At the beginning, it was great. There was nothing Clint enjoyed more than surprising the usually unflappable super solider. The look on Steve's face when he discovered the archer on his couch was one that Clint would treasure for years to come. The first couple of days passed by in a haze of strong painkillers and lame television that Clint may or may not have been stealing from Steve's neighbor's cable connection. But seeing as how SHIELD was paying for the cable anyway, (yes, Clint knew about Agent 13. He'd had an unfortunate encounter with her while he was clumsily picking Steve's lock, crutches under his arm and a cast on his leg. While Clint could never resist a conversation with a pretty woman, he preferred talking to her face, not the barrel of her gun,) he figured it was okay to siphon off a bit of satellite coverage so that he could melt his drugged brain with stupid reality T.V. When he wasn't dozing on the captain's sofa, that is. With several prescriptions keeping the pain to a minimum and Steve waiting on him hand and foot, Clint realized he should have broken his leg a lot sooner. This was the best vacation he had had since…well, he couldn't remember ever taking a vacation, so this was a new, yet welcome, experience.
The start of the second week rolled around and Clint's good mood was rapidly deteriorating. His supply of magic pills had run out and his leg was now hurting in earnest. The television was only replaying the same show on a loop and Clint could rehearse every episode in his sleep by this point. Sore and bored, Clint would grab his crutches and hobble around the entire apartment, searching for something to take his mind off the pain and his lack of field work. Sadly, beside the SHIELD provided décor, the whole place was practically empty. No pictures, no souvenirs, no collectables, no figurines. There was nothing to distinguish this apartment from any other unoccupied space in the building. Clint was going to have to show the solider the right way to pimp out his living quarters. Since Steve hadn't yet seen Clint's bunk on the helicarrier, it was no wonder the guy had no idea what a properly personalized apartment looked like.
In the whole square footage rented out to the super hero, there was only one thing that claimed it as belonging to the captain. Stumbling upon it on a drizzly Tuesday morning, Clint had been amazed to discover the sketchbook. He hadn't had a clue that Steve could draw. But the evidence was undeniable. Page after page was filled with charcoal renderings of people and places in Steve's life. Many pages were devoted to the Avengers, detailed portraits of the team, sometimes in costume, sometimes not. It wasn't until he came to an illustration done so carefully as to look just like a photograph of a woman with waves in her hair and intelligent eyes that the thought occurred to Clint that the book was private and that he shouldn't have been looking through it. Guiltily, he returned it to its proper place and backed out of the bedroom as reverently as he could on his crutches.
After that single incident of interest, things only went downhill. The pain and lack of activity made Clint irritable and the fact that Steve was mind-numbingly predictable didn't help matters. While Clint was drooling on the couch he'd insisted on sleeping on, despite Steve's arguments that the archer take the bed, the solider was already hitting the streets for his pre-dawn run. Even when he returned for a shower afterward, Clint still slumbered on. It generally took the aroma of brewing coffee and sizzling bacon to pull him from the depths of la-la land. Breakfast wasn't such a bad thing; Clint had to admit that, though a more accurate term would have been feast. Bacon, sausage, ham, omelets, toast, muffins, pancakes, doughnuts, strawberries, bananas, apples, coffee, orange juice and milk littered the table and whatever Clint didn't eat, Steve happily wolfed down. When Clint mentioned the size of the meal, Steve flushed self-consciously and explained how his breakfast had to be big, what with the lack of fuel his increased metabolism suffered during the night hours and the stimulation it experienced because of his morning runs. Even after he knew the reason behind it, it was still odd for Clint to watch Steve put away three platters of food.
As Steve would wash the dishes, the good feelings Clint acquired from the wonderful meal would slowly drain away. He knew what was coming and he didn't like it. Steve would put away the dishes, grab his jacket and keys, and head deeper into the city to report to work. SHIELD work. Work Clint wasn't allowed to do. Steve would go and walk around and run and leap and jump and kick and all the other awesome things he could do because he was Captain America and Clint would be left all alone in the bland apartment with nothing to do because he couldn't walk or run or leap or jump or kick or even dance. Why that last activity was so important, he couldn't say but he was feeling frustrated in general, so he decided to be mad about that as well.
The afternoon hours would drag by with Clint wandering the same four rooms of the apartment, or draping himself over the couch and staring at the same spot on the ceiling for the nine millionth time. Sometimes he turned on the T.V. just so he could mouth the choppy dialogue along with the mediocre actors. When he grew tired of that, he fished a pen out of the sofa cushions and scribbled moustaches on the smiling faces in the newspaper Steve got every morning. On a particularly dreary Friday, he found a pair of scissors in a drawer in the kitchen and he proceeded to create a newspaper clipping death threat. Snipping out the words he wanted and rearranging them, he laid them out on the coffee table (which had gained some new rings since he had taken up residence in the apartment.) He'd never made such a note before but he'd read about them in some crummy paperback mystery book and he'd always wanted to try it. It was fun while it lasted but soon he'd run out of scary sentences and so he blew across the tabletop, sending a flurry of paper into a whirlwind of gray moths.
Finally, dinnertime would roll around. If Clint was lucky, Steve returned from the Triskelion in time to prepare them both a huge pot of spaghetti. But sometimes, Fury kept the soldier until eleven at night, if not later. On those nights, Steve returned to the stench of burnt toast and Clint cursing beside the smoking toaster. Cracked windows and pizza boxes could always be found around the apartment the next morning. Sometimes, during dinner, Steve would attempt conversation. If Clint was in a good mood, he'd join in and they would talk for hours about guns, or the difference between Katy Perry and the Andrews Sisters, or whatever meaningless topic they could settle on. But when Clint was in a bad mood, he'd glower until Steve gave up and they'd finish their meal in silence.
When the twenty-one days ended and Clint's imprisonment was at an end, he felt he should get the captain a thank-you of some kind for putting up with such a cantankerous assassin. But they didn't make cards for that kind of thing. Clint checked. So instead, he slid a fifty dollar McDonald's gift card under Steve's door, with a sticky note inviting the soldier to crash in Clint's quarters for a whole month.