A/N: It's been such a hectic couple of weeks, but I was determined to get at least one more update posted this side of Christmas. If nothing else as a thankyou for all your comments and encouragement, which kept me going when the Muse went on the warpath. I've tried to get back to focussing on Clint & Phil's relationship and add a little fluff to tide us all over. I don't think I'll get much writing done between family and work over the holidays - but if I do you'll be the first to know.
Meanwhile - a very merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. And a Very Happy New Year to you all!
It was glaringly obvious that whoever tried to destroy SHIELD HQ had picked the wrong asset to use as a weapon. Question was, though, how long could Clint hold on? Especially with Phil Coulson around.
"I assume SHIELD isn't aware," Clint said after a long moment.
"Not yet, no." There was no inflection in Natasha's voice, but a tiny smirk curled the corner of her mouth. Clint knew that smirk only too well.
"Shit! You're going to tell Fury."
"He's coming over later," Coulson confirmed calmly from behind his stack of paperwork. "It would be useful if we had more than the disaster scenario to share."
"Right," Clint settled himself carefully into the cushions and thought. He'd never finished high school, gone to college or gotten a degree, but he had spent a lot of his time with SHIELD studying. At first, to be better at his job. Later, because he'd seen too much in the field and wanted to make sense of it. The result was that he knew a lot more about drugs and their effects than most people surmised. Right now, that knowledge was a blessing. Being shot up with some arcane chemical that stopped your body from utilising oxygen and left you gasping like a stranded carp if you exerted yourself could have freaked him right out. And that was before he even considered that he was now – for all intents and purposes – a walking bomb.
He turned his head towards Natasha. "Do we know how the bomb part works?"
"Like a giant electromagnetic pulse," she replied immediately.
"So if it had gone off in Medical, SHIELD would be blind, deaf and mute."
"Not just SHIELD, but... yes."
"Any idea what it would it do to me?"
"Best case scenario? Stop your heart."
"Worst case?"
"Stop your heart and fry your brain."
"Nice."
She stuck her tongue out at him and Clint grinned. They didn't talk about death, he and Nat, but given their jobs death continued to intrude. They'd grown very good at ignoring it until it was almost like a white elephant... or maybe a purple one, since purple seemed to be the key to the riddle.
"What exactly happened when I passed out?"
"You win." With a disgruntled frown Natasha reached into her jacket and pulled out a note. She handed it to Coulson, who took it and winked at Clint. And why had Clint never noticed how adorable an expression that was on the man?
"What did you think I'd ask first?"
"How we got you out of SHIELD HQ."
Clint shook his head and forced himself to stopping looking at his handler. They had serious issues at stake here, after all. "If Fury is making house calls, he's authorised me going off site. And Nat? I do recognise a diversion when I see one. Tell me what happened."
She heaved a sigh, but then pulled up some information on her tablet. "Between the drug and your body's adrenaline, your blood chemistry went haywire," she said tightly. "The building energy charge kept your heart rate high. You were in pain, so your body added endorphins into the mix. Most of the drug reacted with the adrenaline, so at least you had enough oxygen circulating. When you started to calm down – and, by the way, the doctors have no idea how you managed that – the adrenaline dissipated and the drug went back to messing with your ability to use oxygen."
"So the drug has a marked affinity to adrenaline," Clint said slowly and waited for Natasha's nod.
When the doorbell interrupted the conversation Coulson got up to answer, leaving Clint to stare at wide shoulders under a deep blue tee and one fine ass covered in denim until Natasha smacked him in the head.
"Focus."
"I'm plenty focussed, thanks!" Clint snarked, surprised by his sudden interest. It wasn't as if he'd never seen Coulson in casual clothes before. So why was he only now noticing the muscles on the man? Strange. He shook his head and waved at the tablet Natasha was still holding. "Do you have historical data on that thing?"
She stared at him suspiciously. "From the moment the medical team got you onto the plane and hooked up to life support," she said slowly, brows furrowed. "Why?"
"May I?" Clint held out his hand, but Natasha clutched the tablet to her chest as if handing it over would do irreparable damage to Clint. "Humour me, Nat," he pleaded. "I think I know how to fix this, but let me look at some numbers before I go shooting my mouth off."
"I'm not going to let you kill yourself."
"Understood."
Nat handed over the tablet, and Clint looked for the results of his blood counts. He considered it a stroke of luck that he had studied the physiological effects of colours, first back in the circus, later in more detail at SHIELD. His mind had retained his torturer's taunts when Clint hadn't been able to pay attention and had alerted him to their content when he was. And now, as he studied the data on Natasha's tablet, the wisp of an idea in the back of his mind solidified more and more with every line of data he scrutinised. Sleeping and dreaming, being awake and unconscious, calm and angry – the results slotted into place with an ease that Clint couldn't quite believe. And it had all started with a taunting remark about the saving grace of the colour purple.
"This is obscene," he gasped out, when he had finally made sense of what his mind was telling him.
"What is?"
Clint looked up into the worried eyes of the three people that meant the most to him. Nat was angry but hiding it well. Coulson didn't hide his concern. And Fury... Nick Fury was dreading Clint's next words. The man was vibrating with the need to act – help – do, clearly held in place by just his will. It meant a lot to Clint, who'd never known anyone to really care for him, to find three people by his bedside who did.
"Talk to us, Barton," Fury demanded finally and while the words were the right ones, the man speaking them and the tone he used were so wrong that Clint smiled and relaxed for the first time since he'd woken in a box.
"I think we can fix this," he said and waved Natasha closer. She needed the reassurance. Coulson and Fury trusted him to look out for himself. Natasha understood him in a different way. "Look." He pulled up the data he'd been looking at earlier. "While I've been unconscious the drug slowly dissipated. When I'm agitated, it doesn't. The levels in my blood stay constant. When I calm after getting angry the drug multiplies as it unbinds from the adrenaline."
"So we keep you unconscious for a month and you're fine?"
"Not quite." Clint pulled up another graph and showed it to Natasha, eyes flashing. "These results suggest that the drug dissipates fastest when I'm awake, but totally calm."
"You mean you can just... Zen it out?"
"Yes," Clint answered on autopilot and with a lot more conviction than he actually felt. He still wasn't entirely convinced that it wasn't all part of the trap. "It might take some time. We need to do tests to see how quickly it dissipates and what I can and can't do."
"Barton, if there's a chance that I don't have to lose you I don't care how long it takes." Fury's palm slid over Clint's shoulder, squeezing hard. "Focus on getting that fixed. Don't worry about anything else."
Clint nodded, Fury left in a swirl of black leather and Natasha went with him to set up a lab to monitor Clint's blood count. After a while, Coulson returned carrying steaming mugs of tea.
"Are you hungry?"
"Not really." Clint took his mug with a grateful sigh. "I've no idea what they've given me while I was out, but even a tub of cookie dough choc chip ice cream doesn't tempt me right now."
"We'll have to see about that." Coulson had his hands wrapped around his mug as if he was trying to ward off a chill. "Were you serious or was this a ton of bullshit designed to placate the director?"
"Would I do that?"
"I've never known you to."
"There you go, then." Clint almost smiled. Coulson was failing miserably at keeping his poker face.
"Explain it to me?"
Clint huffed, not sure where to start. "What's your favourite colour?" he asked eventually.
Phil's eyes almost fell shut as he thought. "Not sure," he said eventually. "Soft grey? Silver?"
Clint smiled widely. "That makes perfect sense. Solid and stable, creating calm and comfort from chaos. Responsible, dependable, formal, elegant and plays well with others," he recited with a smirk.
"Is that so?"
"That is so. But colour doesn't just reflect personalities. It also affects people's minds and bodies."
"I know that much, Barton. Tell me about purple."
The innocuous question felt surprisingly personal. Clint felt his neck heat, felt the flush rise to the tops of his ears, and he forced himself to hold Phil Coulson's gaze. "Purple is the perfect colour, halfway between the warmest red and the coolest blue," he began quietly, feeling as if he exposed his soul and not minding nearly as much as he'd expected. "It's halfway between passion and calm, between action and serenity, despair and pleasure. It's..."
"How you live," Phil said softly.
"Purple is like... a dance on a wire," Clint said, glad Coulson understood. "It's waiting for hours, then exploding into action. It's killing in the hope of doing good." He shrugged. "Purple is... my life, my job. It describes what I do. How I keep grounded."
"And why you think you can beat this drug."
Clint's breath came out in long rush of relief. Coulson had heard his halting explanations and got it. Very few people did. Clint was glad that Coulson was one of them.
They settled into a routine after that. First thing in the morning, Nat arrived with the contents of Phil's inbox, messages and coffee. She left shortly after with Clint's blood, returning at lunchtime with food, the blood count results and more messages and paperwork. They spent the afternoons working spread through Phil's flat. In the evenings, Phil cooked or they ordered takeout, watched movies, or just played music and talked. Clint did little more than meditate and read poetry and for several days the levels of the drug in his blood declined steadily.
Then they hit a plateau. Clint was grumpy all day and the following morning his blood count was up. Phil tried to talk to him about it, Nat almost started an interrogation and Clint was sullenly silent.
"Up again," Nat said as she came through the door, nodding when she saw Clint's face. "You already knew."
"I could guess."
"How? You're better than that, Clint. Tell me."
Clint didn't want to answer that. He really didn't. But... this was Nat, who knew him better than anyone else. Who was just as stubborn and determined as he was. And who wasn't above using violence to get what she wanted. Clint had had enough pain to last him a while, so he finally sighed and admitted: "It's Coulson. He's ... distracting."
"Oh."
Natasha said nothing further, but the pinched lips and furrowed brows spoke volumes. When she left the room, steps brisk and back ramrod straight, Clint pulled the blankets over his head and tried to lose himself in colour.
Of course he failed.
"Nat says I'm the reason for your problems."
"I'm gonna kill her," Clint grated through clenched teeth. He'd expected Nat to talk to Phil. He'd just hoped that she wouldn't.
"Barton."
"What?"
"Your plan was working. Now it's not and Nat tells me it's somehow my fault. Explain this, please."
It was the please that did it. That was Phil talking, not Agent Coulson. And Clint caved. "You're too distracting," he mumbled, head still half buried under his blankets.
"You're one to talk."
"What? I'm not distracting."
"You can be. Very distracting."
"Fine," Clint snapped suddenly. He sat up and glared at the man standing over him like a guardian angel. "But me being distracting isn't an issue right now, ok? Right now, I look at you in those jeans and..." Heat crashed over him like a wave. Just the thought of Coulson's ass in figure-hugging denim, the memory of ancient, much washed tees outlining a muscled chest... it didn't just make his mouth water.
"Clint! Calm down."
He reached blindly for his pillow and buried his face in the lavender-scented linen. Nat had picked it out for him when he mentioned the small bottle of oil he had in his go bag. The scent helped him picture fields of purple, rolling hills of soothing calm and peaceful villages drowsing in the afternoon heat. The three-months undercover mission to Provence was one of Clint's most cherished memories, as close as he'd ever come to a holiday. As usual when he buried himself in memories of the village he'd stayed in, recalling sights and sounds and smells, his breathing calmed and his heartbeat slowed. The burn in his veins receded until it was nothing but the hint of a nightmare.
When Clint raised his head, Phil was sitting beside the bed. His expression was serious and the corners of his eyes were creased with worry.
"I didn't mean to-"
"You didn't," Clint hastened to cut him off. "You've been nothing but supportive. You've invited me into your home. You're looking after me. You're not responsible for the stupid in my head!" His voice had grown louder and louder until he was almost yelling and Coulson stood over him to push him back into the cushions.
"Calm down," he said with firm authority. "Whatever this is, it's not worth getting agitated about."
Clint had heard that voice in his ear too many times over the last years to ignore the implied command. He settled back into bed, relaxed his shoulders and focussed on breathing. He trusted Coulson, trusted him to keep him safe and away from chaos. And Coulson was Coulson, so he did.
"I was trying to apologise for making your job harder without realising it," Phil Coulson said with a tiny smile. "And I had this idea. Would it help if I wore a suit?"