Chapter Text
"Phil, you're not wearing a damned suit, are you?" Clint asked, sounding aghast.
Phil looked up in the middle of knotting his tie and blinked back at him.
"I was planning on it, yes," he said, and tightened the silk down.
Clint just stared at him for half a moment, more than long enough for Phil to begin to wonder if he’d failed to spot a large stain on the lapel-- or rent on the rear-- and then sighed.
"And a silk tie as well. Tony's been getting to you, hasn’t he? Ditch the consultant-to-superheroes-and-spies duds, dear. You wear a fucking custom-tailored three-piece, you're gonna look overdressed and everyone'll gossip about how you went to New York and got all fancy and shit and forgot all about them, and the last thing we need is Wanda Jackson guilt-tripping us again. Or worse, Tony. She’s-- ow. Fuck."
Phil pursed his lips to keep himself from laughing as Clint broke off his tirade to glare at his own shoulder. He'd been dressing as he talked and had clearly forgotten that he’d recently re-injured his shoulder, the one that had taken the brunt of the final confrontation with Ian Quinn and Felix Blake. How he’d forgotten, since he’d only just stopped pain killers, Phil wasn’t sure, but the fact remained that he’d been moving just like normal right up until he'd failed in his attempt to raise his arms over his head to pull on his sweater.
Well-- Phil's sweater, technically. Phil's blue and green alpaca sweater that had been sitting in the back of his closet for ages. It had been bought at some charity sale years past and worn maybe thrice before Phil had realized it was too nice for everyday and too approachable for community events. After the evening concert where it seemed like half the adult population of Gansett Light had found excuses to stroke his arm, clasp his shoulder, or touch the small of his back, he’d thrown the sweater into the back of his closet. It had clearly been made to pet-- which was going to be an even bigger problem this time around, with Clint and his all-too-fondlable arms wearing it.
Clearly, I'm just going to have to stick very close to him. Protect his flanks.
"What?" Clint asked, glaring at him over the neck of the sweater, daring Phil to make something of it. He'd readjusted his angle of attack to pull his head through first, and was now rustling around inside it, trying to find the armholes.
"Nothing," Phil said, hands raised to placate him. "I'd help, but well... if I come over there right now, we're never going to get out of this bedroom." He let his voice dip into a purr-- something he found ridiculous but that Clint, for whatever reason, had strongly suggested he did not.
Clint attempted a sultry look in return. Given that his arms were still bundled beneath fuzzy colorwork, and his nose and lips lost under the sweater's grass-green neckband, he ended up looking more like a seductive gopher than anything else.
In order to hide his snickers, Phil turned away and began removing the other components of his suit from their hangar, his movements quick as he shook the jacket out. He paused, holding it by the collar, and stared at it, let his thumb smooth over the subtle gray pinstripe, then range over the pile of discarded ties on the bed, left because he’d had a hard time deciding on the best match. Maybe… maybe he had been getting a bit too used to fancy New York ways, as Clint called them. It’d been necessary, at first, to suit up as often as possible, to remind himself that he wasn’t just-- or even primarily-- the Keeper of North Bar anymore. That he was negotiating with billionaires and the heads of spy agencies and members of the Pentagon and the UN now. Which was absolutely and definitely not what he wanted tonight to be about. He put the jacket back on the hangar, and drew the vest off.
"Tell you what," he said, as he buttoned it up and removed his tie, "what if I leave the jacket behind and just wear this?"
He turned back to show Clint the results-- which, he would admit to hoping, were pretty natty-- and found Clint a half foot away and closing rapidly.
The world tilted hard as Clint crashed into him one-armed and tackled him backwards onto the bed. Phil ended up staring at the ceiling, stunned, with Clint hovering over him. Clint’s knees trapped his hips in place and his entire body swayed back and forward minutely, like he was still draining off the excess energy from his leap. With his hair and beard all fluffed and rumpled by the sweater, he looked like a friendly, horny lion.
"I'm pretty sure there was something we were supposed to be doing," Phil mused, staring up at him. "Somewhere we were supposed to go? Do you remember? Because something knocked it out of my head."
"Yeah," Clint replied, smirking down at him, and then he kissed Phil sloppily. He threw his entire body, all that coiled energy, into the kiss, and Phil felt himself arching up, bracing himself against Clint’s arms, and trying to curve his neck up far enough to offer it as the next target for ravishing. He’d just gotten himself positioned appropriately when Clint finished his thought: "We were going to church."
"Fuck," said Phil, and felt his entire body droop.
"You'll have plenty of time for that when you get back," Natasha drawled from the doorway, and Phil shoved Clint backwards reflexively.
Clint tumbled off both him and the bed, falling ass-first onto the floor, and sprawling at Natasha’s feet. Phil figured that must be at least partially deliberate, and Natasha must have thought so as well, as she just rolled her eyes and stepped backwards when Clint raised a hand and waggled it in a please pick me up gesture.
He turned pleading eyes on Phil, who ignored it too-- Clint was as likely to pull him down, intent on revenge, as to get up. And if they ended up on the floor, they would definitely be late.
Phil heaved himself off the bed, giving up any attempt at shirking his duties and having his way with Clint. He skirted his still-sprawled lover and went to the mirror on the far wall to adjust his clothing, ignoring the Black Widow hovering in his bedroom doorway for a moment. As he finished putting on his cufflinks, he brooded.
Church.
He blamed Doc Halliday and Clint in about equal measure.
“But Phil,” Clint had said, two weeks ago, when Phil had mentioned how happy he’d be to be back on North Bar for Christmas, how much he was looking forward to a quiet Christmas Eve spent on the couch, curled up between his lover and Lucky, watching the fire, drinking something at least 100 proof, and definitely absolutely under no circumstances in any way shape or form thinking about global security or the Avengers place in it. He especially did not want to think about Tony Goddamn Stark or Captain Puppy Dog Eyes America-- or, for that matter, Nick Director of That Agency Phil Refused to Name Because That Would Imply He Cared and Just At the Moment He Didn’t Fury.
Which… wait… Phil tried to backtrack to wherever his mind had been when he’d started that thought.
Ah. Right:
“But, Phil,” Clint had said,two weeks ago, “we’re going to church, right?”
This had been news to Phil.
“Doc Halliday says we are,” Clint had told him, and Phil had bitten off a groan, one borne of familiarity. Already he heard those words too often from Clint’s otherwise tempting lips. “We’re supposed to be winning hearts and minds in the community, right? There are certain obligations that come with the good will of Gansett Light, and active participation in the seasonal rituals of the town are no small part of them.”
“That was a direct quote, wasn’t it?” Phil had asked him, mostly rhetorically. He still recalled a similar conversation from when he’d first found himself roped into volunteering in the community, years ago now. At the time, he’d wondered whose idea it had been that he should want to be an active part of the community at all-- it certainly hadn’t been his. “Did you try to play the agnostic card?” he tried, without much hope.
“Yeah. She said, and I quote, ‘don’t you try and foist any of that agnostic nonsense on me, Mr. Barton. I don’t care whether you do or don’t believe in God or Jesus or little fluffy bunnies, you can still go to church. That’s what the Unitarians are for, anyway.’”
“Thought she might say that,” Phil had muttered, because that had been what she’d said to him.
So that had been that-- he and Clint were expected at a Christmas Eve late service. It was a small mercy; if they started the service in darkness and silence, it cut out some of the awkwardness of trying not to seem as out of place as the other twice a year churchgoers crowded in with the regular attendees.
Anyway, Phil’s dreams of a quiet evening alone on North Bar with Clint had been doomed to failure from the moment Natasha had invited herself along. He’d been a little surprised there hadn’t been more of an attempt by Stark or Rogers or the others to keep her, but as it turned out Stark and Pepper Potts were joining Col. Rhodes and Doctor Banner in Malibu for Christmas-- Pepper seemed to think she could keep order better there. Thor was visiting his astrophysicist for the holidays, and Rogers and Wilson were holding down the fort, and had invited Bucky Barnes to join them (another step, Phl hoped, in bringing Rogers around to including Barnes on the team).
Phil’d expected Natasha to stay in New York, in case of Avengers-level catastrophes on Christmas day. However, he was never going to begrudge her the need to stay close to Clint-- and definitely not so soon after finally finding him again. It was just….
She just… cramped his style. A little.
Ever since she’d warned him that she never wanted to hear another squeak about their sex life-- not after learning about Clint’s predilection for toes.
She also shooed them down the stairs, into their coats, and out the door with an efficiency that suggested some kind of past experience either herding cats or teaching kindergarten-- Phil wasn’t sure which was the scarier possibility.
As he and Clint slid inside the miniscule cabin of the boat they’d rented for the winter, Phil grumbled and tucked himself further into his peacoat. The wind and the spray were already crawling through the thick boiled wool, and he wasn’t looking forward to the to-and-fro from island to island at all.
“At least someone gets to curl up in front of the fire with my dog and my scotch,” he groused.
Beside him, Clint made a choked-off noise and started the boat. Phil looked over at the man, his face shadowed and unreadable in the dim light from the instrument panel and the boat’s headlamp, and further obscured both by beard and by the locks of hair emerging from his watch cap.
He’s going to look like he just crawled out of bed when he takes that damn hat off-- and he’s going to walk right into church next to me looking like that Phil thought. He bit back a gulp.
The ride was quiet, or as quiet as it could be beneath the grind of the motor and the slap of the waves against the sides. It never warmed up much, and the windscreen fogged a little at the edges with their combined breaths. Phil felt like they were moving through a world of endless black, lit only by the faint glow that revealed small sections of dark water in front of them.
They docked at last, after an ageless time, and debarked. Clint stood on the edge of the dock, stretching out kinks and looking up at the full moon riding high in the sky, beginning to be surrounded by a dusting of stars. The dock creaked beneath him, and Phil turned his collar up. At least there was no snow.
Small comforts.
“Can we get going, if we’re going?” he asked, shuffling his feet to keep his toes from going numb.
Clint turned to look at him, and raised an eyebrow high enough that it registered even in the mostly-dark.
“I’m enjoying the night,” he said, and Phil didn’t think he was imagining the frustration in his tone.
“Can we enjoy it somewhere warm?” he snapped back, because he actually did like his hands, really, and he wanted to keep them, and he’d forgotten to take his fleece-lined gloves from the cottage. The leather ones he was wearing were no help whatsoever. “Like the church?”
Maybe I should have worn the suit; clearly it didn’t take me long to go all big city.
“You didn’t seem that eager to get there earlier,” Clint replied, but he started moving.
“Being guilted into participating in a ritual I haven’t really believed in since I was twelve for the sake of keeping the community peace would do that,” Phil grumbled, following along. On the island proper, street lamps and porch lights provided a little more coziness and a touch more warmth-- if he ignored the vastness of the ocean just beyond them.
“You’d said Doc had the same talk with you about the church thing, years back,” Clint said, never breaking his stride. He’d remembered to wear thick wool-lined gloves, and had one of Phil’s old, ratty, almost absurdly warm scarves wrapped his neck. He didn’t seem to notice the cold at all. “Didn’t sound like you brushed her off.”
“She’s hard to say no to,” Phil sighed. “I used to show up once every couple months or so at a local Friends’ meeting.”
Clint did turn then, blinking at him.
“You’re a Quaker?” he asked, voice spiraling upwards.
“I’m not, I just… well, I had to pick something,” Phil shrugged, “and the meetings are quiet.” He’d gone to the first one just so he could tell Lauren Halliday he had, hoping it would get her off his back-- much like Clint and Christmas Eve services. He’d gone to the next simply because it was nice, sometimes, just to sit in stillness with other people. Yes, occasionally the silence was interrupted when someone felt called to sing or speak, but even then there was this sense that nothing was expected of you but to offer your presence. Even North Bar demanded more; maintenance and watchfulness and chicken feed.
“Yeah,” Clint said, “but aren’t they pacifists? Didn’t they care that you’re ex-mil?”
Phil felt himself bristle momentarily, but let it go. It was just Clint being Clint, trying to untangle the knots that people often made of themselves. He didn’t seem to mean to be critical.
“Plenty of vets who are Friends,” Phil told him, “and at the time, well--” at the time I wasn’t actively shooting at people-- “I really needed it, I found. Peace, I mean.”
Just not cut out for it long-term, as it turns out.
“Peace is good,” Clint agreed, and started walking again. “Little enough of it in this life.”
The echo of his own thoughts unsettled Phil, dredging up the part of him that still resented being pulled into the chaos that inevitably came with the Avengers. Or more properly-- the part of him that resented how much he thrived on the chaos.)
“Pretty peaceful on North Bar tonight,” Phil said, instead of responding directly. It would be, too-- Natasha was probably even now snuggled onto the couch with tea and a dog, the chickens would all be cuddled up in their roost, possibly clucking their drowsy way into rest. The mansion would be still and dark, the entire island hushed.
“Phil,” Clint said, turning on him, “Can you just, for my sake, be okay with this right now? I don’t really feel like dragging you sulking into the church. You know these people. You like these people. This shouldn’t be that difficult, not given everything else you do for this community. We’ve got two blocks left; try and be the Phil they want to see by the time we get there.”
Stung by the frustration in his voice, the suggestion that Phil was somehow being selfish to just want Clint to himself at the moment, Phil felt himself flush.
“Don’t take that tone with me,” he snapped. “You know damned well I’ll be polite when I get there. But are you seriously telling me you don’t resent that we’ve got to be here, instead of safe and warm at home?”
“Yeah, Phil, I am seriously telling you that,” Clint replied, and then all the anger in his face collapsed as suddenly as snow falling from a roof, leaving behind a little rueful smile. “And it’s not because I’m not anxious to get you and your addictive ass back under the covers. Look,” he stepped forward, closing the distance between them and clasping both Phil’s hands with his. “I owe a lot to Gansett Light.”
Phil’s hands were finally starting to thaw under the heat Clint radiated even from inside his gloves. He looked down at them, then up into the dark pools of Clint’s eyes.
“They took me in pretty much on your word alone, and maybe Doc’s,” Clint continued, watching him closely, “and they didn’t ask for that much in return. If would be dead without you, but I would be dead without them, too. You, Phil, you’ve got fifteen years of concentrated goodwill built up with them, running their planning meetings and rebuilding houses and saving their lives, even. If it were just you, you could stay home and do whatever, and they’d all just say ‘that’s our hermit,’ and deal, even now that you’ve got a literal flying car.
“But me? I’m still new, and I want them to know I appreciate everything they’ve done, okay? It’s the least I can do, after all the trouble I’ve been-- and almost definitely will be in the future. I want to be here, sitting in a pew with Doc Halliday, seeing Tom, knowing that Wanda Jackson is doing the same thing over at St. James AME, and we can talk about it later. Hell, even with Des, he can grumble about getting dragged off to the synagogue and I’ll talk about late services and what’s up with that, right?
“Some places, it wouldn’t matter, but here it does. And…” Clint frowned, and looked at the ground suddenly, “and that’s a thing I’ve never had a chance to try before. I want to try it now.”
Phil found his breath caught in his throat.
He’d never asked-- well, when had he gotten a chance?-- what Clint had done, growing up, for the holidays. What it was like in the circus, or in the orphanages. He’d lost his parents even younger than Phil-- not that Clint’s parents had ever been much anyway, from what Phil could tell. As an adult, first mercenary then spy then superhero, Clint might well have not experienced things Phil himself had long since grown accustomed to and perhaps rather resentful of. Quiet nights on North Bar would be, he hoped, in plentiful supply. This was not. He turned his fingers in Clint’s hands and gripped back, tightly.
“Let’s go,” he said, and butted his forehead against Clint’s. “I promise to be good. Well-- unless you make me sit next to Jamie.”
“Nuh-uh,” Clint told him, and pulled him along, “you haven’t been bad enough to deserve that.”
They crossed the remaining blocks quickly, ending up in a little, intermittent stream of people headed for the long neo-colonial portico of the church. At the top of the steps, Phil was startled to see Skye waiting for them, huddled into a long coat and longer scarf, peeping out nervously from under her bangs.
“Heya, Boss,” she said when Phil got close to her, and then she reached out and hugged him-- an act to which he supposed he would someday become accustomed. At the moment, however, it was still more than a little awkward, and he patted her on the back until she let go. Clint snorted at him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her, “did Doc Halliday get to you, too?”
Skye looked back at him, blinking a little in confusion, then over at Clint, then back once more.
“Seemed like the place to be,” she said, and shrugged awkwardly. “Not like I have other family to go to. And….” Her dark eyes turned inward for a moment, “I guess maybe the nuns did rub off on me, a bit. Anyway, I’m feeling a bit… nostalgic? Or grateful? I dunno. Silly, huh?”
“No,” Phil said, and squeezed her shoulder, suddenly fighting not to go down under a flood of mingled fondness and regret. Yet another orphan, their Skye, and he hadn’t had the grace to pay attention to that properly either, he’d been so caught up in Clint’s problems and his own. “Not silly,” he said. “Glad to see you.”
Skye smiled up at him, then broke away and slipped over to the other side of Clint, hooking her arm through his. Clint grinned and bumped her.
“Speaking of, Other Boss,” she said to Clint as they walked in the door, “Kate texted. She’n America’ll be by tomorrow, if you tell me when is too early.”
“They will?” Clint asked, a little wary, “I didn’t think we were gonna see them for a while?”
“Yeah, well, it’s nice to have a girlfriend who can fly, I guess? America snuck her back to New York to see their friends today, and she’s gonna sneak her over to North Bar tomorrow. She just doesn’t wanna come before you and Boss are decent-- I mean, not that I do, either, so tell me when’s safe.”
Phil fought back his blush long enough to start
“The normal time is fine--” but Clint cut him off.
“Give us a couple extra hours,” he told her. “We’re sleeping in.”
“We are?” Phil asked him, suspicious. “But what happens to the chickens and Lucky? Skye’s room’s not ready at the mansion yet and I don’t want the Steves rioting just because they didn’t get their feed at the normal time. Or Lucky interrupting us, for that matter.”
It wasn’t that sleeping in didn’t sound good-- he might have had dreams, of both the day and night varieties, about sleeping in with Clint, just drowsing along in his arms as the sun slowly lightened the room, kind of rolling into morning sex by degrees and then letting the afterglow take them. They’d just never had an opportunity to do it, and there were few on North Bar with its constant demands.
“Nat’s taking care of the chickens tomorrow and making breakfast,” Clint told him. “Our present from her, she says.”
“She is?” Phil asked, stunned. Breakfast was one thing, breakfast he could see. But the thought that Natasha was willing to turn chicken-keeper on their behalf, however temporarily, was unexpectedly touching. “I’ll have to thank her.”
They’d entered the long, high-vaulted sanctuary, where everything was still except for the rustle of people gathering in the near dark. Skye slid down a pew, nodding at Tom, who was already sitting smack in the middle of the row. He smiled back down at her. Phil sat down next to them, feeling a little awkward as he settled in, trying not to rustle his order of service too loudly, and searching the back of the pew in front of him for the hymnal.
Clint settled next to him, distractingly pettable in his sweater, just as Phil’d foreseen. Phil gave in to temptation with a light caress along his arm, and was rewarded with a smile that radiated even in the dim light.
“Nat said not to thank her,” Clint whispered when they were settled, taking the thread of their earlier conversation back up. He paused a moment, then laughed to himself. “Well. That’s not quite what she said.”
“What did she say?” Phil prompted him, when Clint didn’t seem inclined to continue.
Clint leaned closer to him still, breath warm on Phil’s ear.
“She said we could thank her by shutting the damn door and keeping the noise down.” he said. “She doesn’t want to know more about your toes.”
Which was how Phil found himself flushing bright red, caught between mortification and desire, as the pastor stepped up to the lectern and greeted the assembled congregation.
On one side of him, Skye leaned forward, listening intently. On the other, Clint laid his head on Phil’s shoulder, his chuckle so low as to be mostly vibration against Phil’s skin. Phil slid his palm down to the small of Clint’s back and dug in. Tom sat behind him, already shuffling pages in the hymnal. From a few rows in front, Lauren Halliday turned around and gave him a bright smile. Someone coughed, a child whined, and the organ wheezed to life.
As the assembled Gansett Light throng stood, Phil pulled his own hymnal out of the pew back in front of him and handed it to Clint, letting their fingers brush. Clint shot him a sly little smile before starting to sing, confident about it in a way that Phil hadn’t realized he would be. Phil took a deep breath, and lent his own voice to the harmony.
It wasn’t home, a fire, and a warm dog, but Phil decided he’d had worse Christmas Eves.
And he had a hell of a lot to look forward to, come the morning.