When the fight is over, when they've called in and the bad guy is put away somewhere safe for the time being, when they feel it's as save as it's ever going to be, then and only then SHIELD agent Barton lets the fatigue show. Usually this meant that he was somewhere remote, alone except maybe for Natasha or Phil. This time it was different. He and Nat were sitting in the middle of the rubble and ruins their last fight had left behind and they were surrounded by strangers.

They had fought alongside these people and they had saved the world together but beyond that Clint knew next to nothing about them. His tightest bonds were to Stark, whom he heard a lot about – most of it complaints and Thor, whom he once almost shot. If this were even remotely normal circumstances he would do his best to keep up the facade, maybe drop a joke or two, but right now he was so bone-deep tired that he just didn't care. They had given their everything to stop the Chitauri invasion, to stop Loki and none of them had the energy right now to do anything but eating in silence.

He absentmindedly noted that Nat avoided to look at him directly and he knew that she did it to avoid a total breakdown. Like him she was exhausted to the point where her body would betray her if she allowed for one moment of weakness and she wouldn't permit these people to see behind her walls. It would take more than a simple alien invasion for the Black Widow to open up to somebody. Clint himself avoided to think of anything right now except the food in his hand. There were a lot of things that he would have to deal with in the long run but right now he simply concentrated on the Shawarma. He would face his demons later with the help of Nat, huge amounts of alcohol and of course Phil.

Thor was the first one to speak. He had been as tired as the rest of them when they began their meal but Asgardians recuperated faster than humans and the silence felt almost unnatural to him. In Asgard great victories were celebrated with a feast and lots of talking, boasting and singing. So while Thor didn't feel like singing right now, he had to say something to break the silence.

"The Son of Coul would have been proud of this victory in his honor."

Barton watched as Stark, Banner and Rogers nodded their agreement but he only realized what he'd just heard, when Stark raised his glass, "to Phil," and downed the content with angry determination.

Clint's eyes shot towards Tasha's. Her guilty, pale expression told him everything he needed to know, yet for some perverse reason he couldn't stop himself from asking. "Coulson?"

All faces at the table turned towards him. Something had to show in his face, the way everybody looked at him with compassion in their eyes.

Tony was shocked. "No one has told you? – Shit."

Rogers reached out in a comforting gesture. "I'm sorry, Agent Barton."

Clint evaded the Captain's hand by jumping up. He didn't care for anyone's pity. He just stared at Nat for the longest moment of his life before he turned around and fled the place.

Steve was up and ready to follow Barton when a small hand on his arm stopped him. Agent Romanoff shook her head. "I'll take care of it."

Natasha found him on a pile of rubble overseeing a side alley. It wasn't his usually preferred height, but better than nothing. Most importantly it was away from the prying eyes of strangers. If the color of his face was anything to judge by he was very close to being sick but for now he held it together.

"Is it …," he swallowed unable to finish his question.

"Fury announced it while you were out." She deliberately kept her voice neutral. Phil had been her friend too.

"So he died in the attack on the Helicarrier, that I led." He could taste the bile in his mouth.

"No you idiot – you had nothing to do with it. Phil went after Loki one-on-one."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He sounded so lost and hurt, that she put a comforting hand on his arm. "Because we needed you focused. And I couldn't risk losing you because of you doing something stupid in the fight, malenʹkiy yastreb."

Right now Clint wished for nothing more than not having survived the fight. If he had died, he would have died a hero, he would have died saving the world and he would have died not knowing that it was a world without Phil.

Tasha knew him so well that she could see the wheels turn in his head. "Don't even think about it Barton, Coulson would come back to kick us both in the ass if I let something happen to you on my watch."

"I need to see him, Nat."

"You're in no condition to fly." When she saw his determined face she added. "I'll take care of it. But you have to give me a minute to at least tell the others that we're off." He wanted to protest but she cut him off before he had even started. "You'll either wait voluntarily or I'll punch you out till I'm back."

He nodded with a clenched jaw. "Be quick."

When Natasha entered the Shawarma place she found herself confronted with four worried faces.

"Is everything alright?"

The question was so absurd that she almost laughed in his face, but Roger's genuine concern and his puppy dog eyes stopped her.

"I've worked with Phil Coulson for five years and Clint and him were already friends for three years before I even started at SHIELD – so no." She wasn't sure what stopped her from telling them the whole truth, after what happened she trusted these men with her life. But obviously she didn't trust them with her friend's heart. And a tiny part of her also insisted on respecting Phil's right on privacy. "Barton and I are going to the Helicarrier. If you want to pay your last respects you can do so tomorrow," she informed them and left without waiting for an answer.

As she stepped outside she could see Barton arguing with a lower level SHIELD agent. The man – Tasha didn't know his name – tried to keep the exchange reasonable and calm, but Clint was very close to resort to physical violence.

"I'm sorry Agent Barton, but I was ordered to help here and as long as your security clearance isn't reinstated I can't accept different orders from you."

"I'm not under anyone's influence right now and if you don't bring me to the Helicarrier right now, I'm going to..."

"I'm well aware of the fact that you are under no one's influence otherwise I would have called for backup the moment I spotted you, Sir." Natasha was actually impressed by how calm the man stayed. She wasn't sure if it was a good survival trait right at the moment, but it was a sign of a good head on his shoulders if he managed stand his ground when faced with someone as pissed as Barton. "The regulations are still quite clear, I'm to ignore any orders given by you until you are officially cleared. And I won't be threatened."

"Of course not," Natasha chimed in, "but you will listen to my orders. So listen carefully, you will take that helicopter over there and you or someone else with a pilot license will fly me and Agent Barton to the Helicarrier, now."

"Yes, Ma'am." Even the most stubborn agent knew not to cross the Black Widow.

She turned to Barton. "Didn't I tell you to wait?"

He just shrugged and followed the nameless agent to the helicopter.

Clint sat down in the passenger part of the machine and put his seat-belt on, while nameless agent guy climbed into the cockpit. He felt as if he was just functioning on autopilot right now. The noise of the rotor seemed to come from far away and he was only vaguely aware of Nat sitting down next to him. She didn't try to speak to him or comfort him in any way. They had both lost Phil and she probably was the only person to really understand what this meant for him. Nothing would be able to lessen the feeling of loss he felt right now and he loved her because she didn't even pretend. The warmth of her body radiating through the fabric of her suit, pressing against his arm was the only thing that felt even remotely real and kept him at least partly anchored in the here and now.

Clint remembered the first time he had ever laid eye upon Agent Coulson. A mild mannered guy in a suit stepping out of the shadows stopping an undercover agent of SHIELD from blowing his brains out. Back then he'd told himself that he would have found a way out of that situation, that he would have somehow survived Hino's shot. Years later he knew that he would have been dead if Phil hadn't interfered. He was good but not that good and even if Hino wasn't a master shot he knew his own limits well enough to only make the shot if he was sure that he could make it.

But that wasn't the important part. Phil saved him in a far more profound way. Back in those days he'd been drifting, having lost any sense of purpose or belonging. Sooner or later he would have died taking some reckless risk or pissing off the wrong person. So the words "Mr. Barton, I've got a proposition for you," were probably the most important words anyone had ever said to him in his life.

Not that he'd made things easy for anyone. Clint had a lot of heated arguments during his first few months in SHIELD but somehow never with Phil. Phil who brought him his first SHIELD issued bow, Phil who always seemed to listen. He remembered when he thanked Anderson for the bow and the older agent had been irritated and clueless about what he was talking about. That was the moment when he realized that Coulson was different. He did spend the next couple of weeks trying to provoke him, but Phil never took the bait. He remembered beginning to spy on him just to see what the man was doing when he wasn't there listening. He didn't trust people as a rule and the fact that Coulson never gave him a reason to distrust him only put fuel in the fires of his paranoia. He stopped after hearing Coulson defend him to Agent Bridge, if the man didn't even speak bad of him behind his back but stood up to someone higher up in the command structure, then maybe just maybe he could relax a little bit around him.

He remembered the way Phil's fingers relentlessly typed away, when he worked through his paperwork and how that sound had felt so absolutely right, right from the start. As long as Phil Coulson worked on his paperwork the world was alright or at least would be again in a short while.

Now that the typing had stopped who would work on making the world a safer place, who would see to it that everything ran smoothly?

He remembered the moment he realized that he was in love with vivid clarity. It was during the debrief after Galveston. Clint had ignored Coulson's orders and as his handler Phil had ripped him a new one for not going by the book but during the official debriefing he had vehemently defended Barton's right to make the call he had. He had brought up every point Clint had to justify his decision and had successfully stopped Agent Carter from putting a black mark in his file. When the woman went into a lengthy rant about his dangerous tendencies to insubordination and had warned Agent Coulson not to let himself be dragged down by Hawkeye, he had seen something he would have thought impossible. Behind her back Phil rolled her eyes at Carter's melodramatics. He had never asked the older man if he had deliberately let Clint see this or if it was simple chance that he got a glimpse of the man behind the professional mask, but from that moment on Clint had been hopelessly lost.

And now he would never know.

He remembered Phil's warm eyes always caring. The big secret behind mild-mannered, polite Agent Coulson, the fact that he cared.

He remembered the first time he had seen Coulson cry. They had been together for a few months and it was the first time they had managed to sneak off base after assistant director Carter had been killed during a mission. They had worked and succeeded on catching the guilty and SHIELD business was back to normal. Clint hadn't especially liked the woman but Phil had known and cared for her. He would never have shown that kind of emotion on base; he was unflappable and professional, a rock in the storm they were all caught in for others to hold onto, but that night he had let Clint hold him until they both fell asleep.

He remembered Phil's soft and steady breathing when he slept, his chest the best pillow he could imagine. He remembered how annoyed he got when Phil had had a cold and the snoring kept him awake and how he chased Phil out of his own bedroom with a thrown pillow when Fury called in the middle of the night with some crisis or the other.

He would have to learn to sleep on his own again.

Clint was a mess and a part of him had always believed that he didn't deserve to be loved. He tried to keep others at a distance for their protection as much as his own. But Phil Coulson had seen through him, had known him for exactly who and what he was and yet had still for some miraculous reason decided that he loved him. They had grown from colleagues to friends. They had learned to trust each other and through some setbacks had grown even closer. And after a kick in the ass from Tasha he had found the courage to act on his massive crush and asked Phil out. A part of him had always feared that his lover would one day decide that he just wasn't worth the trouble, but Phil had stuck with him.

Stupid, stubborn Phil who had died believing Clint the enemy.

Clint blinked away unshed tears as the pilot's voice pulled him back from his memories.

"We're coming in, Ma'am." There was a short pause in which he listened to whoever was at the other end of his line. "Agent Romanoff ordered me to take her and Agent Barton to the Carrier, Ma'am. – ATA 5 minutes. – Yes Ma'am, over and out."

author's note: "malenʹkiy yastreb" means 'little hawk' in Russian - at least according to google translator, please feel free to critisize the hell out of me for using that crutch and tell me a better translation ;)

The title is an acronym, because I couldn't think of something witty and it basically just is ... well if you can tell me you get a virtual cooky.

Takes place in the same continuity as "The three SHIELD-keteers" and "The dating history of SHIELD agents"