"Agent was something else, huh?" asked Tony, and Clint nodded.
"I made him wait ages for sex, and he never complained, never even said, 'Well, you have reason to be antsy' just put on his Agent Coulson face and told me I didn't owe him anything."
"Well, fuck, you don't," said Tony. "People all think that, just 'cause we're omegas, and they're willing to give us a hand occasionally, that we're all just going to hop in bed all the time. I mean, I'm hardly a great example, I do just hop in bed all the time." He gave a self-deprecating laugh. "But 'heat' means something so totally different for every other animal in existence. It sucks."
"Phil understood all that, better than I did, even," said Clint miserably.
"Steve didn't, not at first," said Tony. "But he didn't need to. After Pepper and I broke up—we should never have crossed the line, alpha to girlfriend, she never wanted that, but we just got so caught up—anyway, I went back to locking myself up, until Steve wormed out of Pepper what was wrong with me, and he didn't even give her time to explain it all, just got the gist and ran upstairs and sweet-talked JARVIS into letting him in. I've never seen anyone sweet-talk JARVIS before. Pepper out-logicked him, but I swear Steve did a full-blown emotional appeal to my A.I. And he cried when he realized how bad it was, and curled up around me like some kind of dog and he made me explain it to him afterwards, and then he told me I was never doing that alone again if I'd have him."
"Phil cried, too, the one day he couldn't get home until the morning of day 2," said Clint, and his jaw was sharp now.
"Fuck—and he's gone," said Tony, realizing. "Back to Natasha—after having that?"
"My brothers, I mourn for your pain," said Thor, and gathered them both in a hug—or tried to. Tony wriggled out and backed away.
"You comfort him, 'cause that's serious pain, that deserves mourning, I haven't lost the love of my life, he's upstairs, and he's a supersoldier, and I'm an insensitive dick…" That was as far as he got before Thor put a foot on the couch, leaned out over the back of it, and literally hauled him back.
"Dude, you did tons of heats totally alone, I never had to do that," said Clint, voice mostly steady through the now-escaping tears. "That's valid pain. I'm kind of surprised you're still alive."
Tony, amazingly, didn't have an answer to that.
"Midgard wrongs you both, and all your kind, by denying this suffering," Thor told them somberly, and Tony gave in, leaning into Thor and Clint.
They clung to each other until Bruce poked his head in.
"It's time for dinner—is everyone all right?"
"Fine, fine, manly bonding session, sorry we forgot to invite you, you're totally manly," said Tony, extricating himself from the embrace with some difficulty.
"All right, well, dinner's on the table," said Bruce and ducked out again. Clint also stood and made to follow Tony.
"You will just go on living in this manner?" asked Thor, with seeming incomprehension.
"Well, yeah," said Tony. "These are our lives."
A/N: Thanks for sticking it out!
Do send me a note if I missed any present tense sneaking in there—it's all of a sudden ridiculously difficult to stay in one tense.
Disclaimer time (I know it's weird to have them at the end, so sue me): I have recently realized I don't know enough about Clint's canon past to have made it look particularly accurate. Oh, well, I'm not going to sweat it. Put it down to alternate universe if you like.
The ending lines are a little odd because they're talking about two different things, but it felt like the right ending point. Thor's asking, because this is Thor's answer to problems, you're not going to fight? Try to change things for omegas? Tony's already shot that down in the beginning of the conversation—he believes it's a hopeless cause—so he doesn't hear that, he's thinking of his own mental scars for spending so many heats alone and Clint's mourning his lover, and it's simple to him—what is there to change?
Although my description of omega heat is based off of recurrent depression, I'd like to make crystal clear a few differences. Sex does not necessarily do anything to alleviate depression. Cuddling/being reminded you're not a screwup also does not always help. And I only wish depression was this predictable, in either time, intensity, or progression. I mostly placed all that in there to plant the seeds of truth that the public perception of omegas grew out of—it is indeed cyclical, and it is indeed often treated with sex, but the use of the word 'heat' is meant to be a complete misnomer. I'm using the omegaverse trope as an allegory for how mental illness is actually treated in our society—not an exact parallel, people don't really think people with depression are all just horny, but you can bet some have been told they just need to get laid, and there's the general misperception of exactly what mental illnesses are. Also, about having no guarantee of a job.
Finally, I'm getting sick of the tendencies of fanfiction characters to leap into bed as soon as they're officially both aware they're both interested. This isn't the best example they could be setting, in my opinion, since often one or both parties isn't ready for sex right off the bat—or, less commonly, ever. This is reasonably uncommon in fanfiction, except when one of the parties has endured some kind of sex-related trauma in the past or the parties are underage, and I haven't seen it at all in Clint/Coulson fanfiction. So, my attempt to assure people everywhere that just because you're of age, not traumatized, and in a relationship, does not mean you owe the other person sex.
Off soapbox now. Hope you enjoyed the ride.