
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/940260.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M
  Fandom:
      The_Avengers_(Marvel_Movies), The_Avengers_-_Ambiguous_Fandom, Marvel
      Cinematic_Universe, Marvel_(Movies)
  Relationship:
      Clint_Barton/Natasha_Romanov, Clint_Barton/Phil_Coulson
  Character:
      Clint_Barton, Phil_Coulson, Natasha_Romanov, Nick_Fury, Maria_Hill, Tony
      Stark, Jarvis_(Iron_Man_movies), Extremely_brief/fleeting_mentions_of
      other_Avengers/X-Men/Fantastic_Four/MCU_characters, Jasper_Sitwell,
      Phil's_family_(OC), Barney_Barton_(extremely_fleeting_mention)
  Additional Tags:
      Implied/Referenced_Rape/Non-con, Past_Child_Abuse, Internalized
      Homophobia, Homophobia, Clint's_childhood_was_no_picnic, Neither_was
      Natasha's, Angst, Violent_Sex, Origin_Story, Budapest, Phil_Coulson_Has
      the_Patience_of_a_Saint, Eventual_Smut, Clint_Barton/Phil_Coulson_get-
      together_story
  Series:
      Part 2 of The_Honor_System
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-08-24 Words: 26202
****** The Way We Really Are ******
by Snapjack
Summary
     Phil Coulson was an Eagle Scout. Not everyone knows this about him,
     but no one is ever surprised to learn it. He tries to take that as a
     compliment, not a commentary on his perceived wholesomeness or white-
     bread-ness or whatever. But sometimes, he wants to grab people by the
     shoulders and scream, “Do you even know what being an Eagle Scout
     means? I had to learn about citizenship from the mayor! My Eagle
     Project involved snow removal in three counties! I got a goddamned
     badge in bugling!!”
Notes
     The title of this work is taken from The Mountain Goats' song
     "Against Pollution". Additionally, I quote and paraphrase extensively
     from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".
                                        
Phil Coulson was an Eagle Scout. Not everyone knows this about him, but no one
is ever surprised to learn it. He tries to take that as a compliment, not a
commentary on his perceived wholesomeness or white-bread-ness or whatever. But
sometimes, he wants to grab people by the shoulders and scream, “Do you even
know what being an Eagle Scout means? I had to learn about citizenship from the
mayor! My Eagle Project involved snow removal in three counties! I got a
goddamned badge in bugling!!”
 
Of course, he would never say this, and so he never gets to mention that the
badge in bugling was a joke. (No one got their badge in bugling, at least no
one who valued their survival in middle school.) Phil made this joke exactly
once, to a junior agent who immediately believed him and solemnly congratulated
him on the accomplishment—Phil had walked around all day in a foul mood,
wondering if the “Pathetic dork: please humor” sign apparently written on his
forehead was in Crayola or Magic Marker.
 
But when the Supreme Court decision came down in 2000, all Phil’s self-
conscious handwringing over not being one of the cool kids sort of paled by
comparison to the Much Bigger Problem he was now confronted with. Phil had
always known he was gay. He’d known since he was seven years old, trying to get
Greg Baldwin to spend time with him by showing him his knot collection (that
didn’t work, but Phil can still tie a rolling hitch in his sleep, and his
shoelaces never, ever come undone). He’d known when he was nine, watching James
MacArthur on Hawaii Five-O. He’d known since the first time he’d read the term
in his parents’ Whole Earth Catalog and thought “So that’s the name for what I
am.” The relief had been so great that he’d marched downstairs into his
parents’ study right away and, without thought or preamble, delivered the news.
Just like that: “I’m gay. Just thought you should know.” He was eleven at the
time. 
 
(To their credit, Art and Judith Coulson managed not to fall out of their
chairs, drop anything, or burst out laughing until Phil, confident his message
had been received, had gone back upstairs and shut his door. Keeping a straight
face was a paramount Coulson family value.)
 
But so anyway. He knew, and his family knew, and that, in fine Yankee
tradition, was enough to be getting along with. He went to a private school
that valued old fashioned English stiff-upper-lippiness (first kiss, Eric
Stocki—pleasant), then a boarding academy with a hell of a rowing team (first
sort-of handjob, Evan Vintner—lousy), then Bowdoin on a crew scholarship (first
sex with a woman—Alex Camber, which was surprisingly nice for all concerned,
and they parted good friends.) Then the Army, 101st Airbourne as an
intelligence officer (first sex with a man—Drew Passarelli, and to hell with
“surprisingly nice” sex, he’s never going to bother with “nice” again, this was
the gender he was meant to fuck, forever and ever amen. Go Screaming Eagles.)
Phil’s military career made him a bit of an oddball in his parents’ world (they
were professors and hung with a fairly tweedy crowd), but they gritted their
teeth and grinned and welcomed him back from every deployment with reminders of
his deeper ties to the Coulson identity: touch football on the lawn, cutthroat
crosswords every Sunday morning, U-Conn women’s basketball before all others,
forever and ever amen (Go Huskies). 
 
So in 2000, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Boy Scouts to purge
whomever they wanted from the membership, Phil was already pretty used to
separating his private from his public life. He’d served effectively and
honorably under DADT and didn’t find it terribly irksome to do so; he’d gotten
used to dodging the rules with the same lack of guilt that, say, a Catholic
feels tucking into a chicken wing on a Friday. Other people got upset. Phil
just… got along. He honestly only found it truly uncomfortable when, sitting at
home in his parents’ kitchen after a long deployment, surrounded by their
friends and wanting only to unwind with a big mug of mint tea in the peaceful
Connecticut winter, some firebrand friend of his mother’s would try to pin him
down on how he felt about putting his life on the line for a country that was
so clearly ashamed of him. How he could sleep at night. How he owed it to his
country to come out right away, make a racket, force the issue. When this
happened—and it happened more than once, with his mom’s friends—Phil would
quietly excuse himself and go upstairs to sit with a book until they were gone.
His mom would come up later, stroke his hair where he sat in the armchair. An
apology in her touch, the only sign she understood.
“Mom,” he said, once, but his voice clogged.
She looked down at him, through tears. “I have always been so proud of you.”
Then she got down on her knees and hugged him.
“Thanks, Mom.”
All they ever said on the subject.
 
But the Scouting thing. He couldn’t let it go. It irked at him, it got under
his skin, reached into his past and polluted everything he’d ever done, even as
a kid, trying to be good, trying to be the best Phil Coulson he could be. He
found himself thinking about it when he was washing dishes, standing in line,
changing his oil. And one day, while he was tying his shoes, he found himself
thinking about it so much that his hands were shaking. He was furious, he
realized. It was an unfamiliar emotion for Phil, an emotion that required no
logical fuel to exist. It simply was. (Years later, he and Bruce Banner will
have a moment over this, and it will be one of the most surreal of Phil’s
exceedingly surreal life.) And then he heard a story on the news about Eagle
Scouts returning their badges in protest, and he thought, “So that’s what I’m
meant to do.” And the relief was so great that he marched upstairs right away,
got his medal out from the top drawer, and mailed it back to B.S.A.
headquarters in Irving. Just like that. The note read: “I’m gay. Just thought
you should know.”
 
So really, Phil isn’t an Eagle Scout any more. He’s voluntarily resigned
membership in the organization. And he can’t correct people who’ve heard it
through the grapevine that he is one, because that would entail explaining more
about his personal life than he’s comfortable sharing with co-workers. So he’s
stuck. Can’t make the bugle joke because people take him seriously, can’t take
credit for the actually legitimately cool stuff he did through the organization
(to this day, there are fourteen low-income families in the back woods of
Connecticut who get their roads plowed because of Phil Coulson) because that
would feel somehow dishonest, and can’t get away from the one thing about his
past that makes him truly ashamed. He’s SHIELD’s little Eagle Scout, whether he
likes it or not. Fury is cool about it and never brings it up, but Maria Hill
is just insufferable on the topic, teases Phil about neckerchiefs and sashes
every chance she gets. One of these days he’s going to find an excuse to leave
her in the woods without a TP roll.
 
But working for SHIELD is still good. For starters, SHIELD lets him do what he
does best: cultivate teamwork, convince people used to doing things their own
way that another way might be better, get everyone pulling on the oars at the
same time. (He’s never let it get out that he was a coxswain. If Maria ever
gets ahold of that one, suicide will be the only option.) He likes it, likes
the crossword-puzzle work of finding just the right person for any given job: a
demolitions guy who can get along with an abrasive boss without pissing him
off, because the abrasive boss is actually a known double agent and they’ve
been feeding him false information for years. A navigator and mapping
specialist who’ll mesh well with a team who just lost their navigator of eleven
years, and oh-by-the-way, this team works nine hundred feet underwater. A
liaison who can talk to the mutant community without getting pulled into their
endless political in-fights (this turns out to be harder to find than any of
the others combined). And Phil is especially gratified when he gets assigned to
bring in Clint Barton, because Clint is someone he’s had his eye on for a while
now. Which makes him sound like some creepy sort of people-collector, like he’s
got a vat of chloroform and a really big cotton ball somewhere, but hear him
out, it’s really not like that. It’s about bringing someone extraordinary to a
place where they can do extraordinary things, where their unique talents are
recognized, where they can (the cliché is unavoidable) be the best that they
can be. Thomas Gray said “Full many a flower is born to bloom unseen and waste
its sweetness on the desert air”, but Phil sees it as his job to make sure as
many damn flowers as possible get seen, and noticed, and valued for what they
are. So maybe it is like collecting: you dig through layers of stuff, yard
sales and attics and all the places that things go overlooked, and maybe you
come up empty-handed, but sometimes—just sometimes—you find a beautiful and
perfect thing, a truly unique item, and you rescue it from obscurity and decay
and neglect, and you give it a home where it can be appreciated for its true
value.
 
In Clint’s case, the need for rescue is especially pronounced. He is in
terrible peril even before he meets the Black Widow, and Phil waits for weeks
to hear that a nineteen year old male with strange calluses and a snapped neck
has washed up somewhere in New Jersey, but the call never comes. After a few
months, they figure out that the call isn’t going to come, because
apparently—and this goes against all the intel they’d ever gathered about the
Black Widow—she’s taken the kid on as a partner.
“Don’t spiders tie their mates up and eat them later?” muses Hill aloud,
looking at a grainy speed-camera shot of the duo. Phil about rolls his eyes out
of his head.
“That’s praying mantises who eat their mates. And spiders who wrap up their
food,” he informs her, and the words have barely cleared his mouth before he’s
kicking himself. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Oh, that’s right, you were the Boy Scout. Tell me again, what kind of badge
did they give you for spider identification?”
Maria is from Long Island, Phil patiently reminds himself. In her world, nature
is an extinct branch of study, like phrenology or alchemy. Food comes from the
grocery store. Water comes from the tap. Trees come from…. well, Phil has got
no clue where Maria thinks trees come from, but he’s willing to bet the answer
would horrify him. He slowly releases his breath, points out a couple of
salient details in the speed camera shot (for instance: Barton’s got his elbow
resting out the rolled-down window, which indicates a certain amount of comfort
and also pretty much puts the final nail in the coffin of the “Barton’s being
held against his will” theory) and beats a hasty retreat to his office, where
he can take deep breaths, page through Barton’s file, and come up with a plan
to bring him in. It should be easy. 
 
It takes four years. Phil has to mentally reclassify Barton almost six times
during the course of those years, as the kid continually defies expectations,
reveals hidden talents. By year two of the hunt, Barton’s file is actually
thicker than Phil’s and contains notes like:
 
“Prospective asset scaled exterior of embassy guesthouse, a distance of
nineteen feet, where he obtained entry via an unsecured window (assistance from
codename Black Widow probable but unconfirmed) and removed the currency in
question from the interior safe using a combination of unknown provenance (see:
prev. parenthetical). Single Post-it note found in emptied folder, handwriting
match to Barton’s, content: ‘Now I have your bank acount (sic). Ha ha.’
Specialist Boothe informs us that the film reference (See: “Die Hard”, 1988) is
apt, though the embassy staff understandably fails to see the humor.”
 
“Prosp. asset can apparently fly light aircraft, although asset cannot yet
effectively land them.”
 
“Prosp. asset avoided interaction with SHIELD agent by using the hotel’s main
telephone line as a tightrope, a route which caused him to walk directly over
the head of the SHIELD agent in question. Recommended add ‘slackline, skilled’
to prosp. asset’s file. See: Agent Wallis, Annual Review.”
 
“Prosp. asset has apparently acquired training in advanced hand-to-hand combat.
See: Agent Wallis, Personal Medical Record.”
 
“After considerable expenditure of time and resources, it was ascertained that
prosp. asset had left country four days prior to SHIELD team’s arrival. See:
Agent Wallis, Dismissal Hearing.”
 
“Prosp. asset can now speak Russian??!!?”
 
It speaks to Phil’s state of bafflement that when (in year three of the Great
Clint Barton Chase) Maria Hill loses her cool completely and melts down in
spectacular fashion (“I HATE that little bastard! He’s a cheap fucking redneck
fucking piece of inbred fucking trailer trash from fucking East Jesus, Iowa!
He’s NOT SUPPOSED to be able to do this!”) Phil doesn’t roll his eyes or tune
her out. Instead, he puts a friendly arm around her shoulders, ignoring the
tears and snot she’s leaving on his shoulder, and escorts her to his office,
where he gives her a slug of the strong bourbon he started keeping in his desk
around year two of the Great Clint Barton Chase. Then he has one with her.  By
drink five, they’re sitting on the floor with their backs against Coulson’s
desk, passing the bottle back and forth and staring at an unspecified point on
the floor. Phil has decided that Maria isn’t that bad. She can’t help being
from a concrete compound on Long Island any more than Phil can help being an
uptight Yankee from Connecticut. It’s not a tight bond and never will be, but
they’ve developed some cohesion in the course of their three years of failing
to reel in Clint Barton. Go Team Failure. Phil says this last bit out loud, and
passes the bottle to Maria, who takes it without looking and presses it to her
lips. Then she turns, grabs Phil’s face, and presses him to her lips. Then she
sways, puts her head between her knees, and pukes all over the floor.
 
Phil is absurdly glad, in the intervening Dance of Many Paper Towels (a festive
two-handed indigenous number featuring ritual apologies and self-mortification
gestures), that Maria is the kind of drunk for whom throwing up wipes clean the
mental slate, refocusing them on higher thoughts like, “Wow, that was my
dinner” and “I’m sleepy” instead of “I just kissed my strangely aloof co-
worker” or “He didn’t kiss me back”. Phil has no desire to hurt Maria. Not any
more, at least.
 
But he does go back to his apartment, after Maria’s been bundled into bed by
her roommate and given a wastebasket and a glass of water, and sits for a long
time by himself.
                                                                                                                           
They finally get their chance at Barton in 2005. Romanov gets injured (a car
accident in Lodz) and they apparently slow down to give her time to heal,
because SHIELD actually manages to catch up with them for once. Barton goes out
for coffee and food, and Phil takes a walk in a similar direction, while Hill
and a surveillance team sit on the hotel with orders to monitor Romanov and
alert Phil if she moves. Phil subtly works it so he gets in line just ahead of
Barton for coffee. There is something about standing with the back of your neck
exposed to one of the world’s better assassins. Phil orders decaf.
“Sir, she’s watching porn on the hotel pay-per-view,” says Hill in his comm,
and Phil chokes on his first sip of coffee, turns and runs smack dab into
Barton. Barton is spreading his hands wide, looking Phil straight in the eyes,
and fuck, Barton is grinning. He’s got Phil backed against the counter, and
Phil realizes he’s just exactly where Barton wants him, not the other way
around, and furthermore that this has probably been the case since wheels-down
in Lodz.
“I understand you want a word with me,” says Barton, and Maria goes absolutely
apeshit in Phil’s ear: “Phil! Was that Barton who just said that? Are you OK?
Is the situation under control?” and Phil cannot win a staring contest with one
of the world’s better assassins AND deal with a panicky Maria Hill at the same
time, so he rips his earbud out and drops it in his coffee. It was decaf
anyway. 
“Yeah,” says Phil. “Let’s talk.”
 
The conversation takes about half an hour, which coincidentally is exactly how
long it takes Natasha Romanov to clear out of the city, leaving nothing behind
except a very embarrassed SHIELD surveillance team who, as it turns out, are so
easily distracted by a little hard-core European pornography that they can fail
to notice that the person watching the porn is not Romanov at all, but a petite
redheaded prostitute wearing Romanov’s clothes and enjoying the easiest two
hundred Euro she’s ever made. Coulson would be mad, but the sight of Maria Hill
trying to explain the lapse frankly makes up for it, and besides, they’ve got
Barton. If Fury guessed right, this means they also have Romanov, just on a
delayed timer. It’s like letting a bear cub wander into your campsite. It’s
cute and cuddly and it can sit on its back legs and it can seriously fuck up
your Dalmation, but sooner or later Mama is going to chew through your station
wagon to retrieve it. And Phil is excruciatingly aware that the only chance
they have of keeping their station wagon intact is to convince baby—and by
proxy, Mama—that camping is the way to go. To this end, he has been saving a
special file, marked “Hawk Meat”. The file is packed full of objectives, none
of them hugely strategically urgent, but all deeply appealing to the type of
person Phil’s figured Barton to be. Objectives like, “We cleaned house in
Dublin back in 1996, but this is the scumbag the Provisional IRA hired to blow
up a primary school. Put an arrow through his kneecap.” “We can’t figure out
how to remotely disable this particular type of tank that’s favored by warlords
in the former Soviet Union. Want to take a crack at it?” “We found an honest-
to-God Nazi. Go make him regret his life choices.” (Okay, that objective was
originally meant for someone else, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely that
that person will ever be found, or that if he is, that there will be any Nazis
left for him.) The file is pretty full. Phil’s had four years to fill it. 
 
And so he starts giving these objectives to Barton, and Barton just cleans the
floor with them, knocks them out one after the other with a workmanlike
efficiency that Coulson very much admires. A bare minimum of chit-chat, too,
which alarms some people but not Phil. The way Phil sees it, Barton is learning
everything he can about his (and potentially Romanov’s) new environment and
scoping it out for potential threats, and if he’s disinclined to spill personal
details to coworkers, well, that means he’s taking it seriously. If Barton were
going to fuck them over, Phil has no doubt that he would be laying down a heavy
layer of bullshit right about now, trying to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.
The fact that he doesn’t seem to give one single shit about how he comes across
is a good sign, permanence-wise. Fury doesn’t give a shit either, and he’s been
at SHIELD since shortly after the continents separated. But Phil’s good
feelings about Barton are tempered by the knowledge that Barton’s vote of
confidence will only go so far if Romanov shows up and smells something she
doesn’t like. If, if, if. If they can’t win Barton’s trust. If Barton takes the
assignment to kill Romanov at face value and bolts, doesn’t even consider
bringing her in. If he tries to bring her in and she resists. If he does bring
her in and she doesn’t like the orders they give or the way that they give them
or the coffee they serve. This is a typical Nick Fury gamble, one full of
little sub-gambles that could fail at any moment. So Phil is very careful
playing his cards (really Fury’s cards), because he is acutely aware that if he
abuses Barton’s trust, someone will probably die for it.  Phil is okay with the
idea that it might be him—he is radically not okay with the idea that it might
be Barton, because Phil brought him here and is therefore responsible for
everything that happens to him afterwards. Barton’s trust was given first—now
Phil has to earn it.  So: when Phil says he is going to meet Barton at three at
the shooting range, Phil is damn well going to be there at 3:00 P.M. E.S.T.,
and he’s not going to check his time against SHIELD’s unbelievably precise
atomic clock, either. He’s going to be there at the dot of three according to
the watch Barton uses, which is set against a burner cell phone Barton doesn’t
know SHIELD knows he has. When Phil tells Barton to look for his post-mission
evals in the morning, he places them in Barton’s mailbox before midnight,
because anything after midnight is morning. And when Phil drops by Payroll to
make sure Barton will be paid on time (because Phil can already tell that
Barton runs on pride and would say exactly nothing if he were getting screwed,
would just quietly live under a bridge eating field mice or something) and
discovers that Barton has not filled out the forms to get paid, Phil knows he
has to fill the forms out himself, and he can never let Barton know, because
again with the pride thing. This is difficult for three reasons. First, Barton
was never actually issued a Social Security number, because Barton was born in
an abandoned trailer somewhere near Cal-Mar by a mother who feared the
Winneshiek County Health and Human Services Bureau more than she feared death.
Second, Barton has no actual bank account, because you can’t open one without
government issued ID since September 11th. Thirdly and as a result of the first
and second facts, Barton has been hoarding cash money like a goddamn squirrel
all around the world since at least 2001. (Prior to 2001, Phil supposes, there
was never enough money to horde.) SHIELD knew these facts about Barton already,
but for some reason Phil had never considered them a serious obstacle to
recruitment—not compared to the more pressing challenges of A) finding Barton,
B) catching Barton, and C) trying not to get shot by Barton between steps A and
B. Now, however, he finds himself flummoxed, by a Human Resources issue of all
things. He wants to impale himself on a letter opener in shame.
 
Instead, he calls his mother. “Mom, I’ve got a problem,” he says, and lays it
all out there, leaving out the name and other classified details but still
being pretty specific about the numerous mind-bendingly frustrating obstacles
to getting Barton hired, aware that he’s never told his mother this much about
his job and completely unable to stop talking. This has never been a problem
for Phil before.
Judith Coulson does not teach Psych 303: Strategies of Selfhood for nothing.
“It sounds like you’ve got quite a talented individual there,” she says when
Phil finally runs out of steam. “To evade detection for so long while traveling
around the world developing interesting and desirable skills right under
everyone’s nose, yours included? You must be quite taken.”
Phil is silent. He hates when his mother responds to the things he hasn’t said.
Even when that ability is precisely why he called her. He can hear the scrape
of the kitchen chair across the floor that signals the end of a conversation
with his mother. “Well, that’s the doorbell,” she says, even though Phil knows
it is nothing of the sort. “Lovely hearing from you, Philip honey, must run.
Good luck with your new find. Bye bye.” 
Phil hangs up the phone and stares at his letter opener. Then he sighs deeply,
picks up the phone, and calls the Social Security Administration.
 
The problem and the blessing of having Judith Coulson for a mother is that the
truths she points out stay pointed. All of them. From “Dear, you are a lovely
human being who cannot wear yellow,” to “There is zero genetic chance that you
will retain your hair” to “I have always been so proud of you.” Now that Phil
is “taken” with Barton (why oh why couldn’t she have said “impressed”, he could
have shrugged off “impressed”, he’s “impressed” by the pyramids and good
bourbon and Diana Taurasi), he can’t be un-taken.  The word echoes in his head
like the last chord of “A Day in the Life”, twenty hands hitting ten pianos, a
note that stays struck. Now that he’s “taken”, it’s like a switch has been
flipped in his head—instead of looking at Barton and seeing an aggregate of
skills and strengths and weaknesses, an asset to be guided and focused and
managed, Phil starts noticing… things. Things like how Barton’s laugh isn’t
really a laugh at all, more like the harsh bark of a fox, and yet it’s somehow
warmer, realer, than other people’s properly identifiable laughs. How athletic
tape—plain old-fashioned athletic tape, smudged and fraying, cream-white
against blunt, tan, workman’s fingers—can be sexy. How “dishwater blonde” is
such an ugly term for a beautiful color, a color like the reflection of the sky
in the sand behind a retreating wave.  Now that Phil is “taken”, he can’t stop
noticing these things. It’s awful, and it’s all Judith Coulson’s fault, and he
tells her so. “I am going to send the bill for my therapy to you,” he threatens
over the phone, and she laughs. “Put it on my tab, son.”
 
Phil gives Barton a Social Security number for his new, completely fabricated
birthday. He hands Clint the card and doesn’t mention the sizeable back taxes
estimate that SHIELD has paid to keep Barton out of hot water with the IRS: an
unreasonable amount by any standards, it was more than Barton ever could have
owed based on his circus earnings, more than he could have owed even if they’d
counted his bank robberies as income, which thank Christ Phil’s managed to work
it so Barton is now a year younger on paper than he is in reality. Now,
Barton’s dumber and more public crimes were officially committed by a juvenile
and are therefore subject to statutes of limitations. So if some rival
department wants to knock Fury’s team out from under him, they’ll have to find
someone other than Barton to pry loose. For maybe the first time in his life,
Barton is safe. Phil feels pretty good about it. 
 
His relief is short-lived. Two days after Barton’s new birthday, he gets the
Romanov assignment.  It’s not Phil’s choice. In fact, he begs Fury not to send
Barton out after Widow, not yet, not before he’s comfortable with SHIELD, not
before he’s had a chance to develop real trust. Fury just shakes his head and
says, “Now or never, Coulson. If he’s not ours now, he never will be. I’m not
willing to lose two, three years’ worth of intel if he ditches.”
“Sir, if he ditches it won’t be bloodless. He spent nearly four years with
Widow. What do we have to counter that kind of history? He’ll kill every backup
agent we send with him to get himself and Widow out alive.”
“That’s if he ditches, Phil. But he’s not going to fuck us over. You did good
work with him, and I have faith in that. Even if you don’t.” 
Phil’s feels like he’s going to pass out. “Sir. Please. Don’t do this now.”
Fury looks puzzled. “Cheese, what the fuck. Cold feet aren’t your style.”
“Sir, I.” Phil’s mouth works a couple of times as he tries to say it. Ten years
knowing Nick Fury, he’s never said anything, and now those ten years are rising
up to wrap around his throat.
Nick’s eye narrows, and just as Phil’s about to say something truly fatal, he
holds up one admonitory hand. “Wait. Before you come down with a terminal case
of the stupids, why don’t we play it like this. You’ll go as Barton’s primary
backup. We’ll send others, but keep them at a safe distance. A very. Safe.
Distance. That way, the Wonder Twins won’t feel too cornered if they decide to
ride off into the sunset. Of course, this plan has one very big catch for you.”
“Which is?”
Fury gives him the full force of the glare. “You have to be willing to play
dead.”
 “Sir?”
“What, you want to let them kill you? I’m not losing my best agent just because
he’s temporarily misplaced his damn mind. One of your backup agents will keep a
scope on you, loaded with a blood round. If it looks like things are going
south, we’ll shoot you somewhere dramatic looking, make some noise, maybe set
off some flashbangs outside, and you will fall the fuck down, play the fuck
dead, and let Bonnie and Clyde walk the fuck over you if necessary on their way
out the door. Catch ‘em later, or say fuck it and let someone else chase them
for a goddamned change.”
Phil is now speechless for other reasons.
Fury throws his hands up.  “Am I the only one thinking here? I feel like I’m
talking to my damn self. Have you got a better idea?”
 “No, sir. I accept.”
Fury regards him with extreme irritation. “I’m so glad to hear that you accept
this truly retarded plan I’ve had to cook up for you because you just got your
period, Coulson. Now go put your goddamn poker face back on. I could win your
house right now with two deuces and a coupon from Dairy Queen.”
Phil walks back to his office, shuts his door, and proceeds to throw the
world’s quietest and most contained temper tantrum. He kicks his trash basket
across the room into the ficus plant; swipes the travel mug full of pencils off
his desk and bats it into the framed poster of Arizona cliffs on his wall; rips
out a sizeable chunk of his DC phone directory and wads it up, throws it at the
window. Then he collapses in his office chair and puts his head in his hands.
SHIELD is full of observant people. After a tactful interval, Maria knocks.
“Yeah, “ says Phil. Maria comes in, sits down.
“Rough day?” she says.
“You could say that,” Phil admits. He really doesn’t think he could do any more
damage to his reputation today than he already has.
“You know,” says Maria, “You could talk to me about it.”
And Phil, noticing once again the tiny crush Maria still thinks she’s kept
hidden, and feeling like the world’s biggest coward, suddenly sees the
opportunity to solve two problems at once.  And he might be shooting his career
in the foot, and he might be a horrible human being, but he just doesn’t have
the energy to keep from hurting Maria Hill any longer.
“Maria, I’ll take you up on that offer,” he says. “Close the door.”
 
She takes it like a champ, Maria does. Not even a flicker on her face as he
delivers what he knows to be a gut punch (which itself is a tell, but whatever.
Not everyone was raised in an emotionally stunted family of Yankees whose poker
faces had poker faces, and Maria’s frozen deer-in-headlights thing is actually
kind of sweet. It lets you know she cares.) What Phil isn’t prepared for is
what happens when he’s done delivering the news (“I’m gay. Just thought you
should know.”) and Maria doesn’t get up and leave. Instead, she exhales a deep
wobbly breath, and her smile is wide and teary and totally unexpected, and she
leans across the desk and puts her hand on Phil’s, and says, “I always knew,
deep down. And I want you to know I’m so glad you finally said something, and
I’m honored you trusted me enough to say it to me.”
Holy shit. Maria looks like a stone-cold military-grade Charlie’s Angel, but is
in fact an Italian grandma from Long Island. Phil swallows, a totally
unexpected lump in his throat, and blinks, hard. He never realized he wanted an
Italian grandma from Long Island until he had one, apparently. And then he’s
really glad he had Maria close the door, because then no one else has to know
that Phil Coulson and Maria Hill once shared an over-a-desk hug that was
completely undignified, totally chaste, and involved more than a little
snottiness on Phil’s part. Whatever. They’re even now.
 
He’s very, very glad Maria has his back the next day. Because Operation:
Ladyhawke (who names these things, is what Phil wants to know) is both the best
and the worst thing it could possibly be: a success. No one has to play dead.
No one, in point of fact, dies. Barton and Romanov reunite with a smoothness
that leads Phil to suspect they had planned it all along. He never was truly
ahead of Barton, not really. Phil is okay with that—he’d be a pretty poor
talent scout if he always had to be the smartest guy in the room. But what he
finds himself unsettled by is the way Barton and Romanov… are. Together. It’s
like watching Nureyev and Fontaine, dark and light, twined together, on fire
with sex and passion and everything that makes the great world spin. And that’s
just how they eyefuck each other through the one-way mirror that lines a SHIELD
interrogation room. He can’t even imagine how it’s going to be when they’re
allowed to be in the same room together. 
“Can you imagine how it’s going to be when they’re in the same room together?”
he complains, tie loosened, to Maria, who is keeping up with him in the beer
and pretzel department, watching the Capitals lose and riding the backwash of
jet lag that followed them back to D.C. Maria is squirming with pleasure, it’s
indecent how much she hates the Capitals, or maybe this is just girlish glee
over getting to talk boys with Phil. Far from being heartbroken (which would
have been a little flattering), she’s apparently decided to play Grace to his
Will. All night long, she’s been giddy over the set-up possibilities, asking
him whether he likes twinks or bears (hearing Maria use these terms nearly
makes Phil spit his beer), making sympathetic noises over the Barton/Romanov
spectacle. Also, she’s done his colors against a beer coaster. (Phil is
apparently a winter.) At this point, Phil is done trying to figure her out:
he’s just riding with it.
“Maybe it’s overcompensation?” Maria helpfully suggests, then rockets out of
her chair., sloshing beer everywhere. “YEAH! YEAH! POUND THAT LITTLE FUCKER!!!
INTO THE WALL! HE’S A PUSSY! GET HIS FUCKING FACEMASK OFF!” On the screen,
Zubrus is having a very bad day, brought to him courtesy of an angry Russian on
the New Jersey Devils. (“Say it with me, kids,” an old SHIELD instructor of
Phil’s used to say. “An angry Russian can happen to anyone. When it happens to
you, try to remember you are part of a long tradition of people having very bad
days!”)  Maria sits back down, takes another bite of her pretzel, talks around
it. “You know, like he’s really gay but he acts really straight to distract
attention from it?”
Phil just looks at her.
“Alright, no,” says Maria. “He’s totally into her. You’re screwed.”
“Thanks,” says Phil, and they turn their attention back to the TV.
 
Maria’s not completely wrong, is the thing. Watching Barton and Romanov
practically scale each other after their first assignment together, Phil can’t
shake the feeling that their relationship is, at least partially, staged for
the benefit of everyone watching. Maybe it’s a kink of theirs, maybe they’re
insecure, maybe they’re just fucking with everyone’s heads, but Phil is pretty
sure that whatever’s going on behind closed doors between those two looks
nothing like the scene currently happening in Ambulance # 6. Barton’s got
Romanov up against the side of the driver’s compartment, moaning his name
theatrically, her nails in his hair, his hands all over her ass. Barton’s
already been cleared by medical, Romanov never had anything wrong with her in
the first place, two med techs are standing around drooling and Phil knows for
a fact the driver’s got better places to be. He clears his throat, waits for
Romanov to tear herself away from Barton’s mouth and fix Phil with that icy,
cat-like stare. Go ahead, sister, Phil thinks. I work with Nick Fury, I can get
stared at all day long.
“Sixty percent of detail is lost in the first thirty minutes,” he tells them.
“Your memories will be flawed by tonight and useless for testimony by tomorrow.
That’s not acceptable, so I’ve prepared digital recorders for you both. You can
give them to the secretaries for transcription. I don’t waste my assets’ time
with typing,” he says, handing them the recorders. “Don’t waste mine with
this.” He walks off, not looking back. He’s thrown down gauntlets before, but
never to a dyad of stone-cold assassins whom he’d just interrupted between
first and second base. Perhaps some chamomile tea tonight.
 
He waits twenty-four hours before going to see if the reports have been turned
in. Tries not to fidget while the secretary searches her transcription database
and then prints two medium-length documents. Takes them back to his office,
sits down, starts to read. They’re perfect. Detailed, precise, dovetailing
smoothly at all the crucial points of the operation, careful not to overstate
matters or get caught in logical contradictions, Barton’s and Romanov’s reports
form a single seamless braid of information and logic, a brick bridge you could
roll a battalion of court cases over. Phil slowly releases a breath he hadn’t
realized he’d been holding. He’d thought Barton wasn’t ready, but he was only
seeing half the picture. Barton is one spiral of a double helix, fifty percent
of a tango, half a raw egg. This is an entirely different animal. This is a
born team. He can work with this.
 
The next mission they share, Barton and Romanov again start making out like
teenagers the second the assignment’s completed—but this time, as Barton
carries Romanov off the scene like Tarzan hauling Jane, he pauses in front of
Phil. “Tape recorders?”
Phil nods, hands Barton his recorder; Barton swivels so Romanov, hanging over
his shoulder, can take hers. Then they’re gone.
 
The next assignment, Barton stops long enough to say, “Batteries are low,” as
he trades Phil the filled-up recorders for some fresh ones. Three words.
Progress.
 
“I don’t know how you deal,” Maria says, watching Barton and Romanov from
across the cafeteria. Romanov is laying on Barton like he’s a hammock, their
shared tray on her lap and her feet up on a neighboring table. She is feeding
herself and Barton by turns: a bite for her, a bite for him. There are three
unoccupied tables around them in every direction. “It’s like they’re in high
school.”
“Yeah,” says Phil. “It’s different.”
 
Different, Phil decides, is not a bad thing. Watching junior agents and support
staff scatter around Barton and Romanov like minnows making way for a pair of
sharks, he wants to laugh at the brilliance of the technique. When you make
everyone around you that uncomfortable, you glide along in a smooth and
uninterrupted bubble of isolation. Barton doesn’t get hassled by Human
Resources to turn in TERs. Secretaries don’t ask the Widow to help set up the
party tray for Tammy who’s retiring from IT. No one asks them to buy raffle
tickets. It’s genius. Phil explains this over festive holiday drinks with Hill
and Sitwell, and they both look at him funny. Well, Sitwell looks at him the
way he always does, but Jasper is wearing a Santa hat with built-in antlers,
and this makes it funny.
“What?” he finally says.
“You like them,” says Hill.
 “I hardly know them,” says Phil.
“Yeah, but you like them. You’re starting to become one of them. The glamorous
pod people. Super Secret Sexy Spymasters. Da-da, da-da-da-da…” Hill trails off
into the Mission: Impossible theme, and Jasper sings right along with her.
They’re making finger guns and everything. Phil cannot believe these are his
friends.
 
“So what do you think of Barton and Romanov?” asks Fury.
“I like them,” says Phil.
“Good. ‘Cause you’re getting permanently assigned to them,” says Fury. “They
are officially your assets. Congratulations. Name ‘em whatever you want, as
long as it’s Strike Team Delta.”
“Thank you, sir. Where would you like us to be headquartered?”
“Frankly? I’d like it to be the Helicarrier, but we don’t have clearance yet
from OSHA to live here full-time, something about the noise levels, I don’t
know, so you’ll have to get them a room in the barracks back at DC.”
“Just one, sir?”
“Oh, what the hell, Cheese. Nineteen different people have already told me we
ought to sell video. So what if Barton and Romanov like to get their freak on
to celebrate a job well done? Jasper Sitwell’s celebratory tradition is eight
tequila shots and a cigar, for God’s sake. At least your team’s chosen method
is aerobic. Put ‘em wherever you want to, Phil, I truly don’t give a shit.” And
walks off.
Some people get sweaters for Christmas. Some people get golf clubs. Phil gets a
dyad of stone-cold assassins who are sleeping together and hate everyone who
isn’t them.
 
He feels pretty good about it.
 
His relief, as always, is short-lived. There are starting to be… rumblings.
Rumors. Nothing particularly definite, nothing with a name or a face to it
other than, “There are these people. We don’t know exactly what they are.”  A
group of them emerge after a botched private spaceflight and move into a
converted warehouse together, calling themselves The Fantastic Four and
fighting some sort of incredibly costly and destructive battle against their
initial investor. Phil is pretty sure this is the life cycle of a garage band,
but Fury seems to think it’s significant. The mutant community disavows the
Four and furthermore registers its “extreme offense at being accused of
involvement whenever anything out of the ordinary occurs.” (“Once, just once,”
Fury moans, “I want to find the thing that that doesn’t light those people’s
tampon strings. Kittens? Hot cocoa? Hell, I’d personally airdrop a couple dozen
bales of weed over the Xavier Institute if I thought it would get me five
goddamn minutes of peace and quiet.”) And the anonymous tipline SHIELD set up
as an early-warning system (fliers posted around university chemistry
departments, on military bases, anywhere weapons designers talk shop) is
getting an unusually high number of calls talking about something called “gamma
radiation”, which is still theoretical but has the potential to get
practical—and dangerous—within a few years. On top of all of this, the CIA has
just turned up a base in the Bolivian jungle that doesn’t look like any drug or
weapons lab they’ve encountered before. There are no personnel, and not much
equipment beyond a few crates of ammunition, but those crates have a logo on
them, a logo that Phil looks at exactly once before he has to sit down and put
his head between his knees. What really bothers him is this: when the CIA got
there, the lights were on.
 
So all in all, it’s a good time to be training. Phil keeps Strike Team Delta in
the gym for four hours a day and in the classrooms for the other six (SHIELD
days are ten hours long. It keeps the riff-raff out). They learn languages and
weapons systems and tactics and theory, and history, history, history. It is
impossible to run an operation in a foreign country unless you have a deep and
nuanced understanding of its culture and its people—SHIELD’s grasp of this
simple fact is why its operations have a 23% higher success rate than that of
the CIA or the armed forces. Barton needs education from the ground up (he got
about as far as “I do not like them, Sam I am” before dropping out of school)
but Romanov needs an altogether subtler form of help. The Red Room wasn’t so
much a school as a testing ground for experimental forms of hypnosis, séance,
occultism—whatever nonsense was currently in vogue with the Soviet leadership
that minute. Phil honestly wishes they’d just shown them propaganda films
instead; it would be easier to weed out the truth from the lies. As it stands,
Romanov will follow along beautifully for eight or ten units on the rules of
modern warfare and then will come out with, “There is no such thing as the
American Red Cross. We talked to Clara Barton through a medium and she told us
her angels of death would sweep the battlefield and execute the cowards who
were too weak to fight.” And then they’ll have to stop everything and backtrack
until they can find and pick up the missed stitch that is causing her whole
grasp of the Geneva Convention to unravel. It’s time-consuming, and
frustrating, and terribly sad, and the worst part of all is the wounded pride
that keeps Romanov on the defensive, sometimes storming out of the classroom
yelling things like, “I know what I heard! I know what I saw! There were
witnesses! Conclusive proof!”
On the up side, with Romanov hogging the instructional spotlight, Barton is
flourishing—compared to her outbursts, his sub-literacy garners little
embarrassing attention, and he chugs along stoically, making steady progress.
Phil fights hard to make sure he gets into classes with the best visual
lecturers SHIELD has, which isn’t easy with all the other handlers advocating
for their own assets. He has a whole new appreciation for mothers navigating
the Manhattan preschool system. He keeps Barton supplied with fresh tapes and
batteries and colored index cards and highlighters and Post-it notes, and makes
sure to give exactly the same things to Romanov. He also asks the custodians to
misroute a few boxes of trashy magazines from the medical offices to the
recycling bin nearest Barton and Romanov’s barracks, and if he happens to drop
a couple dozen cheap Captain Americas on top of the box, so be it. The box is
gone in the morning, Barton suddenly displays an appalling depth of
conversational knowledge about How to Blow His Mind Tonight (which he deploys,
at high volume, in the cafeteria), and Romanov is actually spotted painting her
nails. Mission accomplished.
 
“Your team needs a leash on,” Hill informs him abruptly in the HR offices,
where he is trying to resolve a minor bureaucratic nightmare involving travel
reimbursements for a mutant who can teleport but prefers to fly first class
because of the hot towels. 
“Pardon?” says Phil.
“Barton specifically,” says Hill. “I caught him in the ventilation system the
other day. He’ll tell you it wasn’t him, but I saw one of those neon purple
bootlaces he likes dangling through the ceiling vent. And then it moved and was
pulled up.”
“Did you say anything to him?” says Phil, feeling the throbbing behind his left
eye that always accompanies these picayune little turns into the surreal.
“I said, Barton, you redneck motherfucker, I know it’s you and if you do not
get the fuck out of the women’s locker room in the next thirty seconds I will
tase your balls right through this vent so help me God.”
Phil closes his eyes. “And what did he say?”
“Nothing,” says Hill. “But he was laughing when he left, I could tell ‘cause
the whole vent was shaking.”
Phil goes and has a little talk with Strike Team Delta about not scaring the
other agents unnecessarily when becoming acquainted with alternate means of
egress and exit to given rooms. Specifically, he has a word with Agent Romanov.
No need to bother Barton with this.
“Sir, how did you know it was me?” asks Romanov as he gets up to leave.
Phil sighs. “You’re in the middle of a prank war. He’s three up but you’re
gaining, you would never accidentally let a lace dangle through a vent and
neither would he, and while your laugh is actually silent, Barton’s sounds like
a tractor backfiring.”
This gets a smile from Romanov, one of the first she’s ever shown Phil. Rather,
on her, it’s a smile. On anyone else it might constitute a grimace.
 
After this, it’s totally over. Phil is so onto them. They may have the rest of
SHIELD fooled, but Phil has seen their living quarters while they were out, and
he knows for a fact that James Bond never had that many marshmallow guns. Or
Barbie dolls. Or Legos. If Romanov and Barton want to continue playing Ice King
and Queen of the Archipelago, that’s fine with Phil—but he knows better. So
now, when the mission is over and Hawkeye and Widow have begun their usual
party trick of trying to climb into each other’s mouths, Phil has no
compunction about walking up to them and thwapping Barton in the head with a
rolled-up briefing to get their attention. “Hey,” he says. “You notice anything
odd about that military base?”
Barton tears himself away long enough to look at the charred and smoking rubble
Phil is gesturing towards. “I swear it was on fire when we got here, boss.”
“Come take a walk with me,” Phil says, and walks away towards the ruins. The
secret to getting anyone to follow you, including a dyad of stone-cold
assassins whom you’ve just interrupted between first and second base, is not to
look back to confirm that they are following you. Phil stands at the edge of
the damage zone until the crunch of boots behind him makes Barton’s presence
known, and the total lack of any crunching whatsoever, Romanov’s.
“Where are the flagpoles?” says Phil speculatively.
“Interesting,” says Barton, his eyes narrowing.
“There’s the guard hut,” Romanov points out, indicating a charred heap of
rubble with a low post for the swing-gate next to it.
“There’s the bomb barriers.”
“Way over there’s the fueling station.”
“And right here’s where the landing pad was.”
“So where are the flagpoles?” This time it’s Romanov who says it, and they
stand around contemplating for a few more seconds before Phil speaks up.
“Kids, what do you call a military base without a flag?”
“Not a military base at all,” says Barton. “Sir.”
Phil puts his sunglasses on. The Wonder Twins aren’t the only ones who can play
the super-spy game. “Want to go exploring with me?”
 
It takes about forty-five minutes before they find something with the logo on
it—a charred food service item, of all things. Phil turns the plate over, wipes
the soot off.
“Hawkeye, Widow, over here.” he says. His voice sounds tinny and distant even
to him. Clint doesn’t know what he’s looking at, but for once Phil doesn’t need
to explain. Natasha knows. Seems the Red Room was good for something.
 
After this, Strike Team Delta really hits its groove. Natasha is pleased to
contribute knowledge that, for once, isn’t questioned by anyone, and settles
down in the classroom. Clint is thrilled to be hunting seriously bad guys, and
both of them begin to work with Phil beyond the parameters of individual
missions, looking for a bigger picture. They’re not single-focus by any means;
sometimes months go by without the whisper of a hint of a rumor, and that’s
OK—but they’re always, quietly, on the lookout for it. Bases that aren’t
obviously connected to any government. Aircraft hangars without any aircraft in
them. Armories without any weapons. And always, always, the sense that the
structures have only just been deserted, moments before SHIELD got there.
Sometimes they find a logo. Sometimes they don’t. Clint and Natasha always
bring the item to Phil first when they do, and he passes it to Fury, who passes
it to God-knows-who. Phil suspects they’re housing a warehouse full of this
crap, Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark style. He also wishes that the underwater team he
recruited a navigator for all those years ago would hurry the hell up and find
someone, because it’s looking like if someone ever gets found, there will be
plenty of Nazis left for him.
 
In 2008, two things happen. First, a gigantic green… individual shaped like a
plastic action figure shows up on a college campus in Virginia and engages in
a… lively debate with a small military detachment headed by a general whom
SHIELD always regarded as a crackpot, but whom, they’ve now got to begrudgingly
admit, may have had a point when he came to them a few years ago all arm-wavy
over gamma radiation and out-of-control scientists. About a week later, the
gigantic green… individual shows up again in Harlem, this time having a
pronounced difference of opinion with a gigantic yellow…individual, whom (it
turns out) was a former associate of the aforementioned general and was part of
a completely off-the-books series of biological weapons experiments run by the
very same general, who only came running to SHIELD for help when the (now
gigantic and colorful) victims of his experiments escaped his control. (SHIELD
reverts, gratefully, to its former view of said general.) This all puts Nick
Fury in a bit of a mood for most of… July.
 
The second thing which happens is Tony Stark’s months-long kidnapping, which
creates a supply-chain problem for SHIELD until he escapes, and suddenly it’s a
different kind of supply-chain problem, because now Tony Stark doesn’t want to
make weapons any more. Which Phil personally understands, even though it’s not
helping with Nick Fury’s mood problem.
 
Clint agrees. “Come on, leave the guy alone,” he complains around a mouthful of
Weetabix, gesturing towards the press conference being endlessly re-run on the
small television in Phil’s office. Phil glances up, takes in first Tony Stark
(sitting on the floor with a burger and most of the AP) and then Clint
(sprawled out on the sofa, shoveling in fuel). Phil likes to believe he keeps
the television in his office so he can be kept abreast of the kind of world
news that isn’t on DARPAnet. And because Phil wants to continue believing this,
he has never once mentioned to his mother that he keeps a television in his
office.
 
Clint apparently reaches his tolerance for the Tony Stark Show and reaches for
the remote. Because the remote is on Phil’s desk and Clint is comfortably
ensconced with his cereal bowl on his chest (he’s like one of those otters that
float around on their backs smashing oysters open with rocks), this involves a
very long reach on Clint’s part.
“Ennngh,” whines Clint, making gimme-fingers at the remote. His face is
pathetic.
Phil moves the remote father away. Just to see what Clint will do.
Give up, apparently. Clint relaxes back into the cushions, shrugging. “Fine,
whatever. Have it your way.”
The silence goes on for another ten minutes. Then the remote goes flying across
the room and thwacks Clint in the side of the head. Clint, chewing happily now,
selects “Dora the Explorer”. They don’t talk (except for an occasional choral
“Lo hicimos!”) but the silence is warm.
 
Fury calls Phil into his office late that Sunday evening. (SHIELD weeks are six
days long with a rotating day off. It keeps the riff-raff out.) When Phil gets
there, Fury has already poured drinks. The sun is setting, and Fury’s entire
office is bathed in orange light. There’s a whole stack of folders on Fury’s
desk, another two stacks on the drinks cabinet. There’s a forth stack of banded
folders teetering on top of the paper shredder, and Phil finds he actually has
to move a stack of accordion folders to sit down. He sets it on the floor. Next
to the six other stacks.
“Reorganizing, boss?” he asks.
“Refreshing my mind,” says Fury. “And I have done about all the refreshing I
can stand for one day. I need a fresh pair of eyes.”
Phil looks around at the folders. Some of them haven’t been updated since at
least the seventies. They switched to powder blue folders in the eighties. “How
fresh, boss?”
“You’ll do,” says Fury, handing Phil his Scotch and sitting down. “Cheese, I
have been sitting here for the last few days trying to figure out who the ten
most extraordinary people on earth are who are also on our payroll. And do you
know what I have discovered?”
“What’s that, boss?” says Phil, smiling and leaning back in his chair, swirling
the Scotch.
Fury sighs. “We do not have the ten most extraordinary people on earth on our
payroll. We don’t even have the top five. We used to have four of them, back in
the fifties.”
Phil immediately begins counting them up, sticking his fingers out from the
glass. “There’s Lemsky.”
“Obviously. Katz,” says Fury, and Phil adds a finger.
“Garbo,” they say together, and they both grin. They’ve played this game
before. “Figure out who the fourth is yet?”
“You, sir?” says Phil, because Nick Fury turned forty-five last week and is
sore about it.
“Funny, Cheese. Say, did you get that Rogaine coupon I clipped for you?”
“Depends. Did you get that dome wax I left in your memo tray?”
“Hey, brothers can wear this and it looks good. Bald white men, on the other
hand, look like their own peckers. With freckles.”
Phil nearly snorts his Scotch. “Please don’t ever say that again.”
“Why, am I turning you on?”
“Oh, uncontrollably so,” says Phil. “Did I ever told you my dad went bald at
thirty?”
“Well then you’re doing pretty well, aren’tcha, Junior? Now shut up and drink,
you’re messing up my train of thought.”
“Yessir,” says Phil.
“Now, where was I…. right, the ten most extraordinary people in the world.”
“Right. You were only up to the four we had in the sixties.”
“Right, of which you could only name two. You keep working on it, I’m sure
you’ll come up with it eventually. Anyway the ten most extraordinary people.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and it occurred to me that ten? Is
far too great a number.” Fury gets up, goes to the drinks cabinet, unscrews the
bottle, refills his, holds it out to Phil. Phil shakes him off. Not yet.
“As I was saying. Ten is far too great a number. Do you know what I’m getting
at?”
“Not yet.”
“For a team, Phil! For a team to work effectively together, it has to be small
enough that everyone knows each other, but not so large that sub-groups form.
Ten is too big. Three is—”
“Too small,” Phil finishes for him. “So what’s the perfect number?”
“Five,” Fury tells him. “Or, I dunno, maybe six if the people are just right.
But no bigger than seven at the most. Anyway, I’m still working that out. I’ve
been researching all the best teams we’ve ever had, the best teams the other
guys have, teams from history. Did you know there were only four guys in the
room when they invented the hand grenade?”
“Yeah? How many were there after they invented it?” asks Phil around the rim of
his glass.
“Not the point. Point is, all the best teams in the world have historically
numbered between four and seven people. Or at least, they have been according
to what I’ve been reading over the past six days.” Fury sits back in his chair,
looking tired. “More than that, I can’t narrow down. But either way, it’s all
just so much hot air right now, and you wanna know why, Phil?”
“Why is that, sir?”
“Because we only have three right now.”
“Three, sir?”
“Of the most extraordinary people in the world.”
Phil blinks. “We do?” Three seems a high number to him, but then again he spent
twenty minutes today talking to a disbursement clerk who didn’t understand why
agents couldn’t use blanks at the firing range. Right now, Phil isn’t sure
SHIELD has three of the best of anything. 
Fury nods. “We do.”
“Who are they, sir?”
“I’m getting to that,” Fury says. “But first I want you to imagine for a moment
that you’re me. And your right-hand man, that’s you, starts telling you about a
possible terrorist network that up until a few months ago? We thought was
consigned to the freaky books of history. But besides that, you got a whole
plateful of other issues to deal with. You’ve got scientists experimenting on
themselves with a form of radiation that no one understands. You’ve got mutants
everywhere bending the laws of physics. You’ve got astronauts coming back from
space with strange physical properties that medicine can’t explain. Can you
smell what’s coming, Coulson?”
“World’s getting stranger, boss.”
“Yes. And do you know what the Good Doctor said about that?’
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, sir?”
“Exactly.” Fury sits back in his chair, tents his fingers. “So tell me, Cheese.
Based on raw ability. Who’d you want on your team?”
Phil shifts in his seat, leans forward to look over the folders spread out
everywhere. “On my team of the weird, you mean?”
“Precisely. And think outside the building. Imagine we’re in a hiring mood.”
Phil rolls up his sleeves, starts ticking them off on his fingers. “There’s a
mutant I like the look of, but she’s not a fan of humans and her politics are
murky at best.”
“You talking about that blue chick?”
“Yeah, her. Goes by Mystique.”
“Mystique, I like that. Sounds like an exotic dancer.”
“Yeah, her. Can turn into anybody, it’s a hell of a party trick. Clothes and
everything. We got her on our side, we could eat the CIA’s breakfast. Let’s
see. There’s what’s-his-name, the head scientist from the astronaut crew.”
“Reed Richards?”
“Yeah, him. He’s not good with people, but neither is she so they’d work well
together.”
“You recruiting me a team of assholes, Coulson?”
Phil shrugs. “Assholes work best in the company of other assholes, sir. It’s
why we’ve been friends for so long.”
Fury laughs, and the conversation stretches long into the night, and pictures
and files get spread out and tacked on the walls and argued over and agreed
upon, and by the morning something extraordinary has started to take shape on
the walls of Fury’s office. A team.
 
“There’s just one problem,” Fury says.
“Problem, sir?” Phil says. He’s bleary from lack of sleep, and the Scotch has
left a dry residue in his brain.
“Yep. Team’s too small.” Fury gestures at the wall on which three pictures are
taped, the only three they could finally agree on. A NORAD radar image of Iron
Man, with a list of possible leads on his identity (the list consists of
“Stark.”). A grainy cell-phone shot of the green guy who laid the smackdown on
General Ross’s group. A low-value Captain America trading card with a big
question mark written in Sharpie across its face. “Three.”
Phil blinks. “Yeah. Three.”
Fury snaps his fingers. “But I forgot! You never figured out who our three
extraordinary people in SHIELD are!” He goes to his desk, opens the drawer,
roots around. Comes up with three pictures, goes to the wall, puts them up with
a flourish.
 
It’s Romanov. Barton. And Phil.
 
When Phil is done soundlessly working his mouth open and shut, a whole lot of
sounds come out. Mainly “Take that DOWN,” and “I insist you take that down” and
“This isn’t funny,” despite the fact that it obviously is to some people in the
room. When Fury is done laughing himself sick, he thwacks Phil on the shoulder
with a hand that feels like a steel beam.
“Naw, Phil, you’re part of the team whether you like it or not. I knew it the
moment I started planning this project. You were the only non-negotiable
member. Do you know why?”
“Because I failed to recycle in a past life?”
“Because you are something very special. You are the chemical stabilizer that
can make any combination of people work and play nicely with each other. You
think any other handler would have responded to this challenge—which, I remind
you, was a team based purely on abilities—with a first-instinct pairing of a
mutant who hates us and Reed Richards? No, they would not. They would have
cherry-picked the easiest-to-manage Type-A motherfuckers SHIELD’s got and then
spent the rest of their careers making themselves look good and wasting my
time.”
Phil wipes his hands over his face. “Oh, God, I’ve done this to myself.”
“Damn straight, so no backing out now. Face it, Cheese,” Fury says as they
stare—Fury with pride, Phil with something approaching nausea—at the wall.
“These are superheroes. And you, my friend,” and he claps Phil on the back
again, hard enough to loosen fillings, “You’re Supernanny.”
 
The title sticks. Fury sends Phil to feel Stark out and determine if he A) is
Iron Man or B) knows who is. He gives Phil two weeks for the fact-finding
mission, but Phil knows within fifteen seconds of meeting Stark that A) yes he
is, and B) he’s dying for people to know it. Stark is neither given to subtlety
nor humility, and everything about him, from his handshake, to his eye contact,
to his smirk, screams catch-me-if-you-can. To wit:
The two known sightings of Iron Man match up perfectly with Stark’s no-shows at
a gala for the Jimmy Fund and a planned appearance to ring the opening bell of
the NYSE.
The candy-apple red and Christmas-ribbon gold of the suit are an exact match to
the coloring of the Ford Flathead that Stark bought at public auction in 1996.
Oh, and if you park on Quintanilla Boulevard a bit north of Stark’s mansion and
wait until night falls, you can watch him doing his test flights over the
ocean. Phil does not mention his findings to Fury right away. The pool at the
Malibu Hyatt is really, really nice.
 
So is Pepper Potts, even when she’s doing her best to keep Phil from talking to
Stark—and her best is quite effective. Phil is thinking it may actually take
the full two weeks to get any face time, but then Obadiah Stane initiates
proceedings on what’s got to be one of the more hostile takeover attempts in
corporate history, and Phil finds himself considerably closer to the action. As
in, helping Miss Potts pick glass out of her hair in the driveway. Stark
saunters up wearing the suit he won’t publicly admit to controlling for another
two days, flips up the face guard and says, “So I understand you wanted a word
with me.” And Phil gets his face time, right then and there, just the three of
them under a glimmering night sky in Stark’s driveway, exhausted and covered in
glass and concrete dust. They don’t say very much, but the silence is warm.
 
“It’s him,” are Phil’s first words to Fury when he gets back to SHIELD. “And
he’s not going to play ball with us.”
Fury grins. “Just wait and see, Cheese. Just wait and see.”
 
Fury has always played the long game. For two years following his and Phil’s
late-night brainstorming session, they keep their ears to the ground for heavy
green rumblings, occasionally kick Stark a contract for something interesting
and non-weaponizable (the shields on the Helicarrier are all his), and continue
scanning the shrinking Arctic ice cap for any traces of survivable wreckage.
For their part, Strike Team Delta continue their quiet search for a network
that seems to have gone ominously silent. There is one point when they find
nothing for nineteen months and Phil begins to wonder if maybe the entire
network has imploded from within, splintered due to internal power struggles,
or perhaps been absorbed into another global terrorist organization, an Al-
Qaeda or a Hamas or a Shining Path or any one of countless others. Then comes
Budapest, and a mission so fucked it should have come with lube (Clint’s
phrasing, not Phil’s). The bank they’re supposed to infiltrate turns out not to
be a laundromat for terrorist money at all, but the bank across the street sure
is, and when those bankers notice the disguised surveillance van parked outside
their neighbors’ service entrance and the jumpsuited SHIELD agents milling
around inside empty offices doing things that janitors don’t, they make the
reasonable, if premature, assumption that SHIELD is preparing to launch an
assault from the (perfectly law-abiding) bank across the street and send an
all-hands-on-deck alert that literally has bad guys breaking out the windows of
their own bank to rappel down into the streetlike termites pouring out of a
nest. Clint and Natasha are stuck in the bottom of the canyon-like street,
facing wave after wave of astoundingly fit bankers who are sliding down ropes
but can still shoot, which points to a level of training that your average
illiterate teenager just does not receive when he signs up with Al Qaeda.
“WHO ARE THOSE GUYS!” squawks Clint in Phil’s ear, and Phil, frantic as he is,
will be damned before he lets Clint Barton down on a reference in the middle of
a firefight.
“I don’t know, Butch, but they’re beginning to get on my nerves,” he says,
driving at about three hundred miles an hour across the Széchenyi Chain Bridge
in the bicycle lane with the (entirely fake) police siren on and the emergency
lights flashing. Because he is driving a lime-green Dacia rental, this draws
odd looks.
“We are losing cover,” says Widow into Phil’s ear. “How far away are you, Nanny
Jo?” and it’s a measure of how much they’ve grown as a team that Phil doesn’t
even bat an eye as he’s screaming down the Belgrád Parkway and unbuckling his
seatbelt, the better to crane around while still doing about two hundred miles
and hour and unlock all the doors in the Dacia, which has not got automatic
locks, stupid, stupid, stupid. “Four hundred yards, children,” he says, “Hold
tight,” and busts through two layers of traffic barriers and onto a sidewalk to
get to where Hawkeye and Widow are pinned down behind the surveillance van. He
brakes just enough for them to hurl themselves into the Dacia and then rabbits
down the nearest entrance into the law-abiding-bank’s underground parking
garage, where at least they’re out of the range of small-arms fire, though he
doesn’t give the bad guys long before they produce a rocket launcher. They seem
like those kind of folks. When he screeches to a halt one level down, Hawkeye
and Widow have already reloaded all their weapons, checked and reholstered
Phil’s sidearm for him, and are checking the batteries on their comms, because
that’s how Team Delta rolls. (Phil is going to make them all s’mores when they
get home, see if he doesn’t.)
“Strike Team Delta, what’s your twenty?” asks Jasper Sitwell (now a handler
himself in charge of the newly minted Strike Team Foxtrot) on the emergency
frequency, and they peel themselves out of the car and race for the stairwell.
“Coming up,” Phil barks into his comm. “What floor do you want us on?”
“Sixth would be nice if you could get there,” says Jasper.
“On it.”
Hawkeye and Widow climb stairs faster than most people can run downhill, and
Phil, two steps behind them, is so proud he could cry—elevators are for out-of-
shape wimps who don’t mind getting shot the moment the doors open by nice comfy
assassins who’ve been practicing their breathing exercises and drawing a bead
on the seam of the doors for twenty minutes before your lazy ass arrived on
Floor Gameover—and Strike Team Delta arrives at the sixth floor just as the bad
bankers across the street do, in fact, locate their rocket launcher.
 
Budapest is, in short, a disaster, one which ends up costing SHIELD nearly
three years of intelligence-gathering, not to mention the permanent injuries
sustained by three of its agents in the rocket attack. (Jasper Sitwell never
regains full hearing in his left ear following the explosion of the room above
him, and the two assets on Strike Team Foxtrot both lose a lot of lung capacity
after inhaling superheated air.) Clint, Phil, and Natasha are all relatively
OK, having been blown back into the stairwell when the explosion happened on
the seventh floor, but the mission quickly becomes a just-get-our-folks-out-of-
here-alive mission after that, and all the bad guys get away. Nick Fury
literally bribes an entire Hungarian tabloid to allow SHIELD to publish a cover
story which is promptly ripped to shreds by the not-even-slightly-gullible
Budapest press corps, and it is days before SHIELD can come up with a way to
extract Strike Teams Foxtrot and Delta. By this point, one of the Foxtrot
assets is doing very poorly indeed (her scorched lung has developed a secondary
infection), and the other cannot be away from the oxygen tank they’ve rigged
for more than a couple of minutes before his extremities start to turn blue.
Jasper is beside himself and they’re all stuck in one very tiny room in a youth
hostel with literal mattresses on the floor, and it’s around day two of Clint’s
Godfather references that the penny finally drops for Phil. “My God, that’s
what they’ve done,” he says, and turns to Clint, who’s been sleeping sitting up
against the wall, same as Phil and Natasha and Jasper, so that the Foxtrot
assets can rest as comfortably as possible.
Clint is wide awake, looking back at Phil, and the look in his wide grey eyes
when he says, “What who’s done, sir?” just makes Phil’s throat ache, and Phil
promises himself (for about the eighteenth time) that if they get out of this
hellhole alive, that he will man up and request that goddamn transfer once and
for all. This is getting ridiculous.
“HYDRA,” he says. “They’ve gone to the mattresses. We’re not finding active
bases any more because they’re no longer in the R & D stage of things.
Training’s over. They’re holed up all over the world—”
“In places like this,” Clint says, finishing his thought. “Getting ready for
what, though?”
Phil wishes to God he had an answer for him. For them all. He looks around at
Jasper, who is watching in quiet fascination as Tasha, one of her handguns
strewn in pieces across a towel, teaches him how firearms are maintained in
Siberia, a lesson which apparently involves the freezing point of yak fat.
There’s a crust of dried black blood rimming Jasper’s ear canal and he’s been
too nauseous to eat for days now, but he’s taking it like a champ, has refused
to take even a single Advil that could go to his assets, and is right now
eagerly dismantling his own handgun so Natasha can teach him the Russian names
of the various components. Jasper’s gonna be a hell of a boss one day. Next to
him, Natasha is inordinately pleased to be teaching for a change, carefully
considering each of Jasper’s questions before giving her responses. Her hair
glints like a dark vein of copper as she moves and shifts over the pieces of
handgun like a fluid and powerful snake nosing its way between stones; she
selects each component deliberately and hefts them with respect. Jasper is
already halfway to being in love. The two Foxtrot assets, Jasper’s precious
babies whom he fought tooth and nail to get assigned to, are sleeping fitfully
on the mattresses, and then there’s Clint, sitting right next to Phil. Clint,
whose hair, all sticky-up and sweaty, makes Phil’s fingers ache to tunnel
through it. Clint, who always laughs the hardest at his own jokes. Clint, who
gets looser the tenser a situation gets. Clint, who makes Phil feel like he’s
in that Emily Dickinson poem where she falls through floor after floor, “And
hit a World, at every plunge”.  Clint, with whom Phil is so utterly taken.
 
He cannot believe these are his friends.
 
When they finally get back to DC, Maria Hill is waiting for them at the SHIELD
landing strip. She opens her arms and Phil walks right into them, hugs her
tight. He has spent five days in a crummy little hostel sitting next to and
carefully not touching Clint Barton (not making a big deal out of it or
anything but not touching all the same), and right now if someone doesn’t hug
him he might just come apart into molecules, and Christ, if he’s mentally
referencing Before Sunset then he really does need some time with his Italian
grandma from Long Island. (Sometimes around year six of what she calls The
Great Ongoing Clint Barton Chase, Phil broke down and told Maria that’s what he
thinks of her as. She started laughing and then punched him right in the radial
nerve. He still hasn’t told her he used to be a coxswain. He’s saving that one
for her birthday sometime.) Maria puts him in her car and drives him home and
puts him to sleep on her couch, and, exhausted as he is, Phil is the only one
who doesn’t notice the expression on Clint Barton’s face as he goes.
 
Maria hits him right between the eyes with it the next morning.
“He’s into you, you know,” she says as soon as Phil’s upright, and he freezes. 
“What?”
“He is,” says Maria. “I wasn’t sure before, so I didn’t say anything, but I’m
sure now. Something happened, I don’t know what, but he’s into you, and what’s
more, Romanov knowsit.”  She slides into the chair opposite Phil at his little
kitchen table and grins devilishly at him. “We’ve got ourselves a horse race.”
She clinks her coffee cup against Phil’s—Phil hasn’t moved, hasn’t even
blinked, is sitting there with his coffee cup halfway to his lips—and happily
sits back in her chair, putting her feet up.
 
There is something about being maybe-mutually hot for one member of a dyad of
stone-cold assassins who are sleeping together and hate everyone who isn’t
them. Phil won’t admit Maria has him spooked, but her observational skills have
gotten sharper over the last ten years, and if Romanov is allowing an
expression to cross her face that Maria Hill can read… well. Phil may not need
coffee ever again. Phil very seriously doubts that Barton is feeling anything
at all for him, but it doesn’t really matter what Barton feels, it’s what
Romanov thinks Barton feels that has Phil checking his quadrants every fifteen
seconds that afternoon. And when word comes from a terrified-looking junior
agent that a noisy altercation in Barton and Romanov’s quarters has completely
cleared the wing, Phil has to sit down and put his head between his knees. He
knows he has to go down there, but he can’t stand up. He is going into a room
with a Black Widow in it within twenty-four hours of her apparent realization
that he is maybe-mutually hot for her partner. It’s okay. He wasn’t using that
kidney anyway. No one really needs kneecaps. He’s lead a good life.He tells
himself all these things. None of them work. But then he hits upon one that
does. It’s weird and kind of embarrassing, and it makes no logical sense
whatsoever, but the only thought that enables him to stand and walk down to the
barracks is this:
I am a goddamned Eagle Scout. I can do this.
 
Phil comes around the corner just in time to see the emergency exit door slam
shut at the other end of the hallway. A howl of utter and complete woe rises
from Team Delta’s room. It’s Natasha, making a sound Phil didn’t even know
humans could make. He looks out the window—Barton is hightailing it across
campus, and even from this distance, Phil can tell Barton is angrier than he’s
ever seen him before. Also, he’s naked. Phil realizes in one sickening wallop
that within twenty-four hours, he has gone from having a team that was the envy
of SHIELD, to, most likely, having no team at all. And there is not a goddamned
thing he can do about it. He realizes, too late, that in trying to be good, in
trying to be the best Phil Coulson he could be, he has inadvertently distanced
himself so far from Clint and Natasha (mainly Clint, if he’s honest) that he
doesn’t truly know his team at all. He’d thought he knew everything there was
to know because he’d seen their room, psychoanalyzed their reports, gotten
behind the first layer of smoke and mirrors. It turns out he knows exactly
shit.
 
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Phil moans, punctuating each word with a slight
thudding of his head on the beer-puddled table. Maria, bless her, waits until
he raises his head and slides a stack of cocktail napkins under his forehead
before the next thud.
“You couldn’t have known they were nearing a breaking point,” she says. “No one
really knows those two, because they never let anyone get close. It’s a miracle
you handled them as well as you did, for as long as you did.”
“I thought I knew them,” Phil says miserably into his cocktail napkins. He’s
drunk, in public, and he doesn’t care. This has literally never happened to him
before. He tells Maria that just so she can make a dick joke about it, and it’s
a measure of how good a friend Maria is that she just stores it up for later
and pats Phil on the back of the head. “I know, sweetie. But everyone needs to
do it once or twice in their lives. It’s how we know we’re human. Come on,
drink up.” She encouragingly presses another shot glass into his hand and prods
his shoulders until he sits up and blearily focuses on the task at hand, which
appears to be the scotch portion of his third bourbon/scotch/beer.
“Really?” he says.
“No whining,” says Maria.
 
The next morning is exactly as awful as he’d expected, save one thing: Romanov
and Barton make themselves blessedly scarce. Phil supposes they may be
softening him up for the kill, but frankly as long as it’s a clean kill, he
won’t object. He downs Advil and Tums and coffee, to no avail. He still can’t
open his left eye all the way. Nick Fury walks in, takes one look at him, and
leaves, cackling at high volume. Maria brings him an absolutely disgusting
homemade hangover remedy. Jasper sends him an email with Nick Nolte’s mugshot
and no caption whatsoever. He cannot believe these are his friends.
 
Team Delta stays scarce for days, then weeks, until the penny finally drops for
Phil that they aren’t precisely avoiding him, they’re avoiding each other, and
by extension, him. (After all, they can’t very well avoid each other in his
office; it’s not big enough for that.) The instructor in their ongoing Spanish
class tells Phil that Romanov has effectively dropped out and that Clint, once
a genial and chatty student, has nearly started a fistfight with a probationary
agent by calling him a “fucking maricón”. Phil glimpses Clint a couple of times
on the firing range, and once he thinks he sees Romanov, heading through the
cafeteria line like she’s on rails, but that’s it. Total radio silence. Phasers
set to “ignore”. And then Maria comes to Phil with paperwork in her hand,
looking like somebody died.
“He brought this to me,” she says. Transfer paperwork for Barton. He apparently
wants to go provide security for an excavation of some weird meteorite in New
Mexico.  Barton wants to provide security for an inanimate object. It’s like
watching someone use Excalibur to cut bait.
“No,” he says. “This has gone too far.”
Maria nods. “What do you want me to do?”
Phil swallows. He knows who he really has to fix this with, but he can’t bring
himself to. Not yet. “Bring me Romanov.”
 
She comes into his office looking like death’s leftovers and drops dully into
the chair opposite Phil.
“What happened?” he asks her, and she doesn’t say anything, just shakes her
head, and then he sees her lips are quivering, and that just undoes him. It’s
impossible that the Black Widow is crying in his office, but she is, and it’s
the most horrible sight. He would prefer that she break his kneecaps. He
stands, thinking to give her some privacy, and she keeps right on sobbing,
completely silently, the same way she laughs. He wants to apologize, but how do
you apologize for this? I’m so sorry. I thought I was keeping it hidden. I
never meant to take away your only friend. Five years of knowing Natasha
Romanov, he’s never said anything, and now those five years are rising up to
wrap around his throat. In the end, he can’t say any of it, so he just touches
her shoulder on the way out.
 
He’s never felt like more of a coward.
 
When he goes to Fury and tells him Strike Team Delta needs some time apart,
Fury has the experience and good sense, honed by years of governmental people
management and quietly reserved friendship, not to ask why.
So Phil tells him. “I’m gay. Just thought you should know.”
It’s the only time he’s ever seen Fury look confused. “For fuck’s sake, Cheese,
you think this is news to me?”
When Phil is done soundlessly working his mouth open and shut, a whole lot of
sounds come out. Mainly, “You’re a son of a bitch,” and “No, I mean it, you’re
a fucking asshole,” and “This isn’t funny,” despite the fact that it obviously
is to some people in the room. When Fury is done laughing himself sick, he
wipes his eyes. “I got to hand it to you, Coulson, you do have a hell of a
poker face. But let’s face it. I only got one eye. You can’t outbluff that, and
you never will.” He stands and buttons his coat. “I’m not going to dissolve
your team. You can all go have a little cry in the corner if you need to for a
couple of weeks, but it’s going to be a working vacation. I’m gonna send Barton
to New Mexico to provide some intel on the down low while we’re working out
just what the fuck fell out of the sky down there, and Romanov is gonna go bat
her eyelashes at Stark. You’re coming with me. I’ve got about sixteen
scientists who want to talk to me about how to find a big green guy who doesn’t
wanna get found.”
“Sir, are you sure you want Barton? For subtlety?”
“Why, you wanna send him to seduce the rich guy?”
Phil shrugs. “Might be better at it than Romanov will be.”
“Aw, hell, Phil. Let’s give ‘em some practice at what they ain’t good at. How
else will they learn?”
 
And so Barton is sent off to New Mexico with a suitcase full of tatty and
crudely be-sloganed t-shirts, camouflaged baseball caps, and torn jeans, all of
which are meant to make him look like an opportunistic tailgate salesman of
UFO-themed memorabilia. (Apparently upon seeing his gear, Barton burst out
laughing and told the SHIELD outfitters they could have saved a couple hundred
bucks by telling him to just bring his old clothes from before SHIELD.) Natasha
is given more creative leeway to transform herself into Natalie Richman, ex-
underwear model with a degree from Vassar. In retrospect, sending the Russian
into Macy’s evening wear department with a SHIELD-issue credit card may have
been a slight miscalculation—her choices manage to shock even Maria’s Long
Island-honed sensibilities.
“Phil, she’s spilling out of everything! I’ve never seen so much tits in my
life and I went to an all-girls Catholic school!”
Phil closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose, holds the phone a couple
of inches away. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Stark’s not picky.”
“But Phil! Acrylic platform heels!” Maria shrieks.
“Hanging up now, Maria.”
“A leopard-print romper with built-in bustier!”
“Bye, Maria.”
 
For his part, Phil stays in D.C. playing science translator to Fury, a job he’s
woefully unqualified for.
“Is it just me,” says Fury over Burger King, “Or are you getting used to ending
each day more confused than you were when you started it?”
“Not just you, boss,” says Phil, chewing as he one-handedly opens a ketchup
packet.
“Good, I’m glad to know that,” says Fury. “So. Have you always had a hard-on
for Barton, or is this a recent development?”
Phil nearly chokes on his French fry. “Scuse me?”
“Oh, come on,” says Fury, spreading his hands wide to indicate the restaurant’s
patrons. “No one’s listening. Just making conversation, passing the time.”
Phil blinks. “What do you know,” he says.
“Only that he and Romanov had been fighting and fucking for the better part of
a decade until you came along, at which point the fucking part abruptly fell
out the bottom of the relationship, no pun intended there. Now, Romanov’s still
willing, but Barton hasn’t been laying it on her anywhere near as regular since
Team Delta was formed, mainly cause he’s been so goddamned busy following you
around like a teenager, a fact which has apparently escaped your notice because
you’vebeen so goddamned busy acting like you aren’t interested. Must be
exhausting lying to yourself like that, but your boy’s about ten times worse
off, because that clueless redneck motherfucker? Would sooner get shot in the
facethan admit he wants to get down with a man, hence why I’ve got three
current complaints on my desk right now about homeboy mouthing off about
“faggots this” and “cocksuckers that” in every goddamn language under the sun
other than the one you speak, which how’s that for a coincidence?”
 “It’s not, sir,” Phil hears himself say, faintly.
“That’s right it’s not,” says Fury triumphantly, sitting back.
“Sir? How the fuck do you know all this, pardon my asking?”
“I listen, Cheese. Don’t you ever just listen? Or do you just read the
transcripts?”
 
Phil gives it a whole ten minutes the next morning before going downstairs and
accosting Ellen from the typing pool. “Ellen, do you ever transcribe Strike
Team Delta?”
 “Sure, all the time.”
“Can I listen to some of their tapes?”
“You bet, but wear some headphones. Someone walks in your office with the
speakers on, that’ll take some explaining.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Well, they’re lot of fun but a lot of work. Me and Bridget and Colby usually
draw straws for who has to edit ‘em down into a report we can file, but
everybody likes to listen. How many you want?”
“Give me one from the first year, one from third year, and one from last
month.”
“Coming right up.”
 
Phil takes the tapes back to his office, locks the door. Puts the first one,
from about two months after Barton and Romanov joined SHIELD, into the player.
Barton’s voice, a little strained, comes in mid-sentence.
“—ting on the outcome of Operation Kindling, which was satisfactory from an
objectives standpoint, in that we accomplished our uh, goal of discrediting the
would-be demagogue via a released videotape of him engaging in sex on-camera
with ah, uh, transsexual prostitute, but which didn’t go well in terms of our
uh, Nat? What’s this, uh, term here?”
Romanov’s voice, a little fuzzy and distant: “Which one? Hold the paper closer.
That’s ‘secondary outcomes’.”
Barton again: “Uhhh, right. So, secondary outcomes. Which were that we sort of
won the battle but lost the war, because—ouch!”
Romanov’s voice: “Stick to the script. I write, you record. That was our deal.”
Barton: “And I’m trying to hold up my end but it’s hard—anyway,so our
unforeseen repercussion is that the second-in-command of the, uh, temporary
military government, uh—” and it’s at this point that the breathing patterns
and slight tightness in Barton’s voice click with the background noises of
Romanov’s movements and Phil realizes with a jolt of utter certainty that he’s
listening to Barton getting head while giving a verbal report that Romanov has
written and the typing pool has detangled into one of the seamlessly
professional reports Phil had always attributed—and he now realizes he never
questioned this incredible assumption—to a quasi-literate redneck raised in a
circus (a circus!) and an ex-Russian assassin-for hire for whom English is a
fourth language. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Phil is way past wanting to impale
himself on a letter opener. He wants to lie down and let the entire typing pool
take turns closing a door on his head. How could he have failed to realize that
Ellen—who has a degree from Princeton—Bridget (Pomona), and Colby (Oberlin),
were cleaning up the reports? More to the point, why would he ever assume
SHIELD hired secretaries who didn’tcreate uniform, flawlessly professional
reports out of the varied transcriptions of an extremely diverse asset group?
And more importantly—how much information about his own team has he missed out
on as a result of his incredible naïveté? Awash with embarrassment, he pushes
the play button on the second recording, from Clint and Natasha’s third year
with SHIELD.
 
It begins with a godawful wash of static, and there’s giggling—Romanov’s—in the
background, and then Barton’s voice. “Ok, this is my report on Operation…
Operation… Natasha, the fuck was this operation called?”
“Operation Matzoh Ball,” Romanov supplies.
“Right, Operation Matzoh Ball! What is a matzoh ball, anyway?”
“It’s a dumpling, idiot,” says Romanov, and then the recorder apparently gets
dropped in some cloth, and there’s more giggling in the background, and
unintelligible speech, and then Barton’s voice getting louder as he says, “I’ll
show you a white roundish dumpling,” and then the recorder is picked up again.
“Anyway, so Operation Matzoh Balls. Objective was to sabotage and cripple a
speedboat used in the transport of illegal goods and trafficked immigrants
between Albania and Italy and make it basically possible for the bad guys to
get a few hundred yards out but not much farther, so we could then surround
them and ascertain if….. hang on…. Nat, what’s the full name of the asshole we
were looking for? All I have here is code name Icepick…. Really? That’s it?
Icepick? Memo to self, if I ever get to make up my own code name, make it
better than Icepick. Anyway, so we’re supposed to cripple the boat, get on
board and search the boat for this Icepick dude who’s apparently really really
tall, but as soon as the boat slows down and engine failure becomes, like,
apparent to these assholes, they start pitching the cargo overboard, and the
cargo is screaming Kurds in all their clothes, and so we ask permission to
change the panties of the mission—what? Parameters? That’s what I said,
parameters. What’d I say? Really? I said that? Well Jesus, Nat, it’s not my
fault it’s suddenly become Victoria’s Goddamn Secret in here, what do you
expect when you’re parading it around in my face like OW OW OW OW OW Jesus I
give, I give, Natasha ow I’m trying to write a report here, be nice to the
report. Ow. You’re mean.”
The recorder is apparently picked up and brought very close to Natasha’s mouth.
“This is Natasha Romanov. I order whoever is transcribing this to delete the
last ten seconds of footage on pain of Clint Barton’s death.” A soft thud.
Clint’s voice again in a stage whisper: “She’s serious about that folks, so
please cut me some slack and do-not-whatever-you-do transcribe down in official
SHIELD documentation that Natasha Romanov wears these little green and blue
panties, with like the lace around the thighs? Unnh. It just kills me. You
believe she does this to me and she hasn’t even laid me in like three months?
What! It’s true! You haven’t!”
“Yesh’ menya.” Eat me, Phil quietly mouths as he checks against Google
translation.
“Yeah, yeah, love you too.” A drawn-out kissy noise from Barton. “Anyway, so we
ask for permission to change the rules of the mission to a search-and-rescue
and Coulson gives the go-ahead, which yippee-ki-yay for that, and now we’re
hauling soaking-wet teenagers out of the freezing fuckin’ water, and we have
one count-it one thermal blanket—‘
Natasha’s voice again: “For the record, we would like to request that more
thermal blankets be included in any further operations off Otranto, especially
if Agent Sitwell insists upon falling in.”
Barton: “It’s true, Agent Sitwell if you’re listening? Your name is a clue to
what you should do. Anyway, so we’re fishing for Kurds, when the smugglers
decide to open fire, and because these smugglers are smarter than the average
bear, they aim at our spotlights and take out two before Agent Sitwell cuts the
power and saves our three remaining lights, which goes a long way towards
making me glad I pulled his chunky ass out of the water, even if it did gave me
a hernia.”
Romanov: “Did it really?”
Barton: “Nah, just felt like giving Sitwell some shit. He’s good people,
don’tcha think?”
Romanov: “I don’t think that about other agents.”
Barton: “Awww. Are you saying I’m special?”
 
Phil can’t hear Natasha’s reaction, but he can guess which finger it was
communicated with. He clicks the recording off and grabs the third tape, from
last month. After pressing play, it’s several seconds before he realizes it’s
only Romanov in the room with the recorder—the complete and total silence, her
only giveaway. Her voice, when she does speak, is flat and dead. “Operation
Deposit Slip. Strike Teams Foxtrot and Delta were asked to participate in an
intelligence-gathering mission on the Northern Star Community Bank’s possible
connections to terrori—” and here Phil has to pause the recording for a minute,
because this is Budapest. Their last mission together, and Natasha apparently
filed the report by herself. He takes a deep breath, and hits the play button
again. “—st money laundering operations throughout the region, a theory which
was discredited when it turned out that the intelligence we were given got a
crucial address wrong, the bank in question being across the street from the
Northern Star. Strike Team Foxtrot…” and Natasha goes on to detail in careful
and precisely clipped terms the exact magnitude of the disaster, from beginning
to end, leaving no detail out—except for any clue of what happened to make her
and Clint’s partnership so suddenly and dramatically implode. He goes back and
listens to the entire twenty-eight minute recording again when he’s done, just
to make sure he hasn’t missed anything—a hint, an implication of a poor
decision on his or Clint’s part, a shade of jealousy. There’s nothing. It may
be the most professional report Strike Team Delta has ever filed, and it lacks
the one crucial piece of information Phil needs. He wants to turn in his
resignation and get a job mixing daiquiris on Pismo Beach.
 
Instead, he calls his mother.  “Mom, I’ve got a problem,” he says, and lays it
all out, this time not even bothering to change the first names or to hide his
incredible frustration. Judith Coulson did not retire from teaching Psych 104,
Psych 202-A, and Psych 303 for nothing.
“Phillip honey,” she finally says when Phil runs out of steam, “Your situation
beats the hell out of me.”
Phil is so surprised his mouth shuts with a little clipping sound; his mom
continues. “But then again, I would never have to say that if I hadn’t raised a
son who so far surpasses me in intellect, sensitivity, and bravery that his
daily problems include managing some of the most talented and unusual people on
the planet. My daily problems, at their very worst, involve fitting too many
books into too little time and keeping your father from ruining the pachysandra
with the weedwhacker. I don’t know what to do about your young man there. It
sounds to me as though he must be very frightened and lonely, to be pushing
people away at such a rate. And frightened people frequently do terrible
things.  But loneliness can do two things—it can either embitter a person
against the world they’ve withdrawn from, or it can force them to reflect. I
don’t know which path your young man will take, but I do know that if he turns
to reflection, he can only reach the inevitable conclusion that you are one of
the best people he will ever have the privilege of knowing.”
Phil swallows, blinking hard. “Thanks, mom.”
“You’re welcome, honey. Now, truly must go. Your father’s got the metric
ratchet set out, and that can only mean ill for our chances of having running
water this evening. I’m going to go run a bath before he cuts us off
completely.”
“Bye, mom.”
“Bye bye, love.”
After he hangs up, Phil sits alone for a long while.
 
“Pack your bags,” Fury tells him the next week. “We’re going to California.”
“We are?”
“Well, I am, but I’m coming right back. You’re gonna stay for a little while,
keep Stark company.”
“Natasha not company enough, sir?”
“She hasn’t been calling you?” Fury says, brow creasing in puzzlement. “Oh,
that’s right, y’all are still seeing who can hold their breath the longest.
Allow me to ruin the ending: it’s her. Anyway, she’s gone and made nice with
Stark’s girl, which would be fine except Stark and his girl are on the outs
right now and Natasha can’t get anywhere near him. So she needs us to come out
there and give him a push in the right direction. I’ll take care of that part.
Dude’s got no clue how close he is to getting one of the little boxes on the
periodic table named after himself.”
“OK. Where do I come in?”
“You gotta lock him in a room and sit on him until he gets the clue.”
Oh, lovely. Phil is about to open his mouth and get smartassed about
babysitting duty, but something in Fury’s face tells Phil he’s got a snappy
comeback all teed up, so he doesn’t. Sometimes, the look of disappointment on
Nick’s face when he doesn’t get to use a good line is the only entertainment
Phil gets all day. He’ll feed Fury the straight line later. In time for
Christmas.
 
Babysitting duty doesn’t last for long. Stark, while an asshole, is a properly
motivated asshole, and he lunges for the box of films and notes that Fury
leaves him the second he thinks Phil isn’t looking. Phil isn’t looking,
technically, but JARVIS is, and Phil and JARVIS have long since reached an
understanding based on mutual respect and a lifelong love of P.G. Wodehouse.
Sometimes, when Phil’s killing time in the lobby or the elevator of a Stark
building, he’ll lob favorite quotes back and forth with JARVIS. “‘He looked
like a sheep with a secret sorrow’, Agent Coulson.”
“God, yes…. ‘He stared at the girl like an ostrich goggling at a brass
doorknob’.”
“Oh yes, that one frequently comes to mind when Miss Potts enters the lab.”
They’re nearly an hour into a discussion of Pigs_Have_Wings when JARVIS alerts
Phil that “Sir has left the premises on an apparent mission to locate the old
Stark Expo model.”
Well, would you look at that. He figured it out.
“JARVIS, would you please patch me through to Director Fury?”
“With pleasure, sir.”
 
After that, it’s really just a matter of trying to find earplugs dense enough
to withstand the noise that accompanies any Stark endeavor. It’s a miracle the
man has any hearing left at all, what with the constant Ozzy and the welding
torches and the Blue Oyster Cult and the pneumatic drills and the AC/DC and the
circular saws and the Alice and the jackhammer and JARVIS hollering above it
all, trying to be heard. “YOUR PIZZA HAS ARRIVED, SIR.”
“I don’t think he can hear you, JARVIS.”
“I know, Agent Coulson. Unfortunately, there are programming protocols in place
to keep me from adjusting the music’s volume when Sir is in one of his creative
moods.”
Phil reaches into his back pocket, fishes out a black swipey card embossed with
the SHIELD logo. “Think there are protocols in place for me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of guessing, Agent Coulson.”
The card works. It also cuts the music and dims the lights, which Phil finds a
bit overly romantic, but hell, it gets Stark’s attention.
“Eat,” Phil says, dropping the pizza box on top of a towering pile of crap.
“It’s been over forty-eight hours. The music comes back once you’ve eaten and
drunk a glass of water. Right, JARVIS?” he says. There’s a brief pause as
JARVIS ostentatiously re-examines his protocols (which really only takes a
couple of picoseconds, but JARVIS is all about style) and comes back online.
“Indeed, Agent Coulson is apparently authorized to override the Not Now Honey,
Daddy’s Inventing protocol.”
Phil nearly chomps through his own tongue. Keeping a straight face is a
paramount Coulson family value. For a moment, he and Stark have a little stare-
off. Which, if you’re used to Fury, is sort of like facing off with Bambi.
Inevitably, Stark blinks first (Phil swears he feels a breeze from the
eyelashes) and melts into his mask of practiced ease, his smile coming on like
the light in an airplane bathroom. “Sure thing.” He grabs a slice. “So, how’re
things treating you? You settling in OK? Where are you sleeping, anyway? I
can’t even tell, I never see you even though JARVIS says you never leave.”
“I’m around,” Phil says.
I’m around, Stark mouths back to himself, frowning, rolling the words around as
he wanders to the sink, runs a glass of water, wipes his hands on an oily rag.
“OK, got it, man of few words, I can respect that.” He throws a look at Phil
over his shoulder that is not even close to respect. “But don’t think I’m not
onto you and your little games.”
“Pardon?” Phil says, just a few seconds ahead of his judgment. Stupid, stupid,
stupid. 
“Flirting with my AI. Don’t think I didn’t notice the absolutely massive server
libraries of ancient British crap that get accessed every time you enter one of
my buildings.  JARVIS, I want you to know you’re a hussy. And I’m onto you
both.” He points at Phil, then at an indistinct point in the ceiling, then Phil
again. “Onto you.” The big Bambi eyes narrow, the water goes down the hatch,
and the glass is set down with a thud. “JARVIS. Music. Bring it back.”
“With pleasure, sir,” JARVIS says, and a wall of sound once again barricades
Tony Stark from the hearing world. 
 
Phil gets the call to go to New Mexico sooner than he wants it, and to his
credit, Fury sounds a little sheepish on the phone. “Need you in New Mexico,”
he says. Well. Not really all that sheepish. “Our scientists want to get a
better look at the hardware from Mars. Go roust out all the looky-loos and set
up a field base. Oh, and your boy’s gotten in three verbal altercations with
his superiors since he got there. Enjoy cleaning that up.” Not sheepish at all,
in fact, as it turns out.
Phil sighs, hangs up, goes to tell Stark the news. On his way out Stark has him
use one of Howard’s skeletal prototypes for the shield (probable value at
auction: $80,000+) as a shim. He tries not to look.
“JARVIS?” he says on the way out the door, “If Mr. Stark ever uses a piece of,
say, the Apollo spacecraft as a doorstop? Do me a favor and never tell me about
it.”
“I shall endeavor to do my best, Agent Coulson,” JARVIS says. “And good luck in
New Mexico.”
“Thanks, old plum.”
 
New Mexico is weird. The light is all wrong, piercing and wobbly, making
everything shimmery and unreal. Phil gets to the site of the crash and Clint is
nowhere to be found. Which is as he expected. In his dark suit and shades, Phil
is visible from a long way off. He does note a likely-looking spot on the side
of a mountain not too far off, though. There is something about being watched
through a long-distance scope by one of the world’s better assassins when he’s
in a snit. Phil buys an iced coffee out of a cooler anyway, because fuck it.
He’s tired. He scopes out the likeliest-looking places for an impromptu landing
pad, guesses he’ll need about two miles of fencing, and texts a few preliminary
photos to Fury and the science team.  Then he turns around slowly, puts his
sunglasses in his pocket, takes a long deliberate look straight at the spot
he’s made for Clint’s nest, and saunters back to his car. By the time he gets
back to it, the sun’s low in the sky and the dust is starting to kick up. Clint
is sitting on the ground, back against one of the tires, wearing sunglasses and
looking like he hasn’t just jogged a steady mile and a half to beat Phil back
to his own car.
“Afternoon, sir,” he says.
“Afternoon,” says Phil. A few moments pass. Weather happens. 
“Mind giving me a lift back to base?” says Clint.
Phil unlocks the car doors in response, but takes off his sunglasses to frown
down at the younger man. “What happened to your truck? SHIELD was supposed to
get you a vehicle you could blend in with.”
Clint stands, stretches, goes around to the passenger side. “It’s down there,”
he says, lifting his chin towards the crash site.
“Not realistic enough for you?”
“Oh, it’s plenty realistic. Colorful, too.”
“Colorful?”
“Bright turquoise with white ‘n purple decals.”
“Oh.” Phil closes his door, waits for Barton to get settled in before turning
up the air conditioning and pulling the wheel around. Barton will tell him
what’s up with the truck when he’s good and ready. They’re about ten minutes
into the drive towards their host base at Los Gallos when Barton speaks up
again. “Of course, it’s also realistically and colorfully broke.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s the alternator. I think. Or maybe the starter motor, I dunno. I never
been good with that stuff. You good with that stuff? Sir?” He’s looking at Phil
across the still-scorching car, and Phil feels like he’s being asked about
something other than engines. What, though, he has no idea.
“Not really. A little,” Phil admits. “I ran a snowplow some when I was a kid.”
“You ran a snowplow? Where?”
“At home,” Phil says. “Connecticut.”
“Connecticut,” repeats Barton, rolling the word around and staring out the
window. It sounds like he’s laughing at some dark, private joke.
“Something funny?”
“Nah, just. They got gay marriage, in Connecticut?”
Shit. Really? This is really where he’s taking this? Six years of not saying
anything and this is how Barton wants to bring it up? Phil keeps his expression
neutral, focused on the road ahead. He could let go of the wheel and they
wouldn’t leave the road for five hundred miles, that’s how flat New Mexico is,
but right now Phil is going to drive like it’s the Nurburgring. 
“Yeah,” he says. “For a few years now.”
“And that’s okay with you? Sir?” Barton’s voice is bold, insolent even, and
were this line of questioning coming from any other agent Phil would be
preparing for a fight, but there’s a crack in Barton’s façade, Phil can fucking
hear it, and just like that he knows Barton is looking for a way out of this
fearful corner he’s backed himself into. So he keeps his tone neutral and his
eyes on the road, neither matching Barton’s aggression nor flinching from it:
“Well, it’d pretty much have to be, seeing as I’m gay.”
He doesn’t register Barton’s entire reaction in his peripheral vision, but he
catches at least a
fleeting glimpse of smug as Barton turns and looks out the window, saying,
“Knew it. Tasha’s gonna be so pissed.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?” Phil asks.
Barton shrugs. “She and I had a bet.” A lie, but Phil is willing to play along.
“Yeah? What’d Natasha bet?”
“Twenty bucks,” says Barton too casually, the tension lines showing in his back
as he studies the featureless landscape outside. The rest of the ride to Los
Gallos is silent, save the gears Phil can hear churning in Barton’s head—Clint
thinks louder than anyone Phil has ever known before. The silence is tense, but
on the bright side every minute Clint spends thinking is a minute he’s not
trying to kill Phil or calling some luckless rookie a faggot or otherwise
committing a hate crime. Progress!
 
Phil’s relief, as always, is short-lived. Clint hightails it out of the car the
second they hit base tarmac, and he doesn’t see the younger man again for three
days. Three days in which Phil manages to get so unspeakably fed up with
apologizing and smoothing things over and otherwise cleaning up after his
asset’s bad behavior that by the time he does run into Clint again, at the
firing range, he forgets entirely about the whole patience-and-non-escalation
thing and just snaps at him: “Barton. Don’t ever let me hear about you mouthing
off to a direct superior in the field again.”
Barton whips around and is into Phil’s personal space like a shot, jaw rippling
and muscles bunching in waves, and all Phil can think is: Well, I’ve finally
given him that fight he’s been looking for. Oddly, the next thought isn’t that
this is stupid. It’s dizzying, lightheaded relief. Because Phil can feel in his
bones, in his teeth, that whatever happens next will at least be real: not
another avoidance or evasion, not another step in this endless dance.
“Yeah? Or what?”
Phil opens his palms forward, letting Barton know he’s not going to throw the
first punch. “Or I request that Fury permanently removes me as your handler.”
Barton’s face goes studiously blank. “I thought that already happened,” he
says.
“No,” Phil tells him. “Fury just approved your request to be assigned here.
Sent Natasha to California and me too, for a while. But Strike Team Delta still
exists. If you want it to.”
Barton stands down, steps away. Scrubs the back of his head, goes to the shelf
where he’s left his soda, takes a long swig while squinting out into the
sunset. Looks at Phil, looks away fast. Doesn’t seem to know what to do with
his hands. Phil has never seen Barton at a loss. It’s stranger than watching
Widow cry.
“If I want it to,” Barton finally repeats, looking at Phil.
Phil nods, and Barton chuckles, the darkness in his voice like thunder rolling
up the desert.  “If I want. That, that’s just great…” He screws the cap back on
his soda, flings it down onto his balled-up sweatshirt, turns to face Phil
squarely. The light in his grey eyes like heat lightning. “What about what you
want. Sir. What do you want, anyway? I never could tell.”
Phil doesn’t respond, can’t really. He’s frozen.
Barton continues. “I mean, is it to fuck me? Cause Tasha says that’s what it
is. I dunno, I mean me personally, I could never tell, but maybe that’s on me,
not on you, because I would probably expect a gay guy to be acting all
stereotypical and shit, and no offense sir but you’re not like that at all, so
I always figured you were straight. Which I get is my own fucked-up mentality,
Tasha says it’s a fucked-up mentality and she should know, but you gotta cut me
some slack here, the way I was raised… I’m not. Ya know. Good at this stuff.
Not like you two are, anyway. I pretty much only ever knew someone was gay when
they were trynna slip it to me in the costume trailer.”
Phil’s mouth opens and shuts once or twice. Whole new chunks of Clint’s
psychology are falling into place faster than he can make room for them,
crushing the basic structure of Barton-as-Phil-thought-he-knew-him. It’s like
standing under a tornado as it drops a payload of torn-up trailer park on your
head. The strange thing is, it all fits, just at a different angle than Phil
had ever considered before. Why Barton has never really trusted anyone except
Natasha. Why he uses his and Natasha’s overt sexuality as a weapon, a
performance to scare others away. Why Barton’s run all the way to New Mexico to
avoid dealing with whatever… this is. He owes Barton an explanation, that much
is clear from the way Barton’s looking at him. Phil’s just not sure what’s
going to come out of his mouth. Not a problem he’s ever had before.
“I can’t really… Can we sit down?” he says, pulling out a plastic folding chair
from next to the lockers and sitting, awkwardly, while Barton sort of perches
on the edge of the ammo shelf, looking ready to bolt. Phil puts his head down
for a moment. Rubs his temples with his thumbs. Sighs. You’re a goddamned Eagle
Scout, he reminds himself. You can do this.
“You were?” says Clint, and Phil looks up to realize that yes, he did say that
out loud.Clint is looking at him strangely, sort of half-amused.
Phil nods. “I was. I mailed my medal back ten years ago.”
Something flickers behind Clint’s eyes, and his mouth opens around a silent O
of understanding. “The gay thing.”
“Yeah,” says Phil.  “The gay thing. I wasn’t interested in belonging to an
organization that was ashamed of me.”
“So you joined the Army,” Clint says, and now he’s definitely amused at Phil.
 “It wasn’t completely linear decision-making,” Phil admits.
“When did you, uh, realize that you were into the… guys?” Barton says, and the
awkwardness of the conversation is totally worth it to see Barton not being a
super-cool ultra-spy for once.
Phil shrugs. “I think I’ve known pretty much my whole life. My parents say I
told them when I was eleven. I don’t really remember it too well. But yeah,
pretty much all along.”
Clint looks a bit pole-axed by that, sitting back and blinking a lot, mouthing
eleven to himself. “And your parents were okay with that?”
 “Yeah. I was lucky,” says Phil. “My parents were very…. ahead of the curve on
that. They were both professors, academics. Nothing new under the sun if you
take a long enough view of human history, that type of thing.”
Clint nods, biting his lip. He’s hugging himself, Phil notices, arms wrapped
tight and hands clamped around his elbows. The setting sun has warmed the
plywood range shed. It’s not cold.
“I suppose you saw a different angle on things, growing up?” Phil offers as
mildly as possible, trying to get Clint talking again.
Clint’s bark of a laugh echoes weirdly in the shed. “Yeah, you could say that.
Uh. Yeah. Where I come from, people beat up on f—er. Gay people. No offense,
sir, I—”
“None taken,” Phil reassures him. Last thing he needs is Barton feeling more
self-conscious. “You were saying, about the circus?”
“Um. Not much to say, really,” Clint says, fidgeting. “Not much good happened
there, except I learned to shoot, which got me here. I don’t want to leave
here,” he says, looking at Phil as pleadingly as Phil’s ever seen him look, and
suddenly Phil’s heart is plummeting, because oh. Barton was coerced into sex to
keep a roof over his head. Phil has to address this. Immediately.
“Clint,” he says, as firmly as possible, “You will never have to leave SHIELD
because of anything on my account. I will recuse myself as your handler and
never set foot in your sightlines again if that’s what it takes to make you
feel comfortable here. This is your home, for as long as you want to be here.
If I ever made you feel… uncomfortable, I apologize. That would be the greatest
mistake of my career.”
Clint blinks, grey eyes wide and unknowable. “Um. Geez. Uh. Jesus, Phil. That’s
uh, a hell of an offer.” He scrubs the back of his neck with his palm and
smiles, just a bit, looking up at Phil from under his eyelashes. “I don’t think
anyone’s ever offered to shitcan their career to make me comfortable before.”
“Oh, my career would bounce back,” Phil says. “You’re a good asset, but you’re
not that good.” They grin at each other for a moment, and Phil feels the
pressure in the air ease back towards equilibrium. The night lights of the
firing range click on, their low hum electric and steady.
“Well, don’t go turning in your papers just yet,” says Clint. “I think I can
deal with this. If you don’t mind working with me, that is. Wouldn’t blame ya
if you didn’t want to, after som’tha shit I pulled recently.”
“You have been quite the asshole,” Phil agrees pleasantly. “Want to tell me
what’s up with that?”
Clint looks sheepish. “I don’t know. Natasha says it’s cause I got the
mentality of
a scared homophobic teenager.”
“What do you think?” Phil asks, genuinely curious.
Clint looks out over the firing range. “I’d say it’s cause I got the mentality
of a scared homophobic teenager. Tasha’s got my number pretty good.”
Phil smirks. “Well. Don’t go giving up on yourself just yet.” He stands,
figuring, enough progress for one evening. But Clint surprises him, and
probably himself, as he turns to walk away. “Wait. Uh, sir.”
Phil turns back, eyebrows raised.
“You never answered my question,” Clint says, looking like it’s taken all his
balls to say it.  “Sir. About what you want.”
“That’s right,” says Phil. “And I’m not going to, because it’s not your
problem. ‘Night, Barton.” He smiles, just a bit, and leaves. He feels Barton’s
eyes on his back the whole way.
 
The next few days are… odd. Clint doesn’t really talk to Phil much, but he
never strays very far, either. No matter where Phil is throughout the day,
Barton is in his sightlines. Getting a cup of coffee. Reading the paper.
Helping the secretary replace the water jug on the cooler. It gets a little
ridiculous when Barton decides the chair next to the copier is the perfect spot
to wax his entire collection of bowstrings, but Phil’s not complaining. He
knows what Barton’s doing. He’s trying to fit Phil’s gayness into his pre-
existing concept of Phil as handler, as Team Delta member, as…. whatever. Which
is difficult for Barton. He’s having to delete all sorts of old, faulty
information to make room for new truths. Romanov could have helped with this,
but she and Barton are on the outs, so Barton’s having to figure it out on his
own, and because it’s Clint, that means lots and lots of watching. Phil kind of
starts to feel like he’s on exhibit at the zoo. The Gay In His Natural Habitat.
Do Not Tap On The Glass. Moving suddenly becomes a fraught affair, heavy with
weight and meaning. Phil is aware of his wrists and his posture and his tone
more than he’s ever been in his entire life, including middle school. It’s
exhausting, being the only gay panda on Planet Barton, but Phil is willing to
make the effort if it helps Clint pull his head out of his ass. Which sounds
sort of gay, come to think of it.
“What’s so funny?” Barton’s voice comes through the three-P.M. fog that coffee
hasn’t dissipated, and Phil looks up to see Barton watching him with amusement,
a few dozen bowstrings looped over the arms of the chair he’s sitting in.
“Nothing,” Phil lies, feeling his ears redden.
“Come on, sir, it has to have been something.” Barton says, stretching lazily
in his chair. A few over-waxed strings go sliding off his thighs to the floor,
and Barton makes no move to collect them, just keeps watching Phil with that
steady gaze.
“I was just thinking,” Phil says, thinking quickly. “About our weird crash-
landing. Old saying. When all you’ve got’s a hammer, pretty soon everything
starts to look like a nail.”
Clint nods. “I heard that once in a meeting.” Then, catching Phil’s look, he
clarifies. “NA. Every Wednesday night in the circus, free coffee.” Then,
catching Phil’s slightly more stricken look, “Me and Barney weren’t IN it or
anything.”
A silence. Phil isn’t sure of his footing, never having heard Clint mention his
brother (a real shining star, Barney Barton is currently enriching the universe
as a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Lompoc) by name or deed.
“Sometimes there were donuts,” Clint adds.
“Donuts are good,” Phil agrees. There’s a pause. 
“I like the maple ones,” Clint offers. His eyes haven’t left Phil’s in about
two minutes.
Phil shakes his head. “Nah. Powdered sugar’s where it’s at.”
Clint wrinkles his nose. “But it gets all over your clothes.”
“Such is the price of greatness, Barton.” Phil clicks his ballpoint pen clicker
down and turns back to his file on meteorite impact craters. They don’t say
much else, but the silence is warm.
 
The next morning, there’s a donut next to Phil’s laptop. The piece of paper
next to it, folded like a little table tent, reads: “True Greatness.” It’s
maple glazed.
 
Phil stops at a gas station the next morning and spends several moments
selecting the biggest, chalkiest white-powder donut he can find.  Leaves it
nice and neat on Barton’s black canvas gym bag. The unholy screech can be heard
from two locker rows over.
 
When Phil next goes for coffee, all the carafes have been filled with
Starbucks’ maple nut flavor.
 
When Barton finally gets his truck mended and coaxes it back to base, he finds
the gate checkpoint oddly hypervigilant. As in, three separate drug-sniffing
dogs are given the chance to inspect his cab. When Clint asks the commanding
security officer at the gate for the reasoning behind all the extra rigamarole,
he is tersely informed that an alert was phoned in that Agent Barton might be
attempting to transport some type of white powder onto base. 
 
Clint comes limping into Phil’s office and sits down gingerly. “You know, you
didn’t have to order the cavity search. I was cooperating.”
Phil doesn’t even look up from his laptop. “You’re overselling it.”
“Damn,” Clint says.
“Also, our security staff isn’t authorized to conduct cavity searches,” Phil
adds.
“Then what was that I got last Christmas from McCartney at the gate in D.C.?”
“A bonus,” Phil says without hesitation. In his peripheral, Clint is turning
purple from the effort not to laugh. Phil keeps on typing.
“You shouldn’t joke about this shit with me,” Clint says when he regains his
composure. “Seriously, sir. I’ve been traumatized. I could file a complaint.”
“By all means,” says Phil, reaching for a Post-it note. “SHIELD will conduct a
probe.”
At this, Clint, who really is a teenager in some ways, loses it completely.
Nearly falls off his chair laughing, clapping his hands, legs pedaling like a
puppy on its back. And Phil, seeing Clint red-faced and teary-eyed, helplessly
abandoned to laughter, feels another plank giving way underneath his feet.
 
The next time Phil rides out to the crash site, Barton hitches a ride with him.
Phil is too pleased to ask what’s going on with Barton’s horrible undercover
truck; it can rust for all he cares.  Barton rolls the window down, sticks his
elbow out, squints at the flat, reflective desert.
“Sir? You mind if we stop at this gas station? I forgot my shades and I’m gonna
need something to cut this glare.”
“Sure,” says Phil, and takes the opportunity to fuel up. When Barton comes out
of the gas station, he’s wearing the most hideous pair of wraparound sunglasses
Phil has ever seen. The reflective lenses shimmer with all the hues of an oil
slick, and Barton’s finished the look with a fluorescent orange snug-cord to
hold them in place. Phil regards him levelly from across the roof of the truck.
Barton regards him right back, shit-eating grin firmly in place, and hops back
in.           
“You look like a NASCAR driver,” Phil offers, about ten minutes down the road.
A brief silence.
“You know, these aren’t even close to my best sunglasses,” Barton offers. “I
have even better ones at home.”
Phil closes his mouth. 
Barton smiles out the window.
 
About ten minutes farther down the road, Barton snaps his fingers, says, “Oh
yeah, I forgot something,” and dives into the glove compartment. Takes out
something wrapped in about eight layers of bakery tissue. Hands it to Phil.
 
It’s a donut. But this time, it’s powdered sugar.
 
Phil waits about twenty-four hours before leaving a maple glazed in Barton’s
in-tray. It leaves a greasy ring on his paycheck and makes the whole mail room
smell like syrup, and Barton spends an inordinate amount of time standing there
flipping through his mail with the donut hanging out of his mouth, in full view
of Phil’s desk, studiously not looking at Phil but standing in full view all
the same.
 
It’s a baking hot day. Broiling. Nevertheless, Phil finds himself near the
coffeemaker. It is the only spot on this particular worksite where his daily
orbit regularly intersects with Barton’s. He tries not to take personally the
encouraging observation that Barton seems to be drinking a lot more coffee
recently, but when Barton routinely positions himself right behind Phil in line
for coffee and then smirks at Phil when Phil turns around—well, it’s either a
very thinly veiled reference to their first face-to-face encounter, or… well,
there’s really no “or” possibility. He’s just not sure what the reference is
supposed to signify. So Phil sets up a little experiment. He triples his number
of coffee breaks. Just to see what will happen.
 
By the end of the day they’re vibrating at each other. Phil’s hands are shaking
and Barton can’t shut up. The whole ride back to base is taken up by one long,
very involved monologue about a night in the circus when the power went out
mid-show and all the aerialists, Barton included, were stranded in the top of
the tent with no light with which to find their way down until a net got
strung, which was a low priority compared to evacuating the crowd, who were
getting panicky because darkness apparently triggers the hunting instincts of
big cats, and did Phil know that the purr of a lion is so sonically
disorienting that it can confuse prey into wandering straight into the lion’s
path?
 
Lying in bed that night, staring up at the ceiling and trying to think of the
ongoing caffeine tremor as exercise, Phil registers unprecedented sympathy for
the plight of the gazelle.
 
“It’s all very odd,” says Phil over the phone to Maria the next day, watching
through a makeshift window of clear plastic sheeting as Barton clambers aboard
one of the communication trailers and then jumps to the roof of another, trying
to find a comfortable perch from which to survey the surrounding desert. He
keeps turning around, unhappy with his lines of sight, and nearly trips on one
of the trailer’s roof vents before righting himself, arms pinwheeling. Someone
comes out of the trailer and glares up at Barton, saying something Phil can’t
make out from this distance. Barton steps to the edge of the trailer, leans
down—“Hang on, Maria, I think he might be about to get in a fight,” says Phil,
letting the phone drop—and then sticks his hand down, and the other agent
reaches up and shakes it, and then Barton straightens up and points out over
the desert, then to the other roofs surrounding the hammer. And now the other
agent’s shielding his eyes and looking around too, and pointing to another roof
across the square from Barton, and wow, now he’s helping Barton scout
locations. Phil brings the phone back to his ear.
“Never mind,” he says. “False alarm.”
“Sweetie, you’re wound tight,” says Maria. “Even for you. Can’t you just tell
him you’re in desperate need of a blowjob?”
“Jesus, Maria, unsecured line,” Phil hisses, and Maria laughs.
“Unsecured line, what is this, Mission Impossible? Relax, Phil.  It’s a hammer.
You’re all busy watching a piece of Craftsman hardware that probably got
dropped out of the luggage compartment of a 747 heading to an antique weapons
convention in Vegas. You’re all taking an unofficial little vacation down there
in the salt flats while those of us with real jobs slave away in D.C.  in the
middle of a fucking heat wave.”
“It does look toasty up there,” Phil says, sneaking a glance at the Weather
Channel, which is perpetually on in the SHIELD break room.
“It’s so fucking hot my tits are sweating,” Maria agrees, and Phil closes his
eyes. Maria always gets crude when she gets overheated.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Me too, the elastic’s gone gummy on my bra and my shirt’s a ball of sweat and
wrinkles, and now they’re talking about making us wear a jumpsuit to work on
the Helicarrier, can you believe that shit?”
“Yep.” Phil does not mention having personally signed off on the prototype.
“I just hope the fabric’s breathable.”
“It will be,” Phil says, and nearly bites through his own tongue.  Stupid,
stupid, stupid.
“Wait, you already know about this!?! What color are they?! What do they look
like? I swear to God, Phil, if you’ve dressed us all in orange like prisoners
so help me I will—”
“They’re blue,” Phil says hastily. “Dark navy blue. Flattering on everyone or
so I’m told. Very tailored, individually fitted, breathable. You’ll like them.
Plenty of pockets. Stark designed the fabric.”
“Do you have to wear one?”
“I will if it gets me out of this conversation,” says Phil.
“Well, look who’s getting touchy. I told you, you need a blowjob. Get him to
give you one, you’re getting to be a cranky old ma—”
“Goodbye, Maria,” Phil tells her, but after hanging up he immediately regrets
it. He dials back. Maria picks up on the third ring.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, you’re right, I’m being a cranky old man.”
“Yes you are. You wanna tell me what’s up?”
 Phil sighs. “I don’t even know where to begin. I need some Maria time. What
are you doing tonight?”
“Seriously?” says Maria. They haven’t pulled one of these in years—the last
time was when Maria had a bad breakup and Phil caught three consecutive
military flights to get back to DC from Singapore, twenty nonstop hours and he
arrived at 6 PM the next day looking like shit, but he was there to help her
through the crying and the drinking and the defriending-the-asshole-on-
Facebook, and that was what mattered.
“Seriously,” says Phil.
 
They agree she’ll leave her key under the mat—she’s working late and that can’t
be helped, but it will give Phil time after his flight lands to swing by
SHIELD, check on Romanov. Apparently, the Stark Expo has not gone well. Well,
anyone with CNN can see the Stark Expo hasn’t gone well. A largish portion of
New Jersey can testify directly to how not-well the Stark Expo’s gone, not that
that’s SHIELD’s fault. Or even Natasha’s. Phil wonders if telling Natasha that
she is part of a long tradition of people having very bad days will result in
his death. Only one way to find out, really. He calls her as soon as he gets
on-site.
““I’m in town for the afternoon,” he says. “New Mexico is weird. Meet me for
coffee?”
When he sees her, though, he has to revise his estimate of how badly the Stark
assignment’s gone. Natasha looks worse than Phil’s ever seen her. Her eyes are
red and her skin is dull and her posture looks so… defeated. She slides into
the booth opposite him and folds herself up, like she’s trying to make herself
as small as possible.
“Agent Romanov,” he says, trying to reconcile the victimized-looking woman
before him with the Black Widow. It’s impossible. 
“Is everything OK?” she asks, not meeting his eyes.
He’s not sure how to honestly answer that. “Yes.”
“Is everyone OK?” She flicks her eyes to his, briefly—a tiny spark of something
real there, a tiny spark of Natasha-before-Budapest, and Phil is awash with
guilt for having extinguished that fire. Even though he never meant to. Even
though he’s got no idea how to make it right.
“I don’t know,” he says truthfully, and then something odd happens. Instead of
rising to leave or slapping him across the face, neither of which would have
surprised him, Natasha slides a small hand across the table and carefully
covers his. They sit in the sunlight together for quite some time. 
 
“It’s like I’ve broken up a marriage without even trying,” Phil complains,
sitting with his back against the sofa that Maria’s lying on, his legs
stretched out under a coffee table covered with empties. On TV, the Nationals
are quietly losing to Seattle in front of a nearly-empty stadium. Maria is an
affectionate drunk, finger-combing Phil’s hair and working her fingers down his
collar in an uncoordinated, occasionally pokey massage. She’s told him once or
twice, in unguarded moments, that he’s the most reliable man she’s ever had in
her life. Which makes Phil sad.
“Uh-huh,” she says glassily, a few seconds too late to really be a response to
anything Phil’s said. LaRoche takes a walk to first but is wasted moments later
when Morse strikes out to end the inning. A Domino’s ad blares on and Phil
mutes the TV, letting his head drop back against the sofa cushions.
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he says to the ceiling. With the
TV muted and the windows open, he can hear the humid wash of sound that
drenches every summer night in DC: locusts, car alarms, sirens.
“Mnnghh,” says Maria, and Phil looks back over his shoulder. She’s already
drooling on the couch cushion.  “Come on, then,” he says, and scrambles to his
feet, scooping her up and carrying her to bed. Arranges her on her side, draws
the comforter over her, loosens her watchstrap and hunkers down next to the bed
to brush her hair out of her eyes. “Good night, Maria,” he says, and her
eyelids flutter halfway open—her smile is angelic and drunk, and she reaches
out to pat his face.
“M’love,” she calls him. “Don’ look so sad, m’love. You got me. Clint, he got
you even though he don’t know it yet. Natasha, she’s got NOBODY. She gotta
reasonabee sad.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” asks Phil, but it’s rhetorical.
Maria’s out.
He stands there in the darkness for a moment, looking down at her, alone in her
massive bed. Enough.
 
At night, you can see all the way to the Capitol from Maria’s place, but Phil
isn’t looking. Instead, he’s hailing a cab and booking a flight on his phone,
leaving before the first streaks of blue hit the sky, heading back to New
Mexico.
 
Five hours later, the sun is just rising over the desert when he finds Clint
Barton on the firing range, aiming into the sun to practice his limited-
visibility shooting. Phil walks up to him, Thomas Gray thundering in his ears.
He’s been hearing him ever since he left D.C. Maybe it’s true that the paths of
glory lead but to the grave. Maybe it’s just, and right, and okay, that Clint
Barton was born to fortune and to fame unknown in a trailer in Iowa, while the
likes of Tony Stark are made to sway the rod of empire. All Phil Coulson knows
is, right now, he truly does not give a shit. 
 
Barton turns to look at him and the rising sun sets every angle of him alight
with celestial fire. He is motionless as a desert lizard in the sun, except for
his fingers, which furiously twiddle an arrow like a cheerleader working a
baton. Phil can read his tension, see it drawn tight across his face and his
shoulders. A man who’s been hit as a boy stands differently than one who
hasn’t.
“You asked me what I want. Do you still want to know?” Phil asks.
Barton tilts his head.
“No. Wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t care. It’s you,” says Phil.  “I said it
wasn’t your problem, and I meant that. I said I would recuse myself as your
handler if you wanted, and I meant that too. But what I didn’t take into
account is that not doing something? Isn’t harmless. Not saying things, isn’t
harmless. And refusing to acknowledge how I felt towards you, wasn’t harmless.
It destroyed our team. I take full responsibility for that. So here it is: I
want you. I don’t care to pretend any more, and I don’t give a damn if it makes
you uncomfortable, because I don’t honestly believe it makes you that
uncomfortable and I’m done waiting for you to grow up. You’re nearly thirty
years old and I’m nearly forty. That doesn’t give us much time to get our acts
together. Not in this job. So I’m calling it.”
Barton blinks. It’s slow, like a lizard’s blink. It occurs to Phil that
Barton’s been shooting into the sun for God-knows-how-long, and for all he
knows, the speech he just made came out of a gigantic sunsplotch of purple and
green in the center of Barton’s vision. The silence goes on long enough that he
starts to wonder if maybe Barton’s so blinded that he’s puzzled about who the
talking sunsplotch even is. In which case Phil will just go quietly off in a
corner and die, thanks. He’s about to do that anyway when Barton finally speaks
up.
“Wanna donut?”  He gestures towards a half-open box near his wadded-up
sweatshirt in the corner of the ammo shelf. (The donut box is nestled up
against a half-empty Mountain Dew, because Barton likes to wash his sugar down
with corn syrup. Phil has absolutely no idea why he is in love with this hick.)
“Sure,” Phil says.
They get about two bites into their donuts when Barton says “All right, fuck
this,” and they’re both dropping their donuts on the ground and moving in, and
the first kiss is rough and harsh and hungry, and then Clint pulls away, looks
up into Phil’s eyes, and oh. So it’s like that.  Barton is scared shitless,
terrified of his own desires, wary and hungry as a coyote on the outskirts of a
campfire. His eyes are wide and God, Phil can see his pulse pounding in his
neck. Phil brings his hands to Clint’s jawline and, trying not to spook the
younger man, leans in for a serious, soft kiss, a kiss that tries to
communicate things, things like “value” and “cherish” and “never harm”. Clint
is trembling by the time their lips make contact, and by the time Phil prizes
his lips open his whole body is shaking, and when Phil softly sucks his tongue
he whimpers, and just like that, Phil is officially, and permanently, off the
market. All spoken for. Taken. They trade kisses, slowly, the arousal like a
soapbubble passed gently between wet hands, larger and more iridescent with
every turn. Barton is whimpering and moaning and making all kinds of fucking
noise, and every sound Barton makes is driving Phil closer to the point where
he is going to rip his asset’s clothes off with his fucking teeth if he has to
and fuck him into the ground right here at the firing range. And Barton, thank
God, seems to have the same idea, because he pushes Phil away for a panting
breathless moment, says, “Woah”, and “Shit, you too?” and “OK, you and I need
to take this somewhere else right-the-fuck-now.”
“On it,” says Phil, and Christ they make a good team, because Barton has his
gear together in seconds and Phil gets on his Blackberry and cancels all his
meetings and Barton’s shift for the day while Barton drives like a gravel-
throwing maniac all the way to the nearest motel, where Phil barely gets the
door shut before Barton’s on his knees in front of Phil, yanking open his fly
and sucking him with a ferocity that makes black stars explode across Phil’s
field of vision. Barton’s hands are braced flat against the door to either side
of Phil, he’s rolling his hips against nothing but air, and he’s moaning
because apparently even a mouth full of cock cannot shut Clint Barton up. Phil
slams his head back against the door once, twice, but he can’t help it, the
sensation is so exquisitely high and pure and sweet, and he comes and comes and
comes down Barton’s throat with one hand gripping Barton’s sweat-damp hair, the
other covering Barton’s splayed fingers on the door, both still mostly dressed
in a scorching-hot motel room in the middle of August. Afterwards, he goes
slithering down the door and sits, speechless, goggling at an unspecified point
on the floor. Clint scoots over and cranks the A/C, then comes and sits next to
Phil.
“Am I better at that than you thought I might be?” he says, nudging Phil’s
shoulder.
Phil’s reply is glassy, stoned, sounds distant even to him. “You’re better at
that than I thought anyone could be.”
Clint shrugs. “Just like riding a bicycle, I guess.”
Phil frowns. “Waitaminute. You’re… um… Barton, how much experience are we
talking about here?”
“You mean, consensual?” Barton says, picking at something on the knee of his
jeans and trying, extremely unsuccessfully, to hide a grin.
“Yes of course consensual.”
“Not counting the times I did it for food and shelter?”
“Jesus, Barton.”
“What?! I’m just asking you to clarify!” Barton says, not even trying to hide
the grin now, and oh, that’s it. Phil is so onto him. 
“You know, you can’t brag about how good you are and try to make me feel bad
for how you got good at the same time.”
“Why not?”
Phil opens his mouth to reply and then realizes he doesn’t have an answer for
that. “Huh.”
“See. Gotcha there,” Barton says, scrambling to his feet and offering Phil a
hand up. Phil takes it, gratefully, and Barton begins undoing Phil’s tie,
helping him undress as his brain slowly comes back online. “It’s not nice,”
Phil finally concludes.
“Well, I’m not very nice, sir,” says Barton, nicely hanging Phil’s shirt over
the back of a chair and arranging it so it won’t wrinkle. “Arms up.” He pulls
Phil’s t-shirt over his head, capturing Phil’s lips in a kiss as soon as his
face is clear of the fabric, and Phil groans, grabs Barton by the hips, topples
them both over onto the bed.
“Besides,” Barton says, whipping his shirt off and lifting his hips to squirm
out of his jeans as shoes and belts go caroming across the room, “Nice is
overrated.”
“Barton?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up,” Phil says, and Barton surges up below him, all tan skin and little
pink flecks of scar tissue and bright grey eyes blown wide with lust. They
kiss, skin sticking in the cold pool-scented blast from the hotel air
conditioner, heads swimming with the scents of sweat and salt and chlorine and
come, a dizzying swirl of summer and sex. Phil feels like he’s fifteen years
old again, except that fifteen never had anything this good, fifteen never had
rough hands skimming down his back, open lips catching on his ear, stomach
muscles clenching under his mouth. By the time Phil works his way down to take
Barton’s cock in his mouth, the younger man’s pressed right up against the wall
of arousal, about ready to tip over, the skin of his cock glossy and pink as a
new eraser. Phil pauses. “Now this. This is nice.”
“….Fffffuck you, sir. Gonna kill me with this shit.”
“Can it with the ‘sir’, Barton, unless you’d like me to start giving you some
real orders.”
“Fuck!”
“Oh, so you like that. Duly noted.”
Barton glares down at him. Phil smiles back up, pleasantly, as if he’s not
right next to the firmest sturdiest most mouthwatering prick he’s ever seen in
his life, and then, without breaking eye contact, shifts over and takes
Barton’s cock in his mouth, sliding down just enough to press it snug against
the back of his throat, giving it a good spit-coating before rising, sucking
all the way to the tip, letting it go with a faint popping sound, and settling
between Barton’s legs to give his balls a long, thorough laving with his
tongue, all the while jacking Barton with a grip that has the younger man
arching up off the bed and grabbing at the sheets while he babbles and yowls
like he’s losing his goddamn mind. This… this is really good. Barton is mouthy
and hyper and crazy as a shithouse rat and all that gets amplified when he’s in
bed, and that is just fine with Phil, because apparently crazy rednecks who
never shut up are just exactly his type. He shifts to give his own dick more
space, and the movement doesn’t go unnoticed, at least not according to the
little nonstop monologue that’s going on over Coulson’s head:
“OhJesusGodAlmighty—you’re getting hard again aren’tcha. Aren’tcha. I’mma come
so hard you fuckingcrazysonofabitch. I’mma—FUCK!!—suck you off again. So hard.
So-OHGOD-hard. And I’mma do it slow this time justyouwait. Can’t wait to get
you down my throat again. Sir. CannotFUCKINGwait."
Phil pauses and presses his thumb down firmly on Barton's cockhead, right over
the slit, wobbling it just a bit to create tiny circles of pressure. “You ever
been told you have an oral fixation, Barton?”
“FUCK!”
“So do I,” says Phil, and swallows Barton down whole. And for one second,
everything stops, and the world is bleach-white and cave-dark and freezing cold
and boiling hot at the same time, and then Barton screams and comes like a
volcano and Phil lets his mouth fill before swallowing, slowly, luxuriantly,
the taste exploding over his tongue like little white flowers of chlorine and
vodka, jasmine and caffeine, and he nuzzles Barton’s hip and places come-wet
kisses all over his skin as Barton comes down, breathing hard.  He blows a
steady stream of cool air over Barton’s wet cock, grins when Barton moans and
twitches all over, little last spasms working their way out. 
“Hey,” says Barton, his voice shattered. “Come up here.” Phil pauses, grins,
wipes his face on the sheets and crawls up to where Barton sprawls, looking
knackered. His golden skin is glistening with sweat, and Phil’s glad for just a
moment that Barton’s got his eyes closed, because he can’t see how young and
unearthly-gorgeous he looks next to Phil’s… ordinariness.
Barton cracks one eye and regards Phil narrowly. “You’re going to kill me,” he
informs Phil. “I just want you to know. If you’re going to be doing that shit
to me, I’m going to have a heart attack and die before I’m forty.”
Phil smiles, places a hand on Barton’s belly, shrugs. “We’re in a dangerous
career field. Seems about right.”
Barton laughs at that. “What a way to go, though.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“So, you don’t mind, sir? The, uh, experience discrepancy?”
“Is that what that was?”
“I think I got pretty conclusively shown up, yeah, sir. Blown away completely.”
Barton makes an explosive gesture with his right hand, accompanied by a “PFFF”
sound effect, then mimes falling debris with wiggling fingers, tiny faint
screams of imaginary bystanders.
Phil sighs, drops on his back next to Barton, talks up at the ceiling. “And
here I was just laying here thinking I hope Barton doesn’t notice the
embarrassing way I came all over him within about ten seconds over there by the
door.”  
Barton doesn’t say anything to that, but he pinkens slightly and looks pleased
by the compliment, so Phil continues. “And by the way, I frankly don’t care
where you learned how to do that. Well, I do and I don’t. You’re incredibly
good at it, and I won’t be made to feel guilty for enjoying it, but I’ll
dedicate my life to hunting down your teachers and killing them with my bare
hands if you want.”
Barton chuckles. “Not necessary, sir. I say living well and killing bad guys
with long-range weaponry is the best revenge.” They’re quiet for a moment, both
lying on their backs, eyes closed, and then Phil edges his hand over and
carefully covers Barton’s. Barton reacts immediately, and Phil thinks maybe it
was a mistake and starts to pull away, but no—Barton is turning his own hand
over and grasping Phil’s, squeezing it tight. They lie there together in the
sunlight for some time.
 
“Sir?” Barton says to him, much later that evening, driving back to base.
“Promise me something?”
“What?”
“Promise me this won’t change shit.”
Phil chuckles. “Barton, I think I can pretty conclusively promise you that this
will change shit.”
“I don’t mean it like that, sir. I mean, I know it’ll change some stuff. But…”
and Barton pulls in a deep breath.
“WhatIlikeaboutyouishowyoudon’ttakeanyofmyshit.”
“Pardon?” says Phil, because Barton is mumbling and also because that was
totally not what he was expecting. 
“What I like about you. You don’t let me get away with shit. The only other
person who’s like that with me is Natasha. And, uh, I owe her a lot. Some
explanations, probably. An apology. Anyway,” Barton says, shifting around
uncomfortably and mumbling down into his collar. “I don’t want that to change.
I like that you call me on my shit when I’m acting like an asshole. I like that
you don’t let me play the, uh, victim. Like, ever. With anything. I like that
you’ll tell me when to shut up, an’ that you’ll make me run on the treadmill
for like, nine million hours a day, and that you’ll tell me when I’m outta
line. I need that. Without that, I’m…” and here he trails off, makes a sound
and gesture like the fallout from his earlier mimed explosion. Blowing in the
wind.
“Barton, I...” Phil is lost for words, lost in a sea of nameless emotion. Then
it comes to him. It’s weird and embarrassing and makes no logical sense
whatsoever, but he knows exactly what to say. He takes his eyes off the road
and looks at Barton (he could let go of the wheel completely and they wouldn’t
leave the road for five hundred miles, that’s how flat New Mexico is).
“Clint.” He reaches over, takes Barton’s chin in his hand, and the look in
Barton’s wide grey eyes when he says, “Yeah?” makes Phil’s heart pound damn
near out of his chest.
 
“I promise.” A few moments pass. Weather happens. Phil’s fallen through the
last floor, he’s hit solid ground, and the look in Barton’s eyes is like the
rain that’s pounding down a curtain around their car and drumming a deafening
rattle on the roof, it’s wet earth and fresh rain and a good place to start
roots.
 
“Scout’s honor.”
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