A coda for Number One Crush.

There were times Sitwell wanted to strangle Clint Barton.

The most recent Lithuanian mission, for example. What a clusterfuck that had turned into. Not that it had been Barton's fault, but his solution to the already pear-shaped situation had left everything to be desired, and to top it off he'd decked the operation's commanding officer after a heated debate on the flight home.

Before that there'd been Azerbaijan, which Fury had yelled at Sitwell about for almost an hour. Also not Barton's fault; the intel had been bad, and the op leader had made clumsy decisions. Barton had in turn needed to improvise on those decisions, and had done so with great flair. (At least that mission had been successful, if also an incredible mess.)

And now, this.

Sitwell tossed a manila envelope onto his desk. It slid towards Barton, who was draped in the guest chair like it was a top-end Neiman Marcus sofa and not a governmental Ikea special of hard angles and plastic.

"I thought you never missed, Barton."

Barton didn't dignify the envelope with so much as a glance. "I don't miss."

"Then how do you explain this?"

"Accuracy doesn't mean shit if what I'm shooting is crap."

Sitwell narrowed his eyes. "So the arrowheads were faulty?"

"The first one didn't go off. The second one did. And set off the first one, so everything went to hell sooner and a whole lot faster than it was supposed to."

"We plan for this kind of thing."

Barton blew out a breath. "No, actually, we don't," he said. "We plan for me missing-which by the way doesn't happen-and we plan for planes getting shot down or covers blown-which does occasionally happen-but we don't plan for the small, complicated devices we spend months thinking up failing and then failing even worse when we have to use a second one."

Sitwell counted to five. Barton's attitude was carefully crafted and completely intentional, like most of the high-level field operatives' were. His was just particularly acidic in the wake of the Tesseract event; he resented the extra scrutiny, and he really resented working with any handler who wasn't Coulson. (But even Coulson's 'death' and Loki's possession of him couldn't account for all of it, and Sitwell had yet to figure out how Coulson had never resorted to killing Barton, hiding the body in Antarctica, and feigning ignorance about his untimely disappearance.)

"So there was no contingency in place for the device failing?"

"There wasn't a contingency in place for me needing to fire both of them that close together."

Sitwell grimaced. Fury wanted Barton to go on at least a half-dozen team ops before putting him back on solo work after the whole Loki thing. Sitwell had been questioning the wisdom of that order since day one, because at this rate, he'd be performing damage control with the ops team leaders for the next four months.

He quelled a sigh. "I guess we'll have to make sure to test the equipment more thoroughly next time."

Barton rolled his eyes. "Whatever. Did the same person design these as my last set? The balance is off." His tone went sweet and sarcastic. "Oh, and they don't always work."

"You know they're done by whatever lab is available at the time." Barton raised his eyebrows, and now Sitwell did sigh. "No. It was a different group."

"Well, I want the next set by whoever who did them before. These were terrible. Those were great. Not a single misfire. Balance was perfect. Best-tuned accelerometers I've had yet."

"That researcher is assigned to a field team now." Coulson's field team, in fact. Coulson, whom Barton didn't know was alive.

"I don't care if they're assigned to the moon. These arrowheads suck. If you want missions to go right, then get me arrowheads that don't suck. If they're the only one who can make arrowheads that don't suck, then I guess they're the person who's making my arrowheads from now on."

Sitwell set his mouth in a thin line against what he actually wanted to say. Barton didn't flinch, no doubt knowing that on this he would have even Fury's backing. You didn't give your legendary marksman bad equipment.

Thinking of the various forms he would need to fill out to make it happen (and how they'd be great for burying a body), Sitwell said, "I'll see what I can do."