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Clint’s had money before. He remembers the first dollar he ever earned; he won it in a bet against some city kids who tried to say Hawkeye’s act was all misdirection and illusions. He was even rich once, for nearly a whole month, after he scored a major payday on a hit. He burned through all the dough trying to stay ahead of the target’s super-evil crime family, though, and they still tracked him down in the end. That’s what led him to SHIELD, and eventually, to this: his first ever, totally legit, not blood-money paycheck from SHIELD. Granted, the check is made out to an alias, the one that’s officially on file with SHIELD, but Clint's kind of ridiculously giddy about it all the same. He immediately goes out and blows the whole check on a beat-down old ’62 Corvette at an estate auction.
He spends the majority of every subsequent paycheck restoring her. Between helping the Bearded Lady run maintenance on the circus’ ramshackle fleet of vehicles and boosting cars with Barney on the side, Clint’s learned a fair amount about cars and their parts. What he doesn’t already know, he inevitably picks up on the job through much trial and error.
Three years into his employment with SHIELD, the Corvette is in pristine condition and Clint has never once driven her. He’s turned over the engine plenty, trying to get everything under the hood in working order, but he’s never done more than let her idle in park for a few minutes at a time. Today though, her paint job is finally dry, and she’s been waxed and buffed ‘til she sparkles like an effing vampire in sunlight. Clint puts the key in the ignition, cranks the motor, and slides the gear shift into drive.
He doesn’t go for a joyride, doesn’t head out for an open strip of road to let the top down and put the pedal to the metal. He heads straight for a brownstone in Brooklyn and carefully pulls her into a parallel parking spot on the street.
Coulson steps out onto the sidewalk about a minute later and raises his eyebrows at Clint, who’s leaning against the car with his elbow propped on the lip of the windshield. Clint smirks at the man who gave a mercenary who’d already dug his own grave a hand out of the hole. He tosses the key to the agent who fought to keep Clint out of a jail cell and trained him to become an indispensible asset. Clint glances at the results of his hard work over the last three years and then to the guy who has a framed car magazine cover featuring the same exact model hanging up in his office next to a vintage Captain America poster.
Clint doesn't answer the question that Coulson's asking without actually asking. He simply says, “I’ve been calling her Lola.”