks, a hint of dry amusement in his voice that hints at a sense of humour that Clint appreciates.
“Maybe,” Clint says, because Natasha certainly does.
Bucky shifts his book into his other hand and shrugs again and says, “I can show you?”
And three minutes ago, all Clint wanted was to escape to his room and curl up on his couch, but now. Now he’s a little intrigued by the idea of Bucky Barnes and yoga in Steve’s too-tight sweats.
“Sure,” he says, stripping his vest off because alien-slimed military grade body armour can’t be the best option for yoga. His white tank top is relatively clean. No Dorito dust, even.
When he tosses his vest aside, he looks up in time to catch Bucky staring, eyes a little wider, locked on Clint’s arms, so he flexes a little. Can’t help it. Habit. Instinct. Worth it for the way Bucky flushes, a little, before looking away.
The thing is, Clint actually does know yoga. At least a little bit. Natasha had done her best but he’d never had the attention span for it.
But he finds a whole lot more to focus on when it’s Bucky showing him downward dog.
And it helps. It soothes his muscles and his back and the agitated part of his mind that keeps going over and over and over all the things he fucked up today and yesterday and every other day in his fucking life.
All that matters right now is Stark’s plush carpet and the quiet mechanical sounds of Bucky’s arm recalibrating as he stretches and moves, as Clint copies the movements and the sounds echo in the cracking of his spine.
It’s quiet and it’s nice and Bucky’s ass looks amazing in those sweats.
And Clint felt exhausted before but now he just feels sleepy and soft around the edges.
“Hey,” he says, voice soft like the rest of him -- like Tony’s carpet against his cheek and the palms of his hands, stretched up over his head.
Bucky turns his head to look at him, and he’s even prettier up close. “Yeah?”
“We should get dinner some time,” Clint says, because good things are few and far between and he’s not afraid to reach out and hold on to the good things he’s lucky enough to find.
Bucky blinks, his smile slow and sweet, no hint of Winter Soldier lurking around the edges. “Yeah?” he asks. “I’m not supposed to leave the tower.”
“I was thinking pizza,” Clint tells him. “At my place. I have a fucking amazing couch. And an even better dog. You’re gonna love him.”
Bucky stretches, slowly getting to his knees, watching Clint like he’s not quite sure what to do with him but maybe he wants to figure it out. “Yeah,” Bucky says. “Sounds good.”
There’s still that dark place, that restless part of his mind that doesn’t know how to be still, and Clint knows things are going to get heavy again, but for now…
For now, things are looking up.