A/N: This was also a gift to a friend, and is thus unbeta'd in the interest of timely gift-giving. I hope you like my little drabble about my second-favorite pairing.
The thing of it was, Bruce was easy to be around.
Well, once you set aside his potential for violence Bruce was easy to be around. He worked hard to make himself unobtrusive. He cultivated a lack of presence that rivaled an end table when he was in a real mood. Clint could sit in a room with him for hours and know he was there, but feel nothing. No pressure to talk, no sense of keeping him from something, nothing.
Bruce was just another person close by who was on Clint's side, and that's about all Clint could handle once the dust from Loki's invasion settled.
Bruce could be around, just in case Clint's vision suddenly greyed out as it sometimes did, but not demand anything. He seemed to enjoy being in other peoples' presence, seemed to soak up energy just by sitting quietly in a room with someone else, and if Clint wanted to talk to him, well, that was easy, too.
Politics, baseball, football, art – Bruce could talk about it all. Sometimes Clint would wander into the common room and Bruce and Steve would be hunched over a tablet looking at art together, Bruce explaining the religious significance or political significance or even the artistic significance and Steve soaking up the new knowledge eagerly.
Bruce could talk to anyone, or he could be completely quiet. His past had demanded both skills.
Clint found himself looking for Bruce when he needed to have a person around and Natasha wasn't available. He even dragged a comfy chair from the common room down to Bruce's lab and started drinking chocolate milk and reading his favorite books while Bruce worked. Bruce would smile at him, keep working, and help him back to his chair if he blacked out. He always had a mug of ginseng tea at his fingertips and would have a mug waiting next to the chair once Clint managed to steady his hands enough to drink it.
"It's good for calming nerves," Bruce said, as if he needed to explain.
Clint just shrugged and drank it as Bruce knelt in front of him and rested a steadying hand on his knee.
Bruce was easy to be around. So when the blackouts stopped happening as often, as his hands slowly stopped shaking and the months dragged on after the Battle, Clint still found himself in the same room with him, drinking tea and talking baseball or playing chess or having dinner or going to a concert or waiting patiently for him to finish an experiment or sitting on his couch watching a movie or running his fingers through his curly salt-and-pepper hair or kissing the taste of ginseng tea from his lips.
The thing was, Bruce felt safe, trusted, needed.
That was the thing of it.