Clint is the first one to sneak away. All of the Avengers hate the stupid PR events they're required to attend, but Clint hates them more than most.
Tony hates them because he'd rather be in his workshop but it's a hatred worn down by over-exposure. Steve hates them because he finds the people who attend fancy parties just to show off how rich and classy they are unbearably shallow, and because he always gets himself into awkward conversations on account of how he refuses to lie about his opinions, which are rarely in concurrence with what these people like to think of as 'American'.
Thor finds this Midgardian version of 'royalty' far too lacking in honour for his tastes and gets frustrated because any time he expresses his disapproval they smile at him patronisingly for his 'foreign ways'. Natasha thinks anything which requires her to dress up without allowing her to use any of the weapons she has magically concealed about her person is boring, and more than once one of the others has had to intervene when someone got a little too 'friendly' before Tasha ensured they had nothing left to be friendly with.
Bruce hates these things almost as much as Clint and for many of the same reasons. Both of them struggle with feeling out of place, neither of their backgrounds having prepared them for this sort of function, although Bruce is a little more comfortable because of his experience at scientific conferences. And as the two least-photographed Avengers (the Hulk doesn't count), both also experience the insecurity that comes with being mostly overlooked, not thought of as part of the team, although at least Bruce can usually find someone who speaks his scientific jargon and will get caught up talking about neutrons or prions or somesuch.
And Phil . . . . well, Clint's pretty sure Phil enjoys the opportunity to play with the other guests the way a well-fed cat plays with a room full of baby mice. Where Clint is generally (although he'd never admit it to anyone) intimidated by the men who look down their noses wondering 'who let that in here' and the women who look at him like he's on the menu, Phil is calm and completely confident, seemingly at ease in every conversation. Clint supposes it would be hard to be intimidated when Phil eats these kind of people for breakfast. Where Clint is all too often mistaken for the 'help', everyone who speaks with Phil walks away feeling like they'd just had a conversation with someone very important, if only they could place where they knew him from.
This holiday *cough*Christmas*cough* shindig is being held at the Tower, the invasion of their space offset by the fact that that Tony has complete control over the security and JARVIS is keeping a ready eye on their guests. While the organisers claimed that it would be completely non-denominational, someone forgot to tell the decorators, who had decked the hall in so much commercial Christmas stuff that Clint rather felt it looked as if all of Santa's elves had gotten sick all over the room. Tony's contribution was a large banner that read "Happy $WINTERHOLIDAY!" but most of the guests don't seem to appreciate the joke.
So when Clint eventually gets tired of watching Phil do his thing - it takes awhile, because Phil is hot when he's doing his thing - it's a simple thing to slip out of the large ballroom and down to the library on the Avengers communal floor.
The floor-to-ceiling bookcases are packed thick with books, some obviously older and inherited from Tony's mother, but others clearly purchased more recently. The collection runs the gamut of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, with representatives from nearly every genre Clint can think of. He'd been surprised by the room and the books that were obviously well-read and well-loved, unable to match the room with what he knows of Tony and his preference for electronic communication. Eventually he'd asked outright, and learned that the library here was a replica of a room in the old Stark mansion where Tony had grown up, and where the original Jarvis, an old butler who was the closest thing to a real father Tony had ever had, had made his sanctuary.
Tony had had the books moved and the collection updated (mostly by asking Pepper, Rhody, Happy, Bruce, and anyone else he could find on short notice for recommendations) and set the room up the way the old Jarvis had had it as a present for Steve, who, while adapting rather quickly to the new technology, still preferred actual paper books. Over time, contributions from the rest of the Avengers, particularly Tasha and Phil, had mysteriously ended up on the shelves.
The room may have been a present for Steve, but Clint loves it at least as much as Cap does. It's everything Clint had ever wanted as a child and never had. Those who know Clint only by reputation would be surprised to find that he is an avid reader. As a child, the library and the books they contained were a welcome respite from his father's drunken rages. And while there was no room to keep books at the circus, there was inevitably a library in whatever town they set up next to. Clint learned the basics of thieving by swiping books from the library, lacking the fixed address required to actually get a card. But he always put them back before the circus moved on. So this small room with the worn but comfortable suede couch and rows upon rows of books that Clint could read anytime he wanted to, no sneaking required, is like heaven.
Even better, the room has an actual functioning wood-burning fireplace. And if Tony had installed a gas lighter to speed the process along, well it is only cheating a little. Clint stacks a couple of logs on the rack and sets them alight. In a few minutes he has a nice blaze going and and is pulling an old familiar book off the shelf.
Clint grabs a throw and curls in front of the fire, wrapping the soft fabric around his shoulders and leaning up against the leg of the couch, soaking in the warmth. Warmth wasn't something he'd had much of as a kid, either.
Clint opens the book in his lap randomly and starts to read. He knows that to most who know him he must present an incongruous figure. Hawkeye the ex-carney who never made it past the fifth grade curled up in front of a fire reading Whitman.
Clint had first found Leaves of Grass on the small shelf of books that constituted the orphanage library. He'd pulled it off the shelf for no other reason than that the binding was a deep emerald green and it stood out against all the other bland grey and brown bindings. Then he opened the book to a random page and was sucked in. Clint had never read anything so beautiful. The contradictory, disjointed images and ideas do more than speak to Clint - they seem to speak for him, and with them comes the conviction that this man understands.
Clint knows Phil is at the door before it even opens, but he does not turn, looking up from the book to stare at the fire. "I thought I might find you here," Phil says.
"Come to drag me back?" Clint asks, tone light but somewhat forced.
"No," Phil says, coming around the back of the couch and settling down on the floor next to Clint.
Clint turns away from the fire to glance at Phil, startled. Phil's jacket is absent, his tie is loose, ends hanging limply from around his neck, and the top button of his collar is undone. The ever-present lines around his eyes are barely noticeable, all the tension smoothed from his face. Clint lifts the edge of the blanket and offers it wordlessly to Phil, who takes it with a smile, scooting closer so that his whole side is flush with Clint's, the blanket wrapped around them both.
"Whitman?" Phil asks, nodding to the book in Clint's lap.
"Wealth with the flush hand and fine clothes and hospitality," Clint quotes, "But then the soul's wealth - which is candor and knowledge and pride and enfolding love: Who goes for men and women showing poverty richer than wealth?" Something changes in Phil's expression, and for a moment Clint sees a flash of indecision before it is replaced with the quiet determination Coulson is so known for.
"For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted," Phil says softly, his hand curling around Clint's under the blanket. It is the answer to Clint's rhetorical, quoted question and it rocks Clint to the core.
"Phil . . ." he says, voice shaky. There is something both gentle as a breeze and strong as iron in Phil's eyes, and Clint wants it. Oh, how he wants it.
"I understand the large hearts of heroes," Phil continues, "The courage of present times and all times; All this I swallow and it tastes good . . . I like it well, and it becomes mine."
Clint is silent too long, the words he has read a thousand time before fill his head with Phil's voice, crowding out any of his own. Phil looks down at his lap, finally, when Clint still says nothing. His mouth quirks in a small, self-deprecating smile and Clint suddenly realises that Phil is nervous.
"The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me . . . he complains of my gab and my loitering," he says, looking back up at Clint with a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. There is disappointment there, and embarrassment, and the wistfulness that comes with opportunities lost.
It is then that Clint finds the words, his words, the words he wants to say, written more than a hundred years before he was born. "Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? I am not afraid . . . I have been well brought forward by you; I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you . . .but I know I came well and shall go well," he says, and Phil's eyes are bright, his hand clenched tighter around Clint's.
Clint extracts his hand from Phil's only to turn it over and interlace their fingers. He leans in until his face is only inches from Phil's, trying to put everything he feels into his eyes the way Phil has done from the start.
"In libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead," he says. "But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares, Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island, Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you, With the comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss, For I am the new husband and I am the comrade." And it is Phil that closes those last few inches.
They kiss softly, slowly, as if it were not the first time, but a treasured, comfortable habit. But then it has always been like this between them, even though it has never been this. When they finally pull apart the look on Phil's face is something Clint has never seen before.
Phil, who conceals both his strength and his vulnerability behind his designer suits and his carefully cultivated forgettable ways, is completely unguarded and utterly content. As hot as he had looked earlier, deftly manipulating socialites and minor dignitaries, it has nothing on the way he looks now.
Clint's own walls, which have stood against the most persistent efforts of allies and enemies alike to breach them, have no defense against Phil's very absence of defences, the openness that pulls at Clint like a vacuum until his walls crumble, breached not from without but within.
"This hour I tell things in confidence," Clint whispers, "I might not tell everybody but I will tell you."
The look in Phil's eyes tells him that Phil understands how hard that was for Clint to say, but he asks nothing. He simply lets his whole body rest against Clint's and nods at the book, eyebrow raised expectantly.
Clint picks it up, flips it to the same page he first laid eyes on in the orphanage, to the words he had been trying to say as a child, without knowing how. Now he has Phil to listen; now he knows he is being heard, and that makes all the difference. It barely hurts at all as he begins to read.
The father, strong, selfsufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust,
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture . . . and the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsayed . . . The sense of what is real . . the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of daytime and the doubts of nighttime . . . the curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so . . . Or is it all flashes and specks?