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doesn't matter if i bleed, 2/3
“It’s okay to take him up on his offer,” Cap says with that trademark unassailable niceness. Clint sighs and looks around for an escape.
“You’re allowed to move past the anger,” Natasha says, and Clint should have known the whole team-bonding-over-food-even-though-there’s-not-a-mission invitation was a set-up. Not that he could have refused--it’s a thing now, their thing; no excuses accepted, not even being down and close to bleeding out (more than one of these has happened around a hospital bed). He could have at least been prepared to duck the Sincere Twins, but now he’s trapped, stuck in a booth with Nat and Cap while Banner and Stark are off explaining jukeboxes to Thor.
“I know she has no respect for anything like personal boundaries--especially mine.” Clint sends a glare toward Natasha, who arches an unimpressed eyebrow in response, and then turns to Cap. “But you--you’re supposed to be from when guys didn’t talk about shit like this.”
“I’m adapting to my new culture,” Cap says with a shrug that Clint recognizes with no small amount of alarm.
“You’ve been spending too damn much time with Nat, is what you’ve been doing,” Clint mutters, and okay, fine, maybe he has been walking around pretending like he doesn't know what he wants to do about Phil. “I just--what about the team?”
"I can't speak for the rest of them," Cap says slowly, as though he's feeling his way through a minefield, "but, for better or worse, I… can see where this situation came from. I don't like it, and I will keep on saying that for as long as it takes, but things happen in the heat of battle."
"And after?" Clint makes himself say, because it might have been a year since they'd gotten Loki's thrall out of his blood, but he can still feel the echoes of bringing that battle to life.
"You deal," Natasha says simply.
Clint doesn't need Natasha's input over the next few weeks to know his attempt to deal is pretty goddamn hopeless, but she (of course) gives it to him anyway. If he's honest, she's taking it easy on him, but everything about Phil and where he is now and how he got there is like unhealed scar tissue Clint can barely bring himself to look at, much less touch, so even Nat taking it easy on him is enough to make him snap and snarl. They catch an assignment in the middle of it all, a simple in-and-out in Tallin: Natasha on the ground, ghosting through security like it's not even there; Clint up high, keeping watch on the big picture. It's smooth and easy, no surprises, and the routine of it all calms him enough that he can find words to go along with the shit in his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says once they’re clear. It’s the first thing he’s said in two days that isn’t mission-specific, but it’s Natasha so she doesn’t have to ask him what he’s talking about. “It shouldn’t--he’s one out of the hundreds that I--” He stops before they get derailed on how much blame he can assign to himself, because they’ll just go round and round on that like they have a dozen times before and that’s not what he needs to say right now. “How does him not being gone change anything?”
"It is what it is," Natasha says fatalistically, and Clint is so giving her shit the next time she says she only used to be Russian. "The question is: what are you going to do about it?"
Clint shrugs, and she leans over and--no matter that it's just them in a safe house waiting for exfil, no one else around for ten clicks--whispers, "What do you want to do about it?"
It takes Clint almost a week of Thor randomly throwing even-weirder-than-usual English at him to figure out he's being played, but We few, we happy few, we band of brothers is a little too on-point for even Clint to miss.
"It is good to celebrate the victories of our ancestors," Thor says. "It does not surprise me that he would want you to be a part of that."
"Hell," Clint says. He puts down his bow; it's looking less and less like he's going to be able to work through this alone. The thought doesn't set off as many alarm bells as it might have in the past. Thor claps him on the back and is happy enough to confide where he learned “the most noble epic.”
"Seriously?" Clint asks, walking into Banner's lab. "Shakespeare?"
"Agincourt, in context--you can’t expect us to let that opportunity pass," Bruce says with a smile that's really close to Stark's smirk. The thing about Banner is that he has a freaking ridiculous sense of humor that he lets idle along under the surface. It doesn't come out to play very often, but all bets are off when it does.
“Us?” Clint asks, because he might as well get a good idea of what he’s up against.
“Well, Thor and I, obviously,” Bruce says. “Tony, too. And JARVIS, whom I’d like to count as an extension of Tony just for my own sanity, but who keeps sliding in there on his own merit, regardless. Steve thinks we owe you one. Natasha... actually, I don’t know her opinion on the subject, but since no stingers have been thrown, I assume we’re good.”
“Fuck,” Clint sighs. “Everybody’s in on this?”
“Not surprisingly, Steve took your concerns about us very seriously,” Bruce answers.
Clint nods, because yeah, Cap does pay attention to the team-building thing. Someone should, he guesses, and it’s not like the rest of them have high marks for it on their profiles.
“You couldn’t just trap me in a booth and talk me to death?”
“And miss all this fun?” Bruce leans against the lab table and takes his glasses off, still with that ghost of a smirk on his face. “You have no idea how happy our displaced son of Asgard is to find out we have epics celebrating our warriors. He would have done the whole play for you, but we weren’t sure we’d have the time.”
“I guess you get points for creativity?”
“I’ll admit there might have been some mead involved in the planning process,” Bruce says, his smile brief and genuine this time, before it smooths out into something more serious. “No offense intended--it’s your decision and I can see where it could be a difficult one. We all can.”
“That’s just it,” Clint hears himself saying. He hasn’t spent a lot of time with Bruce--their skill sets, so to speak, don’t intersect much during a situation and they tend to spend their down-time in their own domains, lab and range, where, again, there’s not much overlap. The words come spilling out of him regardless, maybe because Bruce listens quietly, intently. Bruce doesn’t know Clint the way Natasha does; Clint has to explain with him, pull everything out of his head and make it real. “We worked together a long time, Coulson and I. Even before Nat came in--a while before that. When she told me he’d gone down, I--it was like I’d lost a part of me, an arm or a leg.”
Unlike Tony’s shop, which is always filled with screaming guitars and heavy bass lines, it’s quiet in Banner’s lab; nothing but the muted hum of classical music in the background. Nothing to cover the low, mean voice in Clint’s head, the one every shrink thinks should sound like Loki but instead is always, has always been, Barney at his worst. It sneers at him; calls him gutless, a coward and a quitter for not being able to own up to how there’d always been more lying under the surface, more that Clint had never gotten the nerve to even name in his own head.
Bruce waits Clint out without a hint of impatience, and Clint finally manages to say, “I as good as killed him; he... walked. That should mean something, right? It should make anything more than knowing the truth a no-go. At least make it hard to decide whether it's even worth trying.”
“But it’s not,” Bruce says. It’s not a question, but it’s also not an accusation.
“No,” Clint says. “It’s not.”
“Which part of that scares you more?” Bruce asks in that calm way of his, and when Clint honestly doesn’t know the answer, Bruce doesn’t press him; only adds, “It’s always better if you can figure that out.”
Clint figures he still has about a week to really make his decision. He tells himself that every night, when he’s up and roaming the halls or shooting another hundred of Stark’s prototypes. When the call comes in from the Fantastic Four that Doom is playing one of his games, Clint is pretty happy to volunteer to go along with Cap and Stark to help out. Chasing fucking Doombots around a NATO Summit at least means he isn’t skulking through the halls at the Tower trying to avoid Nat and her fraying patience while also doing his best to not figure out the answer to Bruce’s questions. When it’s all over, though, the Latverian contingent safely contained and the team back at the Tower going through debrief, Clint finds himself prowling the conference room, tense and edgy and unsettled.
The Agent in Charge is eyeing him nervously but, rather than having the balls to tell Clint to sit the hell down, he just keeps losing his place in the sequence of events and having to back up and start over. For a couple of seconds, Clint misses Hill and her stone-cold-bitch routine. Now that she's in charge of the carrier she doesn't have time to run debriefs, but she'd have had them in and out in no time. Of course, she'd also have had Clint nailed to a chair if he couldn't keep from distracting everyone, so maybe he actually doesn't miss her all that much.
"I don't think we're gaining much from this," Cap finally says, and though his voice is kind, the agent visibly wilts at his words. Under ordinary circumstances, Clint would feel for the guy--nobody likes disappointing Cap, not even Stark--and probably would have thrown him a bone on how it's mostly Clint's fault, but Cap's words are his walking papers and he's out of the room like a shot. He's already halfway down the hall to the elevators when Stark calls, "Captain Fussypants wants Italian today." Clint waves without turning around, because he can't see how him being there with this attitude is going to be a good thing, but knows he can’t blow them off just because he’s in a pissy mood. Tony adds, in the blandest voice Clint's ever heard from him, "Unless you have other plans," and Clint stops dead as he finally buys a clue. It's really too fucking stupid of him not to have noticed before, but apparently his subconscious has it all worked out that yeah, he does have other plans and time's running out.
"Jeez, finally," Stark says, and when Clint looks back over his shoulder, he’s rolling his eyes.
"I'll, uh, catch you guys next time?" Clint says. "If that's not going to cause--"
"Go accept the olive branch, already." Tony makes shoo-ing motions at him with one hand and opens the door to the conference room with the other. "Hawkeye just remembered he already has a playdate tonight, so it's just you and me, big guy."
Cap leans out of the doorway and nods to Clint, which is all Clint needs to take off. He’s cut it right down to the wire, but the bat-out-of-hell driving he’s picked up over the years serves him well and he manages to get to the airport for the last flight out of New York that will get him there in time. He learned most of the really crazy shit from Phil, and he decides he’ll take that as a sign--there’s a certain symmetry to it that his brain likes.
Welsh longbows are fucking ridiculous in size, especially when you scale up for the difference in average height now as opposed to a thousand years ago--but if Clint’s doing this, he’s doing it right, so he flashes them his SHIELD ID and manages to talk his way into gate-checking the bag. He makes a point to find the air marshal on board so he knows Clint’s nothing to worry about, but spends the rest of the flight not thinking about what he’s doing.
The cabbie who picks him up outside the airport in Virginia gives him and his bag a bored look. Clint slaps a hundred up against the glass and says, “That’s for if you can get me there in under twenty minutes.”
The cabbie takes Clint at his word and tears off into traffic. It’s an impressive effort, one that earns him his C-note, but there’s only so much he can do and Clint still walks into the bar late. There’s a couple of seconds when he doesn’t see Phil or his group and starts to think that--like pretty much everything in his life not related to putting an arrow or a bullet through a target--he’s fallen short again, but then a familiar voice says, “Our guest instructor is more the hands-on type,” and he has to work hard not to sigh in relief.
He gets it together enough to have a pretty credible smirk in place when he turns around to where Phil’s set up in the opposite corner from where he’d been the last time. “Just let me know when you’re done with the boring crap and we can take the real deal out for a test drive.”
The same lady is at the bar; she’s pulling him a beer before he even makes it over to her, and she doesn’t so much as blink when he pulls close to 7 feet of Spanish yew out of his bag and starts the process of getting it strung right. Clint’s happy to see Coulson--whatever name he might be going by now--still surrounds himself with women who don’t flip out no matter what happens. Continuity is a good thing.
This particular bow is one of his babies; he made it by hand, from curing the wood to carving the horn for the nocks and hunting down the exact right kind of hemp for the string. He doesn’t use it in the field, of course, but he’s taken it to a couple of historical exhibitions and shared it with people who appreciate it on its own merits. There’s no place to shoot with it here--it’s built to put an arrowhead through chainmail from a quarter-mile out--but just seeing it is an education in and of itself.
Clint gets it strung and glances up to find Phil watching him, an unreadable expression on his face. Clint doesn’t look away.
“I’m still a little bemused that you actually let anyone touch it,” Phil says two hours later, the bow leaning against the wall behind their corner table. Clint wonders if it’s obvious that he’d taken the seat that let him see the whole room without having to turn his head. Then again, it’s Phil, so it doesn’t matter if Clint was obvious; he noticed anyway. “I remember you working on that one.”
Clint shrugs. It’d taken him nearly a year to get it right, researching how they’d done it a thousand years before, putting it together piece by piece between missions. He’s pretty sure Phil knows why he’d gotten so obsessed with it, how he used it to smooth the jagged edges that particular run of assignments had left behind.
“Didn’t figure anyone could do much with it,” Clint says. “The draw weight’s up around one-fifty, one-sixty-five--hell, I can’t pull much past one-ten without feeling it the next day. They’ve found skeletons on battlefields from, whenever, twelfth, thirteenth century, and the archers actually have deformed shoulders, problems with their elbows and wrists--” He shuts his mouth with a snap, aware that he’s babbling, but Phil doesn’t say anything, only keeps watching Clint with that same unreadable expression.
This time Clint does look away; picks up his beer and finishes it; studies the glass and the table beneath it.
“Why did you come?” Phil asks, and when Clint darts a quick glance at him, he’s got his eyes down, too, all his focus on the last few bits of ice and water in his own drink.
“I... don’t know,” Clint says, and try as he might, his voice still comes out hoarse and low. He looks up finally and waits for Phil to meet his eyes. Whatever else has changed, it’s still easier to say the hard shit when it’s Phil he’s saying it to. “I don’t know which is worse: that I put you here, or that I didn’t know I put you here.”
Phil doesn’t argue with him, just says, “You came, though.” Clint shrugs, but then thinks better of it, because whatever he’s doing, he didn’t just fall into it and he finds he doesn’t want Phil thinking he doesn’t care enough to have made a reasoned decision.
“I needed to,” Clint says, and it really is as simple as that.
Clint’s been riding a streak for over a year: he hasn’t been in Medical since Nat nearly kicked his head in, but it can’t last forever. He supposes a couple of cracked ribs and fifty-something stitches to close the gash that curves over his left hip aren’t the worst way to break it, but he’d still rather be anywhere but in a hospital bed--especially one at Walter Reed, which was entirely too Regular Army for him even when he’d cared about trying to be the perfect soldier. These days, it makes him so twitchy he can barely keep himself in the bed.
“If you’d let them give you something stronger than an aspirin, maybe you wouldn’t mind as much,” Natasha says. Clint likes to think the dumbass implied by her tone is affectionate, but he won’t be taking any bets on it. He also wants to point out that he’s not that bad--he’d gone ahead and taken naproxen from the stash in his quiver--but he doesn’t think it’s going to do much good with her. Still, she’s got her feet propped on the end of his bed and he hasn’t had the remote for the TV since she walked briskly into his room and took it out of his hand, so he doesn’t guess she’s going anywhere. “Even a little codeine would help,” she adds.
“I--it messes with my head,” Clint says. “Not going there, not for something like this.”
Natasha hears what he isn’t saying and her expression softens slightly. It still says You’re an idiot, Barton, but it claims him as her idiot, which is all that’s really important.
“You did let them use a local when they were stitching you, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Clint sighs. It’s just his luck that glue wouldn’t work over the joint. Lidocaine is about as mild as drugs get, but even watching it be administered, having to trust that it was only that, had nearly tripped him over into the hypervigilance he’d spent a couple of months fighting his way back out of. “They said they could hit me with it again if I want, but--”
“They probably won’t let me give it to you, but if I stay in the room, will you let them do at least that?” Natasha says.
“Just the local,” Clint says finally. He keeps his eyes on the TV mounted on the wall like she won’t notice how freaked out he is if he doesn’t look at her, but it’s hard not to think about the last time it’d been just the two of them and a hospital bed.
“Okay,” Natasha says. Clint halfway expects her to push for more, but she just turns the volume on Shark Week down to a murmur and wordlessly sets herself up to keep watch so he can let himself focus on breathing through the dull throb in his ribs and and the fire dancing across his hip.
He doesn’t think he’ll sleep, but the second round of lidocaine takes enough of the edge off that the post-mission exhaustion drags him under not long after Nat supervises its administration. The last thing he remembers thinking is that the nurse who’s handling the injection is pretty damn badass herself, because she hadn’t looked at all rattled to have Natasha watching her every move. When he wakes up, Natasha is curled against the wall on the window seat, asleep. Clint knows she can be conscious and in full Black Widow mode in less than a heartbeat, but he also isn’t at all surprised to turn his head the other direction and see Phil in a chair next to the bed, tablet in hand, because she wouldn’t stand down without backup.
“She wouldn’t leave, but she said she’d sleep if I stayed,” Phil says. “I didn’t think you’d mind if that was the reason I was here.”
“No, that’s good; she needed to rack out,” Clint says. He should say he wouldn’t have minded Phil being there even without an excuse, but that’s apparently a little too much honesty for his brain to deal with. Instead, he reaches slow and careful for the water he’s supposed to be drinking.
“Anything new?” Phil asks, watching Clint with the familiar post-mission assessment attitude.
Clint takes a semi-normal breath; every muscle in his body has stiffened up, but that’s it. He shakes his head, and Phil says, “Good--if the CT scan in the morning is clear, they’ll probably cut you loose.”
“This is not bad news,” Clint says. Natasha comes awake then, alert and on point. It’s testament to how tired she is that she slept through him and Phil talking as long as she did. Keeping up with the super-powered crowd is freaking exhausting sometimes. Phil reaches down and comes up with the biggest coffee Clint’s seen in forever--seriously, it’s like a Big Gulp--and hands it across Clint’s bed, Nat swooping in before Clint can get his brain in gear enough to grab for it. She pries the top off and purrs a little as she drinks, and when Clint looks back at Phil, he’s got a matching cup and the same deeply satisfied expression.
“Aren’t you forgetting some--”
“No,” they answer in unison. They’ve been here a dozen times over the years, the three of them and a hospital room. Whoever’s in the bed doesn’t get the coffee and the other two ignore the sulking and they all play like it’s been no big deal, no matter how many stitches or casts or surgeries have happened. Clint lies back and lets the familiar scene play out and doesn’t think about Phil and heart-lung-bypass machines and no one there with him, because the only way Clint knows how to deal with the emptiness that image calls up is to get pissed off and that’s not going to help anyone.
Phil doesn’t stay long once he’s finished his coffee. His stuff is packed up and he’s gone before Clint can tell him not to go. Natasha doesn’t say anything to stop him, but once the door is closed she shrugs at Clint and says, “He wasn’t going to stay at all.”
“So you let him talk you into taking a nap while he kept an eye on things?”
“It seemed stupid that you wouldn’t know he’d been here.”
She says it dispassionately, as though Phil and his comings and goings are the least of her concerns. It’s very good. Textbook, even. No emotion, totally smooth, pure Black Widow--and the only tell Clint’s ever worked out for her.
“Don’t let my shit fuck up the two of you,” Clint says, which is a still a little bit of a guess, but one that’s confirmed by the minute narrowing of her eyes. He smiles, because no matter how much he aches, he has to properly appreciate being a half-step ahead of her. God knows it doesn’t happen all that often. “Don’t even try to front, Romanova: you go all ice-princess-y and the next stuff out of your mouth is nothing but lies and misdirection.” She eyes him thoughtfully, but before she can work her way up to ice queen--and really fucking pissed, which is an entirely different story--he says, “Seriously. Don’t... I appreciate you having my back on this, but don’t let that make it so you lose him, too.”
For a second, Natasha looks as though she might deny everything. Clint gears up for a fight, because now that he’s thought about it, it bugs the shit out of him that him taking so damn long to work things out in his own head might have messed things up for her, too, but in the end, she just smiles an evil smile at him and says, “You’re talking about your feelings--did we miss a concussion in there?”
“Shut up,” Clint grumbles, mostly for show. Mostly. “I’m talking about your feelings; that doesn’t count.”
“My feelings would like to point out that if you’d quit dancing around the whole subject, we wouldn’t have to be talking about them.”
“All right, Jesus, I give. Put the fucking sharks back on.”
Since the three of them started catching the stupid-crazy SHIELD ops, it’s been a fact of Clint’s life that no matter what he does, Natasha won’t be impressed and Phil won’t be surprised. Nat’s never going to give him a break, but Phil.... There was the one time in Central America when Nat hadn’t been quite quick enough to dodge the barrage of poisoned darts thrown at her and Clint had taken a bullet to his shoulder (through-and-through his right one, thankfully, so he could still shoot and throw a knife or ten). It had taken them an extra five hours to get through the rainforest to the exfil point, and Clint had maybe seen a flash of relief in Phil’s eyes when they came staggering into the clearing, but he’s not sure if that counts.
He thinks the look on Phil’s face as he opens his front door to find Clint standing there does count, but since Clint’s overestimated his level of fitness and is trying not to faceplant into one of the neat topiaries on either side of the door, he can’t really even gloat about it.
“I was bored out of my mind up in Bethesda,” Clint says, aiming for one of his more annoying smirks, to prove it’s no big deal that he’s here on Phil’s doorstep rather than in the hospital. He doesn’t think he’s entirely successful.
“AMA?” Phil asks, his phone already out.
“Not... exactly,” Clint answers, trying to brace himself discreetly on the door frame. It’s the truth--he hadn’t left against medical advice, but three separate doctors had given up trying to keep him in bed. They were probably thrilled to see him go, Hippocratic Oath notwithstanding. He tries for a smirk again. He thinks it’s even weaker this time.
Phil sighs and steps back to let Clint in.
“Thanks,” Clint says. “I gotta...” He waves toward the cabbie waiting semi-patiently at the curb, but Phil fixes him with a deeply unimpressed look--one of his better ones, which is ridiculously comforting--and points down the hall.
“Sit,” he snaps, visibly refraining from pushing Clint toward the living room and the couch under the window as he goes to deal with the guy himself. Clint sits.
Phil comes back carrying the duffel with Clint’s stuff, reading the discharge paperwork as he walks. Clint knows he’d shoved those forms down deep into his bag, but it doesn’t surprise him that Phil found them.
“You’re still not taking anything,” Phil says. “For the pain.” It’s not a question, so Clint just shrugs. “I know you know that having to deal with pain depletes your energy and slows down the recovery.”
“Yeah,” Clint breathes, because it’s possible he hadn’t exactly accounted for what knocking around a cab from Bethesda down to Alexandria might do to his ribs, and now that he’s stationary, they’re letting him know exactly how big of a moron he is. “I know I’m fucking around with my readiness and all--”
“Your mission readiness is not what concerns me,” Phil says through gritted teeth. He drops the duffel and stalks back toward the kitchen, leaving Clint blinking. “What have you eaten today?” he calls, and makes a disgusted sound when Clint mumbles, “Uh, Jell-O?”
There are banging sounds coming from the kitchen, cupboards and glassware and drawers, and then the whine of a blender. Underneath it all, Clint thinks he hears Phil muttering, but it’s too far away to make out any words. Before Clint can steel himself enough to stand up and see what’s going on, Phil’s back, an oversized plastic cup in each hand and a bottle of water held between his arm and his side. Clint takes the cup Phil holds out to him, and then the water, and tries not to look too stupid.
“Chocolate milkshake,” Phil says, pointing to the cup Clint’s holding. “Extra protein powder. Drink.” He stares Clint down until Clint obediently takes a taste, and then a second one, and a third, because he hasn’t really eaten since Nat left and it turns out he’s fucking starving. Phil finally sits in a wingback chair across from Clint and drinks his own shake, much more slowly. It’s a dark, sludgy green, so Clint can understand why.
“Now,” Phil says, once Clint’s finished inhaling the shake and has started in on the water. He pulls four foil packets of ibuprofen from his pocket and watches while Clint takes them. “From the beginning?” It’s his Sit-rep, agent voice; Clint answers automatically.
“They were set to discharge me--the CT scans came back fine--but then Nat had to go deal with some dickhead and they didn’t have another agent there to get me back up to Manhattan and... hell, I don’t know. You know what the military’s like with paperwork and shit. They kept going around and around, and--”
“And the walls started closing in,” Phil finishes for him. Clint sighs and nods.
“It’s the first time I’ve been in a hospital since--” Clint stops and lets his attention be absorbed by peeling the label off the water bottle. Phil waits him out. “Since Nat kicked my head in. On the carrier,” Clint finally finishes.
“All right,” Phil says. “And you ended up here because...?”
“You left pretty fast yesterday,” Clint says. “It--I kept thinking about that, about why, so you were in my head and I thought, hey, at least it’s more or less the same city, and by then they were getting really fucking sick of me, and, uh, I swear it made more sense when I was thinking it in the hospital.“
“Given how much you dislike hospitals, I’m sure twas brillig and the slithy toves would have made perfect sense if it got you out of there,” Phil says, and for the first time since Clint rang the doorbell he sounds like himself, dry and amused. Clint hasn’t really forgotten how much he likes being the reason Phil Coulson is amused, but something eases off inside him regardless. “I’m glad I was home.”
“I thought about calling, but if I didn’t call, you couldn’t say no,” Clint says, which is more of a confession than he’s entirely comfortable with. He covers it by finishing off the water and flipping the bottle from hand to hand, like the admission isn’t a big deal. As diversions go, it’s pathetic. Clint can’t figure out why Phil lets him get away with it, at least not until he hears himself agreeing that he’s pretty wiped and he could use some rack time and ends up being chivvied into a bedroom that is clearly Phil’s.
“Yes, there’s a guest room, but it’s on the next floor and I’m not risking you tearing stitches when this is right here,” Phil says almost patiently. Clint takes it to mean he’s looking like shit, because that’s about the only time Phil ever gives him that much of a break.
“When was Natasha called back?” Phil says, and it is blatantly unfair how he’s using all his weight to keep Clint moving the way Phil wants him to go.
“Couple hours after you left,” Clint mutters, knowing where Phil’s going with this and too fucking tired to head him off.
“I take it you haven’t slept since,” Phil says, not even waiting for Clint to try to deny it. “Hypervigilance?”
Clint shrugs. He’d had a bad couple of weeks right after everything. This is nothing on that scale--they were dumping all kinds of shit into him to get even an hour of sleep then, no matter who was in the room with him--but he’s not unaware of the parallel track he’s on here. It’s the same thing with the food: the Jell-O had been pre-packaged, which is easy enough to tamper with if that’s in the game plan, but that tiny bit of extra security had been enough to let him choke it down.
Phil nods and keeps him moving toward the bed. “I’m not particularly fond of people coming up behind me these days.”
“Put anyone in the hospital?” Clint asks, and if his smile is a little on the black side, Phil is right there with him.
“Surprisingly enough, only the idiot who really was trying to mug me.”
Clint forgets his ribs and laughs, and then has to hang on to Phil to keep from going down. Phil doesn’t fuss at him, just eases him the rest of the way onto the bed.
“I could just crash on the couch,” Clint says, giving it one last try, but the way his breath sighs out of him as he stretches out on the bed pretty much kills that argument before it even gets off the ground.
“Lights, door, drapes?” Phil asks, as if Clint hadn’t even spoken.
“On, open, open,” Clint sighs, gradually shifting himself into the least uncomfortable position for his ribs. “Thanks.”
“I left because I didn’t think you would want--” Phil says. “We’ve... gotten past a lot, but...”
“There was a lot to get past, yeah.” Clint closes his eyes. “I’m sorry I decked you. At the Tower. I was--”
“Angry,” Phil supplies.
“Yeah.” That’s the easy answer, but it’s not untrue, Clint decides. Phil moves around the room, grabbing stuff he might need; after all the years they’ve bunked out together in places all over the world, nothing but the two of them and then Nat to rely on to stay alive, the sound is ordinary and familiar. Soothing. Clint feels everything start to unknot.
“You can always call,” Phil says from the door. His voice is quiet, as though he thinks Clint might have already fallen asleep.
“You can always stay,” Clint counters. “I’m not fucking kidding, Phil. If you--if you can stand to be in the same room with me, I’m sure as hell not going to object.” That’s a little blunter than is probably smart, but fuck it, it’s the truth. When he finally gets the nerve to open his eyes, he half-expects to see Phil’s I-humor-my-agents-when-they’re-injured-no-matter-how-it-pains-me expression, but instead Phil’s just looking back at Clint, open and transparent, with a depth Clint’s never seen before--or never let himself see before. Clint doesn’t look away, and after a few seconds, Phil nods once.
“I’m going to go make a few calls, let the Director know his prize archer isn’t lost,” Phil says. “Make sure Natasha doesn’t take hospital security apart for not stopping you.” He smiles as he steps away and Clint lies back and tries not to overthink this and where it might be going.