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“Nattie, let me get in the door first, damn,” Clint mutters to himself, juggling his keys and groceries in his hands as the phone rings in his pocket. Nat always manages to call him just as he’s crossing his threshold; it’s another one of her quirks that would be almost-endearing if not for the pervasive undercurrent of I’m watching you.
He dumps his grocery bags on the floor and digs his phone free, wrestling with his coat and layers to pull it out. Without checking the caller ID, (who else would have that impeccable timing, if not for his better half?) Clint flips it open and sandwiches the thing between his ear and shoulder, pulling the bags to the kitchen to put his shit away.
“How was your grocery trip? Get me anything good?”
Nat’s crackling voice comes through the phone and his hearing aid, that electronic edge to it growing more familiar than her genuine voice ever was. They’ve had him undercover here in DC for months, ingrained him in the ranks of the Secret Service as a personal protector for the President’s... cousin. (He’s more than insulted by the position, capable of taking out the President himself with an archaic hunk of wood, but he’s doing what he has to to get back to Nat at SHIELD HQ.)
“Oh, yeah, sure thing, Nattie. I gotcha some eggs?” He starts listing things as he sets them away in their respective homes. “Or would you prefer raw bacon? Center cut.”
“So patriotic of you. Hearty American breakfast," she teases, and he rolls his eyes as he sets the bananas on the otherwise-empty top shelf.
His cover is a man who would eat bananas, hence why they’re there, but… Clint is many things, according to his handler at SHIELD, his handler in the Service, his army superiors, his peers at SHIELD. Insubordinate. Stupid. Resourceful. Clever. Batshit. Antisocial. Pathological.
A banana eater isn’t one of those things.
“Who says I’m eatin’ it for breakfast?”
Nat snorts, something she only does with Coulson and with Clint. “A real rebel. Bacon for dinner.”
Clint doesn’t deem her teasing worthy of a response, opting instead to wad up the plastic bags and throw them in the overflowing trash can. Damn. Another thing he forgot to do on his way out this morning.
He turns to the living room, sighing as he lays eyes on his packed lunch he’d forgotten behind. It’s sweating when he picks it up, condensation from the freezer pack leaving a mark on his coffee table. “Aw, stain, no.”
“We talked about this.” Nat hides a little teasing laugh behind her reminder of their plan: “Sticky note on the front door failed?”
“Yeah. I left my lunch on the table this time, and now there’s a- a stain," Clint whines, throwing his head back to the cushions on his couch. His fingers extract a baggie of crackers, and his stomach rumbles as he rips it open in his lap.
“You’re hopeless.” Nat’s eyeroll is audible through the phone call, and Clint can’t even blame her for it. “You need to get out of that apartment and back to HQ. Roberta asks after you daily.”
“I love her, too.” Clint shoves a handful of the little cheesy fishes in his mouth, almost groaning at the way his stomach constricts. “I miss her, and her chocolate cake, and her mac and cheese, and-”
“-and her grilled cheese, I know.” Nat finishes with him, off by a mere second due to the phone between them.
“They don’t have a Roberta for the Secret Service, Tash, maybe that’s why they fight dirty at the inter-agency baseball tournament every year,” Clint languishes, shoving more crackers still in his mouth.
“Are you eating those fish crackers again?”
“Maybe so! What about it!” He cries, the empty bag in his lap and the lights off in the apartment.
“You have to get out," she repeats, and he hears something more than just I miss you best friend ever in her voice. Something desperate.
He uses their code. “How’s the weather there?”
“It was too hot for me today. Nice and sunny though.” All’s fine. So what’s her deal? “I just don’t…”
She trails off, something he can’t make out shuffling on the other end.
“Nat?”
“Fury has a new plan, something… something happening. They found a… a cube. He wants me to watch it.”
“Is it an 084?” He asks, rummaging in his lunch box for the fruit snacks he knows he put there. He finds them just as she answers, and pauses the ripping-open process to better hear her.
“Yes. But it’s more than that, you- you’re wasting away on your own, aren’t you? You’re lonely, you haven’t shot your bow in months. They’re not using you right.”
She spits it out like it’s insulting to her, personally, that they put Clint UC.
“Awh, I knew you missed me. Tell me you miss me, Tash,” he teases, shredding the bag to free his juicy chewy treasure, and she snaps back at him with irritation and well-practiced ribbing.
“You’re skilled enough you could go out. What if you went to a range, or a bar, just to get out of that stupid apartment you don't have enough lamps for."
His cover is not a man with an eye for interior design. Goldfish are less shameful in the dark.
"You could get out and come back unnoticed, couldn't you, Hawkeye?”
He pauses with the handful of gummy snacks in his palm, eyes wide at the empty wall opposite him. “Is that a dare?”
“Don’t be rude, I’m not that childish.”
"Say that to those first years you hazed with me. Nerf or nothin', Tash, and you did more than nothin'."
It’s not long before they end the call, Tasha growing irritated with his loving pet names and him tired after the day he’s had. He decides his lunch is fine in lieu of a real-people dinner and takes the trash out, going through the motions of a domestic life on his own.
Tasha isn’t entirely wrong, though. He is wasting away in this apartment, lonely and cooped up and eating his own cooking (lethal) in the dark. He hasn’t had sex in months, the UC persona a lone wolf and the Secret Service tighter about agent relations than SHIELD ever was. At SHIELD, he has a rotation of agents both above and equal to him on the roster for his needs, people vetted and personally proven worthy of a romp in the bunks, but here, in DC…
He’s an isolated island. Even more than sex, he misses Phil, their sitrep meetings, and Strike Team Delta, and their stupid-crazy missions taking down drug cartels and mutated science professors and terrorist cells. He even kind of misses Fury and his eye patch.
His fellow Service Agents, in DC, don’t know his real name, don’t know his real skillset, don’t know his purpose for being there. There’s a mole in the Service feeding information to Hydra, and Fury sent him personally to find who it is and neutralize the target, and he’s been here for months. He’s likely to work his way up for just as long before he even brushes elbows with someone high enough to be called a mole, instead of informant or traitor or lackey.
What would it hurt if a Secret Service agent had a life outside of the Service for one Thursday night?
What would it hurt if he snuck out to a bar, had a drink, just took in something that wasn’t orders being barked out?
What would it hurt?
Hawkeye is more than capable of a single evening out at a bar and a single drink watching people grind on each other. Hawkeye is capable of a hookup in the bathroom, if it comes to that.
***
Soldat watches.
It’s what it’s trained to do, to silently take in the details of conversations, orders, interactions, and missions around it without passing judgment or commentary, and it does this trained behavior perfectly.
It watches as it’s passed handler to handler, as it’s sent on missions domestic and abroad, as it’s discussed and ignored and treated like furniture. It witnesses the rise and fall of regimes, politicians, HYDRA agents, and headquarters. It silently looks on as HYDRA falls away to Red Room, Soviet handlers rougher and louder and yet more respecting of their bequeathed asset.
It’s in the halls of the Red Room, after years of training and freezing and fighting and training that somehow, still silently through it all, it becomes a he. It is given, on purpose, a personality, with memories it holds in both hands and the right to laugh when it deems it appropriate. It is given more missions, more challenges, more widows, more freedoms, and in doing so, the Red Room has imbued its asset with a sense of accomplishment, of pride, of loyalty as yet unseen in Hydra. The asset, clearly, has flourished under the watchful eye and waterings of the Red Room officials.
It is in Madame B's office, a regal bookshelf behind her desk, that the asset - the Soldier - Yeshua is given his greatest challenge yet - espionage. Her widows are useless against this particular target, as he is of a certain… different persuasion, she explains.
Are you up to this, Yeshua?
She would in no uncertain terms destroy the very memory of him from scorched earth if he proved incapable.
Da.
He had answered affirmatively, both because it was required of him, and because he believed it.
***
Clint’s standing in front of a lower-key cabin-style bar, the sign proudly declaring The Lodge - Dance and Club Bar. How a wood-cabin-style building could house a club bar is beyond him, but it’s populated with a line out the door and there’s plenty of people with flashier outfits and higher heels than him, so he should fit under the radar at least.
The pounding bass becomes clearer to him as the line shifts, and he revels in the music being loud enough for him to hear it outside. In line, there’s chatter and whisperings, excited, about it’s been so long since my last date, and what if they don’t like me, and god I need to get laid. Clint doesn't remember every bar this desperate at the door before his time UC.
He’s dressed down, compared to the others in line - just a black shirt and jeans, but he still gets appreciative looks when he shows his Service cover ID and he’s let in without a thought, not even a door charge in his way. Inside, there are more tables than he’d expect for a dance club, but they’re set up equidistant in a grid. Curiously, he takes in the people around, but it doesn’t click until a tall, hairy man in a chest harness passes by him and winks that Clint’s found his way into a gay bar.
“Okay, pleasant surprise,” he whispers to himself, making his way to one of the empty tables to just breathe and figure out his plan. Gay bars aren't the end of the world. It’s not like Clint’s never entertained a man in his career, and the circus wasn’t exactly the most religious place he’d ever been in - he was used to the Fortune Teller and the Acrobats finding their way to the same trailer each night, and the Ringleader flirting with Barney a bit too much, and then in SHIELD it wasn’t just his female coworkers who found themselves knocking on his bunk frame.
He isn’t against fucking in a gay bar bathroom any more than he is a typical bar’s bathroom, if he’s being honest. He continues his sweep of the place, taking note of the couples and awkwardly mingling small groups, when his eyes land on a TV screen. There’s a slideshow of announcements for future events, Drag Queen shows and costume contests and brunches, and then-
Shit. That’s not today’s date, is it?
He looks around, at the grid of tables, one of them his resident spot, and closes his eyes, shocked at what he’s found himself in the midst of. Speed Dating. The slideshow innocently moves on, as though it didn’t drop a bomb in his lap, and the awkward mingling makes sense now, the grid of tables, the long line.
Hawkeye can’t look at every man in this building for five minutes each and escape attention. No way. Clint Barton is many things, but he is not a banana eater, and he’s not forgettable in a dating context. He stands, ready to make a swift exit, when someone taps his shoulder.
“What?” He turns, looking at a short thin guy in a button down.
“Write down your name and that you’re a top.” The guy hands him a marker and a nametag, and Clint tries to wave him off, but the twink is fast, weaving and bobbing between groups and drinks with ease.
“No.” He says to himself, setting the name tag and marker down and trying to escape. The throngs of people seem to have multiplied in the minute he’s been sat, but he manages, a head above the rest, to make his exit, working as quickly as he can to split the crowd. He’s at the door, the line refusing to give him a window to escape, when the lights all dim once, twice, three times, and the twink announcer taps a microphone.
He’s at the door, watching it close, and the microphone feedback makes him wince.
“Hello hello hello you single bitches!” The twink yells to the crowd’s delight, and Clint pushes the last few steps to the door when the bouncer looks at him strangely. “The doors are locked and now we’re starting! Don’t worry, Henry, your date can’t run away this time.”
“I gotta get out of here,” Clint yells over the music, the crowd, the twink, but the guard shakes his head.
“We can’t-” The rest is lost, the swelling sounds impossible for Clint’s aid to let him parse through.
“I know everyone has been looking forward to our speed dating event, you thirsty whores!” The twink roars, and the undulating crowd uproariously agrees.
Clint tries to focus on the guard. “What?”
“We can’t let you-” The bouncer looks irritated, now, and Clint rolls his eyes. Like he enjoys asking people to repeat themselves. “-Club policy.”
“You can’t lock me in here.” Clint furrows his brow, and the bouncer shrugs.
“Sorry pal. It’s about event safety.”
Clint scowls, scoffing as he turns away. Event safety. He tries to think about what might make the event safer to have it locked, and immediately, the talk of the town today comes to his mind - everyone on shift had been discussing the attack on the nightclub in New York City, how a clubgoer had left and signaled max capacity to a terrorist organization that had gone in guns first. While the Service has their own assumptions and thoughts, and Clint is privy to them, that attack is one of the reasons why Clint is even in DC in the first place - Fury is sure the recent string of attacks on domestic locations (grocery stores in black neighborhoods, gay bars, mosques) are due to intel coming from the Service mole about places frequented by convenient political targets of Hydra.
After turning to look deeper into the bar, Clint shakes his head and realizes he’s stuck in here for the foreseeable future. He might as well get somewhere comfortable in a far-stretch corner to just people watch - he knows it’s a distant possibility that he’ll be allowed to not participate, but fuck if he won’t do his damnedest to make it happen against the odds.
He settles in a dark corner, watching the announcer continue to regale the crowd with the rules and expectations of the event, and crosses his arms in frustration. Why did he do this? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Watch him ever take another of Nattie's dares. Black Widow dares are a different breed; he might blow his cover here under candlelight and Nicki Minaj's latest track.
In another corner, curled in much the same way Clint himself is, there’s a dark-haired guy with leather gloves on his hands and his hair back in a bun. Clint notices the obvious military stance, surveilling glare, the back to the corner, and wonders if the guy is also from the Service, maybe a different sector or target.
Or, since it is DC, he could be any branch of the military, including ex-military. It’s still possible Clint gets out of this, cover unscathed, even if it isn't likely. Clint slowly, over the next few minutes, smoothes out his furrowed brow, lowers his hunched shoulders, and settles in as the announcer’s voice washes over him.
***
Yeshua watches, as is his custom, from a corner of the bar, the dim lights meaningless as his eyes have been adjusted to the dark for an hour or more. He arrived in the first throng of people, his ID one of many handed to him by Madame B. The target arrived soon after, hanging off the shoulder of another man who seemed more interested in their third than in the target. Something on the tip of Yeshua’s tongue makes him smirk at the idea, the target reminding… him of someone.
It doesn’t escape his attention that several men in various states of dress have tried and failed to catch his eye. It doesn’t escape his attention that he will likely have to schmooze (?) and wine and dine several meaningless civilians before he can make point of contact with the target tonight. It doesn’t escape his attention that in another corner, glancing covertly at him, there is a blonde operative of similar stance and military training surveilling the joint (?) as well as Yeshua himself does.
“-And I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise that we have room for all of you!” The announcer drives on, met with a chorus of cheering men. Yeshua pushes off the wall and does not spare a glance to the operative or to the blushing bartender when he picks a nametag and marker off a nearby table and scribbles down his cover name, Joshua, sticking the small scrap of paper to his chest.
It sticks easily enough, just one corner curling up off his jacket lapel. He smooths it in place, capping the marker with his gloved metal hand. Behind him, the operative lowers himself into a chair, his blond hair too short to stick up, but appearing as though it wished to anyway. The operative seems unhappy to be here. Yeshua can solve that for him, if he proves himself interfering with the mission. Yeshua understands it is his role and place to laugh, to smile, to flirt, and he will, but his eyes still fight to land on the target, remind himself of his purpose, never lose sight of the singing in his veins that he won’t hesitate to kill to satisfy. The mission.
The mission, several tables away, sat so Yeshua can watch every emotion splay across his face, is Mark Lirsten. At thirty-two, his fraying hairline and meshed shirt age him and do not impress his first of many meetings of the night. Yeshua himself only removes his gaze from his target at the clearing of a throat - he sits upright, the whirring of his arm clothed nicely behind the glove and lowered music.
The man across from him is meaningless. His beard is patchy and dark, his eyes narrowed in irritation.
“Are you going to ask me anything?” The man asks with a pinched scowl, the nametag on his chest reading Patrick. Patrick holds a notepad in his thin, long hands, and Yeshua shrugs.
“Anything in particular you’d like me to ask?” He asks, clearing his throat of the Russian accent he’s worked hard to undo. He scowls at the interfering man across from him, and the young guy, Patrick, curls in on himself with trepidation. Good.
“Ask me about… sex.” Patrick winks, clumsily, awkwardly, trying to save something that Yeshua’s effectively shot in the face. Yeshua blinks away the confusion at how Patrick would allow such an imperfect performance, such an awkward segue, reminding himself that Patrick isn’t performing. Patrick is simply being Patrick.
The ballerinas of the Red Room are trained by Madame B to proudly, powerfully whisper about sex with their targets - she trains them on noticing a mark’s preferences, reading the room, testing boundaries, keeping the mystery alive. Yeshua, similarly, has been trained on how to be a person, or at least, how to be read as a person - but he isn’t trained in sex. He remembers, or thinks he remembers, someone calling him a doll dizzy, but that’s a ways away, and hazy in quality. Yeshua wouldn’t know what a doll dizzy was if Patrick were to ask him.
He tries to draw upon some deep, human knowledge or memory, but he hasn’t been programmed to know about sex, or how to discuss it. He flounders around a wordless question, and Patrick withers away before his eyes. Effortlessly, they both check out from the conversation, Yeshua now able to peripherally pick up on Mark Lirsten’s continued failure to impress his date. Patrick falls silent and uncomfortable, but Yeshua prefers it this way.
“Okay! One person from each table, pick yourselves up and pick somebody new to date!” The thin announcer from before cries excitedly, clapping his hands rapidly in front of his chest. Patrick attempts to blithely slink to his feet, but he stumbles on the leg of the table, almost faceplanting. Yeshua nods briefly to him as he takes his leave, and the next man lowers himself down slowly, taking in everything Yeshua has on display, down to the gloves.
“Oh, I’m taking my sweet time at this table, Joshua. Make every minute count with you. I’m Frenchie, and you should write that down, cause you’re gonna want to remember me later. Uh-huh.”
After his ‘date’ with Frenchie (during which his metal hand is almost discovered not once, but three times), the announcer states that anyone who did not move last, must move now to someone new.
Yeshua seats himself uncaring of his new date, keeping his eyes on Mark Lirsten, who also seats himself somewhere new. He does not allow himself to be discouraged by the fact he will not end up opposite the mission if this pattern holds true; he will find a time appropriate to approach.
Yeshua continues to remind himself he must prove capable of espionage, of convincing, of performing humanity before he can finish the mission - but for each new audience member, their varying presentations and names remain a blur to him. He is sure he fails to impress each of them, but does not log this information as necessary to the mission. The operative, not vital but still present in his awareness, moves tables to Yeshua’s right, his laughter low and answers practiced enough that Madame B might have trained him herself. Yeshua finds himself… jealous, and tries to convince himself that this is proof that the training is working. He feels… and therefore, he is.
It is after ten interactions that Yeshua stands, a brief intermission called. In his own notepad, handed to him by a mediating member of the event, there is a drawing of the mission, shaded lightly and frowning. The mission’s ankle lays on his left knee, and Lirsten, now crossing the room to the restroom, is fairly alike the drawing. For some reason, Yeshua wishes to keep the drawing, to show it to-
To someone. Madame B, perhaps, but… that feels wrong. It is wrong. There is Madame B, and there are the ballerinas, the Widows, but they would not appreciate the frivolity of a sketch. Even if this is a mission, something more important than a monkey on a unicycle, it’s-
Monkey on a unicycle. Raindrops on the sketch.
Yeshua is an asset. There are no memories, as the asset does not exist outside of the confines of the Red Room. It was born an asset, it will die an asset, and it will do so happily, in the far, far future. After it proves itself to Madame B.
***
“Hopefully you’re not a serial killer. I promise I’m not one either, ha!” The small, blonde guy across from Clint laughs with his nose, a repetitive and harmless sound that grates on Clint’s ears anyway.
Clint doesn’t wince at the poor joke, the way he (in some lighting) is a serial killer, or, well, was. No, Clint Barton is trained better than that - he laughs low, under his breath, and the guy opposite him (his nametag reads Kyle) takes a bolstering swallow from his drink. This bar, unfortunately, sells their drinks in very small plastic cups, but fortunately, serves a heavy, heavy pour - Clint’s on his third, and he’s still aware of the ex-military guy two tables over, but he’s letting loose, he’s doing what Nat told him to. He’s being normal.
“So, Kyle, if you’re not into the serial killer look, what are you into? I heard creepy is all the rage, lately,” Clint jokes, his smile performative and cocky. Kyle blushes and sips again from his drink, demurring with a gentle gesture to Clint’s biceps.
“I can’t say I have a type, per se, but I’m very not opposed to those arms. I could just grope them!” Kyle looks tempted to do just that, and Clint carefully shifts his elbows off the table (and those biceps out of reach.)
“Yeah, you’re, um,” Clint clears his throat, and notices, not for the first time, the ex-military guy glancing up at another civilian across the room. As normal as Clint is trying to be, as civilian as he’s made himself in this bar, he can’t help his attention drifting to the clear threat on guard two tables down. “You’re not the first.”
“Yeah, well, can you blame us?” Kyle rolls his eyes. “God, girl, you’re strong. We like it when a guy throws us around, y’know?”
“So I’ve heard.” Clint winks, covering up his more-than-sardonic tone with the flirty gesture.
He’s a sexually appealing guy, he knows, but Clint doesn’t appreciate rough sex. He doesn’t get physical with his partners, he doesn’t like the idea of hurting his partner or being hurt himself. He gets enough of that on the job without bringing it into his bunk.
It’s after a few more minutes, during which Clint is told a number of times that he’s “yummy,” “tasty,” “tall,” “daddy material,” and “juicy,” that it’s finally time for Kyle to move on to another victim to torture. Clint rolls out his shoulders, tense after the intrusive (and descriptive) evaluation, and looks up just in time to recognize the military guy dropping down across from him, man bun still oppressively tight against his skull and 5 o’clock shadow a mere whisper.
The leather gloves creak as he grips his pen tightly, and Clint’s eyes aren’t quite sure where to look before the guy, Joshua, meets his gaze. Grey, focused eyes meet Clint’s.
A timer goes off, the mark of the beginning of their time together, and Joshua just keeps… staring, like Clint’s a puzzle, or an abstract artwork, or one of those intense silent Russian films Natasha watches, whose message, theme, or meaning is hidden beneath layers and layers of subtext, innuendo, and hint.
“Well, my, uh, my last blind date left after five minutes, so we’re off to a great start, yeah?” It’s a cheap joke, one he expects Joshua’s heard before by any one of his fifteen dates so far. But instead of an eye roll, or a long-suffering sigh, Joshua quirks up one corner of his mouth, his questioning gaze dropping from Clint’s eyes to his crooked nose and back.
“Look like most’a your dates end up in the alley throwin’ punches," the guy answers, nudging his chin towards Clint’s nose, and for DC, his accent is somethin’ new. Clint can’t quite place it, but he likes it.
“Why do I feel like you look disappointed by that?” Clint can’t for the life of him figure out why he asked that, why he cares, because of all the people in the room, Joshua looks like one voted most rough in bed. But he hasn’t taken his eyes off of Clint’s face, still searching for something there, and he answers quietly, like he’s caught off guard.
“You’re not disappointing in the slightest, doll. Familiar, s’all.”
If Clint was a blushing barbie, he’d have swooned, but because he himself is incredibly suave and impressive, he just responds in kind.
“I’d remember if I met someone like you.” Clint finds himself grinning without a thought, falling almost into a rhythm, flirting with danger in that signature Barton Bad Taste.
“Same.” Joshua’s voice is gravelly, low, his gaze still so intense but softened with curiosity and longing, and Clint readjusts in his seat to lean forward, his nametag crinkling with his cover name as he lays his forearms on the table.
***
The operative, Thomas, is enough of a threat that the protocol has dislodged from its obsessive attention on the mission to assess him. When Yeshua sits, he’s intent on sizing up his potential opponent, but then blue eyes meet his, and a once-broken nose scrunches in surprise, and the protocol is suddenly a long-ingrained train track that Yeshua’s been thrown off of.
He spins out of control, a car on ice, maybe, or wind chimes chaotically screaming in a tornado, staring at the operative, the familiar face. Yeshua doesn’t show him the drawing, doesn’t ask him about the monkey on the unicycle, but it’s a near, near thing.
When he says, “same,” he means it. He’s sure he’d remember someone like Thomas, and he’s not convinced he hasn’t met him before. There’s this rough charm to him, like he’s worth listening to, and yet he leans forward and analyzes Yeshua with an intensity that should upset the protocol, that should send him skittering for shadows.
It’s a beat of shared silence, leaning forward, staring openly, that shakes Yeshua of the trance Thomas has laid upon him. The mission, he’s- he’s lost sight of him. He doesn’t turn to search, that would be egregious, but there’s a pulsepoint in his neck that tightens and throbs with tension, with the knowledge he’s been diverted. He is capable of espionage, he has captivated his audience, but this operative, Thomas… Yeshua’s been as well-trapped as he’s been successful in laying his own snare.
The panic broils, like a floral ceramic pot on an open flame within his mind, and that pot was his mother’s, she’d inherited it two generations - she’d cried when someone, long hair in bows, broke it in the winter. Yeshua blinks, shaking his head free of the oppressive ache that comes with the foreign memories, the swath of feelings attached, the searing cry bubbling in his chest.
He looks up wordlessly, hopelessly, at Thomas, across from him, and Thomas cocks his head to the side, just like- like- like- “I’m sorry, do I…?”
“What branch were you?”
The question is a boon, an island of shit he knows, and Yeshua’s regurgitating the number and brigade with an accent, a folding of his tongue he didn’t have ten minutes ago.
“107th Infantry Regiment, 32557038.”
He gapes after himself, the information as new to him as it is to Thomas, who seems just as shocked by the revelation.
“Huh.” Thomas leans back, crossing his arms across his chest, and the movement is so familiar it hurts. He looks at Yeshua with the same eating curiosity, something to be figured out and puzzled over. “Don’t be so surprised I clocked you; you got the stance.”
“What?” Yeshua screws up his brow, leans forward as if by a string, pulled. “The stance?”
“Civilians don’t stand with forward momentum, backed into a corner.”
Thomas’ smile has this smug quality to it, as if he knows things Yeshua would beg him to share, given the chance. He has half a mind to, setting down the pen in his metal hand so the notebook keeps the page. The drawing, the one of the mission, is visible in the gap, and Thomas dips his chin at it.
“Just a drawing.” Yeshua sees the corded muscles of Thomas’ arms, fit to bursting, from carrying around that damn shield all the time.
That same urge, to show someone the drawing, flushes back into Yeshua’s consciousness; but rather than Madame B or one of his widows, it's him. Joshua's pushing the book across the table, laying his very mission bare for Thomas to see before he can stop himself.
“Joshua, that’s- good, really good.” Thomas leans forward, finger brushing the inked page. He doesn’t comment on the mission, doesn’t poke at the frivolity of the action, and his response is warm in Yeshua’s chest. What he expected. “Do you draw often?”
“No, y- you did.” He nods, pushing the page closer. He feels possessed by the knowledge, strange but real, in his head. “I remember. I remember, the monkey and the unicycle. You- you used the shield as a table, never put the damn thing down.”
Yeshua smiles, proud and clenched onto that memory, digging his teeth into the satisfaction of having it, of knowing it, but when he looks up at Thomas, the one who should know it, too, he finds only confusion.
“The shield.” Thomas chews on it, contemplative. He lays his palm on the page, possessive, holding Yeshua by a leash neither of them can see, and whispers, “The one with the star?”
Yeshua nods, laughing a bit at how much he knows the shield, his relief that he’s found someone. What does it mean for an asset born in the Alps to recognize an operative on American soil? To speak with a foreign tongue, laugh with a borrowed laugh, see with the eyes of another man? For Yeshua, a trained personality and manufactured idea, to morph and shift in the chrysalis of Thomas’ gaze?
“Yes, you- you still have it, don’t you?” Yeshua knows Thomas has to keep it close, he’ll need to defend himself when Madame B comes for him. The mission, irreverently and obnoxiously, laughs aloud behind them, immediately identifiable to the protocol in Yeshua’s head and no longer relaxing to notice. It bursts in on the moment, soils this reunion, and Yeshua wishes the mission didn’t exist, or was somewhere far away from this small moment that’s completely Yeshua’s to have. “You need it.”
“You know me.” Thomas’ eyes are full of wonder, and that’s a sight Yeshua hasn’t seen in decades, but it- he knows he used to look at Thomas like that. “You think I’m-”
The timer goes off, indicating their time is up. Yeshua stands abruptly, unsure of what changed in him under Thomas’ gaze but positive that it will hinder his mission if he is to (as he wishes to) stay here, changing again and again under that watchful cornflower blue.
“Joshua," Thomas calls, and though it’s not Yeshua’s name, he bites his tongue and forces himself to snatch up the book and leave. He turns to run, run as far as his feet will take him, and almost trips over his mission himself - seated and surprised to see Yeshua stumble into his lap.
“Please tell me you’re my next first date.” Mark grins, and Yeshua, as the mission requires, nods brusquely.
“Hopefully your last.”
***
Clint lays down on his mattress, not caring to pull the blanket over him just yet. He may not have gotten a one night stand out of tonight, may not have gotten bathroom head, but his mind swirls with the five drinks he’d had and the realization that he sat across from somebody who thought he was Captain America. Besides that one hiccup, Joshua was electric. He was engaged, his eyes never leaving Clint despite his clear fascination with the civilian he kept looking at, Mark. He was funny and ex-military and he drew Mark really well, paid attention to a scar on his chin and the lighting in the bar.
He was the only number Clint walked away with. It has to mean something, even if the guy needs some help, first - but damn. Captain America’s been dead a long, long ass time.
***
The news the next morning will read, “‘Don’t Say Gay’ Senator’s son found dead, last seen at gay bar!”
The news, the next morning, will read, “Tragic loss for the gay community.”
The news, the next morning, will show pictures of his very dead body, shot in the head once, execution style. The news will read of his mother’s grief, of his father’s raving-mad anger at the “gay monster” that slaughtered his son, of the reasons why the gays must be stopped. The news will question who saw him leave, the officers investigating, the bystander who found him in the park on her jog.
The news will not tell you the man responsible whispers, for the first time in his career, “I’m sorry,” as he shoots from behind.
The news will not tell you the man responsible shakes and cries after he pulls the trigger.
The news will not tell you the man responsible digs the bullet out of the tree it lodges in, and again, for the first time in his career, repositions the body with regret and grief, the victim’s arms crossed over his chest and his forehead wiped clean of the blood.
The news will never tell you the man responsible returns to his base of operations (a longstanding empty bank) and clenches his teeth down on a bite plate, is hosed down with cold water, his belongings (the drawing, the blood-soaked bar napkin, the notebook, the only phone number written down belonging to a Thomas Grasden) incinerated.
The news, after all, won’t know of the man’s existence until years later, when he is unearthed beside his equally undead best friend, and they certainly won’t connect him to the mysterious murder of a homophobic senator’s gay son.
***
“Hey, Joshua, I’m not sure if you, ah, remember me. I shouldn’t even be making this call, if I’m being honest- well, nothing against you, you were great! That’s- that’s why I even have your number, and oh god. I sound so stupid. Anyway-”
“Hey, this is Thomas, again, that last dumb voicemail was me, Thomas, I didn’t mean to hang up. I, um, look. I’m not great with relationships, historically, but I- I’m glad I met you, even if you thought I was Captain America. I… god, this is stupid. I want to meet you again, if you’re- if you’re up to it? I know I’m not a historical icon, or anything, but I do work in the Secret Service, so. Shit, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone- forget I said that.”
“Hey, Joshua, fuck. I really wasn’t supposed to say that. Call me, or- or don’t. Yeah. Makes more sense not to, at this point. Yeah. Sorry for bothering you.”
The phone is laid down on the table before the impassive woman with her coiled hair and mink scarf. She steeples her fingers, purses her lips, and takes her time responding. When she does, she speaks with a thick accent.
“We will not inform HYDRA of the slip up with Captain America. We will wipe the asset, we will reprogram Yeshua into him, and we will remember, for the future - remove any lookalikes from the immediate vicinity. He performed the mission satisfactorily, the investigation believes it was a personal killing. We will simply… be more mindful, in the future.”
“Are you sure, Madame?” The only reason the man can doubt her, can question, is because he is the handler, and he would be missed by the American government if he were shot. She looks down her nose at the tall blonde brute before her and sighs.
“Do you see, Alexander? This is proof. He is convincing. He can perform. We might even be able to use this- this Thomas.”
“The asset remembered.”
“The asset finished the mission and returned home," she snaps, pushing to her feet. In her heels, she is the same height as her challenger, and she levels a damning glare his way. “This is proof, under a guiding hand, that your fist does not require brute force. He can be… a masterpiece.”
***
When Clint finally reads the news, his stomach churns with suspicious horror at the missing piece glaring him in the face. Joshua drew the dead guy, but isn’t being interviewed, isn’t part of the investigation. He hasn’t answered Clint’s call, though that’s proof of nothing other than the old Barton Bad Taste.
But Joshua thought he was Captain America. There’s no- Captain America died in the ocean, and he's, like, a paragon of purity or something. Clint knows Phil’s trading cards, he’s seen the old war movies, and sure as shit, when he pulls out his phone and looks him up, he does kind of look like Steve Rogers, if a little leaner and a bit more roughed up and a bit less suburban dreamboat. He swipes through the images, the old war propaganda, and wonders if maybe Phil picked him, stood up for him, because of this similarity.
He should so make fun of Phil for it sometime. Also, he knows his Halloween costume this year. That’s a relief. Maybe he can talk Tasha into being the Peggy Carter to his Steve.
He swipes a few more and almost drops his fucking phone - his date from two nights before, Joshua, stares back at him on Captain America’s right side.
Clean shaven, shorter hair, but that’s him. Piercing eyes, heavy brow, pouting pink lips, clean shaven but just as criminally pretty as he is with shadow.
You still have it, don’t you? You need it.
What the fuck is James- Bucky, google tells him - doing alive, speed dating at a gay bar? If James fucking Barnes is still alive, is still around -
Clint dials Phil. He picks up on the second ring, as is his tradition. “You better be dying.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Phil-”
“You don’t sound dead.”
“-but I swear I’m being so serious, I could not be more serious in this moment-”
“Still sound not-dead.” Phil’s eyeroll is audible over the phone. How he and Natasha manage it is beyond Clint.
“-Could you stick with me here, it’s gonna sound crazy!-” Clint sits up, rubs his shorn hair, and leaves it stuck in all directions.
“You sound so not-dead, that I’m persuaded to kill you myself for blowing your cover.”
“But Phil. James Barnes is alive, and not to brag, but I got his number. Before you say anything, it's all Natasha's fault."
***
When they go to find the asset to inform him of his next mission, opening the door to his quarters without further adieu than their footsteps approaching, they open the door to an empty room, the bed made with pristine military corners and the room devoid of signs of life. Much like his time spent living there, the asset does not leave words behind on paper, nor pictures or personal effects - the only belonging, insofar as the word will stretch to include it, is the leather muzzle left upon the stark white pillow.
Alarms sound and bright lights screech along the concrete. Widows will be sent out in pursuit of the best-armed prey they’ve been given in years, weaving their webs and fruitlessly circling everything the asset might return to - the grave of Captain Rogers, the apartment Thomas Grasden left behind, the childhood home of Sergeant James Barnes.
He will never quiver the fine silk of their trap.
***
Clint Barton isn’t expecting a phone call from the undead vet from the 40’s. He isn’t.
He isn’t upset by the fact Coulson took his UC phone and destroyed it, believing anyone in charge of Barnes (capable of keeping Barnes frozen, alive, at what looks like maybe 35 years old, for 65 years) to be an enemy of the state, considering the questionable circumstances surrounding James’ appearance (and subsequent disappearance.)
He isn’t bothered by the fact he leaves James Barnes with nothing to hold onto, nothing to look at, nothing to remember him by or find him with.
Totally not bothered.
“Tell me what’s bothering you?” Nat leans over and hands him half of her orange, having peeled the thing knowing he hates the smell of orange juice on his fingers, and he growls as he takes his offered half and rips a section off it.
She leans back in her chair and peruses his frustrated, bothered presentation lazily, chewing on a section of orange herself. She knows as well as he does that he’ll break sooner rather than later, unable to keep a secret from her (or pass up the opportunity to get her advice.)
“I don’t want to talk about it," he hedges, chewing aggressively until the orange chunk in his mouth becomes a lifeless, tasteless clump on his tongue.
“Really," she mutters, nodding along to mock him. She’s evil.
“Yeah.” He chews the clump of cud in his mouth, fighting bile in his throat, and she swallows her own easily. Clint stares petulantly down at his lunch.
“Phil won’t tell me why you’re back. I know you didn’t find a Service mole on your night off.”
No. He found something much bigger. He glares harder at his lunch, chewing the wet mass even further.
“Spit it out already, Clint. You don’t have to tell me, you know that, but stop chewing that disgusting thing.”
He shifts his childish glare from the table, up to her face, where she pointedly looks down her nose at his nasty manners and horrid attitude. She holds out a napkin with nothing short of disdain on her face, a performance and a joke. She doesn’t show real emotion on her face to nearly that extent, if she means it. He snatches the napkin from her and spits out the nasty, nasty thing, rubbing his tongue with the leftover clean corner to rid himself of the aftertaste of orange pulp.
“So?” She asks, after the wad is placed hatefully down on his tray and covered with his plate.
“So," he answers, dragging his fork along the empty tray. “Nothing to tell.”
“So you met someone.”
“How the fuck did you know that?”
Nat winks. “You just told me.”
She's the absolute picture of a cat that ate the canary and licked her fingers clean after.
***
Clint is incorrigible for the following two weeks. He has no idea what his life would have been like if he hadn't found James Barnes - he’s become absorbed with old war films, documentaries about the Lost Howlie, interviews about him and Steve Rogers. Phil silently lets him join in on nights he previously would have watched the films alone; estate sales he would have crawled alone, looking for trading cards, memorabilia, and vintage things; conventions and luncheons with old vets with memories of so-and-so’s nephew, or Dum-Dum’s daughter making the rounds and donations.
He’s accepted with open arms, Phil and Fury conducting the largest search ever silently founded in history for the inevitable question - if James Barnes is out there, where is Steve Rogers?
Clint Barton lies awake, sleepless and haunted, reading his written account of the entire night - including Creepy Kyle, including the clueless Mark Lirsten, including the bodyguard at the door and the aggressive twink announcer who ran the event. He has quotes of things James Barnes said to him, things like “you look like mosta’ your dates end up in an alley throwin’ punches,” that make sense, and make sense, and make sense.
You still have it, don’t you? You need it.
What does Bucky Barnes know that endangers his lifelong best friend? Where is he now? Does he still think Thomas is that wheezing, sick twig from the 30’s? Is he out there looking for him, assuming danger is coming, and Thomas’ll meet it with that old shield and stripes?
Phil pulled him aside and asked, when it was confirmed with CCTV footage, are you prepared to be Steve Rogers to rehabilitate him?
Clint had answered, Is SHIELD prepared?
Fury hadn’t liked that answer, but Clint had further rejected the original question itself. SHIELD wasn’t prepared to pretend Clint was the long-gone national icon Bucky thought him to be - they don’t even have a replica shield. The vibranium alone would cost more than the helicarrier they’re building, more than Phase Two already has in its entirety, more than Stark’s obscene consulting fee could dream; and even if they did somehow source it, Clint knew nothing about how to wield it. His muscles are built on the back of decades of gymnastics tumbles and archery - throwing a shield? Forget it.
He’s not willing to lie to Barnes, anyway. The look in that man’s eye, when he’d thought Clint was Steve - it hadn’t been wonder, not like Clint had felt in spades.
No. It had been fear.
***
The Asset doesn’t mutter to itself like some people do in the alley. It doesn’t trade money for food, it doesn’t ask for anything from anyone - it is a silent ghost, seen and not heard, forgotten before it’s left the periphery of anyone who comes across it.
The only things it has to its name are a knife, the blade snug against its foot in the left boot, and the clothes on its back - and those were stolen from a store a good few days ago, now. The Asset is used to sitting and awaiting instructions, and even though it knows the handlers are gone, that it’s running from the handlers, there are no choices to be made in their absence. There is no mission, no purpose, no burden of meaning in the Asset’s life. It fades into a grey stain as the days pass, no mission given to it and no choice ripe for the picking.
It waits, knowing it ran from the handlers and Madame B for a reason. A reason on the tip of its tongue, a word it knows but can’t quite fit its lips around, a knowledge it was told once and has since… forgotten.
It waits to remember. When it remembers what brought it here, in an alley near a garden with a vigil and gathering of bears, pictures, and flowers for a man the Asset doesn’t know, Mark, then the Asset will know what to do. It will open its eyes, and do.
***
Clint doesn’t want to take the New Mexico mission. He wants to go back to DC and look for Barnes - hell, he’d take a New York mission if it meant getting more research done on the sergeant’s history. He doesn’t want to cross the nation with Coulson studying an 084 that may or may not come with civilian tracking duties attached - the last time they had a mission with that combination, Iron Man was revealed to the world.
But Natasha tells him if he doesn’t take it, she’ll have to, and he knows how that woman feels about deserts. She’ll keep an eye out for Barnes-related news while he’s gone; she’ll pester Fury and sneak confidential documents and reach out to her network without making waves. He should be fine to leave her, and should trust her with this. She’s very trustworthy, for being an ex-brainwashed assassin who tried to kill him yesteryear. A very capable woman.
But he doesn’t want to go to New Mexico. Which is why, when the time comes and the jet picks up off the ground headed to the desert state, he’s strapped in with a bow and a rifle and a big, obvious frown beside Coulson, prepped for sweating his brains out and tracking the civilian doctor who discovered the 084 in the first place - Dr. Jane Foster.
***
The asset has moved from the alley near the park - its feet carry its weary body across state lines, further north, the trail one it has never traversed before but treks as if familiar.
It trusts its feet. It’s going somewhere important.
***
“Barton, I need eyes in the sky!”
Coulson calls out on the radio, and Clint vaults out of the truck to snatch his bow from the weapons rack. A nest lifts him high over the fight below, the intruder on their tented city bashing purposefully and effectively through men Clint has trained to take down near anything. He pushes through them to the heart, the hammer in the mud, with relative ease, as if he were fighting clueless civilians instead of trained agents. Clint in his nest fights the urge to kind of root for him.
He reminds him of Nat, in a way.
More than that, he reminds him of Barnes. Fighting toward a goal he can’t see. Driven by a purpose he doesn’t understand. Reaching for the obviously familiar hammer with a hand that fits perfectly around the hilt, and heartbroken when it doesn’t lift. Like he expected it to, like it has before, and for it to not lift is world shattering news. Where is Barnes now?
“I was rootin’ for him, Phil.” And likely always will.
“You and your underdogs. Take him in.”
***
The asset evaded the widow by the skin of its teeth, unsure why it didn’t surrender or cross her path but dedicated to escaping her web. It- he - knows to be caught is to be killed, and something beyond him, something bigger than him, demands he stay alive.
He has things to do. People to meet. Things to remember.
The blond braid he taught her to make in her hair is painful to watch snap around a corner, and painful to walk away from, knowing he made her into the weapon leveled against him. He knows he is the prey she searches for, he knows he is the reason she is here in this small neighborhood in Brooklyn ducked into an empty hotel room. If he remembers correctly (and who knows if he does), her eyes are green. She is lethal with a throwing knife.
He made her that way.
He ducks into the sewers, dropping the metal cover plate with his left hand so it settles into place above him. He couldn’t bring himself to kill her.
***
Coulson struggles to decipher the doctor’s physics notes, and Clint struggles to forget about Barnes. He rereads that written record, relives the night, recreates Barnes in his mind’s eye until the war vet is reconstructed into a hero on a pedestal, a man out of time. There’s a tab on his phone with just Barnes’ picture, and he knows it’s obsessive to think about the man this much. He just can’t stop… needing more. More answers, more time, more of that rhythm they fell into and puzzling wondrous stare. He doesn’t want a one night stand, he wants more of whatever they had in that dark bar.
When Bobbi knocks on his bunk frame, lowered lashes and beer on her breath, he pushes her away. It’s nothing against her, he’s never said no before, just-
He has bigger things on his mind, this time.
***
Natasha calls him with a somber voice and whispered details. He can’t leave his station, Coulson assuring him they’ll need at least three more days after the Destroyer is removed with Thor. Something about catastrophic cleanup and an exploded gas station.
Clint thinks James fucking Barnes being alive and in Natasha’s apartment in Manhattan is slightly bigger, but maybe he’s biased. Every hour under the sweltering sun, picking up debris and fielding news reporters is torture, knowing Barnes is waiting for him, ready to meet him, living with Natasha.
It’s made worse by Natasha’s only request:
“Don’t tell Coulson. SHIELD doesn’t know.”
***
The footsteps in the hall make Natasha pause, her hands stiffening on her cards. Yeshua knows she exaggerates her movements for his sake, and he appreciates the gesture, but he can read her - her specifically - as well as he could read Steve, if he were alive.
The memories are still splintered in his mind, appearing in flashes and beats and disappearing as quickly; Natasha has spent the last few nights sorting out “real, or not real?” while they sit awake on her couch, coffee brewed black in matching mugs they each hold.
“This is him," she whispers now, and Yeshua lays his own cards facedown on the table. The arm, not fully Yeshua’s (just like his mind), whirs in anticipation of the threat at the door. A key loudly jiggles in the door for far longer than is custom, surely, and Natasha’s eyeroll is as charming as it is new to him. This woman, playful, is a new sight, and it- it hurts, the flashes of her silent and stoic.
(There’s a part of him who isn’t surprised to learn he has made her playful. Yeshua himself underwent a metamorphosis beneath his watchful gaze; found new humor and old urges and wonder there. He is happy for her to have found the same with him. Thomas.)
Finally, an eternity of the lock being jimmied later, the door swings open, and Yeshua’s eyes study the face, the tall blond man, taller than Steve had been. The catalyst.
“Joshua?” The man asks with that same intoxicating wonder in his eyes, stepping into the apartment with his hands raised in surrender. He drops a duffel at his feet and closes the door behind him with his foot - and in the quiet of the apartment, no longer invaded by the sounds of the echoing stairs, Yeshua knows this is the thing he’s searched for. The operative.
“You’re not really Thomas," he says by way of greeting.
“You’re not really Joshua.” The operative quirks one corner of his mouth. It’s different than Steve, less of a bitter laugh and more of a what-can-you-do. Yeshua knows this isn’t Steve, as much as his nose is the same, and his eyes have that same mischief.
“Yeshua." He gives his name, the one Natasha gave him, standing slowly and passing Natasha.
The operative watches and waits, not stepping closer, and Yeshua wishes he knew how to do this part, the reunion-being-a-human part with someone who is so clearly warm and real and human. Natasha is silent and deadly and a secret wrapped within privacy curtains, but this…
“Clint. I- I left you that shitty voicemail.” Clint, smiling and dusty and sunburnt on the shoulders, starts and doesn’t stop, the words flowing faster as Yeshua steps closer, and closer. “I don’t really work for the Secret Service, either. I don’t- did you get that voicemail? I’m sorry about it, if you did, but I- I meant it. The seeing you again part. I looked you up, not in a- a creepy way, I-”
“I read your file," Yeshua answers, stopping too late to be a normal distance away. Clint is different than Steve, to nervously erupt like he just did. Steve was measured, every word serving a purpose, but this is new. Yeshua’s almost chest-to-chest, looking up at Clint Barton’s face, and it feels good to see freckles that weren’t there in that bar and hair longer than he remembers. It still stands in different directions, and Yeshua remembers his mother smoothing down his own cowlick once. Yeshua grins at Clint’s sour, surprised face. “Not in a creepy way.”
Natasha scoffs and mutters under her breath a Russian curse, something about their grandchildren and a wheelbarrow, but Yeshua pays her no mind. Clint laughs, his mouth and warm breath shaky as he starts to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
“Right. Of course you did, you’re- how are you alive? Has anyone asked you that, yet? Is Steve with you?”
Yeshua closes his eyes at the mention of Steve, the grief threatening to eat him whole even as he isn’t sure if Steve’s hair was short or long. He knows Steve was his everything, and that’s enough. “No. Steve is dead. Natasha told me. I was kept… after the mountains.”
“We don’t know that, Yeshua," Clint softly insists, bringing a hand up and pausing above Yeshua’s shoulder, second guessing the touch. It’s the first time in many, many years that anyone has asked to touch him.
Yeshua doesn’t know how to tell him, yes, how to beg, so he just stares down the very solid man in front of him and dares him to do it, to cross that gap. To be asked, even silently, is new, making the choice is new, too, and Yeshua does it seamlessly - read the question and make the choice. Yes.
Clint’s hand drops and rests on the metal shoulder, landing hard on the cold weapon latched to Yeshua’s chest. His fingers clench and relax, as if testing the metal beneath them. “Steve could be out there. They found a, a cube, while they were looking, and that’s from Steve’s crash.”
Yeshua remembers that cube, the experiments that came of it. The weapons they used on him, on Steve, on … faces flash behind his eyes rather than names.
“Put it back.”
He reaches up, the gap crossed, the bridge made, and grips Clint’s shoulder, his neck. Once he starts, it’s impossible to stop, his fingers searching and palms brushing skin and shirt and warmth. “Put the cube back.”
“It’s not my choice.” Clint sharply inhales and reaches out, too, with both of his hands, touching long hair and metal arm and rising chest with as much interest and need as Yeshua does himself. “Why should we?”
“It’s a weapon.” Yeshua stills, grips Clint’s shirt in his hands; he needs Clint to know how terrifying it was, it will be if they don’t return it. The stillness of the moment is haunting, stark contrast to the curious touches of seconds before. “People… disappeared. Gone. Not a bullet, but… something else. They ki- killed so many men.”
Clint narrows his eyes, nodding. “I understand. I understand. We- Natasha and I, we’ll do what we can, okay? It’s not our choice, but we- I believe you. I believe you.”
“So many men.”
Yeshua’s metal fist whirs and whines with the sustained grip on Clint’s collar, and he releases it, smoothing the fabric down. The wrinkles and stretch marks don’t disappear, and Yeshua winces at the reminder of his own ‘so many men.’ Clint’s chest still has that hypnotic heat under Yeshua’s fingertips, and his chin is bruised. Steve was always roughed up, fresh off some fight he picked, and it’s a relief that there’s things Yeshua knows, things he can grip in his hands that are just as real as Clint is.
“Should we sit?” Clint tilts his head to the table, the forgotten card game, and all at once, Yeshua realizes they’ve stood for too long in the doorway.
“Yes, we- we should.” They sit together, Clint taking the seat Natasha wouldn’t - Natasha’s cards lie opposite Yeshua, but Clint sits beside him, their knees touching beneath the table. It’s heady and new to be touched on purpose, be sought out, denim on denim.
The cards before him were a winning hand, Yeshua’s sure of it, but it’s meaningless with Clint warm and heavy beside him. Clint Barton, sniper for SHIELD (Peggy’s creation), sits next to Yeshua like it’s normal and comfortable to be here. Clint Barton, Natasha’s only partner, the only person she trusts to watch her back, is the one who took a chance and broke Yeshua’s protocol. The world is small, so small, and yet big enough that Yeshua could hide here, at Natasha’s dinner table beside Clint Barton, and be satisfied. Be warm. Be real.
***
Clint can’t really figure out what to do or say. Natasha brings him a coffee, almost milky with cream, and exposes her winning hand to Yeshua with a wink before shuffling the deck for something to do. Over the next deal of cards, Natasha explains they’re playing spades, of all games, and Yeshua explains he isn’t ready to be turned in to SHIELD yet.
He remembered Natasha when he ran into another Black Widow that was hunting him, and immediately sought her out. He’d been seated at her dinner table when she came home after a Paris mission, and together the two of them had pieced out rare memories that came to him and much more common hallucinations / induced memories that had been burdened on him. This brings them to now.
The realest things Yeshua remembered were Steve and Red Room. Someone named Madame B., someone Natasha remembered. Natasha told him about Thomas, about Mark’s death, and Yeshua had remembered the rest on his own - meeting Thomas, the date, the mission. He’d immediately asked for Thomas to come. Clint presses his knee in further to Yeshua’s, not able to hide his pleasure that they both sought each other out.
Yeshua wins the game of spades, surprising Clint (he’s never seen Natasha lose once, and that’s a fact) and they decide together for Clint and Natasha to field the SHIELD situation one day at a time. They have no way of knowing if SHIELD is safe for Yeshua to surrender to, if HYDRA is within SHIELD at all; they’ll have to take the situation to Fury and figure it out from there.
In the meantime, Natasha offers for Yeshua to stay with her, and Yeshua in turn asks Clint to stay as well.
“I- Natasha I know from before. From the dark place. I trust her because she knows, but you… you started all of this. You brought me here.” Yeshua chews the inside of his cheek. “It’s with you I stay.”
Clint thinks about his SHIELD lodgings, his barren crash pads only Natasha knows about, the fact he’s always wanted to adopt a dog and settle but never had a reason or a strong enough anchor to sit still. He thinks about his bow and his reputation and everything he has because of SHIELD, and he thinks about how none of it matters if he lets go of the living, breathing history beside him - the impossibly warm and real and human Yeshua.
“Then stay," Clint answers.
And stay he does.
***
Yeshua remembers in a quiet, soft, altogether unnoticeable sort of way. It creeps upon him like a dawn, questionable and cold and not-quite-morning until the dust doesn’t settle and the curtain is outlined by the irrefutable push of the day.
He makes his coffee black until, one morning, arguably (but not definitely) by accident, he sips from Clint’s mug instead, and the sweet, creamy taste is gone in three pulls.
He makes his bed with machine-like precision, every single day, and walks past Clint asleep and loudly askew on the couch each morning.
He notices, between greasy pizzas and aromatic chinese, that they’re missing red pepper flakes, and didn’t this used to have peanuts in it?
His footsteps grow heavier when Natasha arrives after a mission, and it doesn’t bother him, the feeling of someone knowing exactly where he is.
He realizes his eyes used to be blue, once upon a time, and Steve’s were, too.
It’s walking down a street and turning into a corner bodega, calling the owner by his grandfather’s name, that feels like a bird call promise of dawn. That whispers, oh. It’s here.
***
“Corner!” Natasha calls as she passes behind Yeshua into their cramped kitchen. He nods, lazily raising his mug in acknowledgement of her presence, and she rolls her eyes at the way he’s adopted Clint’s silent, underestimated awareness of the world - you’d never know it, but Clint’s more lethal when he’s yawning than when his eyes are open all the way.
“There’s leftover chicken and stir fry in the fridge, top shelf. Eat it.” She levels her gaze over at the man who made her, and he nods, eyes wide as if caught red handed.
“Yes ma’am.”
“I’m talking to Fury today," she remarks, stuffing a lunchbox (black, Clint got it for her for Christmas - real leather is such a luxury) with meal-prepped salad and sandwich.
“About me.” Yeshua swallows, not nervous, but acutely attentive to their exchange.
“Eat the leftovers.”
She looks up to him, ensuring he understands this is I care about you. This is I’m going to fight for you today. This is I want you and Clint to be happy.
She doesn’t have the time to stand and stare at him, she’s calculated exactly the moment Fury will sit at his desk for her to breeze in, his first appointment of the day - but she does anyway. She stands and stares and quirks an eyebrow just as he used to do to her, and he nods, his eyes saying I know.
Natasha rests her case and flits from closet to kitchen to keyring to front door, gathering her armor for the day. All the while, Clint’s snores from the couch underline the chaos of leaving before the dawn. When her halestorm of preparation comes to a brief pause at the door, and Yeshua tips his chin to her, she rolls her eyes at the affection she finds there that he’d never have shown back when she knew him. It swells to an uncomfortable pitch, and she points her finger at him as she swings the door open.
“And brush your hair. ты в птичий!” (you're a bird's nest!)
She slams the door before he can respond, taking the steps two at a time in such a fashion her lunchbox slams against her hip with each footfall. If she allows herself the luxury of imagining his laughter on her way down, that’s no one’s business but her own.
***
“Barton!”
Clint spins on his toes, lithe agility and arrow nocked, to find Director Fury standing by the door with his hands clasped behind his back.
“Yes, Director?” Clint lowers his weapon, stepping back from his stall to address the incomer. Agents around him fire at the ready, headphones covering their ears from the ricochet of bullets.
“It’s come to my understanding that you could potentially bring in a powerful asset for SHIELD. Walk with me.”
Clint’s stomach drops between his knees and drags on the ground behind him, trepidation and anxiety a weight and distraction as they exit the range to walk side by side. The two of them fall into an easy-enough stride, Fury purposeful and strong, and Clint’s legs long enough to follow through.
“What did Natasha tell you?” Clint asks, reaching up to sling his bow over his shoulder. It rests as a comfort across his body.
“Enough,” Fury remarks, hands clasped behind his back again as they walk. “Are you confident in your ability to bring in the asset?”
Clint chews on his cheek, viscerally irritated by Fury’s word choice. “He’s more than an asset, Fury.”
“Not until he proves himself so.”
“Then no. No, I’m not bringing him in." Clint stops in his tracks, the hallway empty save for the two of them. “I refuse to let him be put through the same shit, just with a new logo on his arm.”
“Let me be clear, Barton.” Fury narrows his one good eye in contempt, and Clint stands his ground, righteously indignant in his cause. “You will not imply that SHIELD is anywhere near the same playing field as HYDRA. You were brought in as a criminal, as a mercenary, as a kid. HYDRA would have chewed you and spat you back out, burying you in the ice somewhere no one would find your body. Remember that.”
“And you would have me bring in a test subject for SHIELD to poke and prod and fuck around with in a hole somewhere no one will ever find him. I refuse. He’s been poked enough.”
“If he cannot withstand testing to prove the safety of his implementation in the field, he-”
“No.” Clint cuts off the Director with a hand in the air. “I sleep with him staring at me, Fury. I eat dinner with him, I- he doesn’t need to be ‘tested.’ He needs to be helped. If you won’t do that, I won’t bring him in. Simple as that.”
“You knew Romanov would be tested.” Fury cocks his head, curious now - not in the way a child watches fireworks, but in the way a hunter watches a deer. “You brought her in without a second thought.”
Clint grips his fists staunchly, refusing to punch Fury in the face over this but fighting the urge nonetheless. “This is different. Tasha needed to be tested for her own sake. She wouldn’t trust herself unless SHIELD trusted her. He would break if I brought him in like that.”
Fury clenches his jaw, and at the end of the hall, a junior agent turns the corner and immediately spins on her heel to exit the way she came. The silence in the hall is pregnant, as if the anticipation were swelling between them with weight and more.
It’s uncomfortable to stand under Fury’s scrutiny and watch the gears turn in his head, but Clint doesn’t back down. He doesn’t step away. He doesn’t lower his gaze.
Fury takes what could be an hour to decide what happens next. When he finally does speak, it’s reserved, in a tone Clint’s never heard him use before. It seems to be… thoughtful.
“Fine. I have one condition.”
Clint nods once.
“Get him somewhere more secure than the damn Lower East Side.”
***
Late into the night, Natasha’s shiniest throwing star embedding a note about the trash and dishes into the cabinet and her blondest wig missing from her room, Clint and Yeshua sit awake side by side. They do not look at one another, Clint leaned forward to stare down between his knees as if willing the floor to gape its maw; Yeshua picks at the plates of his arm (more his, now, like his mind) with an oiled tool, something foreign lodged deep between his elbow and bicep and causing it to malfunction.
“So," Clint coughs out, tucking his chin and shifting his right knee out into Yeshua’s space.
“Are you cold?” Yeshua asks, watching with quiet fascination as Clint’s skin breaks out in a reaction to the cold, or maybe their knees touching, or maybe something else entirely.
“No, I- sorry ‘bout that.” Clint rubs the affected skin, willing away the sensitivity, and Yeshua blinks away an image of a girl in an alley, square neckline pulled taut over heavy chest, her head back against the brick and those same… bumps, over her skin.
The image conjures another, much like it, except this time it’s Clint in an alley, breathing in his ear.
Clint on the couch, rubbing the back of his head in that aw, Nat, no. way he always does.
Clint sprawled out on Yeshua's bed, the way he always does on the couch, and Yeshua allowed to look and touch his fill.
Yeshua often finds himself staring at Clint wanting to share things with him, the way he shared that drawing of the mission one night too long ago. He wants to tell him about things he remembers, things he likes, things he wants - he wants Clint in an alley, breathing in his ear. He wants to listen to Clint apologize for stupid things and tell Natasha jokes she’s doubtlessly heard before and talk while he chews, something distinctly Clint and a sign of how much life Clint is stuffed with, fit to bursting.
“I used to be a-” The word is on his tongue, interrupting whatever Clint’s apologizing for. He isn’t sure why he says it, isn’t sure what it would accomplish, but he says it anyway, until he of course finds something the light of day has yet to touch.
What he used to be. The word. Clint gives him time to search for it, knowing without speaking that Yeshua frustrates when Natasha fills in the words he forgets. She is efficient in communication, whereas Clint, he’s… patient. Forgiving.
“You used to be…?” Clint encourages him, finally, finally, looks to him, that curious gaze so familiar and so different from Steve, and Yeshua bites on the word, chews on what’s there. He used to beg for Steve to look at him, loved Steve in a way Steve didn’t understand, used to wonder. Clint looks at him like he knows. Clint looks at him, sometimes, when he thinks Yeshua doesn’t know, like Clint wonders too.
Which is why Yeshua tries again. Why he tells him. Why he wants. “I forget the word. I- I was in an alley.”
Clint furrows his brow, and Yeshua, in that alley, would have smoothed it out, a finger tip on skin and a breath between their mouths, but now, he doesn’t know the word, and it pulls at his hair that he’s forgotten. He remembers so much.
“Were you fighting someone in the alley?” Clint asks, and Yeshua snorts. If he was Steve, he woulda been, but no- Bucky was always a bit more delicate in his alleydoings. Bucky.
Who the hell is Bucky? Yeshua makes a face, disgruntled and confused, and Clint assumes it’s about him.
Clint rolls his eyes, shrugging in a defensive posture- “I’m trying to help you, jerk!”
“Then just listen, you punk!” Yeshua bumps Clint with his elbow, the metal one with the lodged rock, and once again the burning warmth of dawn, of memory glides across his eyes. “Holy shit.”
“What? What happ- are you alright?” Clint readjusts, haplessly sets his hands on him as if to reassure himself with the warmth of Yeshua’s skin, face, shoulders. “Talk to me, what’s wrong?”
‘“Time is a circle.” Yeshua laughs and stares at his newest friend, overcome with the innumerable ways in which he is just like his oldest. Til the end of the line. Then stay. You look like you like getting your ass beat. You look like most of your dates end up throwing punches in alleys.
I’d remember if I met someone like you.
Yeshua takes Clint’s hand in his own, and finishes his sentence, the one that started all of this: “I used to kiss in alleys. A lot of them.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all.” Clint winks gaudily, a cartoonish rendition of something supposed to be covert. “You were pretty smooth in the gay bar, too. Well-practiced.”
“Yeah, well.” Yeshua looks down at their hands, Clint’s tan skin warm. “Had… a while to work on it.”
“Don’t look a day over 100,” Clint offers with a serious face.
“You’ll have to thank HYDRA someday for that. With my genes, I should be bald.” Yeshua shrugs one shoulder, a flash of someone with his nose but a broader chin in a Hanukkah sweater behind his eyes.
Clint barks out a laugh, breaking their streak of deadpan delivery, and gives Yeshua an incredulous look. “You should be dead, not bald.”
His eyes widen with realization, and it’s only in that moment that he notices how close they’ve become, swapping one-liners back and forth. How he can see, in clear detail, Clint’s eyelashes as he blinks. His freckles on his face - Steve never had freckles.
“Oh.”
“It might be insensitive to say this,” Clint says, much softer now, “but I’m glad I met you.”
“It was insensitive.” Yeshua smirks, closing the gap between their mouths. “You should try to make it up to me.”
“Oh, see, there’s that smooth charm back agai-”
Yeshua cuts him off, of course, and it’s proof that time isn’t in fact a circle. Every day he spent looking st Steve and dreaming, every time he watched Peggy light up a room, every time Steve drew him and it never meant anything more-
It was worth it for the first time he kisses Clint, and Clint, with everything in him, kisses back.