Half a Minute and Thirty Seconds

by mrasaki

He's not hiding, he's on vacation. [Clint/Coulson]

Title: Half a Minute and Thirty Seconds

Author:

Rated: PG-13

Wordcount: ~18,560

A/N: This is an unholy mashup of elements from both Avengers movie-verse and the Hawkeye series of mostly issues 1-4. Because I write that slowly.

Summary: He's not hiding, he's on vacation.

Prologue

Three years and some change ago (okay, that's a lie, Clint knows exactly how long it was) New Mexico happened. New Mexico happened to be one of the few states Clint had absolutely no desire to step foot in and Puente Antiguo does little to change his mind, but hey, Coulson's on this op and when Coulson is around, things stay interesting.

Well, okay. Things stay interesting for Clint. Because the other SHIELD agents spend their time sweating into their suits and surreptitiously trying to finagle excuses to get into the air conditioned mobile command units and stay there, but Clint – well, Clint's been in hotter climates (like Yemen), and unlike Yemen, here he has eye candy.

Coulson never does take off his coat, though he concedes to the heat enough to wear his summer-weight suits, but a man can dream.

Then suddenly there is even more eye-candy in the form of a god with god-like tresses that put shampoo commercials to shame, and pecs that shirts wet from driving rain cling to lovingly, so Clint isn't complaining. At. All. He watches the guy mow through the best and brightest and burliest of SHIELD and needles Coulson over the comm, Coulson acting as if he's not hugely impressed by "Donald" too and just as curious as to what's going to happen if Fabio actually reaches the hammer.

Nothing, that's what.

Then a whole lot of something happens, and hey, aliens exist, Fabio is also an alien, those not put out of commission by Fabio's MMA gauntlet run the night before are nearly blown up by a mobile alien flamethrower Godzilla…thing, and to top of it all off, Coulson receives the rough side of some intern's tongue over her goddamn iPod and she stalks Coulson and Sitwell and Blake until they practically throw the iPod at her and hand her quite a bit of cash besides to make her go away.

Coulson's having one whopper of a bad week.

So Clint searches out the only Starbucks in a 100-mile radius, gets him a venti caramel frappuccino with extra whip and extra caramel, just the way Coulson likes it even though Clint thinks it's an abomination on the name of all things coffee, and takes it to him where he's holed up in Puente Antiguo's only motel.

The door to the unit at the end is unlocked.

Clint opens the door cautiously, all senses on alert, because this is just not right. Basic security measures – so basic it's remedial - Coulson would never –

Coulson looks up from his sprawl in a tatty armchair in the corner. There's a bottle of semi-good scotch on the end table next to him. The tumbler in his hand, sheaf of paper in his other, file folders across his lap and across the bed. He looks simultaneously good and terrible, the elegant line of his throat and wrists exposed by loosened tie and unbuttoned cuffs offset by red-rimmed eyes, the obvious bone-deep exhaustion dragging at his face.

"Barton," Coulson says, and tries to sit up.

"Five o'clock somewhere, sir?" Clint tries, trying to hide the shock he feels at seeing Coulson like this. Not drunk – not yet, anyway – but even that he apparently wants to be.

"If you mean five a.m., yes." He gives Clint that genuine half-smile only a select few sees that makes Clint want to do ridiculous sexy things to him. He gestures at the other armchair. "Drink?"

Clint takes the glass Coulson hands him and sips it slowly. Sipping liquors have never been his thing, he prefers shots – one and done, no tasting involved – but he endures the burn and the peaty aftertaste because well, Coulson. There are so many things that Clint would never try or experience without Coulson, because Coulson has a surprising taste for luxury. Which stands to reason; for a person in a line of work where one is more likely to die than retire, enjoying the finer things is a priority, but Clint doesn't know if it's just the way he grew up or if he's just got a mental block about these things, but he doesn't see the point in wearing tailored suits or eating foie gras in Paris or even having the latest StarkPhone with the highest data plan, except when Coulson does, suddenly Clint does too.

"I actually wanted to talk to you about your report." Coulson leans over, picks up a number of papers off the bed, and waves them at Clint.

Clint stretches and grins, knowing what's coming.

"I appreciate you completing and submitting it in record time for a change, but," he flips through it until he finds the right page and Clint grins wider. "'Alien flamethrower Godzilla thing'? Really, Barton?"

"You always tell me I need more descriptions in my report," Clint says. "That's descriptive, isn't it?"

In response, Coulson rolls his glass across his forehead, doing that thing where he looks bone weary yet secretively amused and also desperately in need of a hug.

Or a massage.

Which, you know, Clint is totally okay with offering either.

"Maybe you should go back to your room and get some rest," Coulson says into the silence as Clint's working out the logistics of a sexual harassment complaint. "You're leaving pretty early tomorrow."

And Clint remembers what he came there for in the first place and presents Coulson with the coffee abomination. Coulson blinks at him, then gives a smile, a real smile that reaches his eyes, and then Clint remembers the second thing he came there for. "Before I do that, how about we talk about your death wish?"

Coulson pauses in inhaling the entire contents of his cup. "What?"

Crap. This is where he should re-evaluate his uncanny ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time and move on, but Clint's never backed down from anything in his life. Plus, he's pissed off, has been since that afternoon, and it all comes roaring back at the genuinely confused look on Coulson's face, like he can't think of a single reason why Clint would be angry. "That part where you took on a giant alien flamethrower with nothing but a megaphone and got yourself blown up?"

Coulson puts down his cup and says with that maddening calm, "Where is this coming from, Barton?"

"What do you mean, where is this – you nearly died. Is that just government spook arrogance or just plain balls? Because I know you're not stupid."

Coulson just hums thoughtfully at that as if he's seriously considering the question, which finally succeeds in tipping Clint over the edge. "Any sane person would know that if you're dealing with deities from mythology that you didn't know was real until like three hours ago, maybe you should hide and let them work their shit out."

Coulson rests the cup on his knee. "Please don't shout."

"I'm not shouting." He realizes then that he is, is simmering with anger and frustration, and forces himself to unclench his fists and sit back.

Coulson watches him fidget for a long moment. Finally he admits, "To be honest, I didn't know what it was going to do, or what it was. I thought it might've been one of Stark's inventions."

"Jesus, sir." He'd been there, watching through a sniper scope. When the thing had gone ballistic, he fired three rounds, hitting it square in the middle of what could be called a face, and absolutely nothing happened. Then he'd emptied the entire magazine, for all the good it did anyone, because Coulson and Sitwell and a dozen other agents were right there, at ground zero, armed with nothing but a megaphone and a smile. Coulson knows this of course; it's all in Clint's report, but what isn't in the report is how sure Clint had been that Coulson was going to die right then and there and Clint would have to watch every second of it from a mile away, helpless to do anything about it.

So Clint kinda wants to grab Coulson and make sure he's still here, solid and alive, after all that craziness with gods and trans-dimensional travel and things exploding (seriously, he'll take just one mission without shit blowing up) and yeah, maybe run his tongue along the lines of Coulson's mouth to catch a taste of that expensive whiskey, and maybe help erase that pinched look of chronic stress.

Except – "Barton, what are you doing?" - this isn't how it's supposed to go, Coulson's mouth hard underneath him and unresponsive. He freezes, and then Coulson raises a hand up to Clint's chest and gently but inexorably pushes him back.

Coulson's pink cheeked but otherwise as unflappable as ever. "Barton. I'm flattered, but—"

But.

Oh.

Clint steps back and lets the words flow over him, sinking first into white-hot embarrassment, then numbness. Not appropriate. Colleagues. Regulations. Don't feel that way about you. Hope we can still - Words, more words, laced with sympathy and a kindness that cuts deeper with each syllable, all lost in the rush of blood in his ears until Clint can't take it anymore.

He nods, says, "Sorry sir, don't know what I was thinking, just forget it," without looking at him once, and flees.

He hears Coulson call out after him, but he keeps his head down and keeps walking.

He ships out early the next morning, pale and grouchy from no sleep. Coulson doesn't come to find him before he leaves, and only as he returns from Jakarta and is reassigned to the Nevada base for some downtime does he find a message from Coulson.

Which he promptly deletes.

He doesn't want to know what Coulson has to say. Clint's fucked up one of the only stable relationships in his life, there's nothing to say or hope for except maybe Coulson will be willing to pretend nothing happened and maybe one day Clint can think back on it without immediately cringing and cursing himself for being a deluded idiot.

And, well. Loki happens, and Clint's world falls apart.

Afterwards he puts his life back together again piece by agonizing piece. In his head, on an intellectual level, Clint knows none of it is (really) his fault, but then there's the small part of him filled with anger and self-loathing, the part of that Loki took apart and put back together wrong, that knows that nothing can be the way it was, no matter how much Clint wants it to be.

He resigns his active commission in SHIELD to join the Avengers when Fury asks, and slowly life goes on, even more interesting than before.

Then Coulson comes back, and Clint's world falls apart once more.

Part 1

It's stupid, really. Clint really doesn't spend all his time flinging himself off high places with nothing or no one to catch him, he's not suicidal. (Except on Mondays, haha.) But there are these stupid rocket launchers, and these even stupider goons who fire them, and one of them gets lucky, so Clint falls four stories flat on his back onto a car.

Coulson is having a quiet aneurysm in his ear, a constant, "Barton, report, dammit," while Clint is trying to remember how to breathe and vaguely wondering if he'll be able to walk again, since something in his hip grinds together when he tries to move his leg and nothing happens except sharp blasts of pain. Wolverine tries to be comforting with an "It's just a scratch Barton, walk it off," complete with a considerate 'tch,' but all Clint can do is squint back, the man so short that they're eye-level when Logan's standing next to the car, and wheeze, "Ow."

Later on in the hospital Coulson is there when Clint wakes up. He's aged in the three years since the Chitauri attack; thinner, more lines on his face, more silver in his hair. Clint notices these details under his lashes as he's pretending to be asleep and Coulson's reading his chart with total disregard for patient confidentiality and the hovering doctor's blood pressure.

"At least Jasper asks," Clint grouses finally when the silence drags on a little too long. He likes Sitwell, Sitwell's sour humor a solid wall against which Tony's deliberate obnoxiousness crashes like a breaking wave. Though the man had grasped at resigning his position as the Avenger-SHIELD liaison and returning to regular duty with an eagerness that was almost insulting.

Coulson ignores that sally, politely not pointing out that though he's an Avenger, Clint's ass still belongs to SHIELD and as such medical record confidentiality is a pipe dream and has been since Clint signed his soul over nearly fifteen years ago. (Fine, maybe Clint's being a little melodramatic but dammit, he's in a hospital bed with what looks like a million needles stuck in him and in spite of the good meds his ribs and hips hurt like crazy in that localized way that makes him want to dig down to it with a rusty spoon.)

"You'll be glad to know that you'll walk again," Coulson says, all disinterest as if his suit isn't rumpled and his tie crooked and as if he doesn't look like he's been sleeping in hard plastic chairs and subsisting on awful hospital sandwiches and coffee for much too long. "You also have three cracked ribs, a broken wrist, and a concussion, so don't fake sleep again if you don't want the doctors swarming all over you."

So no pretending to fall asleep to avoid Coulson. No bueno. Clint's done an excellent job of keeping Coulson strictly on the business side of things so far, contact limited to briefings before and after and in terse orders over the comm, but nothing more. And now here Clint is, stuck in traction and nothing between them except rough hospital sheets and Clint's skimpy hospital gown, with Coulson standing near enough for Clint to smell his aftershave.

Which really isn't so different from what they did for years except New Mexico then Loki happened, which makes this deeply awkward.

Coulson has a newspaper rolled up under his arm. For a minute Clint thinks he may start reading to him from it or maybe just whack Clint on the head with it for doing something as stupid as throwing himself off a building again, we've talked about this, Barton, but he doesn't, just looks at Clint in a way that makes Clint want to squirm. "Come back home, Barton," Coulson says finally. "Please."

"I have a home," Clint says, snappishly, partly because he's in a lot of pain but mostly because he wants Coulson to stop looking at him like that. "The Tower's not my home."

"You called it that for years," Coulson replies.

"Yeah, well. I don't have to live there to be an Avenger, do I?" He flings this at him, watches his mouth tighten. "A bunch of people don't. Like Luke and Jessica. And Logan."

"That's different."

"How?"

"Cage lives off-site for his family, but still trains regularly with the Avengers. And Wolverine has commitments to other teams." Coulson looks down, adjusts his cuffs, and doesn't point out that if Clint needs to use Wolverine as an example, he needs to reevaluate his life choices. "You moved out because you're upset with me."

"Well," Clint says after a long moment. "That would just be stupid. And immature."

Coulson just looks at him.

"I just –" Put baldly like that, it is stupid and immature. It's not Coulson's fault (not really) that he died. Not Coulson's fault that Clint had just begun to come to terms with that was his fault and what was not and all the stupid what-could-have-beens, when Coulson turned up alive.

Clint had freaked. To be fair, everybody freaked, but they'd gotten over it in time and in their own ways, but Clint can't stop freaking out even with the man before him again, a living embodiment of a second chance, solid and dependable and here, and Clint can't stop being himself.

So, awkward.

They stare at each other.

"Sorry, sir," Clint mumbles at last. "Just. I didn't mean - This is all fucked up."

Coulson just says simply, "Yes, it is." His steady eyes pin Clint in place, and immediately Clint knows what he's going to say next, something kindly and stupid like Let's just keep things professional or Let's just be friends, I'll pretend you never tried to kiss me in New Mexico and I was totally not interested, except kinder because Coulson is a good person and will do that much for him and also Coulson's his boss again and it's Coulson's job to make sure this works.

But inside, Clint knows the words already, words that will break him into a thousand pieces to hear them spoken aloud, and so he really, really, really needs to not hear Coulson say them.

His heart monitor makes a sudden alarmed beep.

Coulson's disconcerting gaze flicks away to it. The distraction frees Clint enough to blurt, "Look, it's okay, we don't need to – I mean, you don't need to –" He pauses and clenches the sheet into a fist. "I know, okay? So let's move on, welcome back, glad you're not dead and all that."

"Barton."

"Look, sir, everything kind of hurts and I'm really not in the mood. Can we do this later?" Of course, by 'later' he really means never, but he tries a winsome smile anyway.

There's a heavy moment in which he thinks Coulson will press the issue, those heavy lines still creasing his forehead between his eyes as he regards Clint with that penetrating stare.

Then the stare switches off, like flicking off a lamp. Coulson gives him that bland not-smile, the one that's meant to be reassuring but mostly has the effect of freaking out enemy combatants and junior agents alike. "Get some rest, then," is all he says.

Clint breathes a silent sigh of relief. "Not much choice, sir. I'm stuck here and I'm not even strapped down."

The joke falls flat into ringing silence. Without another word or glance, Coulson settles back in the chair, pulling out the newspaper and a pen to do the crossword. He looks for all the world like he's going to be there a while.

This perversely pisses Clint off, because who asked him to stay?

The minutes tick by, the pen scratching away, as Clint fidgets.

Coulson waits just long enough for Clint to relax, to sigh several times, then to begin thinking sleepily of taking a nap. Then he pauses writing just long enough to promise, not looking up, "But we are going to talk about this, Barton."

The pen resumes again. Clint is left wide awake, glaring at the ceiling.

Awesome.

oOo

Clint thinks there's plenty of opportunity to get pigeon-holed by Coulson after that - after all, he's not going anywhere fast. After enduring several weeks of torture masquerading as physical therapy and staring at day-time talk shows on the blurry tv in the corner and flicking his jello cup at the ceiling and at various targets around the room, he's almost ready to have a super embarrassing conversation with Coulson.

But it doesn't happen, because the Avengers have a crisis (when don't they have a crisis, honestly) and they all fuck off to the Savage Lands while Clint is left to rot.

Okay, that was a little self-pitying.

But he's in a top-secret facility so he can't have any civilian visitors (Katie) and everyone else is off fighting dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Which would be awesome except he's not there, he's here.

So six weeks pass with the speed of congealed molasses. When he gets out, there's no one to meet him, no one to say, Hey, welcome back, we missed you.

Clint destroys a wheelchair (causing a massive car pile-up in the process but it's the best fuck you to SHIELD and Coulson he can think of), buys his apartment building from some Russian thugs, and discovers he's been adopted by a dog.

Which is sorta nice; it's not often someone or something decides that they like him enough to follow him home, and he doesn't even have to try this time. Clint doesn't get it either; it was only pizza.

Not even good pizza, at that.

The dog's name is apparently 'Arrow', how twee is that. Clint thinks it's a stupid name. A dog should have a badass name like Rebel Ryder or something, which Nat vetoes on pain of….pain, but nothing else seems to click so 'Arrow' the dog remains for now. (Or 'Pizza Dog', but Clint hasn't worked up the courage to tell Nat that one just yet, no matter how apropos.)

Turns out, the dog really likes bad pizza, which means Arrow gets the runs, which in turn doesn't help the aroma of Clint's apartment nor the state of his carpet.

"He'd stop eating pizza if you'd stop feeding it to him," Natasha advises as she's curled up on the couch, neatly picking pepperoni slices off the entire pizza and popping them into her mouth. She's got a line of neat stitches going from her cheekbone running up into her hair, and has a bite from a small-ish dinosaur she's promised to show Clint if he's really, really good.

"Look at that face, Nat. It's a face that says, 'feed me pizza or I will look at you sadly until you die from sad.'"

"Stop enabling the dog, Clint."

"He's in a cone! How can you say no?"

She doesn't answer. He hears her reaching up, sliding her fingers along the spines of the few ancient books on a splintered Ikea bookcase he'd found in a dumpster by the NYU dorms. He doesn't ask how she'd found him, in this place in Bed-Stuy he squirreled away long before he ever joined SHIELD, a safe house secure enough that not even SHIELD had known about it.

He's not hiding, he's on vacation.

"Fury wants to know if this is going to be a problem," she says finally.

"Nat, I've got nearly a year in holiday pay saved up over fifteen years. Pretty sure that violates some employee rights law somewhere."

"And you're taking them now?" She sounds deeply unimpressed.

"I'm taking them now."

"Clint."

He turns to face her. She's studying him with something very like understanding.

This sets his teeth on edge.

When Coulson walked into the briefing room four months ago, just as if he hadn't been dead for three years, she cried. Then got thoroughly pissed off about crying and valiantly pretended she didn't have tracks cutting through her muddied makeup, and then disappeared for a week. When she returned, she'd punched Coulson and threatened, in excruciating detail, to emasculate him if he ever did that again.

Which is probably healthier than what Clint's doing, this unending moment of pause his life has become.

"I don't want to talk about it."

The silence stretches between them. Finally Natasha obviously lets the subject drop. She says instead, "I brought you a housewarming present. It's some kind of cactus. I had to spend thirty minutes talking to an old lady in a flower shop about her cats and being shown photos of all her grandchildren to get it, so I'd appreciate if you tried to not kill it." She sniffs. "Don't let the dog eat it."

"As if." As if he knows he's under discussion, Arrow hobbles over and leans against Clint's leg hard. Clint reaches down to give him an ear rub, continuing as the dog melts and puddles until he's lying across Clint's foot.

"Oh hey, that's the dog from the video," a younger voice comes from the kitchen window, accompanied by a thump and a grunt. Two hands appear on the sill and push the pane further open until she can fold her slim body through.

Clint makes a sound of disgust. "Hey, Kate. Feel free to use the door."

"Says the guy who uses vents like highways." Her boots thump solidly onto the wood sideboard he'd placed just under the sill, a good find (if a bit splintery and needing a coat of varnish) from some open-air flea market thing.

"Wait," Clint says, holding up a hand, "Video? What video?"

Kate is the master of selectively ignoring Clint and instead of answering, is eyeing the interior of his admittedly shabby apartment with the jaundiced eye of the young and privileged. "Cool digs, Clint. Just needs a few cockroaches to complete the ironically homeless hipster je ne se quois."

She's just giving him crap, he knows, the same sarcastic bluntness that Clint also finds in himself, but it still kind of stings. He likes his place, put a lot of work into it. It's his. He growls, "Check under the sink, you can make them your minions."

"Don't need any, I already got you."

He isn't going to win this one, he decides. He usually doesn't, not with Kate. He changes the subject. "How did you even find me?" She doesn't know any of his tracking signals, at least that he knows of, but she's got Batman-levels of smarts backed up with money and ridiculous computer-savviness, so he wouldn't put it past her.

"Your super secret lair isn't so secret, old man. Since your very public ass-kicking of certain Russian mobsters was up on Youtube and got like, half a million views before it got taken down."

It's worse than he thought. "Fuck," Clint groans.

"Yeah, way to stay under the radar, Clinton Francis. Nice and subtle. Textbook super-spy skills."

"Why," Clint says, at Natasha and not at Kate, "do I put up with crap like this from a kid that isn't even mine?"

Natasha doesn't even miss a beat. "Because you like women who can beat you into a pulp." She licks grease off her thumb and holds out her hand to Kate for a high-five.

Once they're finished with their super secret girl-power fist bumps, Kate bends down to inspect Arrow. She flips the tag on the collar around so she can read it.

"Arrow?" she demands, disbelief dripping from every word. "Really? That's just a bit on point, isn't it?" Natasha's watching Kate with approval, as if Kate's asking something that Nat politely refrained from asking out of deference to Clint's feelings, and Nat does so love efficient interrogations.

Clint grunts. "It came with the dog, don't ask."

"Uh huh. Right."

"Really. Girlie girl, you know I don't lie to you."

"He's right," Nat says. "He's a terrible liar."

"Choosing not to lie and being bad at lying are very different things," Clint huffs, and snatches the pizza box and offers it to Kate.

Kate frowns at the pizza. "I'm vegetarian, Clint."

"Then you're lucky Nat ate all the pepperoni, then, aren't you?"

The unimpressed look they both give him would be enough to wither steel. "Kidding, kidding, jeez."

"S'okay, you don't need to feed me. Just stopped by to give you a heads up about that video. I figure you're going to be a popular guy now that everybody knows where you live."

"What."

Kate frowns at him, propping her hands on her hips. "Told you. Youtube, super-secret spy skills. Great combination. By the way, your dog's escaping," she says just as Arrow, who's been industriously rubbing his cone against the wall as they talked, manages to pop off the tab. The cone sails across the room as the dog darts forward, snatches the pizza out of Clint's hand, and hightails it into the next room to eat his prize in peace, probably under the bed where Clint will find the rotting remnants months from now.

They stare after him in silence.

"Well," Natasha says finally, "He's definitely your dog."

oOo

Clint squints against the morning light slanting through the newly dusted window slats, fishing under his pillow until he finds his shrilling phone. The name on the screen makes him seriously consider throwing the phone across the room, but instead he answers.

"Barton." The voice on the other end betrays surprise. Maybe he's surprised Clint answered. Which is fair; Clint is surprised he answered too. Next to him, where he's taking up more than his fair share of the bed, Arrow raises his head and stares at him, then blows an entire lungful of doggie morning breath into Clint's face.

Clint coughs. "Yeah."

"Your request for a sabbatical is approved, on the condition that you remain on-call for alpha and beta-level threats."

"Oh—uh. Thanks," Clint says, scrubbing a hand over his face. Good, this is good. Better news than he'd expected, to be honest.

"And you're to check in with me on a weekly basis."

His gut sinks.

"Yes, sir," he mutters, knowing he should be grateful Fury is even giving him the latitude that he is, but not quite managing it.

Coulson hmms, mostly to himself. It's thoughtful, almost a sigh. "Barton," he starts, then stops again. "Clint. Are you all right?"

Now Clint's definitely regretting picking up the phone. Before coffee – before anything, is not the time for any kind of conversation with Coulson, but especially not the one Coulson is angling for.

He doesn't want it this way; he wants it to go back to the way it was, before everything happened and Clint was an idiot and Loki was an asshole with daddy issues, but sometimes things go wrong of your own doing, and keep going wronger and wronger (yes, that's a word) until it's too late to do anything about it. There's an awkwardness between them that wasn't there before Loki, and Clint put it there.

"There's nothing to talk about sir," he says in the brightest tone he can muster, eyes closed. "Everything is fucking fine." He doesn't need Coulson to explain again, in his most reasonable tone, the years of recovery and physical therapy and experimental grafts, of him being alone in that hospital while the world and Clint moved on, as if that makes everything okay.

It should, because Clint has no right to be pissed off about any of it.

He'd known that it was going to be next to impossible to totally avoid Coulson, short of quitting the Avengers. At least Fury seems to be humoring him for the time being. Clint would even say Fury owes him this much because rights or no, Clint is pissed, because pretending someone is dead for three years even if he's recuperating in fucking Oregon from being stabbed through the heart with a magical spear, is just fucked up. There'd even been a service, dammit, and therapy, and a lot of Clint being a total fucking mess.

But this is an olive branch, and probably the best he can hope for. At least this way, he doesn't have to see or talk to Coulson every day as he would if he still lived in Avengers Tower. This is Fury's version of being nice.

And he thinks Coulson knows it too. "We done?" Clint asks, and feels rather than hears Coulson sigh before Clint hangs up.

oOo

"Doesn't anyone know how to use the door?" Clint demands, leaning out of his window.

He'd been woken up by the tink tink tink of pebbles – pebbles, of all things – clinking against the glass and Arrow barking his head off and dashing between the living room window that fronts the street and then back to Clint's bedroom, just in case Clint missed all the commotion and is still sleeping. At – he checks the clock – 2 am. "What the fuck, Tony, seriously."

"I feel like I should be holding a boombox out here on the sidewalk playing In Your Eyes," Tony says, as if he isn't hovering four floors above the ground.

"Wouldn't Should Have Known Better be more appropriate?" Clint asks, scrubbing a hand over his face. The car chase and explosions last week hadn't done his still recovering body any favors; the whiplash alone makes him groan as he leans over to talk out the window, nevermind the fact he feels like he's been run over by a dump truck and could sleep for a week.

"It Must Have Been Love. Are we going to keep swapping power ballads from the 80's or are you going to let me in?"

Clint seriously considers just slamming the window shut in Tony's face, but then Arrow jams his head between Clint's ribcage and the windowpane to have a vigorous sniff at this new visitor. His tail thrashes and smacks Clint in the side with every wag.

Clint pulls at him, but Arrow just shoves back and this time, manages to bunt Clint aside with a bony hip. One hind paw scrabbles for purchase on the sill, most of him practically lunging out the window.

Clint gives up. "Fine, I'm out of 80's songs anyway. Get in here before the dog falls out."

"Spectacular." Tony hovers for a moment more. "Oh, also –" He gestures, and now Clint notices Steve lurking (well, okay, Steve is physically incapable of lurking anywhere, so he's loitering just outside the circle of light the streetlamp throws) on the street below him.

"Kate told me this would happen," Clint groans.

"You mean us visiting because we discovered where you're hiding out from your stint as white knight and Youtube sensation? Yeah, it was all very swashbuckling and sexy and gritty street vigilante—" Tony gesticulates in the air wildly as a thought strikes him. "Wait, what do you mean you're out of 80's songs? We're the same generation! What's wrong with – wait, how old areyou?"

"Younger than your mom," Clint growls.

Tony points an admonishing finger at Clint. "That," he says, "is a terrible comeback. Although technically true."

"Go get Steve and get in here, the neighbors are going to notice Iron Man and Captain frickin' America hovering outside my window."

Tony goes, thankfully without any further comment. And wow, Clint's hitched a few rides on the Iron Man train himself, but he's never done the full Lois Lane carry that Steve's mastered.

"Well. Hello, dog. Dog. Hey. Clint, your dog is slobbering on my suit. Hello, I just waxed it? Clint. Clint."

"What's his name?" Steve asks. There's something about Steve that makes little children and grannies alike love him, so of course the dog goes berserk, immediately throwing himself down and exposing his belly for rubs, then paddling all four paws in the air in a proxysm of joy as Steve, a bemused smile on his face, bends down to oblige.

"Dignity, dog. Have some."

Clint loses his patience. "Can I help you guys with something?"

"Can't we just come to visit and hang out, like old friends?" At Clint's raised eyebrow Tony grins. "Yeah, yeah. Listen –"

"Maybe we should sit down," says Steve firmly, and Clint belatedly remembers that he should offer them drinks. Snacks? Does he even have anything to offer guests besides stale Cheetos and Gatorade? It's not like he has a lot of practice at being a host, not like he's ever had a place of his own before to welcome people to.

Nat and Kate don't count because they're something like family, but Steve and Tony feel like guests right now, actual guests, Steve perched formally on the edge of Clint's sagging couch and Tony, his nervous fingers touching everything, flitting around the room with a maniac energy as if (probably) hopped up on too much coffee and not enough sleep.

Once he's settled, Steve fixes his unnervingly direct gaze on Clint and says without any preamble, "If you're having any problems with Director Fury or Agent Coulson, I want you to know that we're behind you, Clint," which has the effect of making Clint groan because it's way too early in the morning for this. Why does everyone want to have very serious conversations with Clint first thing in the morning?

And Clint doubly hates it when Steve gets all Captain America on him because it makes Clint feel all grubby and just not good enough. There's not enough coffee in the world for this.

Without waiting for an answer, Steve continues in that same mix of stilted formality and earnestness that makes everyone want to straighten their spines and vow to do better, "You're one of us, an Avenger, and you were one before he came back. If the current arrangement doesn't work for you, I'd rather that you come to the team and we'll work it out with Fury. You're more important to us, Clint." He studies Clint's face for a reaction, and then adds with a straight face, "And if it comes down to it, fuck Coulson."

Clint's startled into a laugh at the profanity, because whatever 1940s prude stereotype people think Steve is, Steve isn't. Then, as the words sink in, he recoils.

"What he said," Tony says distractedly.

He's studying Clint's couch with a mixture of horror and thoughtfulness that Clint would normally find worrying, except – except he doesn't like anything about what Steve just said, the tone he said it in, or the order of the words, nothing.

The Avengers Initiative was – is – Coulson's pet project. Clint spent too many years luring Coulson, owl-eyed and half delirious from poring over candidate dossiers all night, out of his office with coffee, spending too many missions with him over private channels waxing philosophical about superheroes and arguing about whether they were necessary or even existed, distracting Coulson so the man would actually eat something that didn't come in a cellophane package.

And towards the end, watched hope and the goofiest fucking smile Clint's ever seen dawn on Coulson's face when they finally triangulated the Captain's final landing area. Clint's not going to fuck it all up for Coulson now just because he has issues that aren't anybody else's problem but his own.

If it comes down to it, Clint will leave the Avengers. The Avengers need Coulson more than they need a guy with a big mouth and good aim. Half the time Clint's sure he was only included in the original team because Fury wanted a team of five (Thor was a last minute surprise addition), a good round auspicious number like they're a boy band or something, one to fit every niche and taste.

Clint can live without the Avengers. He's not sure Coulson can, with his stupid faith in superheroes and the ability of the human spirit to surpass itself.

"Look, Steve," Clint says at last, saying it slowly so it catches their attention because he needs to make Steve and Tony understand all this, "I really, really, really appreciate what you're trying to do here, but—"

"No, I really think you don't," Tony says, cutting him off with a wave. "We get it, all right? Fury sucks. Fury is a terrible person who thinks the end justifies the means and all sorts of other horrible clichés that we think about assholes like him. And Coulson is his right hand man. And you're trying to avoid them - him, whoever, we get it, it's obvious."

"Wait, when you say 'obvious' -"

"So, what Steve's trying to say in the terrible language he picked up in the military – which, by the way Steve, shame on you – is, we will back your play. Whatever you want. You want Agent out? We'll go on strike. Want to punch Fury? I volunteer Steve. Want to punch Agent? I volunteer Natasha, though I can't guarantee the outcome this second time around. I also volunteer to get you a new couch, because what the hell is this, Clint."

"I like my couch," Clint says defensively, addressing the lesser question because Tony's words are making him warm inside and also more than a little embarrassed. "Don't even think about upgrading it, Tony, I swear to god."

"I don't want to upgrade it, I want to light it on fire in the name of all non-bug-infested couches everywhere," Tony protests. "Did you find this in a barn?"

"Boys," Steve says loudly, causing Arrow to perk up his ears where he's melted into Steve's lap, "I think we're getting off-topic."

Clint sighs and rubs his forehead. "Look, I appreciate you coming out here and saying all that, but you really don't need to worry. It's just me, in a weird place in my life, okay? I'll work it out."

"And it has nothing to do with Coulson?"

Yes. "No. Nothing. All me."

Steve puts a hand on his shoulder, all worried blue eyes and obviously not buying a word of it. "You're part of our family. And if you're having problems, you don't need to solve them alone."

Clint would never have thought that Steve's 'Yay team' speech, which Steve's given to pretty much everybody at least twice, would make him choke up just a little. But then he never thought he'd be here, settling into a life in Brooklyn with a dog, making a difference in the world instead of dead in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in his head.

They're staring at him with concern, and it strikes him forcefully now that jesus, he misses the assholes. Misses Tony gifting him with random trick arrows that he won't tell him what they do until Clint shoots one (he'll never live down the boomerang one coming back and giving him a concussion; man, was Sitwell pissed about that), misses Steve making pancakes on Saturday mornings with Star Wars pancake molds, misses Bruce and the semi-occasional reek of pot if Clint wanders into his lab without announcing himself. Misses Natasha curling up next to him on the couch and putting her cold toes under his thighs, and stealing his books and occasionally his boxers to use as shorts. Even misses Logan slicing cheese in the kitchen without wiping his claws first, or Peter sticking to the ceiling and walls and watching people like a fucking creepster.

"So." Tony pokes him in the shoulder. "Come back to the Tower. No, you don't need to move back in, so don't glare at me like that. Obviously you have some sort of fun slumlord thing going on here, but –"

"At least come visit," Steve says. "Please?"

"See, Captain America just said please and gave you puppy eyes, now you have to say yes," Tony tells Clint. "Say yes."

"Well," Clint hedges.

Tony holds up a finger. "Say yes. Yes. Very easy, it's one syllable."

"Tony, I'm on vacation."

"Yes. Yes. Say yes. I can do this all day, Barton, I have more practice at annoying people into doing what I want than you."

"That's true," Steve says, grinning a little. "He is the master of being an obnoxious asshole."

"Thanks, I think," Tony says. "So? Come back to the Tower, avenge things full time again, help me annoy Wolverine?"

Clint gives in. "Fine. All right, okay? Jesus, you are annoying." But he's smiling. Yeah, he missed them.

oOo

Two nights later the couch goes missing.

oOo

"Where the hell is my couch, Tony?" Clint yells as he strides into the Tower common room. "If you burned it, I swear to god—"

"Stark isn't here," a quiet voice says.

Clint stiffens. He's cool, he can do this. He'd known that Coulson might be here although Clint picked a day, gleaned from circuitous conversations with Sitwell and Natasha, where Coulson's more likely to be out at one of the field offices terrorizing younger staffers.

"Oh hey," Clint says, and stops. It's hard to look at Coulson. It's as if he'll burn his retinas if he looks straight at him too long, but in his peripheral vision Clint notes the dark suit, the tie with a subtle black-on-black pattern against an impeccably starched cream-white shirt, and well. Coulson looks good.

Clint also looks good, if he does say so himself. Not that he took extra pains to make sure to wear a clean, non-holey shirt and his nicest pair of jeans and Converse sneaks, just in case he met certain people, nope.

"Stark is currently in Tokyo, presenting the latest of SI's – oh." Coulson's stopped short and is staring at the area around Clint's knees.

Oh, yeah. Um.

Looking down, Clint must admit that Arrow isn't much to look at. He's still a bit scrawny with patches of dirty-yellow fur shaved off by the vet that hasn't grown back in yet, pink surgery scars twisting across his sides and hips, and the overall aesthetics of a street mutt of no particular breed. Or all of them.

So no one's told Coulson that Clint has a dog. And there are varying things Coulson's thinking here, and among them are probably surprise and wondering what the hell Clint was thinking, because Clint never showed any interest in adopting a pet before, not even a fish. Which goes to show what Coulson's missed, because while life at SHIELD precludes having anything dependent on you for regular feedings, the Avengers have considerably more down-time.

Clint levels a glare at Coulson, daring him to say anything.

Coulson smiles. "Sorry, who is this?" He extends a hand, about to touch the dog's head.

Arrow lets out a low growl.

Clint looks down with surprise. Arrow's got both ears laid back, his teeth bared in threat, focused with deadly intensity on…Coulson.

"Hey, no. No." Clint kneels, puts a hand on the dog's collar in case he decides to lunge. "Arrow, this is Phil. He's a….um, a friend, got it? No growling. Be nice."

Coulson, having taken back his hand, only continues to study the dog who gazes back, both distinctly unimpressed with the other. He and the dog proceed to have a glare-off.

It ends in a draw.

This is Clint's surreal life.

"Oh hey, a dog!" A bright voice exclaims, behind and above him.

Clint does not jump.

Clint very definitely does not nearly have a heart attack.

Clint has SHIELD-trained situational awareness and automatically cases every room he enters, but he could've sworn nobody was there a second ago.

"Peter," he says very calmly. "Do you have to do that?"

"Do what?" Parker's stuck to the wall upside down, his skinny ass resting on the ceiling. Then he crawls down the wall on all fours like a salamander and fuck, fuck, Clint fucking hates that, that is so fucking creepy. "That. Sneaking up on people. Staring at them like a creep from the ceiling. The crawling around on the walls thing."

"Sorry," Parker says, not sounding sorry at all. "Those're my powers, that's what I do."

"Reminds me of a certain SHIELD agent I know," Coulson says, sounding more amused than Clint thinks is strictly warranted. "I seem to recall a number of incidents in which that agent got written up for eavesdropping on top secret meetings while in the ventilation systems and also for scaring Agent Brar so badly she went into early retirement. Perhaps that person is someone you know?"

"Shut up," Clint mutters. "This is different."

Coulson snorts laughter, and – okay. Clint can't stay mad when Coulson does that, he never could even when Coulson's being an idiot, like writing him up for listening in on executive meetings.

"Can I pet your dog? Will he bite me?" Parker waves a hand in front of Arrow's face. The dog stares at him, tongue lolling out, tail wagging furiously, probably deciding where best to lick for maximum slobbering. The switch between this demeanor and the one he'd just been presenting to Coulson couldn't be more marked.

"If he bites you, will he get spider powers?"

"Actually, I'm glad I caught you," Coulson says, before Parker can launch into spider-power origins blah blah that's not how science works mumbo-jumbo. "There's a mission we need you on. I was just about to go pick you up."

"Yeah? Can Arrow come?"

Coulson glances back down at the dog, who's currently trying to sniff Parker's crotch as the boy looks embarrassed and squirms away up the wall.

Clint crosses his arms. "Dog goes, or I don't."

There's a three second pause as Coulson processes this. Clint waits him out. It's not his problem if Coulson's intel isn't up to date, if the Avengers chose not to tell Coulson about Clint's new pal. But it'd take more than this to faze Coulson, whose expression barely flickers before he smiles again and says, "Of course."

At SHIELD HQ, Arrow dogs his heels so closely Clint nearly trips over him. Clint doesn't know much about dogs, but it's weird, this automatic hostility to Coulson, not when Arrow is generally a big mushball for everybody else. Perhaps the dog can sense the tension between them, can sense all the things Clint doesn't know how to feel about Coulson.

Which sounds dumb even saying it in his head, but it's hard not to think when Arrow keeps eyeing Coulson with hostile suspicion, first in the car then the helicopter. Now he pads along, diligently keeping himself between the two men at all times.

As they enter the briefing room, Clint nudges Arrow with his knee. Arrow huffs and leans against his leg, eyes never leaving the other man as if he's afraid Coulson will attack Clint.

This is simultaneously flattering and worrying.

Flattering, because Clint's only just starting to realize that there are persons (and a dog) in his life who are willing to do anything to protect him, and worrying, because the last thing Clint needs is for his dog to bite his sorta-boss.

Clint's pissed at Coulson, yeah, but not that pissed.

"Sorry about that," Clint tries as he finds his seat. "He's not usually like this with most people."

"I'm more of a cat person myself," Coulson says, and leaves him there.

Clint can't tell if he's being sarcastic or not. He's saved from some snarky rejoinder that might get him written up for insubordination, something probably along the lines of "Well fuck you anyways," by Thor clapping him on the back so hard he nearly goes over. "Friend Barton! It is good to see you!"

Thor pauses as Arrow inserts himself between them. There's no growling this time, though, just a warning bark.

Thor turns to Clint. "I congratulate you on your new companion and guardian."

"I don't know about the 'guardian' bit," Clint hedges, but it's hard to argue with Arrow backed up against his legs, ears pricked up and alert. Then Thor makes a little growl himself and oh god, now Thor's carrying on what appears to be a conversation with the dog, all low growls and little yips and barks.

Clint looks back and forth between them, wondering when this became his life.

Arrow breaks it off at the noise of more people entering the room, and he lets out a happy yap and bounds off.

Thor looks at Clint. "Your guardian has a fitting name."

Clint groans. "How did you know - Look, 'Arrow' is not going to stay his name."

"It is not his name, yet this strikes me as a fortuitous sign."

"It's not fortui—wait, it's not his name?"

Thor seems utterly unconcerned that he is currently blowing Clint's mind, although Clint supposes this isn't the strangest conversation he's ever had. "He says it is not."

Clint rubs his temples and mumbles, "Of course he does," even as Fury stalks into the room amid a swirl of ridiculous-yet-not black leather and glares at them all until they sit down.

Only then does Clint notice that there's only Thor, Nat (who Arrow ditched him for ear rubs), Coulson, Sitwell, and himself in the room.

"I'm not going to Asgard," Clint says immediately.

Fury grins widely. The effect is sharklike. "It's cute you think you have a choice," he says.

oOo

"Smile," Natasha says at him through her own. "Muttering 'I'm cool, I'm cool, cool, cool, cool,' isn't going to help." This is Nat's distinct lack of sympathy for Clint's quiet panic attack. Everything is in baroque gold and silver and rich brocades and the receiving room they're entering looks the size of a football field and there are a lot of fancy-looking, elegant people staring at him. Technically he's supposed to be escorting Nat, but what it actually shakes out to is Nat towing him along behind her like a recalcitrant child at the supermarket, panicked expression on his face and everything. Her nails are threatening to pierce through his ceremonial wear as she hauls at his arm and smiles at everybody else.

"This is the worst idea ever," Clint tells her plaintively.

Clint is quite possibly the last person who should be appointed ambassador to anywhere, in his opinion. He has no illusions about himself; he can get into this as a role for infiltration if he has to, but he isn't great at it like Nat is, and by no stretch of the imagination is he diplomatic, if Budapest is anything to go by. His style is more in line with Tony (and Steve, though Steve won't admit it) in that they have an almost preternatural ability to make things blow up. He's the backup while Nat is front and center; he's the sniper with a gun in a dark window trained on any potential hostiles, the protector, not the spotlight. He's not a spy. And he's not particularly wanting to visit any place within a million miles of Loki and whatever the hell bligesnipes are. Clint has plenty of excitement in his daily life, thank you very much; he doesn't need homicidal gods and homicidal fauna added to it.

"I know this isn't what you wanted to do," Coulson speaking into his ear as they process into the main chamber. Clint shivers at his proximity, a slight brush along his lower back signaling maybe the aborted placement of a comforting hand there. "Remember the briefing and you'll be fine."

"Says you," Clint grits through his teeth.

"Just smile," Coulson reminds him. "You survive Stark's charity galas on a regular basis. This will be a cakewalk in comparison."

"What he means is," Nat hisses, "look pretty and quit whining."

"That's not what I said," Coulson shoots back.

"Shut up, shut up. You're not helping, both of you."

"Smile."

In the whirlwind of ceremony and speech-making (the bit where Thor announces Clint as 'the pure-hearted warrior who helped defeat Loki and saved Midgard despite being compromised and with a total lack of extra-normal powers' via epic balladic singing makes Clint choke on his mead) that ensues, Clint forgets that he's not good at pretty words and dealing with rich people in clothes that cost more than his monthly rent, because though the Asgardians are as sophisticated in their way as the New York elite, they love to eat and drink, which Clint can do. And here he doesn't have to worry about which is the soup spoon or the salad fork because everybody eats with their hands.

Even the bilgesnipe hunts are fun, on a scale of 'terrified for your life as you face down hordes of alien monsters because this is what Asgardians think is fun' versus 'terrified for your life as you face down hordes of monsters created by crazy supervillains on a week-to-week basis for work,' which is to say – not much. But there is a certain appeal to having his 'shot it through the eye while nearly pissing my pants because it was coming at me and I didn't want to get eaten' exploits recounted as a grand epic ballad in which the brave hawk-eyed warrior faces down impending doom with steely resolve and thereby gains a momentous trophy to be remembered through the ages.

There's a difference.

"That was really impressive," Coulson says out of the dark as Clint's wandering the gardens and blinking owlishly in the weird, flat light of Asgard.

Clint turns and grins at him. It comes easily, lubricated by the entire jugful of mead Thor tricked him into drinking, proclaiming, "Come! And I shall show you wonders such as you have never seen!" which Clint would've thought Thor was hitting on him, except this is Thor and Thor always talks like that. He's the only person who can proclaim, Feel the might of my hammer! with a straight face, and half the time Clint isn't sure if Thor isn't just fucking with people.

This time, the 'wonders' involved Thor, the Warriors Three, and a drinking contest, which Clint normally would absent himself from except Natasha was there too, and any kind of drinking contest between Thor and Natasha is worth watching. Pity that Clint had forgotten that Thor is also allergic to empty glasses and can pull the most epic puppy face when Clint's trying to be that responsible, non-hungover, non-drunkenly-naked person in every party.

"Hey," he says. He doesn't slur too badly, in his own grand opinion. "I felt the might of Thor's hammer." He grins again. "See what I did there? I'm hammered."

Coulson's eyebrows do that thing they do when he's not sure if he should be amused or concerned, something Clint prides himself on being the numero uno beneficiary. "Was Natasha involved?"

A groan escapes at the thought of Natasha, his sister from another mother (and father), and Coulson's total lack of an I'm joking, really I am face combining to really harsh his mood. "Man, why you gotta bring her into this?"

"Asgardian mead causes hallucinations and hyper-aggressiveness in humans. It's not for the likes of us mortals."

Jesus, Coulson can't be real. In fact, is probably not real, is made of steel because he's the only one in the entire party who's ever not drinking the stuff, because water—who drinks something as plebian as water in Asgard?

Clint wonders how Coulson's staying hydrated, then wonders if he's not drunker than he thinks. He drags himself back soddenly to the topic at hand, realizing Coulson's still studying him, a small smile wrinkling the edges of his eyes.

Christ, those laugh lines are going to kill Clint someday. Just—boom, right in the heart. And Coulson looks all regal in that Asgardian get-up, quietly powerful in that way only the truly self-confident can be, in armored grays and blues that accentuate his shoulders and chest and the elegant length of his legs.

Although they don't do much for his height. Clint grins. Coulson's eyebrows climb, and Clint realizes he's been staring a little too long to not be creepy.

Right. Nat.

"Last time I saw her she was huddled in a corner, talking about little purple birds." He laughs at the expression on Coulson's face. "Coulson. Phil." The name slips out without his noticing. "I'm joking, don't look at me like that. She drank Thor and his friends under the table and then told me to get out, she wanted to read. The woman isn't human, I swear."

Coulson steps closer, close enough for Clint to see the details in his handstitched Asgardian ceremonial wear. The thread is emerald green, so subtle against the blue it only serves to make the blue more intense. "And you're not that drunk?"

"Nope," Clint replies, drawling it out and mangling the word until it comes out nawwwp. "I'll let you in on a little secret. How to not get drunk. Just a freebie between you and me."

"Hm?"

"You just keep your cup halfway filled. Pretend it's either just been filled or you're still working on it. With luck the others will be too drunk to notice."

"Did that work on Thor?"

The tree in front of him swoops alarmingly. "Thor…Thor is a special case."

The way Coulson laughs at that makes something in Clint warm and he can't help grinning foolishly back at him.

Then he rewinds what Coulson said to him. "Wait, you complimented me."

Coulson blinks at him, derailed by the sudden shift in the conversation.

"You never compliment me."

This gets an almost indignant, "I'm sure I do."

"No, no, 'That mission ended satisfactorily, Barton' doesn't count. Neither does 'You're bleeding everywhere, Barton, go to Medical right now.' Or 'This report is semi-legible for a change, Barton.'"

"I do not sound like that." Coulson's ears have pinked. "And I do compliment you. I'm sure I have."

Clint stumbles sideways until his back hits a tree, and suddenly standing is too much work. He slides to the ground. He blinks owlishly at Coulson as Coulson adds, "Don't you read my reports?"

"Hell no," Clint replies. He stops. "Well, sometimes." He does, mostly because he's a perfectionist in his own way, and if something goes wrong in the mission he likes to know why – could his decision been wrong, was his aim off (not so far), could he have read the target differently. But he doesn't remember anything particular that Coulson might have said that wasn't a fact, like Barton's quick thinking prevented what could have been a global crisis.

Somehow Coulson's wound up sitting next to him, and his shoulder is pressed warm into Clint's.

"I'm sorry," he says then, and crux of it all is that he does sound sorry, like he should have spent the last ten years telling Clint he's pretty or something. "I was trying so hard to be… unbiased, I guess. I was better at hiding it than I thought."

He sighs, then. "Just. Okay, first compliment ever. You were – " Coulson takes a breath as if about to plunge into deep and murky waters. "You were magnificent today. Facing down that bilgesnipe, so fearless and sure, and. And beautiful." He gestures helplessly, gives an awkward laugh that Clint's never heard before. "I really must be rusty at this. That was terrible."

Silence, as Clint studies the fairy light swirling in the sky above the garden and absorbs this. "I missed you," Clint says abruptly, so low he almost thinks Coulson didn't hear.

"Clint," Coulson says, almost helplessly.

"I'm not trying to make you feel guilty," Clint says hastily, because he can readCoulson like no one else can, and that ethereal calm that Coulson puts on for everyone else has cracked right then and Clint can't handle the pain that's bleeding through at him because it's all Clint' s fault.

"Just. You should know." He wonders abruptly where the pleasant fuzzy-headed drunkenness has gone, because it would, should make this conversation so much easier, so that he can add, I missed you. I love you. Don't fucking die on me again.

"I know this won't help, but I'm sorry. I can't say it enough. I'll keep saying it until-"

"Until what?" Clint asks sharply when Coulson doesn't continue.

A pause. "Until you're okay," Coulson replies slowly as if defusing a ticking bomb.

"I don't know if that'll ever happen," Clint tells him honestly, too tired and heartsick to pretend any more. Under the weight of the years of being Coulson's go-to special ops agent, then something like friends, and in the years after where he taught himself to not miss Coulson's steady presence and the way he made him feel...grounded, in a life filled with absences and departures, he doesn't know anymore how to have Coulson around and keep himself from wanting to touch and take and have this.

There isn't much he cansay after that. Clint doesn't do angst very well. He's a man of action, likes to yell it out in the shower, then push everything aside and work himself into a lather and avoid thinking about it altogether.

Apparently Coulson is at a similar loss too, so they sit on the soft turf of alien grass, Coulson's shoulder companionably socketed into his like it belongs there, staring at the sky in silence.

Part 2

The next morning, when he wakes up, head pounding and tongue fuzzy and wondering if he'll even make it to the lavatory or if he'll have to puke in the waste basket, is when he remembers that this just isn't what they do anymore.

Obviously, Clint really sucks at holding a grudge.

The next few minutes are spent freaking out, because god knows what Coulson made of it all. Clint seriously considers drowning himself in the water jug on his dresser.

But on his StarkPad, which is lying on the ground where Clint apparently knocked it in his drunken stumblings last night, there blinks a message from Coulson.

Just the fact that the StarkPad gets6G connectivity in Asgard of all places, land of the Middle Ages, is why Clint will never sell his StarkTech stock.

He's afraid to click the message, afraid of what it might say. Afraid of what it might not say.

Finally, after an eternity of hiding under his bedcovers and occasionally peeking out to glare at the StarkPad, Clint reclaims enough of himself from the pounding hangover to remember that he is Hawkeye, one of the first Avengers, and hiding isn't what he does even if Nat and Kate will kick his ass if he tries, so he flails an arm out and rakes it towards him.

The message blinks at him.

I missed you too. More than you know.

Another message, below that:

Friends?

Clint doesn't let himself think before messaging back, Yeah. I'd like that.

The reply is almost instantaneous:

:)

Clint buries himself back into the pile of covers and makes embarrassing noises at himself.

He returns home practically waddling, and weighed down with a mounted bligesnipe head he leaves on Fury's desk, because no matter how well things have turned out, Fury is still a lying asshole.

He finds his apartment marginally cleaner - the mantels and counters, at least - and the carpets definitely worse, and Kate in an uncertain temper.

"I tried to get Arrow on a decent diet," she tells him tetchily as she yanks on her arm warmers and her boots, "Veggies and plain meat and shit like that. That junk food maniac just threw it up in practically every room." She glares at him. "I will be billing you for my favorite bag he chewed up. Also my favorite Doc Martins. And he ate the necklace my mother gave me, so you'd better either take him to the vet or go through his poop, and I swear to god, Clint, it'd better be washed and disinfected when you give it back to me, and lose my number if you ever need a dog-sitter again."

The air seems to shiver as the window slams shut behind her.

Arrow only gives him a whine and a what can you do? look.

"You're tellin' me," Clint replies, and spends a good part of the next hour in the bathroom.

Unfamiliar food agrees with no one, it seems.

oOo

"Yeah, I've got your couch," Tony says. He jitters off screen, comes back with a screwdriver. "Better come and find it."

"This isn't some kind of Easter egg hunt," Clint complains.

"I'm not the sassy jerkbutt who promised to come back to the Tower regularly and then never showed his face. By the way, you ever get that entertainment system set up?"

"It's fine," Clint says firmly, though it's currently sitting behind him in the same tangle of wires and exposed circuit-boards it was in the last time Tony visited. Things have been a bit crazy lately. He'd agreed to only alpha and beta-level missions. Fury must be laughing his ass off, because they're all alpha or beta. So with Avengers missions and solo ones and also the Russian gangsters getting restless, he hasn't been home a lot.

"You know you can always come back here and watch Dog Cops with us. Sergeant Barko hooked up with that –"

"Hey! No spoilers!" Clint claps his hands over his ears. "What did I tell you about spoilers?"

"If you didn't have a DVR old enough to be fossilized, you'd be all caught up on this season. If you'd just let me –"

"No, Tony," Clint says. He knows it's just a thing Tony does, this pathological need to spend money on people out of some fucked up idea of making and keeping friends, but it's always made him uncomfortable and makes him mostly wish that Tony would knock it the fuck off.

(Except when Tony lets him drive his cars, because Clint might be frugal and unwilling to accept favors but he's not dead.)

Tony pauses in fiddling with whatever just long enough to give him a sharp look. "Sometimes," he says, "You need to let your friends help you, Barton." He holds up a grease-streaked hand before Clint can snort. "Yeah, I know I'm not the best example, but trust me, at least I try."

"Like when?" Clint demands.

"Like – like shut up, how about that." Tony gives him the middle finger. Black grease is embedded deep into the nail. "Since you won't let me buy you a nice new couch that doesn't have bugs in it, I'm going to –"

"Please please don't let it be sentient or have the ability talk or start playing the violin or make waffles or anything like that," Clint pleads. "You know that stuff creeps me out."

"I was going to say that I'm going to clean and re-upholster it, but now you've given me ideas."

"Tony," Clint whines.

Tony smirks back at him through the screen, expansively cheerful and with zero sympathy. "Or, you know, you could come back to the Tower more often and I might tell you where it is."

"I do visit. You're just off doing things halfway across the world when I come."

"Massive coincidence, that." He studies Clint, and dammit, the problem of being friends with one of the most brilliant minds of anyone's generation is that Tony doesn't miss much. "Maybe because Agent Agent tends to visit the Tower when I'm not there?"

"He just doesn't appreciate your finer qualities. By which I mean, you being you."

Tony's like a terrier shaking a rat when he gets like this; his eyes sharpen and he leans into the screen as Clint leans away in reflex. "Flattery will get you everywhere, but don't change the subject. What was that about Agent?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." He really doesn't, at least not that he'll admit to Tony. Clint visits regularly; he trains at the Tower, sometimes visits whoever's on duty, sometimes goes only to steal his books back from Natasha. If Clint happens to be at the Tower at the same time as Coulson...well, that's just coincidence.

But it's good when they're there together, to catch the occasional quiet word, the warm regard and cautious friendliness Coulson gives him now after Asgard. Coulson always checks him over to see if he's eating well and isn't getting too injured, the way Coulson used to. If no other Avengers happen to be around (which, also by total coincidence, happens more often than not) Clint sometimes spends the rest of the day in the living room with Coulson in companionable silence, watching whatever trash reality tv the satellite feeds can find, the dog an ever vigilant chaperone between them. Clint likes American Ninja Warrior, Coulson prefers Honey Boo Boo. Arrow really hates Cats 101.

It's fragile, this thing they're doing, groping their way back through the dark into some semblance of a friendship, and isn't something he wants Tony barging into with all the usual tact of a bull in a chinashop.

"Luckily for you, I do." A leer.

"I gotta go. Um, emergency."

Tony stops and raises both bushy black eyebrows at him. "Uh huh. You need some backup?"

"No, just my couch back."

"Help, Clint," Tony tells him magnanimously. "Everyone can use some, sometimes. Even you."

oOo

Clint being Clint, Clint can't do anything decent in his life without somebody or other holding a massive grudge out of hurt pride (it certainly isn't hurt finances, since he paid those assholes three times as much as the building – shit, the whole block – was worth) so the Russian mobsters, instead of doing the smart thing and getting the fuck out of town like Clint so kindly suggested, hires a bunch of thugs in tracksuits who talk like rejects from Jersey Shore.

Clint is very sure this is because he's Clint, aka Hawkeye, aka the one person on the Avengers team who isn't otherwise super powered, super smart, or just plain super scary, and so people think they can fuck with him.

Which is the story of his life. But hey, there are perks, such as a place of his own, neighbors who smile at him and sometimes dog-sit for him, and who give him fruitcakes and bottles of whiskey for Christmas even though he's sort of shit at maintenance and collecting rent on time. He even has friends who drop by occasionally, Kate sometimes, Natasha most often.

At some point, Natasha's trashy romance novels and space operettas got wedged in between Clint's Lord of the Rings bookends on a pair of splintery bookshelves he'd found in a dumpster by NYU. He can't even tell when she sneaks in, only that he doesn't go out that often and yet he keeps finding evidence of her visits in left behind Anne McCafferey novels, his silverware drawer reorganized, Nat's housewarming cactus that he stabs himself on at least twice a day moved to the kitchen table, a framed Alphonse Mucha print that mysteriously appeared on his living room wall one Tuesday, a red knitted throw over the spot where his couch used to be, and all his discarded dirty socks pointedly piled in a corner of his bedroom with GET A LAUNDRY HAMPER scrawled on the back of a take-out receipt on top.

Maybe she's trying to tell him something, perhaps a tortured metaphor about continuing to live life and moving on or some shit.

Or maybe she just hates his housekeeping.

But yeah. Gangsters who are much, much better than Clint at holding grudges, and who are now currently cornering Clint behind the counter of his favorite coffee shop using his favorite barista as hostage.

"Hey man," he tries, hands going up – slowly, so they won't shoot him – and palming a plastic knife as he goes. "Take it easy." He thanks the stars that Arrow's tied up outside, because he's pretty sure he's going to get shot, which is never fun, and he doesn't need a shot-up dog on top of it all.

"Bro, hey man yourself," Tracksuit says, and presses the barrel of the gun harder into Annie's temple. She squeaks, her eyes getting rounder, pleading silently with Clint to do something. "Don't think I don't see that thing you just picked up, Avenger. You try throwing that at me, and I shoot. You even make a noise, I shoot. You open your stupid mouth and give me any sass, I shoot. You capisce, bro?"

How'm I supposed to say yes if I can't talk, Clint thinks but doesn't say, because that would definitely count as sass, even as he opens his hand and drops the knife. He was forced to toss his gun and phone at the outset, and his bow's back at his place. He's supposed to be good at improvising, better than most of the Avengers if he does say so himself, but now he's clean out of ideas.

This looks bad, really bad.

"Look," he tries, and when the guy presses the black muzzle of the gun harder into the girl's temple, he adds hurriedly, "Look, no sass, okay? I promise in total seriousness, I'm not going to – I was just going to say – just stop, okay? Stop, stop. Jesus Christ, stop. I'm just telling you that you can just take me, okay? No fights, no backtalk, just let her go. Please."

Tracksuit shrugs. "We're going to take you anyway, big hero."

He's right, Clint's got to give him that. He casts about for other options even as four more tracksuit mafia goons crowd into the stockroom, and great, there's a black bag being shaken out with great fanfare, and it's apparent they're planning on kidnapping Clint somewhere they can have a private chat that will probably involve his face and their fists. Maybe they won't kill him, seeing as they probably won't want the combined almighty powers of the Avengers and probably SHIELD coming down on their asses, but one can never overestimate the stupidity of the criminal element.

"Right, but I'll go easy, okay? No fights, nobody gets punched or kicked or shot. If you take me outside with my head in that thing, everybody on the street will know someone's getting kidnapped. If I just go with you, nobody will know. Right?"

Nobody will know, that's the problem, because Annie's chances of surviving this even if Clint goes quietly are microscopic. The coffee shop was empty to begin with on a sleepy Wednesday mid-afternoon, and they'd locked the door. There's nobody else around to witness or raise the alarm if they kill Annie, and there's nobody to notice if Clint goes AWOL, at least not for a day or two.

His only comfort is that he's been in worse situations, caused by people smarter than these guys. He just needs to make sure Annie stays alive. She'll be okay. He'll be okay.

They should be okay.

Maybe.

Someone clears his throat behind them.

"Excuse me," that someone says, "Could I get some service here?"

Clint looks up into Coulson's blue eyes, and his day gets abruptly better.

Coulson stares back, in full undercover agent mode, his eyes staring through Clint without the slightest trace of recognition. Only long training keeps Clint from making a whole series of embarrassing frog noises out of surprise.

"Hey," Coulson raises his voice, looking every inch the harried Wall Street hedge fund manager he's pretends to be in his bespoke black suit and expensive watch. "Excuse me. I've got someplace to be, give me a large coffee to go, three sugars." This is directed at Tracksuit, who looks like he's suddenly processing a difficult math problem in a pop quiz.

Coulson drums his fingers on the countertop as he waits for the response, gaze flicking from Tracksuit over to Clint, a flicking assessment so quick none of the goons notice.

"Bro. Place is closed, dude," Tracksuit says. Then in bewilderment, "How did you even get in?"

"Door was unlocked," Coulson shrugs. The guy cranes his head, but Coulson's conveniently blocking his line of sight to the door. There'd been somebody big and burly guarding it, Clint remembers, allowing himself to be impressed, because Coulson? Secret Agent Ninja Badass.

The guy waves the gun at Coulson. He's starting to sweat, licking beads of it off his upper lip, obviously derailed by the appearance of this crazed coffee fiend and valiantly trying to get the situation back under control. "We're closed. Fuck off, bro."

Coulson rounds on him. "Bro, I just want a coffee." He focuses on the gun as if just noticing it and for a long moment he gives it his best unimpressed glare. "Get that out of my face, are you kidding me?" The expression on Tracksuit's face is almost comical in its flabbergasted surprise. Coulson taps his watch impatiently. "I've got places to be. One coffee, it's not that hard."

"I think it might be easier to just give him what he wants," Clint ventures, hoping he's reading Coulson right. "Just – it's that pot over there."

Coulson taps his foot and continues to give them his thousand-mile stare until Tracksuit growls, obviously unable to think on his feet when his plan goes pear-shaped. Low-rent hirelings, you get what you pay for, Clint thinks, hoping the guy will go for Coulson's mad gamble and opt for the easiest route of giving Coulson what he wants just to be rid of him. Simply shooting Coulson or taking him hostage too are options that Clint hopes won't occur to any of those assholes, and probably Coulson's planned for those scenarios too, but Clint readies himself for a tackle should things go south with the rapidity of a coin flip.

"Fine. Go get it yourself, then fuck off."

"Great," Coulson beams, all relief, and goes around the counter. As he passes Clint, he ducks his head and drops him a little wink where the henchmen won't see.

The coffee pot is an industrial-sized affair, of heavy glass and metal. Coulson lifts it, turns for a cup – and takes two steps and flings the entire contents of boiling hot coffee into Tracksuit's face even as Clint grabs Annie with the other hand and yanks her out of harm's way in a perfect ballet of coordination. She goes sprawling under a table where, recovering herself, she wisely decides to stay.

The guy collapses, screaming, clawing at his scalded face.

Then, while the others gape, stupefied by the sudden attack, Coulson moves in a blur, round-house kicking a second goon over a table, and slamming the face of another into the granite countertop with enough force that the crunch of bone and cartilage is audible over the screams of the henchmen and the loud barking of a dog.

Clint wastes no time admiring Coulson's form. He stamps hard on the instep of the guy behind him, the one with the black bag – Clint fucking hates black bags, they never wash them – and whirls to punch him in the solar plexus, just as a yellow blur of dog lunges around the corner and goes for the man's face.

Black Bag sprawls backwards, screaming and thrashing, flailing futilely at Arrow.

Clint turns just in time to catch a kick to the ribs from the last guy. The blow isn't that hard, but the foot catches him right in the wrong spot and he reels backwards, vision spiraling in black spots, landing on his ass on the tiled floor.

The guy readies to kick Clint again. Suddenly Coulson's there, yanking Clint's attacker backwards by the shoulder and smashing him full in the face with the coffee pot he's apparently hung onto all this time. Glass and blood flies everywhere.

The whole thing takes less than two minutes.

"Jesus," Clint says eloquently from the floor, when he can hear himself again over the pounding of blood and the high tone of adrenaline in his ears, sound crashing back in a wave of sensation.

"Are you okay, Barton?" Coulson asks, over the groans of the henchmen and Arrow's growls, as mild and calm as ever as if he didn't just nearly beat a man to death with a coffee pot. Said coffee pot is resting on the counter next to him in pieces. Coulson is delicately wiping his hands with a moistened napkin.

"Whoa," Annie breathes, her eyes round with interest, staring at both of them. She picks herself off the ground and gazes around unbelievingly. "Are you an Avenger? Like him?" she asks Coulson, hiking a thumb over her shoulder at Clint.

"Hey, who says I'm an Ave–" Clint starts, trying to stand, then stops and slides back down, his breath catching, because ow, jesus. His fingers skitter up his side to clutch at his ribs.

Coulson's next to him before he's even aware Coulson's moved. "Clint! Are you injured? Should I call –"

"No, I'm fine," Clint says after a moment, out of breath with pain, which is long enough and unconvincing enough for Coulson to have an escalating panic attack and yank out his phone. "Just – give me a sec. No seriously, stop dialing, I'm fine."

Coulson hesitates, then hesitates some more, as if trying to judge if Clint's going to keel over in the next minute, because Clint sure doesn't feel and probably doesn't look fine, not by a long shot.

"I have to call this in anyway," he says at last, gesturing at the groaning henchmen on the floor guarded by a furious dog, at the blood sprayed in a fine mist over the counters and previously gleaming espresso machines, and especially at the way Annie is staring at them with open-faced awe and curiosity. "Just – sit there."

Clint can do that; he feels like he's been hit with a wrecking ball every time he inhales, though the pain is already starting to ebb to a slightly more bearable sobbing ache as long as he doesn't poke it. Sitting here in a coffee shop, he can do, was what he'd been planning to do before his day had gone to hell.

"What are you even doing here?" it occurs to Clint to ask as Coulson dials the SHIELD emergency code.

Coulson blinks at him. "Oh, I was just –" He sighs, phone still pressed to his ear, and leans up against the counter next to Clint. His suit is still impeccable, not a single drop of coffee or blood on the wool or even his cuffs. "I was hoping to catch you. Maybe hang out." He smiles wryly. "Someplace relaxed, not at work."

"We're always at work," Clint reminds him. Then Coulson's meaning catches up to him and his face heats.

Coulson came looking for him, when he usually never ventures outside of Manhattan unless for a mission, here, in Clint's space. Not in the Tower, not on Avengers business. Wanted to hang out, like friends, because that's something that they do now.

Coulson talking to the agent who answers the emergency line gives Clint an excellent excuse to stand and walk away, in case his face gives too much away.

"Containment team will be here in ten," Coulson tells him when he's done. "Medical team's on its way too."

"I'm fine, Coulson. Really."

"Right. Then you do this a lot?" Coulson gestures at Clint's chest.

Clint drops his hand like it's hot. "No," he says. "It's just an old injury."

Unfortunately the words only make the concern on Coulson's face sharpen and he says sharply, "Old injury? From when?"

"From….a while ago?" Clint tries. But now Coulson's stepping closer, into his space, and Clint takes a quick intake of breath that he can't hide as Coulson runs the tips of his fingers up Clint's side.

"Miss," Coulson says, still looking at the way his fingers are resting against the soft gray jersey of Clint's t-shirt as if mesmerized.

"Um, Patel. Anissa Patel," she supplies.

"Annie," Clint adds under his breath, feeling frozen to the spot, anchored in place by the five points of warm pressure against his side. Which, okay, also hurts.

"Ms. Patel," Coulson continues, "Could you please go outside and meet the agents that will be arriving?"

"I – are you sure?" She's looking at Clint now, with concern and more than a little avidity that's all too familiar to Clint, and he has to stifle a groan. He's pretty sure everybody in the neighborhood knows who he is, but up to now they'd been discreet enough to let him alone. The look in her eyes now, now that she's seen him being Hawkeye – is for Hawkeye. Not Clint Barton.

He's had too much hero-worship and not enough genuine friendship to fill several lifetimes, and the thought tires him enough to sigh, "Yeah, Annie. Go."

She goes, casting one last doubtful look over her shoulder.

Coulson hasn't moved his attention or his fingers from Clint's chest. "So you were saying?"

"Saying what?" Clint says mulishly.

"About this." He runs his fingers over the sore spot again, and Clint flinches because damn, that hurts, even a week after the fact. "And them." Nodding at the groaning bodies on the floor. "Because I get the feeling that these two things are related, and when I get these feelings I'm never wrong, Barton."

"Getting stabbed through the chest hasn't changed you at all, has it?"

Coulson rolls his eyes. "If you mean my concern for your welfare and your preternatural ability to get yourself into impossible situations, then no."

"It's complicated."

"You mean you think it's complicated."

"No, I –" Clint rubs his nose, sighs. How or where would he even begin? Most of it he's only begun to piece together, the complex web of deception and good intentions and consequences that came together to ambush him in front of his own damn building and ended with a baseball bat to the gut and the back of his head. "No, it really is."

He aches to tell him. Coulson's known him since he was a merc, angry at the world and distrustful of everybody in it, and though he might not approve of what Clint did, Clint knows he'll at least understand. He wants Coulson sit him down and talk it out and then offer solutions in his dry, pragmatic way, cutting through the dreck of superficial detail and Clint's own tangled mess of logic and feelings, and laying things out in simple terms. A flow chart. Problem and resolution. A to B to C. Although Clint doesn't need to be told that his problems right now have no easy solutions, but Coulson has a way of making him feel like the world would lay down at his feet if he only asked.

"May I?" Coulson asks, fingers hovering over the edge of Clint's shirt. At his nod, Coulson lifts the fabric until the kaleidoscope of bruises across Clint's torso is exposed.

"It isn't as bad as it looks," Clint explains hastily.

"You haven't had this checked by Medical, or even a doctor." It isn't a question.

"I'm fine."

Coulson lifts his eyes then to Clint's. "But you're going to." It's still not a question.

"Coulson—"

"And you are going to brief me thoroughly on your current status with these people," indicating the unconscious bodies scattered around them, "and so help me, if you try to run away again, Barton, I will—"

Coulson doesn't make empty threats, Clint knows, and they're always interesting ones, but he's not given a chance to find out how this one goes as Arrow, apparently satisfied that the bad guys are down for the count, comes over and gives a low woof.

They jerk apart, realizing belatedly that their faces were only inches apart, practically staring into each others' eyes. Clint promptly feels idiotic because it's not like he got caught doing anything, especially not by a dog.

Clint moves aside and turns to Arrow, mourning the loss of Coulson's touch.

He extends a hand, thinking Arrow wants attention, but the dog ignores him, pointing his nose up at Coulson instead with bright eyes and perked ears. Coulson looks down with surprise and Clint more than half-expects another stare-off, but then Arrow rears up, plants both feet on Coulson's chest, and barks in his face, tail wagging.

"God, get off," Clint says frantically at the bloody paws smearing on Coulson's lapels. "Shit, sorry, sorry, I'll pay for the dry cleaning."

"Don't worry about it," Coulson murmurs, still staring down at the dog. His hands hover for a second, as if unsure Arrow might still try to take a bite out of him, then tentatively settles for an ear scratch. That at least gets Arrow down, twin blurred pawprints now stamped on his formerly pristine suit.

"Um. Guess you've made a friend," Clint says, craning to see as he hears the screeching of tires outside. Dammit, he's probably not going to be able to come back here; too many of his formerly favorite hangouts are already on the 'Avengers Star Tour of NYC,' and though 'site of Avengers fisticuffs' is way too common to be remarked, 'favorite coffee shop of Hawkeye and also site of Avengers fisticuffs' will definitely land it on Celebrity Yelp.

"I'm hoping this means you've forgiven me," Coulson replies quietly, continuing to scratch. He looks up with those blue-grey eyes, and crinkles them at Clint.

"It means my dog has forgiven you." Coulson's smile, which had been brightening, dims. This makes Clint feels guilty as fuck, and he adds hastily, "I wasn't mad at you in the first place."

Coulson snorts. "Yeah, you were."

"No, I wasn't."

"I was hoping we were past the part where we lie to each other, Barton."

"No, I—" Clint stops at his words, derailed. He didn't lie, not exactly. "Well okay, okay? Just a little, because we did talk about your fucking death wish, didn't we?" Immediately Clint mentally slaps himself, because Coulson does not need reminding of that conversation or of its context, nope, not of that hot evening in Puente Antiguo where Coulson had had pretty much the worst week of his life and Clint had made it exponentially worse by being an idiot. "Never mind," he amends hastily.

"Barton." Christ, now Coulson's using his careful voice, the one he uses to talk crazy people out of blowing up buildings and shooting hostages. "He was going to kill Thor. There was nobody else to-"

Clint shifts. "Yeah, I know all that. I just. Stop trying to get killed, alright? I just can't—" He looks away and doesn't finish, I can't handle it if you do. He couldn't handle it the first time. Only Nat knew how much of a wreck he'd been, that first year.

Coulson won't stop, of course. Stupidly brave, endlessly efficient, totally fearless Coulson, who will insist on fighting fights he knows he can't possibly win, because Coulson doesn't pass the buck on to anyone, even if that buck is super-powered and will more than likely kick his ass.

Which is why Clint loves him. None of that 'falling in love' crap, just – Clint loves him, full stop.

"Only if you do the same," Coulson replies, and continues scratching Arrow's ears even as his smile at Clint begins to grow again.

Clint tries not to bask in its warmth. "Maybe. Can't promise."

oOo

Kate tells him he's being pathetic.

Which must be true, because when teenagers think you're pitiable, when generally you like to think of yourself as the somewhat cool older brother (okay, okay, he can be an uncle too; jesus, when did he get so old?) compared to Steve, it means you're at the bottom of the pile for coolness, especially when you're dealing with a crush like a high schooler.

Nat just laughs at him.

Turns out, everyone is very irritated at Clint for not telling his team or SHIELD about his Russian mafia problems, which Clint doesn't entirely get. All the Avengers have their nemeses, and his don't even ping on the radar for the kind of supervilliany that warrants SHIELD's attention. Sure, they've kidnapped and threatened him and his three or four (or ten) times, but they're hardly trying to take over the world or hurl the Earth into the Sun or start a multi-dimensional war or anything. Of course, any threat to any one of their assets would be taken seriously, he figures, in case it compromises him during a battle. Or something. Nat tells him he's being dumb.

Coulson – well, suffice to say Coulson is even less pleased, even with the abridged version Clint had come up with that left out red-headed girls and stray dogs. But he sits next to Clint in Medical, supervising Clint getting his ribs taped up, and says little. Clint doesn't say much to him; there's nothing to say in the face of the disappointment and guilt that rolls off him in waves, and Clint just shrinks in on himself, hunching his shoulders until the doctor scolds him and tells him to straighten up so she can wrap the bandages tighter.

oOo

Clint's cleaning boot prints off the sideboard under the window and scraping Parker's sticky fingerprints off the windowpane because apparently none of the Avengers or Kate seem to know how to use the door (the windows, the fire escape, the vents, teleportation, and even magic, are apparently all fair game, but the door is a foreign concept), when a knock comes at the door.

A look through the peep hole reveals Coulson in glasses, blinking at something down the hall.

Clint steps back and tries not to freak out, because Coulson, at his door.

The knock comes again. Then again, as Clint dithers in a panic, wondering if Coulson can hear him breathing. Arrow dashes up and doesn't brake in time, claws skittering across the hardwood floor, and slides right into the door with a thud.

"Clint?"

Clint wrenches open the door and tries to look cool. "Hey, Coulson," he says, and grins a bit wildly. Coulson's in a blue sweater vest – a sweater vest – and jeans. And thick framed black glasses. Clint doesn't know what to do with this information.

"I think your neighbor just gave me the shovel talk in sign language," Coulson says, still looking down the hall, at Mrs. Pinsky's door. He's holding two coffees and a paper bag.

"Oh, yeah. She's really nice, once you get to know her." Old Mrs. Pinsky next door with her five cats, who once invited him in for rock-hard cookies and bitter tea and confessed that she thought his apartment was occupied by drug dealers or the mob, what with the mysterious comings and goings of unseen figures at all hours of the day and night and then long periods of total silence, and isn't it nice that a sweet young man like Clint moved in? "You're the first visitor to ever use the front door. She probably thinks you're an assassin."

"I can go back around and climb in the window if that'll make you feel better," Coulson quips, totally deadpan.

"Well, the door hinges are about to rust from disuse, so." Clint runs dry of things to say at that moment, and he ends up just staring at Coulson like a creep. If pressed, he'll claim he's justified – Coulson looks simultaneously softer and younger like this, his incredible eyes magnified behind the lenses, sweater and jeans clinging to the lines of his body in a way his suit doesn't.

"Can I come in?" Coulson asks, sounding suddenly uncertain. "In the coffee shop, you said—"

"Huh? Oh, yeah." He remembers saying a string of words that sounded like an invite to Coulson to come over whenever, um this weekend is good, just before they were swarmed by SHIELD agents, but he'd blurted it out fast before his nerve failed, so he hadn't been sure if Coulson had even heard.

Kate said it was a date. Clint said that everybody else had already invited themselves over to his place, what was one more person.

Then conversation about how pathetic Clint is, redux.

He stands aside so Coulson can come in. He does so, toeing off his shoes in an unconscious, automatic gesture, then takes a long look around as Arrow prances around his feet barking, ridiculously happy to see him.

"You don't need to be polite," Clint says, nervously, suddenly aware of just how dingy his stuff looks, most everything secondhand and beat to hell. Usually that's something that doesn't bother him, even takes pride in, but now, with Coulson standing there impeccably elegant and always so put together, the place feels scruffy and cluttery and disorganized and...used up in comparison.

Coulson hums. "I'm not," he replies. "This is nice. I was just thinking that this place is so very you." Which could be vaguely insulting, but he can read admiration in the way Coulson runs his gaze along the exposed brick wall of the loft, and then the sideboard, then returns to Clint. He clears his throat. "I brought coffee and scones." He holds it out, like a peace offering. "I remember you used to like your coffee black, two sugars."

"Still do." Clint smiles, takes the coffee. He's touched that Coulson still remembers. "And you like yours with so much blended crap in it you can't even call it coffee."

He takes a sip as Coulson continues his examination of the room. He should feel offended at such an obvious casing of the joint without invitation, but where Steve and Tony felt like guests, Coulson….doesn't. Coulson's nebulously grouped in his head with Nat and Kate, and Clint refuses to examine that avenue any further, but there's a curious feeling of familiarity and comfort that comes as he watches Coulson smiling at the battered paperbacks and the one photo strip of himself and Natasha in a photo booth on Coney Island, acting like idiots because Clint had just conned all the rigged carnival games and scored a fabulous haul of oversized stuffed animals and live goldfish. In the photo, Natasha is outwardly scornful but betrayed by her wide, excited eyes because she'd never been to a carnival just for fun before.

"I don't think I've been properly introduced to your dog," Coulson says after a moment. Arrow's trying to climb him like a tree again in an effort to lick his face, his claws scrabbling at the material of Coulson's jeans.

"Oh. Um, it's Arrow." Clint really does have to find a different name for the dog, one that doesn't make him cringe every time he says it. He rolls his eyes at the humor glinting in Coulson's eyes. "Shut up, I'm open to suggestions."

"How about 'Lucky'?"

"He look lucky to you?" Clint wants to know. The dog looks worse than Clint does, but that's only a matter of scale; there's still massive scarring, though the fur covers most of the damage, and Arrow still walks with a pronounced limp where his hip had been fractured. Clint's bruises and scrapes and other injuries that make him look like he went through a wood chipper, on the other hand, are mostly covered by clothes.

Coulson sounds surprised. "He found you, didn't he?"

"If this is lucky to you I wonder what you think the opposite is," Clint says, but the way Coulson is looking at him, all warm like he can see something about Clint no one else can, makes something in his chest lift. He clears his throat. "Pizza Dog. That's his name."

"Right, because that's better than Lucky or Arrow."

Clint studies the dog. Lucky. "Maybe," he concedes.

"I'd like to hear the story behind 'Pizza Dog' sometime," Coulson adds. It's almost casual, but a tension underlying his tone betrays him. His thumb smooths the crease of his perfectly pressed trousers. For Coulson, it's the equivalent of a fidget.

"Sometime," Clint echoes, ducking his head to hide his smile.

"Barton," Coulson says then and Clint pauses, catching the way Coulson is smiling faintly at him now, with humor and affection and something else that makes Clint's throat seize up.

"Yeah," he croaks when Coulson doesn't continue. "You can call me Clint."

This catches Coulson by surprise. He blinks. "I— okay." He smiles. "I'd like that. And I'd like you to call me Phil."

This throws Clint for a loop. Back in the SHIELD days part of the comfort in their relationship was that Clint always knew where he stood in their relationship. They were handler and asset. Superior and subordinate. Almost-friends. Colleagues. Deceased and mourner. Now Clint is learning to be friends with this new Coulson, the Avengers liaison but not handler, Clint's nothing in particular.

It's unexpectedly disorienting.

But Coulson hasn't stopped talking, has added, almost to himself, "It'll make this conversation easier, anyway."

Oh. That conversation. Clint starts looking for avenues of escape.

He's wondering if making a run for the door would be more expeditious and less dangerous than diving out the window, when Coulson grasps him by both shoulders and gives him a brisk shake. "Hear me out, Clint," Coulson says, stern but still smiling faintly as if he can read every thought passing through Clint's head.

"Um, no, that's okay," Clint tells him. "Really."

Coulson swears then, a few choice expletives that freeze Clint in his tracks because in the years he's known him, Coulson never swore, and definitely didn't use words like that to do so. Then he doesn't have any more time for surprise because Coulson kisses him.

It isn't chaste, it's full of want and heat and oh hey, some tongue, and it's over before it's barely begun. Clint is left gape-mouthed and staring at Coulson and wondering if that'd even happened. His traitor hands, however, are apparently with the program, and somewhere in that interval have tangled themselves in Coulson's sweater.

"I should have done that in New Mexico," Coulson tells him, and the raw honesty in his face and voice shakes Clint to the core.

"But you said –"

"I," Coulson says firmly, "have been known to make mistakes." He softens then, eyes searching Clint's face. Clint has no idea what his face is doing, but Coulson seems to find something encouraging, because he continues. "Mistakes that I had a long time to think about in Oregon. There's nothing quite like being about to die and knowing it to make you rethink all your regrets, and I have only one."

"One?" Clint echoes, like a dumb asshole because his brain has frozen into a series of exclamation points.

"That I never had the chili cheese dog from the cart down on 42nd and Houston," Coulson says, rolling his eyes. "Seriously, Barton?"

"No, I—" Clint recovers himself enough to flash a shaky grin. "Sorry."

"It didn't sound like a line from a cheesy B movie from the 80s in my head," Coulson confesses.

He's still standing very close. Clint supposes this is where he should say something to the effect that he is in fact very much not opposed to the evening's developments, but his brain bandwidth is currently occupied with keeping his hands from mauling Coulson's probably obscenely expensive sweater in getting to all that skin beneath. He settles for being good, 'good' in this case giving himself permission to reach up and take off Coulson's glasses in the name of not destroying property, and lay it carefully on the coffee table for safety, then kiss him again.

"I wasn't done," Coulson breathes against his mouth after several long minutes. He's hard against Clint's thigh and Clint is really, really onboard with doing something about that, but Coulson's dug his fingers into Clint's hair and pulled him back and is holding him there just far enough so he can keep talking without interruption.

"Now?" This comes out as a whine. Clint can't bring himself to care, because this – this is happening, Phil warm and solid and here under his roaming hands, the smell of the man's familiar aftershave filling his head.

"It has to be said."

"Can we get naked in the meantime?" Clint wiggles strategically, and is rewarded by Coulson swallowing hard, his throat clicking audibly.

"Clint, focus." His voice roughens as Clint explores the line of his neck with his tongue. "Clint."

Clint sighs and pulls back. "Look, I know you want to say something about how I didn't trust you enough to tell you about those Russians, okay? And I'm sorry I didn't, I was having obvious issues, not to mention I thought I could take care of it myself, and –"

"That's the problem," Coulson says, that pinch back between his eyes. "You had to get used to doing things by yourself again. That you couldn't –"

"Yeah, I know," Clint interrupts. "It's fine, okay? You had other problems too."

Coulson frowns at him for a long moment. "Natasha?" he asks finally.

"Yeah." Between the Avengers all pretty much having problems of their own, not to mention the world-endangering crises and political fiascos and bust-ups with other teams that happened entirely too often, Clint still wasn't convinced that his Russian mafia problems weren't small potatoes. "She's pretty pissed at me."

"I'm sorry. That you—"

"That's good," Clint interrupts. "Don't – don't say sorry, okay? This is fine. We're good." He doesn't want to talk about this. Clint can avoid talking about feelings and things 'til pretty much the end of time, but he feels the traitor pinpricks of tears behind his eyes, and the words come out half-choked. "You're here, and that's all that matters. Okay?"

When Coulson doesn't reply, he opens his eyes to find Coulson regarding him. His eyes are faded and blue and warm. "Okay," Coulson tells him. "Okay." And he leans in.

oOo

Clint is a screamer, it turns out.

He didn't know that about himself.

He just hopes Mrs. Pinsky down the hall still doesn't.

But he shakes, and he shakes, and Coulson lifts his head from whatever he's doing to Clint down there and asks if he's okay, and it's all Clint can do to not fall apart at the seams.

oOo

"I know where your couch is," Coulson says some time later as they're lying on the living room floor. "I only tell you this because I think this would be a lot more comfortable on your couch than a hardwood floor."

"I have a bed," Clint mumbles against his chest, his hand exploring the ridges of the long discolored scar there, that stretches from shoulder to sternum. "Although this intel is pertinent to my interests, do go on."

"If you looked harder, you could've found it yourself," Coulson says. "He's not exactly hiding it."

"I wasn't exactly looking," Clint says. "You really think about it, does anyone really need a couch?"

Coulson turns over to stare at Clint, and the warmth in those crinkled blue eyes makes something flush hot within Clint. "Of course they do. The couch is the linchpin of the living room and the center of the social scene." He pauses. "And the family."

"If I buy or scrounge another couch, the one I can afford will have to be assembled and then Tony's going to have to assemble the couch for me because jesus fucking christ, Ikea's instruction manuals. But then it's Tony, and Tony will judge the fuck out of me and then probably still try to steal it, then build me a couch that can talk. Or buy me a ridiculous one that costs more than your average car."

Coulson sighs and sits up. "Or, we could go get your couch back."

"How?" Clint demands.

"He's using the couch as a spare bed in lab 34b."

"He what?"

Coulson continues on blithely. "Yes, according to JARVIS he apparently thinks it's comfortable, judging by how many nights he's slept on it." He grins at Clint. "I have the access codes to all levels of Stark's R&D levels. He doesn't know that I know. Yet."

"You're kind of amazing, Phil," Clint breathes, and has to kiss him breathless again as Coulson looks ridiculously pleased, a flush sweeping up his neck to tinge his cheeks and the tips of his ears.

When they break apart, Arrow, who'd been hiding in the kitchen, comes over and lays his head on Coulson's knee. He only looks up at Coulson with liquid eyes until Coulson murmurs, "Guess you think I'm amazing too, huh?" and scratches him behind the ears. The eyes close, and the dog droops with a whuff of appreciation as he leans into the touch. Coulson looks up with a smile. "Get dressed, Clint. Let's ruin Stark's day."