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the_wordbutlerMotion Practice, an Avengers AU
“Chapter 3: Avoidance, Bargaining, and Other Tactics”
Clint Barton, Darcy Lewis, Bruce Banner, Pepper Potts, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Phil Coulson, Bucky Barnes, Peggy Carter, Maria Hill, Natasha Romanoff, Thor Odinson, Jane Foster
Rated PG-13 for language; 9,531 words
When Clint Barton takes a job prosecuting traffic offenses and DUIs at the Suffolk County District Attorney's office, he's pretty sure his life is finally going in the right direction. But the problem isn't the direction: it's where he ends up.
In this chapter, Clint tries to avoid, advert, and otherwise prevent disaster. But sometimes, avoiding and courting disaster look a little bit the same.
“I need a favor.”
“I don’t do favors.”
Darcy’s playing Words with Friends on her cell phone, feet kicked up onto the corner of her desk and her whole body stretched out almost vertical in her desk chair. Her computer background’s of some science-fiction character in a fez and bowtie, but it’s half-hidden by her open Facebook page—which, by the way, is supposed to be blocked by the network’s filter.
“Darcy,” Clint presses. She holds up a single finger, twitches it back and forth like a nanny correcting a naughty kid, and reaches for her drink. It’s a blended mocha-something-something from Starbucks, and there’s condensation sliding down the sides.
She puts it down on one of Clint’s case files, and he reaches to move it. She slaps his hand away. “I also definitely do not share,” she informs him, but at least she moves the cup.
Clint sighs. It’s early right now, a whole half-hour earlier than he normally gets in—and he’s already been there an hour, today. An entire hour, his office door open and his ass tucked into the far corner of the window ledge while he waited for Darcy. Not that he’d called it that. No, he’d told Hill he was getting a jump on things, told Pepper he’d wanted to clean up his office so it didn’t end up looking like Bruce’s, and smiled, just a little, when Coulson wandered by.
But all he’d really been doing was finishing up his correspondence course in Clock Watching 101. That, and drinking a little too much break room coffee.
“Darcy,” he repeats, and she shuffles her tiles for the fifth time in as many seconds. He resists the urge to snatch the phone out of her hand. “Darcy.”
“Busy.”
“Quieter.”
She frowns, her nose crinkling, and looks up at him. “What?”
“Quieter,” he says, and gestures vaguely toward the phone. “E in ‘egotist’ as your second E. Double-letter on the Q.”
Her head drops back to the display, and, after another shuffle of the tiles, she plays the word Clint suggested. The little chiming sound is drowned out by her hoot in pleasure when she sees the score. Clint thinks maybe he’s in the clear, maybe he’s earned some assistance from his, you know, assistant . . . until Darcy leans over to pick up her drink again. “Still no favors.”
He groans audibly. He thinks, for a few seconds, about firing her outright, but he knows he doesn’t have the authority. Plus, even if he did, Steve thinks Darcy’s “invaluable.” Clint’s not sure where “invaluable” came from, but Steve’s mentioned it often enough that he suspects there are nail and hair care tips involved.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. He presses his hand against it, waits for it to stop, and then ignores it.
“It’s not really a favor,” he tells Darcy. She’s leaning over to scroll through her Facebook feed. “It’s more—running interference.”
That brings her head up. “Interference?”
“Yeah.”
“Interference between you and who?”
“My . . . ” This, Clint suddenly thinks, is a bad idea. A very bad idea. “My brother.”
“You have a brother?” Darcy squints at him and takes a long, considering slurp of her mocha-something. Her eyes travel, drift over the whole of his face, but Clint holds his expression neutral. At least, he tries to. He’s still thinking, quietly, about firing her.
“You don’t look like the brother type,” she decides.
Clint rolls his eyes. “Does Thor?”
“Oh yeah. Thor’s totally that overprotective big brother who, like, vetted all the girls Loki brought home to make sure they had pure intentions.”
“That’s—weirdly specific.”
She shrugs. “Blame Jane,” she replies, then takes another sip of her drink. Her thumb dimples the domed lid, then releases. “Did your brother vet your boyfriends?”
He definitely wants to fire her, now. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“Then you’re not denying—”
“Okay, you know what?” Clint tosses up his hands. Whether it’s at Darcy or his own stupidity, he doesn’t know. “I’m done. I’m sorry I asked, I thought you’d—”
“Wait, wait, don’t get all butthurt.” He’s almost out of her cubicle, almost free of her particular brand of insanity, but he turns around anyway. She drops her feet off the edge of the desk and pushes her chair over to him. She’s craning her neck, still squinting, but she’s not saying no, either. “Interference with your brother I can do. But not forever. And eventually, I’m gonna want the scoop on what’s going on with you and him.” She peers at him over the rims of her glasses. “In detail.”
“Fine.” For what kinda feels like the first time all morning, Clint exhales. His chest doesn’t feel tight, anymore, and his nerves settle—at least for a few seconds. The relief doesn’t last, maybe because he knows this is a hollow victory. “His name’s Barney,” he tells her, “and all you have to do is make up an excuse if he calls.”
Darcy looks up from the post-it note she’s scribbling, one that might say Barney—or just be a giant squiggle. “Any excuse?” she asks, frowning.
He tries to nod, but his phone buzzes again. He doesn’t press his palm to his pocket, this time. “Switch them up as much as you need to, but make sure I’m never available. Not for him.”
“But—”
“Any excuse, Darcy,” he stresses, and whether it’s his voice, his expression, or both, it keeps her from asking anything else.
Three steps outside the cubicle, he fishes his phone out of his pocket. He has a half-dozen texts from Barney, plus a few from local numbers he doesn’t recognize. He’d cleared all messages in the parking lot that morning without replying, but it seems like nobody got the hint.
He doesn’t read any of the texts before deleting them, and once they’re gone, he turns off his phone entirely.
He’s tucking it back in his pocket when Darcy calls after him. “You know I only said yes because of the pants, right?”
Clint turns around, frowning. “The—pants?”
She nods, curls bouncing. There’s something—evil, somehow, in her gaze, and the way she bites her lower lip. He sighs. This, he decides, is going to be a long day.
Especially since, when he turns to walk into his office, Darcy wolf-whistles behind him.
Yeah. It’s gonna be a very long day.
==
Turns out that it’s just a long week.
The murder of Jordan Silva-Ribiero gets top billing on every news station Wednesday and Thursday, and the newspaper doesn’t drop the headline to below the crease until Friday morning. Editorials ramble on about liberal guilt and self-congratulatory corporate charity, and the more headlines he sees, the more Clint feels bad for busting Bruce’s chops over Urban Ascent. He tries not to read the articles, but they follow him everywhere: someone leaves a newspaper in the break room Wednesday after lunch, Pepper sends a link to an article on the program’s history all through the office, and Bruce shouts at an intern for pinning up an editorial cartoon of an evil-looking Stane looming over the dead kid and saying It’s all going according to plan. Clint’s not even sure what the cartoon’s supposed to mean, but when somebody sticks an article called False Charity, False Hope to the bulletin board outside the bathroom, he takes it down and shoves it into the shred bin.
Fury spends more time out of the office than in, looming at the police station and meeting with the mayor. At lunch on Thursday, Steve shares a rumor about Fury being called in by the governor. No one confirms it, but— Well, it’s not great news. “Especially,” Steve stresses, “in an election year.”
Stark locks himself in his office, churning out rapid-fire appellate briefs. Twice, Clint sees Bruce slip in to see him . . . but nobody else. No one dares wake that sleeping giant, not now.
Barney texts Clint at least ten times a day even when the messages from strange local numbers stop coming. He deletes every one without reading or replying. Barney tries to call the office, too, but Darcy’s as good as her word, spinning lies about trials, judicial subcommittee meetings, and, “Oh, he got some bad Mexican for lunch. You don’t want the details.”
For the first time, he’s—glad to have her. Well. Somewhat glad.
Friday, then, is at least welcome. It’s warm, the first spike in what the weather report promises will be a week-long heat wave. Walking through the parking lot in a full suit is uncomfortable, so Clint tucks his jacket over his bag before he wanders up the sidewalk. He’s not sure he wants to be there, not after such a scattered week, but it’s his job.
Plus, Stark’d sent out a two-line e-mail to the entire office the night before:
Dot’s party is still on so you better all show up or else.
Bring extra beer.
Clint’s in no hurry to find out what or else entails.
He’s all of four feet from his car when a young woman asks, “Excuse me?” She’s pretty and blonde, wearing a flowery summer dress that’s just short enough to make Clint look. He’s human, and he likes legs no matter who they belong to. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place, but you look like you work here. You got a second?’
“Sure,” he answers. He tries to force a smile, but it’s—not really been a smiling week. “What do you need?”
“I have to report for some court thing,” she explains, and starts digging through her bag. “I got this—paper, a while ago, to come today, but I can’t—dammit, where is it, I don’t—”
“It’s okay,” Clint assures her, putting out a hand. “If it’s court, it’ll be somewhere on the second or third floor. The security guards’ll check you in and make sure you get to the right place. Just have the paper for them, yeah?”
Her head jerks up, and she nods. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Mister—”
“Barton,” he replies. This time, he can manage an actual smile. “And you’re welcome.”
The woman’s cell phone rings, just then, and she apologizes before taking the call. He leaves her on the sidewalk, chattering with someone she calls baby an awful lot, and spends the better part of his morning pleased with his one good deed. Thor’s radio is turned to some talk-show where nasal-voiced “commentators” discuss current events, and the Silva-Ribiero murder turns into the argument of the day. It’s loud enough to hear all the way down the hall. Clint tries to block it out, forcing himself to think about how the world can’t be all bad if strangers still trust one another for directions.
An hour before lunch, as Clint’s coming back from the file room, he witnesses Bruce walk into Thor’s office, pick up the radio, and walk out with it. He lets the cord drag along the carpet behind him.
When Clint goes down for afternoon docket, then, he doesn’t have to ask why there are bits of plastic, wire, and metal strewn throughout the back stairwell. No, he definitely knows why.
All he has for the afternoon are two sentencing hearings—both pursuant to pleas, so quick and dirty that he could do them in his sleep—and the probation revocation of a woman who’d gotten picked up for driving on a suspended license three weeks after pleading out on a DUI. Clint tries not to think how stupid a move that is—
When the woman from the parking lot walks into the courtroom.
She stops in the doorway and frowns. Clint frowns, too.
No good deed goes—
“You’re the motherfucking lawyer on this shit?!” she demands. It’s so—angry and out of character from the person he’d met on the sidewalk that he blinks instead of responding. His jaw opens, but he can’t actually formulate sounds. He stands there, instead, limp-shouldered and—
And the woman throws up her hands. “I shoulda known it. I shoulda known it! No asshole in a suit’s actually a good guy. Always an undercover pig or a fucking lawyer.”
“I’m—sorry?” he asks, kind of—half-blankly.
He’s pretty sure the woman—Kelly Gambino, according to the file in front of him—doesn’t hear. Or, if she does, she just doesn’t care. She stomps up to the defense counsel table, slams her summons and ticket down hard enough that it makes the microphone stand shake, and immediately turns on him. “I knew I shoulda hired a lawyer!” she announces, throwing up her hands. “Johnny kept telling me that I don’t need a lawyer for this shit, that I can just appeal to the judge and the guy prosecutin’ it to cut me some slack, but I can tell you’re not that kind of a guy!”
“Because I—gave you directions?”
“Because you’re just another suited-up asshole lawyer!” Her heels clomp across the carpet and she slams both her palms on Clint’s table. They pin down her file, plus the two others for the afternoon. “You wanna make me a deal?”
He tightens his jaw. “Not if you don’t calm down,” he admits. “I can’t really reason with you if you’re—” Flying off the fucking handle comes to mind, but he decides against saying that. He kinda gestures towards her, instead.
She blinks a couple times, like she’s just now realizing that she’s spent the last minute and a half shouting at him, and straightens up. She smoothes her dress all the way down her sides and hips. She’s pretty. Clint wonders if pretty worked on Pym before he went to practice patent law. “Sorry,” she apologizes, puffing out a breath. “I just get so worked up at this kinda stuff.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s just—look, okay?” When she puts her hands on her hips, everything . . . bounces. “I work two jobs, ‘cause my loser boyfriend’s just out on parole and is having an awful time finding work. The nail place kept threatening to fire me ‘cause I was late, but Johnny wasn’t home in time to drive me there.”
Clint tries not to frown. He focuses on the files, because the less he looks at her, the less likely he is to make a face that’ll send her back into the world of the irrational. “Where was he?”
“Where was who?”
“Johnny. You said he doesn’t have a job, so why wasn’t he home to drive you?”
“He was out with his—” She pauses halfway through the sentence. Clint watches her roll her full lips together. “He was out dropping off some job applications.”
Yeah, over beers at the nearest bar. He forces a little smile. “Any luck?”
“Not yet. But anyway—” She waves a hand at him. “I had to get to work, you know? And then after work, I had to—”
“You didn’t apply for work release?”
“What?”
“Work release.” Clint flips open her file. “First-time DUI offenders are eligible for work release when they’re on their six-month suspension. It’s a limited-use lift on the suspension that lets you drive to work, from work, and on work-related errands.” He turns the file toward her, and Kelly bends to peer at it. Sure enough, on the plea sheet she signed when she agreed to probation, it says, Defendant is eligible for work release and will apply for approval before driving.
Defendant—Kelly—scowls. “I didn’t get a chance.”
“In three weeks?”
“Listen, I’m a busy woman, I work two jobs to support—”
“Your loser boyfriend.” Her eyes narrow, and Clint holds up his hand. “Quoting you,” he says, but he grins a little at the file as she huffs and tosses her hair.
“And anyway,” she presses, crossing her arms over her chest, “work release wouldn’t’ve mattered. Not for what happened.”
Clint’s read the police report and verified affidavits, and he’s watched the video from the patrol car’s onboard camera. But he still looks up and asks, “Why’s that?”
“Because I wasn’t at work when I got pulled over. That is, I wasn’t going there or coming back. See, my cousin Natalie, she’s getting married next weekend. And I’m helping our nana bake the cake.”
“Okay . . . ”
“So I went out to pick up a bunch of what my nana needs to bake it. ‘Cause she’s got a busted hip and can’t do it herself. So, see?” She looks over at Clint, big-eyed, but it’s not big-eyed in a generous, hopeful way. It’s big-eyed in the way of those crummy Japanese animation shows. It’s the sparkly doe eyes the heroine flashes right before she throws a hissy fit.
He presses his lips together. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” he says, finally. “You knew your license was suspended, but didn’t apply for work release in the three weeks since you got put on probation.”
“‘Cause I’m busy.”
“Boyfriend, yeah, right.” Kelly nods urgently. “You drive to work because he’s not home to take you, work a full shift or whatever, then leave and, instead of going straight home, stop at the store.”
“Two stores,” she corrects.
Clint pulls in a breath. “Two stores.” He wonders whether his eyebrow twitches, or if he’s just imagining it. “So, you did all this—”
“Right.”
“—and you want me to cut you some slack?”
“Well, yeah,” she says. She’s a little slack-jawed, like she can’t wrap her head around the question. “I told you everything that happened! I told you how messed up a situation it is.” She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “You’re supposed to take pity on me ‘cause it’s extennisuating circumstances.”
“Extenuating.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” Clint shakes his head and turns back to the file. “Before I decide whether I cut you some slack, I’ve got another question.”
There’s that big-eyed look, again. Like some Disney-animated deer, Clint thinks. Then again, everybody knows what happens to Disney-animated deer. “Anything.”
“Where’s the part of the story where you called Officer Jones a—” He glances down at the affidavit in his file, squinting at the words. “—‘doughnut-eating fatass waste of space who deserves to have himself pepper sprayed for even looking at me funny’?”
Kelly’s mouth opens. She sputters, her whole body quaking in what Clint’s pretty sure is rage. “You—you motherfucking asshole lawyer, I am gonna make you so sorry we ever met, I am gonna—”
“No deal,” Clint replies, and then Judge English’s bailiff comes in and tells them to rise.
==
Clint’s shout of “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding!” when he leaves work that night, it—echoes. Even with the parking lot empty, there’s the sheer wall of building behind him and plenty of space for his voice to carry. A couple birds stop picking at a sandwich wrapper and flutter away. A squirrel skitters up a tree.
His voice carries even further when he adds, “God fucking dammit!” to the equation, and throws his bag onto the sidewalk.
In his defense, his tires are flat.
All four of them, absolutely pancake-flat. Mostly because they’ve been thoroughly slashed.
Kelly Gambino’s spending the next five days and nights in county jail thanks to her Fast and Furious driving and threats to Officer Jones, but Clint still immediately suspects her. Her, in her tiny silky sundress and high heels, with all that flicky blonde Jersey Shore hair and the bad attitude. Or if not her, Johnny-the-loser-boyfriend. Maybe a whole group of them, maybe a posse like in a bad gang movie, hovering around the parking lot until they got the signal to go for the blue two-door in the back of the lot, maybe—
“Fuck!” he says, again, because it’s more satisfying than standing there like an asshole. He kicks the bumper, hard enough to make his foot ache. Good. Good, the ache’s nice. Maybe he’ll kick it again, just for shits and—
“Clint?” someone asks, and Clint closes his eyes.
He recognizes that voice. He just—doesn’t want that voice, not when his primary urge is to inflict bodily harm on his traffic defendant and her asshole parolee boyfriend.
The problem is, he knows he doesn’t have a choice, either. He exhales and opens his eyes just as Coulson comes around the back of his car. Clint watches as Coulson cycles through ten expressions in as many seconds: shock, confusion, concern, frustration, plus a handful Clint can’t catalogue. He’s not sure he’s quite earned quiet anger yet, but he sees that on Coulson’s face, too.
“Do you know who it is?” he asks, attention shifting from the tires and up toward Clint.
Clint shrugs. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Defendant?”
“Yeah. She—wanted a deal she didn’t get.”
“Obviously.” There’s something so dry about it, so matter-of-fact, that Clint snorts a noise that’s almost a laugh. He looks up at the sky, pushes out a hard breath, and shakes his head. “I don’t suppose you’ve got some kinda ‘coworker coverage’ AAA plan,” he jokes.
“No, just the regular one.” And like that, Coulson swings his briefcase onto the trunk of Clint’s car and starts digging out his wallet. “Tow’s free as long as you go with the nearest place.”
“No, boss, I didn’t mean—”
Coulson pauses. The card’s already halfway out of his wallet. “Do you want to leave your car in the lot all night?”
“I can just call a regular tow truck, I don’t need—”
“Clint,” and Coulson’s so good at doing this—infinite patience thing with his voice that it distracts Clint immediately. Their eyes meet, and Coulson’s are soft and . . . kind. They haven’t made it to worried, not yet, but they’re close. It’s hard to argue with those eyes. “I spend a hundred bucks a year for the privilege of keeping this thing in my wallet. If I have two catastrophic car disasters before it expires in October, then we can talk. Right now, I’m calling you a tow truck. Okay?”
“Okay,” Clint agrees, and picks up his bag from the sidewalk.
The girl at the AAA call center estimates a half-hour to an hour before the truck’ll be there. Once the reservation’s confirmed, Coulson takes his briefcase off the trunk and wordlessly holds out a hand in Clint’s direction. Clint pulls himself away from the side of the car, frowning.
“Your bag,” Coulson says simply.
“I don’t—”
“You’re not going to walk home from the repair shop, Clint.” His fingers wiggle. “If you were Stark, I might consider this an imposition. You’re not. Give me your bag.”
He manages a little grin. “You wouldn’t do this for Stark?”
“No, I would,” Coulson replies with a smile that’s just the right side of smug. “But he’d owe me.”
Clint laughs and hands over his bag. He leans against the trunk of his poor, abused car and watches Coulson track back across the parking lot in the fading light. He’s the only motion in the whole place, save a bird or two, and Clint ends up just—focusing in on him. He sheds his suit jacket and hangs it in the backseat of his sedan, and there’s just enough sunlight left in the day that Clint can study his shoulders through the thin white of his shirt. With his coat on, he looks like some stock Law & Order lawyer, not worth the second glance. But when he sheds the coat and rolls up his sleeves, there’s a lot to admire.
The view when he bends over his trunk isn’t too bad, either.
When Coulson wanders back over, he’s carrying two bottles of water. “Be glad I went to Costco and was too lazy to carry in the case,” he says, offering one to Clint.
Clint grins. “The secret life of Coulson: AAA membership he doesn’t use, stashes of water in his trunk.”
“It’s water or bodies. Depends on what kind of mood I’m in.”
“Is that why you wear so much black? Hide the blood?”
“No. I wear black because it’s slimming. Learned it from Fury.”
“Well, one of you needs it.”
“I can still cancel the tow truck, you know.”
Clint laughs, then, at the biting sarcasm that Coulson doesn’t even attempt to hide, and his reward’s this perfect little grin. It finds the crinkles around Coulson’s eyes, crinkles that do weird things to Clint’s belly. He twists off the cap to the water and takes a couple big gulps to drown those particular thoughts. Doesn’t work, but it’s worth a try.
He watches Coulson out of the corner of his eye. He’s not fidgeting, not playing with his phone or his watch, or even the water bottle. He’s just—leaning there against the trunk of the car, settled next to him like they’ve done this a thousand times. It’s the most familiar, most companionable silence Clint’s had since he started his job.
“Don’t you have something better to do with your Friday night?” Clint asks, finally. Coulson twists to look at him. “Stark’s always talking about your knitting circle or whatever.”
Coulson rolls his eyes. “I went to a craft show with Steve once, and now Stark thinks I’m Susie Homemaker.”
“Your wife must be proud.”
“I’m sure if I was interested in one, she would be.” He shrugs when he says it, dismissing his own words like a throw-away, and it’s not ‘till Clint opens his mouth for the next joke that he realizes what Coulson’s said. He spends so long regrouping that he misses watching Coulson’s throat when he swallows a sip of water. “What about you?” he asks.
Clint blinks. “Me—what?”
“You must have better things to do on a Friday night.” He twists the cap back onto his bottle. “You’re, what, two years out of law school? You should be going to bars with your old friends, complaining about your boss.”
Clint snorts. “Yeah, I never really—fit in with the rest of them.”
“No?”
“Nah.” He moves to set his water bottle down somewhere behind him on the trunk, and their elbows bump pretty hard. He turns to apologize, but there’s something—distracting about the way Coulson looks at him. It’s honest curiosity, nothing demanding or nosy, and Clint . . .
Clint’s not used to those kinds of looks.
“I got started late, with college,” he explains, shrugging. “I mean, I went straight from undergrad to law school, but the problem was the five years before undergrad. I was too old to fit in with the other people who went straight through, but I didn’t have the whole ‘first career’ thing to fit in with the non-traditional students.” He glances at Coulson. “I kinda got—stuck in the middle.”
Coulson smiles, softly, and shakes his head a little. “You can still be on the fringes even if you go straight through.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Clint’s pretty sure there’s more to the story, the way Coulson wets his lips and draws in this caught little breath, but then there’s the telltale rattling of a truck coming into the parking lot. The conversation dies, and the next half-hour’s spent signing paperwork and convincing the driver that no, really, it’s not worth it to file a police report, trust him. The driver shoots some funny looks between the two of them, looks Clint’s not sure that he likes, but then his car’s strapped in and ready to go.
“We’ll call you Monday,” the driver says after he tosses his clipboard into the cab.
“Monday?” Clint demands. “I don’t have another car, I can’t wait ‘till—”
“You got two options,” the driver informs him. He’s a jowly guy, probably a couple years older than Coulson, and he smacks his lips when he speaks. “First one is we take it to the nearest shop. They don’t open ‘till Monday, so you don’t get your car ‘till Monday. And the second is we take it to one of the shops that’re open on Saturday, and you pay for all the mileage and everything.”
Between student loans and car payments for a car that he can’t currently use, Clint’s not sure how he’s gonna pay for the new tires. Coulson glances at him, all soft-eyed again, and Clint . . . Clint shakes his head. “Monday’s fine,” he—well, he kinda grumps his way through it, if he’s honest.
“Hey, you be glad your boyfriend’s willin’ to put you on his membership,” the driver chides while he climbs into his seat. He closes the door harder than he maybe needs to. “Imagine how much you’d be paying without him.”
Clint’s too busy trying not to swear to correct the guy. He leaves it to Coulson to thank him, mostly because he’s walking down the middle aisle of the parking row and resting his urge to kick something.
The truck rolls away, blasting exhaust and groaning as it turns out of the parking lot, and Clint doesn’t realize Coulson’s said his name until a firm, wide palm lands on his shoulder.
It’s just Coulson’s hand, just touch, but Clint feels like somebody’s just jabbed a pin into the balloon of his anger. He exhales, long and hard, because—what else can he do? His tires are slashed, his brother’s an asshole, Kelly-the-nail-stylist couldn’t follow the terms of her damn probation, and—
And then, there’s Phil Coulson.
Kind-eyed Phil Coulson, watching him when he turns around.
“Sorry,” he says, half-heartedly.
“Don’t be,” Coulson replies, shrugging a little. “I’m already driving you home tonight. I might as well pick you up tomorrow, and then again on Monday. And if you need groceries or something, we can—”
“Tomorrow?” Clint repeats.
“Dot’s birthday party.” He smiles a little at Clint’s full-body groan. That smile is the only thing that Clint from dropping to the pavement like a two-year-old and crying about life not being fair. And trust him, he’s still tempted. “If it doesn’t cheer you up,” Coulson encourages, “I’ll—buy you a beer.”
“After a whole day with Stark,” Clint retorts, “I’ll need more than a beer.”
“Two, then.” Coulson’s smile finds those crinkles, and for another few seconds, Clint forgets how to breathe. He only remembers when Coulson adds, “And an appetizer. At the seedy college bar of your choice.”
It disarms him—and that’s Coulson’s secret, Clint suspects, disarming people when they’re at their worst—and he laughs a little as he shakes his head. “I’m fresh out of seedy bars,” he says as they start wandering toward Coulson’s car, “but I’m sure you can pick one for me.”
“How can I choose?” Coulson wonders aloud, and Clint can’t ignore the way their laughter echoes through the parking lot, too.
==
“Coulson.”
“Yes?”
“Remember how you said Stark was rich?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know you meant this.”
Coulson laughs around a sip of his beer—good beer from a pretty exclusive microbrewery, and there’s not a thirty-six pack of Bud Light in sight—but Clint’s not actually laughing. ‘Cause even though he’s here, standing on Stark’s back patio and drinking Stark’s good beer, he can’t believe it.
He can’t believe that Tony Stark lives in a fucking mansion.
It’s not even one of those trendy places you hear about on the news, where thirty-something trendsetters come in, bulldoze a split-level, and build a three-story eyesore with marble everything in its place. No, this is a massive old brick behemoth of a home, the kind with white trim around the windows and one of those—turret-looking rooms built onto one of the corners. When they’d turned onto the street, he’d asked Coulson if they were lost, ‘cause son of Howard Stark or not, he’d figured Tony Stark for a “modern townhouse” kind of guy.
Instead, they’d wandered through a living room with a vaulted ceilings, greeted Peggy and Bucky—“Food duty,” Stark’d reported—in the kitchen, and emerged onto an enormous, dark-stained deck. A deck which, by the way, led down to a cobbled patio and an enormous in-ground pool.
And that’s without mentioning the massive spread of snacks, the leaning tower of birthday presents for Dot, and the two greyhounds lounging in the shade of perfectly-manicured trees.
“Dummy and Butterfingers,” Stark’d reported, and one of the dogs’d rolled over and glanced at them upside-down. “Dummy’s got a crotch thing. Lemme know if he does the crotch thing.”
But then Bruce’d finished a phone call, Stark’d thrown an arm around him and dragged him over to the massive bowl of sangria, and that’d been that.
Coulson’s still laughing, a little, and Clint—tries not to look at him for too long. He’s been staring, off and on, since Coulson showed up at his building, dressed in a black button-down that shows way too much skin (arms, wrists, throat, collarbone, please god let that be chest hair) and a pair of jeans that—
There are jeans in the world that fit like a second skin, and jeans in the world that are so well-worn and loved that you spend an hour wondering if they’ll be soft against your fingertips. And then, there are Phil Coulson’s jeans, which combine those two qualities while also hugging his ass and thighs in a way that should be illegal.
Clint takes a long pull from his beer and forces himself to stop looking. “Should’ve clarified what kinda rich you meant,” he says, simply.
Coulson grins, and it finds those crinkles around his eyes. Is there anything about this guy that isn’t distracting as hell? “The best part about bringing in somebody new is introducing them to Stark’s place,” he replies. “After his welcome party, Thor spent three weeks thinking this wasn’t really Tony’s house, and that we were just hazing him.” He pauses, beer halfway to his lips. “Well. We might’ve helped his theory along, a little.”
He glances out of the corner of his eye, just to see whether Clint laughs, and Clint—gives in. He rolls his eyes, a little, and takes another deep swig, but yeah, he’s laughing. He’d laughed in the car, too, at Coulson’s couple stories about Stark’s other parties, and at how Coulson’d mouthed the words to some pop song when they’d stopped talking. The little clump of nerves about the party, they’d almost gone away, and—
And then, Coulson’s phone rings. He frowns, sets his beer on the corner of the snack table, and pulls it out of his pocket. “Fury,” he says, and he can’t even fake a smile at Clint’s little grimace.
“I’ll guard your beer,” Clint promises, but then he’s off, taking the call.
Clint hangs around the snack table for a couple minutes, just—watching everybody else. Most the office’s already there—Thor and Jane’re running late, according to Darcy, and the way she wiggled her eyebrows filled in several blanks Clint would’ve happily left empty—but it’s pretty . . . subdued. Steve and Hill are both sitting on the edge of the pool, legs dangling in, chatting while Steve’s kid bobs around in one of those bathing suits that are also kiddie life-jackets. She’s cute, with these ridiculous blonde braids down either side of her head and her dad’s grin, and keeps interrupting Steve’s conversation with something. Steve’s wearing star-spangled swim trunks and a white t-shirt that leaves pretty much nothing to the imagination. Clint lets himself imagine for a couple seconds, anyway, and then feels kinda creepy, given that the guy’s husband is one screen door away.
Creepier, though, is the fact that Hill’s wearing cut-offs and a tank top that shows off a strip of tanned midriff. It’s like when you’re six and run into your teacher at the grocery store, you know? She’s Hill, she lives in suits and heels, not—tank tops and damp curls.
Pepper’s wandering around in cut-offs and a t-shirt, but she at least looks like she belongs in that. The same way Darcy belongs in the slouchy jeans, strappy tank, and ridiculous oversized hat she’s wearing. Clint—he keeps trying to figure out that hat, whether it’s knit or cotton or meant to flop around like it keeps—
“I’m not sure what team you bat for, but I’m pretty sure it’s not even the same sport as Darcy.”
There’s something—elastic about Natasha’s voice, the way it stretches slowly from one syllable to another. Clint smiles at her around the mouth of his beer. “What sport do you play?”
Natasha raises both eyebrows in this perfect fluid movement, and raises her glass. She’s drinking sangria, but not the ridiculous strawberry kind that Stark claims he spent three days perfecting. No, she’s drinking the peach flavor from the little pitcher, the one with the PEPPER’S ONLY BECAUSE OF HER PSYCHOSOMATIC STRAWBERRY THING label on it.
She’s also wearing a tiny bathing suit with a pretty flimsy, flowy, white cover-up. There’s no way not to look. Clint thinks maybe she doesn’t care who’s looking as long as she’s happy with it.
“I’m pretty sure that, same sport or not, we’re not in the same league,” she answers.
“I’m surprisingly athletic.”
“You’d be surprised how many people think that about themselves until they meet me.”
Clint barely manages to bite back his smile. He’s not sure why he likes Natasha—he’s had fewer conversations with her than with almost anyone else, save maybe Thor—but there’s something . . . addictive about her. “Then maybe we have to find time to—”
There’s a yelp, a crash, and then a torrent of laughter, and Clint twists just in time to watch Stark and Bruce roll around, a heap of limbs sprawling on the grass. “We’re fine!” Stark announces, laughing, while the dogs bark and start racing around the yard in manic circles. Bruce shoves Stark, but there’s this—brightness in his whole expression when he does. He’s a pretty serious guy, and Clint’s not sure he’s ever seen him smile like that before.
Stark scrabbles to catch Bruce’s hands, but Bruce is somehow faster. Clint watches as he pulls his shirt out of his waistband, shakes it a few times, and tosses the ice cubes that’ve been trapped between cotton and skin into the pool.
Steve laughs. “I told you it never works!” he calls out to Stark.
“Correction: it always works, just not on Bruce.” Bruce shoves Stark again, a little harder, and Stark has to catch himself on his elbow to keep from sprawling out over the grass. His t-shirt rides up, revealing a lot of stomach and waist, and Clint—
Maybe Clint’s losing his mind, between Coulson’s jeans and Natasha’s bathing suit, but he swears he catches Bruce looking at all that skin and the trail of dark hair that under Stark’s navel.
At least, he looks until Stark picks an ice cube out of his glass, shoves it down the front of Bruce’s shirt—he’s as bad as Coulson, with the open buttons, so it’s not that difficult—and then jumps up and runs away.
Steve laughs, Hill rolls her eyes and declares she needs more alcohol to deal with this, and Darcy whips out her phone to take a video. Clint grins. “Thor and Jane, I get,” he admits, glancing over at Natasha, “and even Steve and Bucky.”
“You mean Steve’s husband Bucky? The one you’re still avoiding?” Natasha raises her glass in a mocking toast.
Clint ignores her. “My point is,” he retorts, “I never really expected Stark and Banner.”
Natasha pauses, her glass against her lips, and for a half-second, she just—watches him. She’s a master at non-reactions, Clint thinks. She can hold the world’s straightest face.
Most the time, anyway. Not this time, because as soon as Clint thinks it, her eyes start dancing. The longer she looks at him, the more they twinkle. Her hand shakes just enough to rattle the ice cubes in her glass, and when her lips twitch?
When her lips twitch, Clint knows he’s in trouble.
Her laughter’s loud enough that it echoes through Stark’s backyard. One of the dogs stops sniffing at the platter of pigs-in-a-blanket and howls at her. Dot stops splashing, Bruce pauses where he’s tucking his shirt back into his pants, and Thor—who’s coming out onto the deck—freezes so suddenly that Jane runs into his back and nearly bowls both of them over.
“No,” Natasha says. She’s wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, and the words are hardly recognizable around her laughter. “No. That is just—no.”
She chuckles as she walks over to Pepper, and when she murmurs something into Pepper’s ear, Pepper bursts out laughing, too. Clint frowns at her back, and frowns again when, a couple minutes later, Tony drapes himself over Bruce’s shoulders while regaling them about the time he went skinny dipping in Lake Erie.
It’s another five or ten minutes before Coulson wanders back from his phone call. “The cops pulled in somebody who looked good for the Silva-Riberio case,” he says, tucking his phone back in his pocket. “Fury wanted at least one of us on notice.”
Clint’s pretty sure he could’ve stood just one day without mention of the murder. He picks up Coulson’s abandoned beer, holding it out to him. “But?” he asks.
“But P.D. beeped in while I was on the line with him, and it turns out the guy has a rock-solid alibi.” His fingers are warm against Clint’s palm when he takes the beer. “CSI’s ruined us. Everybody thinks a murder gets solved in all of ten minutes, instead of—”
Coulson’s last couple words are lost behind the sound of an enormous splash. The waves in the pool are high enough that Dot, who’s holding onto Steve’s legs, almost gets swept away, but she’s laughing. The laughter turns into squeals when, seconds later, Stark breaks the surface, spraying her with water.
“Mature,” Hill grumbles, and Stark shakes his head of wet hair hard enough that it sprinkles Hill, instead.
“Six-point-five,” Bruce intervenes before Hill can start threatening damage to the really important parts of Stark’s anatomy. “Sloppy form, lots of back splash.”
Tony spits water at him, and seconds later, Dot does the same thing to Steve. He makes an offended noise and gives her a little shove, sending her spiraling into the wet blue yonder of the pool’s shallow end. Stark splashes Bruce again before shouting to her, “Wait up for Uncle Tony!”
Clint shakes his head a little, but when he glances at Coulson, Coulson’s smiling.
“Six months,” he says.
“What?”
“Stark and Banner.” In the black shirt, even his shrugs are distracting. “Guarantee you, it’ll take six months.”
“Less than that,” Clint replies, but he’s—not really thinking about Stark and Bruce. Not right now.
Not when he can watch Coulson’s throat when he swallows and wonder, very quietly, how long it could take him.
==
“Ten bucks says Tony throws the first punch,” Bucky Barnes remarks, and Clint nearly chokes on a Dorito.
He’s watching Stark and Steve argue, mostly because everybody else is watching Stark and Steve argue. Well, okay, not really everybody. Natasha is, but then, Natasha’s sitting on the pool steps in her distractingly tiny swimsuit, nursing what Clint’s pretty sure is her fifth or sixth glass of sangria. She’d been in the middle of chatting with Pepper—who’s only damp to her knees, and who’s mostly-sharing Natasha’s drink—but it’s pretty clear the fight’s more exciting than whatever they were talking about. Darcy, Jane, Thor, and Bruce are watching a little, too, in between rounds of the saddest game of bocce ball Clint’s ever seen. Peggy, Hill, and Coulson are too busy talking about politics to notice a little arguing—mostly because they’re arguing, themselves.
Clint’d been in a conversation, too, talking about baseball with Steve (not that he liked baseball all that much, but the other option was flawed tax reform, and he believed pretty firmly in choosing the lesser of two evils). But then, Stark’d walked up, handed Dot an iPad with a pink bow, and walked away while whistling the chorus to “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”
Dot’s still dancing around with the iPad, squealing over “pony shows” and “the bird game”, and Stark and Steve are arguing.
Loudly.
Clint glances over at Bucky. In court, he’d been this—clean-cut, baby-faced guy in a crisp suit, about as “defense lawyer” as you could get. Here, at home, he’s in jean shorts and a t-shirt from some charity 5K. He raises his eyebrows, wiggles them once, and takes a pull from his beer.
If they’d met like this—shorts, t-shirts, chips, beer—Clint’s pretty sure they would’ve gotten along just fine.
“I can’t imagine Steve punching anybody,” he admits, shrugging. “Isn’t he a ‘more flies with honey’ kinda guy?”
Bucky snorts and shakes his head. “Steve’s got a pretty specific skill set when it comes to pissing people off,” he responds. He leans against the snack table. “He won’t throw the first punch, he usually won’t even shove somebody. No, what he’ll do is, he’ll rile them up until they make the first move.” He smirks, but it’s—amused. Warm, Clint thinks, not shitty. “Back in high school, there was this guy. Total bully asshole. He’d mess with you just to show he could. Steve was still scrawny back then, but he wasn’t afraid of the guy. He’d walk up to him in the hallway and just—tell him off. Y’know, the usual ‘you can’t talk to people like that’, ‘pick on somebody your own size’ kind of stuff. Even though he was still maybe five-eight and about a buck forty soaking wet.”
Clint swallows his next chip so hard, it hurts. “You’re—kidding,” he stammers, and looks over at Steve. Steve Rogers, who’s gotta be at least six feet tall. Steve Rogers, who’s almost as broad as Thor, who’s made entirely of angles, abs, and hip-bones. Steve Rogers, who ditched his t-shirt for the pool and who is the perfect combination between pale and tan to star in a high-budget porno. Just—
No.
“You’re hazing me,” he decides.
“I swear to god,” Bucky replies. He raises a hand like he’s taking the Boy Scout oath. “Half the time, I’m not sure I believe it. I went away to boot camp, came home, and my skinny boyfriend looked like that.” He tips his beer in Steve’s direction and shakes his head. “Anyway,” he continues, “he kept finding some way to mouth off to this asshole football player every damn day. And every damn day, the asshole shoved him out of the way and kept on walking. And you, me, most people, we’d figure we’re not making an impression and give up. Tell a teacher or something. But not Steve. Steve kept on going for—months, probably.”
Across the yard, Stark starts laughing. Clint’s pretty sure there’s steam coming out of Steve’s ears. “And?” he asks.
“And one day, the asshole swung at him. Halfway through Steve’s lecture, he just hauled off and sucker-punched him.” Bucky shrugs. “I laid him out, of course, ‘cause there was no way Steve was gonna win that one. But since the asshole threw the first punch, he got suspended for, like, two weeks. Missed some important playoff game and everything.”
“You think he did it on purpose?”
“Are you kidding? He admitted it to me the second we were alone in the nurse’s office! ‘At least if he punched me, I could fight back,’ he said.” Bucky’s smile pushes at the corners of his lips and finds a ridiculous dimple. Clint can see how he could’ve charmed a teenaged Steve Rogers—and can kinda imagine the reverse, too, now that he thinks about it. Bucky shakes his head. “What he really meant was that I’d fight back for him, but he’d never admit to that one.”
Clint laughs, a little, and picks up his own glass. He’s not sure how he ended up with the world’s strongest strawberry sangria instead of beer, but he seems to remember Darcy wandering by with the pitcher two—or three—times. “It still like that?”
“Worse.” When Bucky grins, Clint laughs again. “Listen,” he says, after he drains the last of his beer and drops the bottle in a garbage can, “I know I blind-sided you with that motion. I thought Thor was keeping you updated, he didn’t, and that was on me. Steve came home and spent a good half-hour running through the ‘It’s hard to work with these people when my husband’s an ass to them’ rant. Which, y’know, I’ll probably hear again the next time I piss Tasha off.”
Clint snorts and kinda shakes his head. “Yeah, I didn’t mean to—”
“No, you were probably right,” Bucky interrupts. “I just get sick of defendants getting bulldozed. I mean, even if they did it, they still deserve basic rights.” He shrugs a little. “Without the bottles, they would’ve let him keep driving.”
“He fell out of the car,” Clint notes, rolling his eyes.
“Oh, yeah. No, I’m not arguing with that. I’m just saying: without the bottles, there was no case, and my job’s to—”
Something rattles, then, and both Clint and Bucky turn just in time to see Stark regaining his balance after— Well, there’s no way around it. He’s been shoved. Just a little, just enough that he knocked into a patio chair, but it’s stopped the political debate and the game of bocce. One of the dogs comes running up and puts himself between Stark and Steve.
Stark puts his hands up. “But you gotta admit,” he says, his ass resting against the chair he’d almost knocked over, “she’s kinda in love with it.”
She is, apparently, Dot, who’s sitting cross-legged on the patio in her swimsuit and robe, watching what Clint can only assume is the pony show.
Steve sighs. “She’s four, Tony.”
“No better time to learn the technology of tomorrow,” Stark retorts, jabbing a finger into the air. “And, again, kinda in love with Uncle Tony’s special present of godfatherly love.”
They stare at each other for a couple seconds, separated mostly by Steve’s human decency . . . and the huge dog. Then, Steve throws up his hands and storms off toward the house.
Stark grins. “Pepper, fetch the sangria!”
Pepper rolls her eyes. “It’s Saturday,” she points out, and Natasha grins into her glass. “I’m off-duty on Saturday.”
“I don’t care. Sangria for everyone!”
When Clint glances over at Bucky, the dazzling dimple is back. “You owe me ten bucks,” he points out after Steve’s slammed the back door.
“I’ll win it back next time,” Bucky promises, and opens another beer.
==
“You sure you don’t mind? ‘Cause I can get a rental if it screws with your schedule.”
“What schedule?” Coulson asks, and slides out of the car.
It’s pretty dark and—pretty late, actually, by the time they get back to Clint’s building. No, not they. They implies that they both belong there, but Clint’s the only one staying, the only one who lives in the old brown building in the quiet neighborhood. Coulson’s just dropping him off.
The problem is, Coulson’s sitting in the idling car, foot on the brake while he waits for Clint to climb out. As soon as they arrived, Coulson found a parking spot and killed the engine, and now, he’s standing on the sidewalk with Clint, still in those jeans and the button-down that shows too much skin. Clint scrubs his face with a palm. The last glass of sangria was a mistake, he decides. It was one glass too many, and now, he’s muddling through this warm-bellied, unbalanced kinda feeling, the kinda feeling that usually ends in some pretty bad choices.
“You okay?” Coulson asks. They’re literally toe-to-toe on the sidewalk.
“Yeah,” he replies, and squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, Coulson’s still there. Clint spends a few seconds studying the hollow of his throat. “You come in earlier than me,” he points out, once he’s forced himself to start walking.
“I can come in later.”
“You don’t live on this side of town.”
“I get good gas mileage.”
“Yeah, but I mean—”
“Clint.” There’s something hard edging Coulson’s voice. They’re on the steps, all of ten feet from the freedom of “goodnight” and Clint’s front door, but Clint turns around anyway. Once he does, though, all he can see is Coulson. He’s half-illuminated from the security light over the door, and there’re shadows that find all his fine lines. He looks softer, in that light. He reminds Clint of a charcoal drawing, not a man.
He needs to go inside, he thinks. He needs to put on a pot of coffee, watch some bad after-midnight TV, and sober up. Because right now, in the dim security light and the haze of Stark’s sangria, he’s thinking about grabbing Coulson by the shirt collar and kissing him ‘till neither of them can breathe.
Coulson’s his boss, and he’s the new guy.
Coulson’s a fucking brilliant lawyer, the chief assistant district attorney, Fury’s go-to guy, and Clint’s—
“Clint,” Coulson says, again. It’s a murmur, something caught in his throat. “It’s not a problem.”
“Yeah,” Clint forces out, but it’s—breathless. All the coffee in the world won’t fix the way his head’s swimming. He presses his palm to the metal handrail, clutches onto it like he’s trying to keep from drowning.
But Coulson’s hand is on the rail, too, and Clint doesn’t realize how close they are until their hands brush.
Bump, he corrects, because it starts out a bump. Accidental contact, but then it builds into a brush, deliberate and gentle, and all while Coulson’s eyes are trained perfectly on Clint’s face.
The sides of their hands press together, and Clint feels goose flesh rise along his arm.
“I—want to,” Coulson says, but not in his usual tone. It’s deeper, and Clint wonders exactly what he wants.
Coulson’s his boss, he reminds himself again. He’s three weeks into the job, they hardly know one another, and—
And he can smell Coulson’s cologne, a bite of spice, in the night air.
He jerks back, trying to step onto the concrete porch, but he misjudges the distance. His bare heel catches against the rough stone, scraping off a layer of skin, and he hisses in pain. He somehow manages to keep his sandal and catch himself from falling.
He’s leaning on the rail and half-panting, but at least it’s another foot of air between them. Breathing room, he labels it. Thinking room.
But instead of breathing or thinking, he immediately looks back down at Coulson.
Lawyers learn, early on, how to be neutral. They learn how to keep their expressions steady, even when they want to scream. Coulson’s one of the best lawyers in the office, one of the best lawyers Clint knows—but right now, his face isn’t neutral. There’s something—caught, right then, captured by the light.
“I need to— Coffee,” he stammers. It’s not even a sentence.
Coulson nods. “I’ll pick you up,” he says. It’s quieter than Clint expected, but it’s not—cold. It’s still kind, still familiar.
Cold would’ve been easier, right now.
“Yeah, thanks.” Neither of them moves, and Clint suddenly realizes that he doesn’t wanna run off. He doesn’t wanna lock himself in his apartment like a coward, leave Coulson standing on the steps with that—soft, searching look on his face. He swallows and adds, “I’ll see you Monday.
Coulson nods, and Clint watches his arm work when he grips his keys. “Goodnight, Clint.”
“‘Night, boss.”
He says it normally, says it the same way as he does any day of the week, and even manages a little smile—but it doesn’t matter. ‘Cause as soon as the words tumble out of his mouth, something in Coulson’s face twists. It’s subtle, almost too small to notice, but Clint spends a lot of time looking at that face.
And now, he knows how those lines wear disappointed.
He stays there, on the concrete porch, until he hears Coulson’s car pull out of the lot and onto the street. Then he stays longer, long enough that the security light thinks he’s gone and switches off. He can see stars, in the dark, and he starts up at them while he listens to the rustle of the wind in the trees.
When he finally goes inside, he sends Barney a text message that reads stop sending me messages, you know the answer. Then, he turns off his phone and shoves it into the bedside drawer with the expired condoms and forgotten magazines. He slams the drawer hard enough that the whole nightstand rattles, and he listens to it settle in the darkness of his bedroom.
He thinks that’ll help, that the silence will fix something. It doesn’t.
He lies awake, staring at the ceiling, and spends too much time thinking about the stairs, the near-dark, and Coulson.
Natasha picks him up Monday morning, instead.
Previous chapters: Disclaimer | Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
“Chapter 3: Avoidance, Bargaining, and Other Tactics”
Clint Barton, Darcy Lewis, Bruce Banner, Pepper Potts, Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Phil Coulson, Bucky Barnes, Peggy Carter, Maria Hill, Natasha Romanoff, Thor Odinson, Jane Foster
Rated PG-13 for language; 9,531 words
When Clint Barton takes a job prosecuting traffic offenses and DUIs at the Suffolk County District Attorney's office, he's pretty sure his life is finally going in the right direction. But the problem isn't the direction: it's where he ends up.
In this chapter, Clint tries to avoid, advert, and otherwise prevent disaster. But sometimes, avoiding and courting disaster look a little bit the same.
“I need a favor.”
“I don’t do favors.”
Darcy’s playing Words with Friends on her cell phone, feet kicked up onto the corner of her desk and her whole body stretched out almost vertical in her desk chair. Her computer background’s of some science-fiction character in a fez and bowtie, but it’s half-hidden by her open Facebook page—which, by the way, is supposed to be blocked by the network’s filter.
“Darcy,” Clint presses. She holds up a single finger, twitches it back and forth like a nanny correcting a naughty kid, and reaches for her drink. It’s a blended mocha-something-something from Starbucks, and there’s condensation sliding down the sides.
She puts it down on one of Clint’s case files, and he reaches to move it. She slaps his hand away. “I also definitely do not share,” she informs him, but at least she moves the cup.
Clint sighs. It’s early right now, a whole half-hour earlier than he normally gets in—and he’s already been there an hour, today. An entire hour, his office door open and his ass tucked into the far corner of the window ledge while he waited for Darcy. Not that he’d called it that. No, he’d told Hill he was getting a jump on things, told Pepper he’d wanted to clean up his office so it didn’t end up looking like Bruce’s, and smiled, just a little, when Coulson wandered by.
But all he’d really been doing was finishing up his correspondence course in Clock Watching 101. That, and drinking a little too much break room coffee.
“Darcy,” he repeats, and she shuffles her tiles for the fifth time in as many seconds. He resists the urge to snatch the phone out of her hand. “Darcy.”
“Busy.”
“Quieter.”
She frowns, her nose crinkling, and looks up at him. “What?”
“Quieter,” he says, and gestures vaguely toward the phone. “E in ‘egotist’ as your second E. Double-letter on the Q.”
Her head drops back to the display, and, after another shuffle of the tiles, she plays the word Clint suggested. The little chiming sound is drowned out by her hoot in pleasure when she sees the score. Clint thinks maybe he’s in the clear, maybe he’s earned some assistance from his, you know, assistant . . . until Darcy leans over to pick up her drink again. “Still no favors.”
He groans audibly. He thinks, for a few seconds, about firing her outright, but he knows he doesn’t have the authority. Plus, even if he did, Steve thinks Darcy’s “invaluable.” Clint’s not sure where “invaluable” came from, but Steve’s mentioned it often enough that he suspects there are nail and hair care tips involved.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. He presses his hand against it, waits for it to stop, and then ignores it.
“It’s not really a favor,” he tells Darcy. She’s leaning over to scroll through her Facebook feed. “It’s more—running interference.”
That brings her head up. “Interference?”
“Yeah.”
“Interference between you and who?”
“My . . . ” This, Clint suddenly thinks, is a bad idea. A very bad idea. “My brother.”
“You have a brother?” Darcy squints at him and takes a long, considering slurp of her mocha-something. Her eyes travel, drift over the whole of his face, but Clint holds his expression neutral. At least, he tries to. He’s still thinking, quietly, about firing her.
“You don’t look like the brother type,” she decides.
Clint rolls his eyes. “Does Thor?”
“Oh yeah. Thor’s totally that overprotective big brother who, like, vetted all the girls Loki brought home to make sure they had pure intentions.”
“That’s—weirdly specific.”
She shrugs. “Blame Jane,” she replies, then takes another sip of her drink. Her thumb dimples the domed lid, then releases. “Did your brother vet your boyfriends?”
He definitely wants to fire her, now. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“Then you’re not denying—”
“Okay, you know what?” Clint tosses up his hands. Whether it’s at Darcy or his own stupidity, he doesn’t know. “I’m done. I’m sorry I asked, I thought you’d—”
“Wait, wait, don’t get all butthurt.” He’s almost out of her cubicle, almost free of her particular brand of insanity, but he turns around anyway. She drops her feet off the edge of the desk and pushes her chair over to him. She’s craning her neck, still squinting, but she’s not saying no, either. “Interference with your brother I can do. But not forever. And eventually, I’m gonna want the scoop on what’s going on with you and him.” She peers at him over the rims of her glasses. “In detail.”
“Fine.” For what kinda feels like the first time all morning, Clint exhales. His chest doesn’t feel tight, anymore, and his nerves settle—at least for a few seconds. The relief doesn’t last, maybe because he knows this is a hollow victory. “His name’s Barney,” he tells her, “and all you have to do is make up an excuse if he calls.”
Darcy looks up from the post-it note she’s scribbling, one that might say Barney—or just be a giant squiggle. “Any excuse?” she asks, frowning.
He tries to nod, but his phone buzzes again. He doesn’t press his palm to his pocket, this time. “Switch them up as much as you need to, but make sure I’m never available. Not for him.”
“But—”
“Any excuse, Darcy,” he stresses, and whether it’s his voice, his expression, or both, it keeps her from asking anything else.
Three steps outside the cubicle, he fishes his phone out of his pocket. He has a half-dozen texts from Barney, plus a few from local numbers he doesn’t recognize. He’d cleared all messages in the parking lot that morning without replying, but it seems like nobody got the hint.
He doesn’t read any of the texts before deleting them, and once they’re gone, he turns off his phone entirely.
He’s tucking it back in his pocket when Darcy calls after him. “You know I only said yes because of the pants, right?”
Clint turns around, frowning. “The—pants?”
She nods, curls bouncing. There’s something—evil, somehow, in her gaze, and the way she bites her lower lip. He sighs. This, he decides, is going to be a long day.
Especially since, when he turns to walk into his office, Darcy wolf-whistles behind him.
Yeah. It’s gonna be a very long day.
==
Turns out that it’s just a long week.
The murder of Jordan Silva-Ribiero gets top billing on every news station Wednesday and Thursday, and the newspaper doesn’t drop the headline to below the crease until Friday morning. Editorials ramble on about liberal guilt and self-congratulatory corporate charity, and the more headlines he sees, the more Clint feels bad for busting Bruce’s chops over Urban Ascent. He tries not to read the articles, but they follow him everywhere: someone leaves a newspaper in the break room Wednesday after lunch, Pepper sends a link to an article on the program’s history all through the office, and Bruce shouts at an intern for pinning up an editorial cartoon of an evil-looking Stane looming over the dead kid and saying It’s all going according to plan. Clint’s not even sure what the cartoon’s supposed to mean, but when somebody sticks an article called False Charity, False Hope to the bulletin board outside the bathroom, he takes it down and shoves it into the shred bin.
Fury spends more time out of the office than in, looming at the police station and meeting with the mayor. At lunch on Thursday, Steve shares a rumor about Fury being called in by the governor. No one confirms it, but— Well, it’s not great news. “Especially,” Steve stresses, “in an election year.”
Stark locks himself in his office, churning out rapid-fire appellate briefs. Twice, Clint sees Bruce slip in to see him . . . but nobody else. No one dares wake that sleeping giant, not now.
Barney texts Clint at least ten times a day even when the messages from strange local numbers stop coming. He deletes every one without reading or replying. Barney tries to call the office, too, but Darcy’s as good as her word, spinning lies about trials, judicial subcommittee meetings, and, “Oh, he got some bad Mexican for lunch. You don’t want the details.”
For the first time, he’s—glad to have her. Well. Somewhat glad.
Friday, then, is at least welcome. It’s warm, the first spike in what the weather report promises will be a week-long heat wave. Walking through the parking lot in a full suit is uncomfortable, so Clint tucks his jacket over his bag before he wanders up the sidewalk. He’s not sure he wants to be there, not after such a scattered week, but it’s his job.
Plus, Stark’d sent out a two-line e-mail to the entire office the night before:
Dot’s party is still on so you better all show up or else.
Bring extra beer.
Clint’s in no hurry to find out what or else entails.
He’s all of four feet from his car when a young woman asks, “Excuse me?” She’s pretty and blonde, wearing a flowery summer dress that’s just short enough to make Clint look. He’s human, and he likes legs no matter who they belong to. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place, but you look like you work here. You got a second?’
“Sure,” he answers. He tries to force a smile, but it’s—not really been a smiling week. “What do you need?”
“I have to report for some court thing,” she explains, and starts digging through her bag. “I got this—paper, a while ago, to come today, but I can’t—dammit, where is it, I don’t—”
“It’s okay,” Clint assures her, putting out a hand. “If it’s court, it’ll be somewhere on the second or third floor. The security guards’ll check you in and make sure you get to the right place. Just have the paper for them, yeah?”
Her head jerks up, and she nods. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Mister—”
“Barton,” he replies. This time, he can manage an actual smile. “And you’re welcome.”
The woman’s cell phone rings, just then, and she apologizes before taking the call. He leaves her on the sidewalk, chattering with someone she calls baby an awful lot, and spends the better part of his morning pleased with his one good deed. Thor’s radio is turned to some talk-show where nasal-voiced “commentators” discuss current events, and the Silva-Ribiero murder turns into the argument of the day. It’s loud enough to hear all the way down the hall. Clint tries to block it out, forcing himself to think about how the world can’t be all bad if strangers still trust one another for directions.
An hour before lunch, as Clint’s coming back from the file room, he witnesses Bruce walk into Thor’s office, pick up the radio, and walk out with it. He lets the cord drag along the carpet behind him.
When Clint goes down for afternoon docket, then, he doesn’t have to ask why there are bits of plastic, wire, and metal strewn throughout the back stairwell. No, he definitely knows why.
All he has for the afternoon are two sentencing hearings—both pursuant to pleas, so quick and dirty that he could do them in his sleep—and the probation revocation of a woman who’d gotten picked up for driving on a suspended license three weeks after pleading out on a DUI. Clint tries not to think how stupid a move that is—
When the woman from the parking lot walks into the courtroom.
She stops in the doorway and frowns. Clint frowns, too.
No good deed goes—
“You’re the motherfucking lawyer on this shit?!” she demands. It’s so—angry and out of character from the person he’d met on the sidewalk that he blinks instead of responding. His jaw opens, but he can’t actually formulate sounds. He stands there, instead, limp-shouldered and—
And the woman throws up her hands. “I shoulda known it. I shoulda known it! No asshole in a suit’s actually a good guy. Always an undercover pig or a fucking lawyer.”
“I’m—sorry?” he asks, kind of—half-blankly.
He’s pretty sure the woman—Kelly Gambino, according to the file in front of him—doesn’t hear. Or, if she does, she just doesn’t care. She stomps up to the defense counsel table, slams her summons and ticket down hard enough that it makes the microphone stand shake, and immediately turns on him. “I knew I shoulda hired a lawyer!” she announces, throwing up her hands. “Johnny kept telling me that I don’t need a lawyer for this shit, that I can just appeal to the judge and the guy prosecutin’ it to cut me some slack, but I can tell you’re not that kind of a guy!”
“Because I—gave you directions?”
“Because you’re just another suited-up asshole lawyer!” Her heels clomp across the carpet and she slams both her palms on Clint’s table. They pin down her file, plus the two others for the afternoon. “You wanna make me a deal?”
He tightens his jaw. “Not if you don’t calm down,” he admits. “I can’t really reason with you if you’re—” Flying off the fucking handle comes to mind, but he decides against saying that. He kinda gestures towards her, instead.
She blinks a couple times, like she’s just now realizing that she’s spent the last minute and a half shouting at him, and straightens up. She smoothes her dress all the way down her sides and hips. She’s pretty. Clint wonders if pretty worked on Pym before he went to practice patent law. “Sorry,” she apologizes, puffing out a breath. “I just get so worked up at this kinda stuff.”
“Obviously.”
“It’s just—look, okay?” When she puts her hands on her hips, everything . . . bounces. “I work two jobs, ‘cause my loser boyfriend’s just out on parole and is having an awful time finding work. The nail place kept threatening to fire me ‘cause I was late, but Johnny wasn’t home in time to drive me there.”
Clint tries not to frown. He focuses on the files, because the less he looks at her, the less likely he is to make a face that’ll send her back into the world of the irrational. “Where was he?”
“Where was who?”
“Johnny. You said he doesn’t have a job, so why wasn’t he home to drive you?”
“He was out with his—” She pauses halfway through the sentence. Clint watches her roll her full lips together. “He was out dropping off some job applications.”
Yeah, over beers at the nearest bar. He forces a little smile. “Any luck?”
“Not yet. But anyway—” She waves a hand at him. “I had to get to work, you know? And then after work, I had to—”
“You didn’t apply for work release?”
“What?”
“Work release.” Clint flips open her file. “First-time DUI offenders are eligible for work release when they’re on their six-month suspension. It’s a limited-use lift on the suspension that lets you drive to work, from work, and on work-related errands.” He turns the file toward her, and Kelly bends to peer at it. Sure enough, on the plea sheet she signed when she agreed to probation, it says, Defendant is eligible for work release and will apply for approval before driving.
Defendant—Kelly—scowls. “I didn’t get a chance.”
“In three weeks?”
“Listen, I’m a busy woman, I work two jobs to support—”
“Your loser boyfriend.” Her eyes narrow, and Clint holds up his hand. “Quoting you,” he says, but he grins a little at the file as she huffs and tosses her hair.
“And anyway,” she presses, crossing her arms over her chest, “work release wouldn’t’ve mattered. Not for what happened.”
Clint’s read the police report and verified affidavits, and he’s watched the video from the patrol car’s onboard camera. But he still looks up and asks, “Why’s that?”
“Because I wasn’t at work when I got pulled over. That is, I wasn’t going there or coming back. See, my cousin Natalie, she’s getting married next weekend. And I’m helping our nana bake the cake.”
“Okay . . . ”
“So I went out to pick up a bunch of what my nana needs to bake it. ‘Cause she’s got a busted hip and can’t do it herself. So, see?” She looks over at Clint, big-eyed, but it’s not big-eyed in a generous, hopeful way. It’s big-eyed in the way of those crummy Japanese animation shows. It’s the sparkly doe eyes the heroine flashes right before she throws a hissy fit.
He presses his lips together. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” he says, finally. “You knew your license was suspended, but didn’t apply for work release in the three weeks since you got put on probation.”
“‘Cause I’m busy.”
“Boyfriend, yeah, right.” Kelly nods urgently. “You drive to work because he’s not home to take you, work a full shift or whatever, then leave and, instead of going straight home, stop at the store.”
“Two stores,” she corrects.
Clint pulls in a breath. “Two stores.” He wonders whether his eyebrow twitches, or if he’s just imagining it. “So, you did all this—”
“Right.”
“—and you want me to cut you some slack?”
“Well, yeah,” she says. She’s a little slack-jawed, like she can’t wrap her head around the question. “I told you everything that happened! I told you how messed up a situation it is.” She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “You’re supposed to take pity on me ‘cause it’s extennisuating circumstances.”
“Extenuating.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” Clint shakes his head and turns back to the file. “Before I decide whether I cut you some slack, I’ve got another question.”
There’s that big-eyed look, again. Like some Disney-animated deer, Clint thinks. Then again, everybody knows what happens to Disney-animated deer. “Anything.”
“Where’s the part of the story where you called Officer Jones a—” He glances down at the affidavit in his file, squinting at the words. “—‘doughnut-eating fatass waste of space who deserves to have himself pepper sprayed for even looking at me funny’?”
Kelly’s mouth opens. She sputters, her whole body quaking in what Clint’s pretty sure is rage. “You—you motherfucking asshole lawyer, I am gonna make you so sorry we ever met, I am gonna—”
“No deal,” Clint replies, and then Judge English’s bailiff comes in and tells them to rise.
==
Clint’s shout of “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding!” when he leaves work that night, it—echoes. Even with the parking lot empty, there’s the sheer wall of building behind him and plenty of space for his voice to carry. A couple birds stop picking at a sandwich wrapper and flutter away. A squirrel skitters up a tree.
His voice carries even further when he adds, “God fucking dammit!” to the equation, and throws his bag onto the sidewalk.
In his defense, his tires are flat.
All four of them, absolutely pancake-flat. Mostly because they’ve been thoroughly slashed.
Kelly Gambino’s spending the next five days and nights in county jail thanks to her Fast and Furious driving and threats to Officer Jones, but Clint still immediately suspects her. Her, in her tiny silky sundress and high heels, with all that flicky blonde Jersey Shore hair and the bad attitude. Or if not her, Johnny-the-loser-boyfriend. Maybe a whole group of them, maybe a posse like in a bad gang movie, hovering around the parking lot until they got the signal to go for the blue two-door in the back of the lot, maybe—
“Fuck!” he says, again, because it’s more satisfying than standing there like an asshole. He kicks the bumper, hard enough to make his foot ache. Good. Good, the ache’s nice. Maybe he’ll kick it again, just for shits and—
“Clint?” someone asks, and Clint closes his eyes.
He recognizes that voice. He just—doesn’t want that voice, not when his primary urge is to inflict bodily harm on his traffic defendant and her asshole parolee boyfriend.
The problem is, he knows he doesn’t have a choice, either. He exhales and opens his eyes just as Coulson comes around the back of his car. Clint watches as Coulson cycles through ten expressions in as many seconds: shock, confusion, concern, frustration, plus a handful Clint can’t catalogue. He’s not sure he’s quite earned quiet anger yet, but he sees that on Coulson’s face, too.
“Do you know who it is?” he asks, attention shifting from the tires and up toward Clint.
Clint shrugs. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Defendant?”
“Yeah. She—wanted a deal she didn’t get.”
“Obviously.” There’s something so dry about it, so matter-of-fact, that Clint snorts a noise that’s almost a laugh. He looks up at the sky, pushes out a hard breath, and shakes his head. “I don’t suppose you’ve got some kinda ‘coworker coverage’ AAA plan,” he jokes.
“No, just the regular one.” And like that, Coulson swings his briefcase onto the trunk of Clint’s car and starts digging out his wallet. “Tow’s free as long as you go with the nearest place.”
“No, boss, I didn’t mean—”
Coulson pauses. The card’s already halfway out of his wallet. “Do you want to leave your car in the lot all night?”
“I can just call a regular tow truck, I don’t need—”
“Clint,” and Coulson’s so good at doing this—infinite patience thing with his voice that it distracts Clint immediately. Their eyes meet, and Coulson’s are soft and . . . kind. They haven’t made it to worried, not yet, but they’re close. It’s hard to argue with those eyes. “I spend a hundred bucks a year for the privilege of keeping this thing in my wallet. If I have two catastrophic car disasters before it expires in October, then we can talk. Right now, I’m calling you a tow truck. Okay?”
“Okay,” Clint agrees, and picks up his bag from the sidewalk.
The girl at the AAA call center estimates a half-hour to an hour before the truck’ll be there. Once the reservation’s confirmed, Coulson takes his briefcase off the trunk and wordlessly holds out a hand in Clint’s direction. Clint pulls himself away from the side of the car, frowning.
“Your bag,” Coulson says simply.
“I don’t—”
“You’re not going to walk home from the repair shop, Clint.” His fingers wiggle. “If you were Stark, I might consider this an imposition. You’re not. Give me your bag.”
He manages a little grin. “You wouldn’t do this for Stark?”
“No, I would,” Coulson replies with a smile that’s just the right side of smug. “But he’d owe me.”
Clint laughs and hands over his bag. He leans against the trunk of his poor, abused car and watches Coulson track back across the parking lot in the fading light. He’s the only motion in the whole place, save a bird or two, and Clint ends up just—focusing in on him. He sheds his suit jacket and hangs it in the backseat of his sedan, and there’s just enough sunlight left in the day that Clint can study his shoulders through the thin white of his shirt. With his coat on, he looks like some stock Law & Order lawyer, not worth the second glance. But when he sheds the coat and rolls up his sleeves, there’s a lot to admire.
The view when he bends over his trunk isn’t too bad, either.
When Coulson wanders back over, he’s carrying two bottles of water. “Be glad I went to Costco and was too lazy to carry in the case,” he says, offering one to Clint.
Clint grins. “The secret life of Coulson: AAA membership he doesn’t use, stashes of water in his trunk.”
“It’s water or bodies. Depends on what kind of mood I’m in.”
“Is that why you wear so much black? Hide the blood?”
“No. I wear black because it’s slimming. Learned it from Fury.”
“Well, one of you needs it.”
“I can still cancel the tow truck, you know.”
Clint laughs, then, at the biting sarcasm that Coulson doesn’t even attempt to hide, and his reward’s this perfect little grin. It finds the crinkles around Coulson’s eyes, crinkles that do weird things to Clint’s belly. He twists off the cap to the water and takes a couple big gulps to drown those particular thoughts. Doesn’t work, but it’s worth a try.
He watches Coulson out of the corner of his eye. He’s not fidgeting, not playing with his phone or his watch, or even the water bottle. He’s just—leaning there against the trunk of the car, settled next to him like they’ve done this a thousand times. It’s the most familiar, most companionable silence Clint’s had since he started his job.
“Don’t you have something better to do with your Friday night?” Clint asks, finally. Coulson twists to look at him. “Stark’s always talking about your knitting circle or whatever.”
Coulson rolls his eyes. “I went to a craft show with Steve once, and now Stark thinks I’m Susie Homemaker.”
“Your wife must be proud.”
“I’m sure if I was interested in one, she would be.” He shrugs when he says it, dismissing his own words like a throw-away, and it’s not ‘till Clint opens his mouth for the next joke that he realizes what Coulson’s said. He spends so long regrouping that he misses watching Coulson’s throat when he swallows a sip of water. “What about you?” he asks.
Clint blinks. “Me—what?”
“You must have better things to do on a Friday night.” He twists the cap back onto his bottle. “You’re, what, two years out of law school? You should be going to bars with your old friends, complaining about your boss.”
Clint snorts. “Yeah, I never really—fit in with the rest of them.”
“No?”
“Nah.” He moves to set his water bottle down somewhere behind him on the trunk, and their elbows bump pretty hard. He turns to apologize, but there’s something—distracting about the way Coulson looks at him. It’s honest curiosity, nothing demanding or nosy, and Clint . . .
Clint’s not used to those kinds of looks.
“I got started late, with college,” he explains, shrugging. “I mean, I went straight from undergrad to law school, but the problem was the five years before undergrad. I was too old to fit in with the other people who went straight through, but I didn’t have the whole ‘first career’ thing to fit in with the non-traditional students.” He glances at Coulson. “I kinda got—stuck in the middle.”
Coulson smiles, softly, and shakes his head a little. “You can still be on the fringes even if you go straight through.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Clint’s pretty sure there’s more to the story, the way Coulson wets his lips and draws in this caught little breath, but then there’s the telltale rattling of a truck coming into the parking lot. The conversation dies, and the next half-hour’s spent signing paperwork and convincing the driver that no, really, it’s not worth it to file a police report, trust him. The driver shoots some funny looks between the two of them, looks Clint’s not sure that he likes, but then his car’s strapped in and ready to go.
“We’ll call you Monday,” the driver says after he tosses his clipboard into the cab.
“Monday?” Clint demands. “I don’t have another car, I can’t wait ‘till—”
“You got two options,” the driver informs him. He’s a jowly guy, probably a couple years older than Coulson, and he smacks his lips when he speaks. “First one is we take it to the nearest shop. They don’t open ‘till Monday, so you don’t get your car ‘till Monday. And the second is we take it to one of the shops that’re open on Saturday, and you pay for all the mileage and everything.”
Between student loans and car payments for a car that he can’t currently use, Clint’s not sure how he’s gonna pay for the new tires. Coulson glances at him, all soft-eyed again, and Clint . . . Clint shakes his head. “Monday’s fine,” he—well, he kinda grumps his way through it, if he’s honest.
“Hey, you be glad your boyfriend’s willin’ to put you on his membership,” the driver chides while he climbs into his seat. He closes the door harder than he maybe needs to. “Imagine how much you’d be paying without him.”
Clint’s too busy trying not to swear to correct the guy. He leaves it to Coulson to thank him, mostly because he’s walking down the middle aisle of the parking row and resting his urge to kick something.
The truck rolls away, blasting exhaust and groaning as it turns out of the parking lot, and Clint doesn’t realize Coulson’s said his name until a firm, wide palm lands on his shoulder.
It’s just Coulson’s hand, just touch, but Clint feels like somebody’s just jabbed a pin into the balloon of his anger. He exhales, long and hard, because—what else can he do? His tires are slashed, his brother’s an asshole, Kelly-the-nail-stylist couldn’t follow the terms of her damn probation, and—
And then, there’s Phil Coulson.
Kind-eyed Phil Coulson, watching him when he turns around.
“Sorry,” he says, half-heartedly.
“Don’t be,” Coulson replies, shrugging a little. “I’m already driving you home tonight. I might as well pick you up tomorrow, and then again on Monday. And if you need groceries or something, we can—”
“Tomorrow?” Clint repeats.
“Dot’s birthday party.” He smiles a little at Clint’s full-body groan. That smile is the only thing that Clint from dropping to the pavement like a two-year-old and crying about life not being fair. And trust him, he’s still tempted. “If it doesn’t cheer you up,” Coulson encourages, “I’ll—buy you a beer.”
“After a whole day with Stark,” Clint retorts, “I’ll need more than a beer.”
“Two, then.” Coulson’s smile finds those crinkles, and for another few seconds, Clint forgets how to breathe. He only remembers when Coulson adds, “And an appetizer. At the seedy college bar of your choice.”
It disarms him—and that’s Coulson’s secret, Clint suspects, disarming people when they’re at their worst—and he laughs a little as he shakes his head. “I’m fresh out of seedy bars,” he says as they start wandering toward Coulson’s car, “but I’m sure you can pick one for me.”
“How can I choose?” Coulson wonders aloud, and Clint can’t ignore the way their laughter echoes through the parking lot, too.
==
“Coulson.”
“Yes?”
“Remember how you said Stark was rich?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know you meant this.”
Coulson laughs around a sip of his beer—good beer from a pretty exclusive microbrewery, and there’s not a thirty-six pack of Bud Light in sight—but Clint’s not actually laughing. ‘Cause even though he’s here, standing on Stark’s back patio and drinking Stark’s good beer, he can’t believe it.
He can’t believe that Tony Stark lives in a fucking mansion.
It’s not even one of those trendy places you hear about on the news, where thirty-something trendsetters come in, bulldoze a split-level, and build a three-story eyesore with marble everything in its place. No, this is a massive old brick behemoth of a home, the kind with white trim around the windows and one of those—turret-looking rooms built onto one of the corners. When they’d turned onto the street, he’d asked Coulson if they were lost, ‘cause son of Howard Stark or not, he’d figured Tony Stark for a “modern townhouse” kind of guy.
Instead, they’d wandered through a living room with a vaulted ceilings, greeted Peggy and Bucky—“Food duty,” Stark’d reported—in the kitchen, and emerged onto an enormous, dark-stained deck. A deck which, by the way, led down to a cobbled patio and an enormous in-ground pool.
And that’s without mentioning the massive spread of snacks, the leaning tower of birthday presents for Dot, and the two greyhounds lounging in the shade of perfectly-manicured trees.
“Dummy and Butterfingers,” Stark’d reported, and one of the dogs’d rolled over and glanced at them upside-down. “Dummy’s got a crotch thing. Lemme know if he does the crotch thing.”
But then Bruce’d finished a phone call, Stark’d thrown an arm around him and dragged him over to the massive bowl of sangria, and that’d been that.
Coulson’s still laughing, a little, and Clint—tries not to look at him for too long. He’s been staring, off and on, since Coulson showed up at his building, dressed in a black button-down that shows way too much skin (arms, wrists, throat, collarbone, please god let that be chest hair) and a pair of jeans that—
There are jeans in the world that fit like a second skin, and jeans in the world that are so well-worn and loved that you spend an hour wondering if they’ll be soft against your fingertips. And then, there are Phil Coulson’s jeans, which combine those two qualities while also hugging his ass and thighs in a way that should be illegal.
Clint takes a long pull from his beer and forces himself to stop looking. “Should’ve clarified what kinda rich you meant,” he says, simply.
Coulson grins, and it finds those crinkles around his eyes. Is there anything about this guy that isn’t distracting as hell? “The best part about bringing in somebody new is introducing them to Stark’s place,” he replies. “After his welcome party, Thor spent three weeks thinking this wasn’t really Tony’s house, and that we were just hazing him.” He pauses, beer halfway to his lips. “Well. We might’ve helped his theory along, a little.”
He glances out of the corner of his eye, just to see whether Clint laughs, and Clint—gives in. He rolls his eyes, a little, and takes another deep swig, but yeah, he’s laughing. He’d laughed in the car, too, at Coulson’s couple stories about Stark’s other parties, and at how Coulson’d mouthed the words to some pop song when they’d stopped talking. The little clump of nerves about the party, they’d almost gone away, and—
And then, Coulson’s phone rings. He frowns, sets his beer on the corner of the snack table, and pulls it out of his pocket. “Fury,” he says, and he can’t even fake a smile at Clint’s little grimace.
“I’ll guard your beer,” Clint promises, but then he’s off, taking the call.
Clint hangs around the snack table for a couple minutes, just—watching everybody else. Most the office’s already there—Thor and Jane’re running late, according to Darcy, and the way she wiggled her eyebrows filled in several blanks Clint would’ve happily left empty—but it’s pretty . . . subdued. Steve and Hill are both sitting on the edge of the pool, legs dangling in, chatting while Steve’s kid bobs around in one of those bathing suits that are also kiddie life-jackets. She’s cute, with these ridiculous blonde braids down either side of her head and her dad’s grin, and keeps interrupting Steve’s conversation with something. Steve’s wearing star-spangled swim trunks and a white t-shirt that leaves pretty much nothing to the imagination. Clint lets himself imagine for a couple seconds, anyway, and then feels kinda creepy, given that the guy’s husband is one screen door away.
Creepier, though, is the fact that Hill’s wearing cut-offs and a tank top that shows off a strip of tanned midriff. It’s like when you’re six and run into your teacher at the grocery store, you know? She’s Hill, she lives in suits and heels, not—tank tops and damp curls.
Pepper’s wandering around in cut-offs and a t-shirt, but she at least looks like she belongs in that. The same way Darcy belongs in the slouchy jeans, strappy tank, and ridiculous oversized hat she’s wearing. Clint—he keeps trying to figure out that hat, whether it’s knit or cotton or meant to flop around like it keeps—
“I’m not sure what team you bat for, but I’m pretty sure it’s not even the same sport as Darcy.”
There’s something—elastic about Natasha’s voice, the way it stretches slowly from one syllable to another. Clint smiles at her around the mouth of his beer. “What sport do you play?”
Natasha raises both eyebrows in this perfect fluid movement, and raises her glass. She’s drinking sangria, but not the ridiculous strawberry kind that Stark claims he spent three days perfecting. No, she’s drinking the peach flavor from the little pitcher, the one with the PEPPER’S ONLY BECAUSE OF HER PSYCHOSOMATIC STRAWBERRY THING label on it.
She’s also wearing a tiny bathing suit with a pretty flimsy, flowy, white cover-up. There’s no way not to look. Clint thinks maybe she doesn’t care who’s looking as long as she’s happy with it.
“I’m pretty sure that, same sport or not, we’re not in the same league,” she answers.
“I’m surprisingly athletic.”
“You’d be surprised how many people think that about themselves until they meet me.”
Clint barely manages to bite back his smile. He’s not sure why he likes Natasha—he’s had fewer conversations with her than with almost anyone else, save maybe Thor—but there’s something . . . addictive about her. “Then maybe we have to find time to—”
There’s a yelp, a crash, and then a torrent of laughter, and Clint twists just in time to watch Stark and Bruce roll around, a heap of limbs sprawling on the grass. “We’re fine!” Stark announces, laughing, while the dogs bark and start racing around the yard in manic circles. Bruce shoves Stark, but there’s this—brightness in his whole expression when he does. He’s a pretty serious guy, and Clint’s not sure he’s ever seen him smile like that before.
Stark scrabbles to catch Bruce’s hands, but Bruce is somehow faster. Clint watches as he pulls his shirt out of his waistband, shakes it a few times, and tosses the ice cubes that’ve been trapped between cotton and skin into the pool.
Steve laughs. “I told you it never works!” he calls out to Stark.
“Correction: it always works, just not on Bruce.” Bruce shoves Stark again, a little harder, and Stark has to catch himself on his elbow to keep from sprawling out over the grass. His t-shirt rides up, revealing a lot of stomach and waist, and Clint—
Maybe Clint’s losing his mind, between Coulson’s jeans and Natasha’s bathing suit, but he swears he catches Bruce looking at all that skin and the trail of dark hair that under Stark’s navel.
At least, he looks until Stark picks an ice cube out of his glass, shoves it down the front of Bruce’s shirt—he’s as bad as Coulson, with the open buttons, so it’s not that difficult—and then jumps up and runs away.
Steve laughs, Hill rolls her eyes and declares she needs more alcohol to deal with this, and Darcy whips out her phone to take a video. Clint grins. “Thor and Jane, I get,” he admits, glancing over at Natasha, “and even Steve and Bucky.”
“You mean Steve’s husband Bucky? The one you’re still avoiding?” Natasha raises her glass in a mocking toast.
Clint ignores her. “My point is,” he retorts, “I never really expected Stark and Banner.”
Natasha pauses, her glass against her lips, and for a half-second, she just—watches him. She’s a master at non-reactions, Clint thinks. She can hold the world’s straightest face.
Most the time, anyway. Not this time, because as soon as Clint thinks it, her eyes start dancing. The longer she looks at him, the more they twinkle. Her hand shakes just enough to rattle the ice cubes in her glass, and when her lips twitch?
When her lips twitch, Clint knows he’s in trouble.
Her laughter’s loud enough that it echoes through Stark’s backyard. One of the dogs stops sniffing at the platter of pigs-in-a-blanket and howls at her. Dot stops splashing, Bruce pauses where he’s tucking his shirt back into his pants, and Thor—who’s coming out onto the deck—freezes so suddenly that Jane runs into his back and nearly bowls both of them over.
“No,” Natasha says. She’s wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, and the words are hardly recognizable around her laughter. “No. That is just—no.”
She chuckles as she walks over to Pepper, and when she murmurs something into Pepper’s ear, Pepper bursts out laughing, too. Clint frowns at her back, and frowns again when, a couple minutes later, Tony drapes himself over Bruce’s shoulders while regaling them about the time he went skinny dipping in Lake Erie.
It’s another five or ten minutes before Coulson wanders back from his phone call. “The cops pulled in somebody who looked good for the Silva-Riberio case,” he says, tucking his phone back in his pocket. “Fury wanted at least one of us on notice.”
Clint’s pretty sure he could’ve stood just one day without mention of the murder. He picks up Coulson’s abandoned beer, holding it out to him. “But?” he asks.
“But P.D. beeped in while I was on the line with him, and it turns out the guy has a rock-solid alibi.” His fingers are warm against Clint’s palm when he takes the beer. “CSI’s ruined us. Everybody thinks a murder gets solved in all of ten minutes, instead of—”
Coulson’s last couple words are lost behind the sound of an enormous splash. The waves in the pool are high enough that Dot, who’s holding onto Steve’s legs, almost gets swept away, but she’s laughing. The laughter turns into squeals when, seconds later, Stark breaks the surface, spraying her with water.
“Mature,” Hill grumbles, and Stark shakes his head of wet hair hard enough that it sprinkles Hill, instead.
“Six-point-five,” Bruce intervenes before Hill can start threatening damage to the really important parts of Stark’s anatomy. “Sloppy form, lots of back splash.”
Tony spits water at him, and seconds later, Dot does the same thing to Steve. He makes an offended noise and gives her a little shove, sending her spiraling into the wet blue yonder of the pool’s shallow end. Stark splashes Bruce again before shouting to her, “Wait up for Uncle Tony!”
Clint shakes his head a little, but when he glances at Coulson, Coulson’s smiling.
“Six months,” he says.
“What?”
“Stark and Banner.” In the black shirt, even his shrugs are distracting. “Guarantee you, it’ll take six months.”
“Less than that,” Clint replies, but he’s—not really thinking about Stark and Bruce. Not right now.
Not when he can watch Coulson’s throat when he swallows and wonder, very quietly, how long it could take him.
==
“Ten bucks says Tony throws the first punch,” Bucky Barnes remarks, and Clint nearly chokes on a Dorito.
He’s watching Stark and Steve argue, mostly because everybody else is watching Stark and Steve argue. Well, okay, not really everybody. Natasha is, but then, Natasha’s sitting on the pool steps in her distractingly tiny swimsuit, nursing what Clint’s pretty sure is her fifth or sixth glass of sangria. She’d been in the middle of chatting with Pepper—who’s only damp to her knees, and who’s mostly-sharing Natasha’s drink—but it’s pretty clear the fight’s more exciting than whatever they were talking about. Darcy, Jane, Thor, and Bruce are watching a little, too, in between rounds of the saddest game of bocce ball Clint’s ever seen. Peggy, Hill, and Coulson are too busy talking about politics to notice a little arguing—mostly because they’re arguing, themselves.
Clint’d been in a conversation, too, talking about baseball with Steve (not that he liked baseball all that much, but the other option was flawed tax reform, and he believed pretty firmly in choosing the lesser of two evils). But then, Stark’d walked up, handed Dot an iPad with a pink bow, and walked away while whistling the chorus to “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”
Dot’s still dancing around with the iPad, squealing over “pony shows” and “the bird game”, and Stark and Steve are arguing.
Loudly.
Clint glances over at Bucky. In court, he’d been this—clean-cut, baby-faced guy in a crisp suit, about as “defense lawyer” as you could get. Here, at home, he’s in jean shorts and a t-shirt from some charity 5K. He raises his eyebrows, wiggles them once, and takes a pull from his beer.
If they’d met like this—shorts, t-shirts, chips, beer—Clint’s pretty sure they would’ve gotten along just fine.
“I can’t imagine Steve punching anybody,” he admits, shrugging. “Isn’t he a ‘more flies with honey’ kinda guy?”
Bucky snorts and shakes his head. “Steve’s got a pretty specific skill set when it comes to pissing people off,” he responds. He leans against the snack table. “He won’t throw the first punch, he usually won’t even shove somebody. No, what he’ll do is, he’ll rile them up until they make the first move.” He smirks, but it’s—amused. Warm, Clint thinks, not shitty. “Back in high school, there was this guy. Total bully asshole. He’d mess with you just to show he could. Steve was still scrawny back then, but he wasn’t afraid of the guy. He’d walk up to him in the hallway and just—tell him off. Y’know, the usual ‘you can’t talk to people like that’, ‘pick on somebody your own size’ kind of stuff. Even though he was still maybe five-eight and about a buck forty soaking wet.”
Clint swallows his next chip so hard, it hurts. “You’re—kidding,” he stammers, and looks over at Steve. Steve Rogers, who’s gotta be at least six feet tall. Steve Rogers, who’s almost as broad as Thor, who’s made entirely of angles, abs, and hip-bones. Steve Rogers, who ditched his t-shirt for the pool and who is the perfect combination between pale and tan to star in a high-budget porno. Just—
No.
“You’re hazing me,” he decides.
“I swear to god,” Bucky replies. He raises a hand like he’s taking the Boy Scout oath. “Half the time, I’m not sure I believe it. I went away to boot camp, came home, and my skinny boyfriend looked like that.” He tips his beer in Steve’s direction and shakes his head. “Anyway,” he continues, “he kept finding some way to mouth off to this asshole football player every damn day. And every damn day, the asshole shoved him out of the way and kept on walking. And you, me, most people, we’d figure we’re not making an impression and give up. Tell a teacher or something. But not Steve. Steve kept on going for—months, probably.”
Across the yard, Stark starts laughing. Clint’s pretty sure there’s steam coming out of Steve’s ears. “And?” he asks.
“And one day, the asshole swung at him. Halfway through Steve’s lecture, he just hauled off and sucker-punched him.” Bucky shrugs. “I laid him out, of course, ‘cause there was no way Steve was gonna win that one. But since the asshole threw the first punch, he got suspended for, like, two weeks. Missed some important playoff game and everything.”
“You think he did it on purpose?”
“Are you kidding? He admitted it to me the second we were alone in the nurse’s office! ‘At least if he punched me, I could fight back,’ he said.” Bucky’s smile pushes at the corners of his lips and finds a ridiculous dimple. Clint can see how he could’ve charmed a teenaged Steve Rogers—and can kinda imagine the reverse, too, now that he thinks about it. Bucky shakes his head. “What he really meant was that I’d fight back for him, but he’d never admit to that one.”
Clint laughs, a little, and picks up his own glass. He’s not sure how he ended up with the world’s strongest strawberry sangria instead of beer, but he seems to remember Darcy wandering by with the pitcher two—or three—times. “It still like that?”
“Worse.” When Bucky grins, Clint laughs again. “Listen,” he says, after he drains the last of his beer and drops the bottle in a garbage can, “I know I blind-sided you with that motion. I thought Thor was keeping you updated, he didn’t, and that was on me. Steve came home and spent a good half-hour running through the ‘It’s hard to work with these people when my husband’s an ass to them’ rant. Which, y’know, I’ll probably hear again the next time I piss Tasha off.”
Clint snorts and kinda shakes his head. “Yeah, I didn’t mean to—”
“No, you were probably right,” Bucky interrupts. “I just get sick of defendants getting bulldozed. I mean, even if they did it, they still deserve basic rights.” He shrugs a little. “Without the bottles, they would’ve let him keep driving.”
“He fell out of the car,” Clint notes, rolling his eyes.
“Oh, yeah. No, I’m not arguing with that. I’m just saying: without the bottles, there was no case, and my job’s to—”
Something rattles, then, and both Clint and Bucky turn just in time to see Stark regaining his balance after— Well, there’s no way around it. He’s been shoved. Just a little, just enough that he knocked into a patio chair, but it’s stopped the political debate and the game of bocce. One of the dogs comes running up and puts himself between Stark and Steve.
Stark puts his hands up. “But you gotta admit,” he says, his ass resting against the chair he’d almost knocked over, “she’s kinda in love with it.”
She is, apparently, Dot, who’s sitting cross-legged on the patio in her swimsuit and robe, watching what Clint can only assume is the pony show.
Steve sighs. “She’s four, Tony.”
“No better time to learn the technology of tomorrow,” Stark retorts, jabbing a finger into the air. “And, again, kinda in love with Uncle Tony’s special present of godfatherly love.”
They stare at each other for a couple seconds, separated mostly by Steve’s human decency . . . and the huge dog. Then, Steve throws up his hands and storms off toward the house.
Stark grins. “Pepper, fetch the sangria!”
Pepper rolls her eyes. “It’s Saturday,” she points out, and Natasha grins into her glass. “I’m off-duty on Saturday.”
“I don’t care. Sangria for everyone!”
When Clint glances over at Bucky, the dazzling dimple is back. “You owe me ten bucks,” he points out after Steve’s slammed the back door.
“I’ll win it back next time,” Bucky promises, and opens another beer.
==
“You sure you don’t mind? ‘Cause I can get a rental if it screws with your schedule.”
“What schedule?” Coulson asks, and slides out of the car.
It’s pretty dark and—pretty late, actually, by the time they get back to Clint’s building. No, not they. They implies that they both belong there, but Clint’s the only one staying, the only one who lives in the old brown building in the quiet neighborhood. Coulson’s just dropping him off.
The problem is, Coulson’s sitting in the idling car, foot on the brake while he waits for Clint to climb out. As soon as they arrived, Coulson found a parking spot and killed the engine, and now, he’s standing on the sidewalk with Clint, still in those jeans and the button-down that shows too much skin. Clint scrubs his face with a palm. The last glass of sangria was a mistake, he decides. It was one glass too many, and now, he’s muddling through this warm-bellied, unbalanced kinda feeling, the kinda feeling that usually ends in some pretty bad choices.
“You okay?” Coulson asks. They’re literally toe-to-toe on the sidewalk.
“Yeah,” he replies, and squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, Coulson’s still there. Clint spends a few seconds studying the hollow of his throat. “You come in earlier than me,” he points out, once he’s forced himself to start walking.
“I can come in later.”
“You don’t live on this side of town.”
“I get good gas mileage.”
“Yeah, but I mean—”
“Clint.” There’s something hard edging Coulson’s voice. They’re on the steps, all of ten feet from the freedom of “goodnight” and Clint’s front door, but Clint turns around anyway. Once he does, though, all he can see is Coulson. He’s half-illuminated from the security light over the door, and there’re shadows that find all his fine lines. He looks softer, in that light. He reminds Clint of a charcoal drawing, not a man.
He needs to go inside, he thinks. He needs to put on a pot of coffee, watch some bad after-midnight TV, and sober up. Because right now, in the dim security light and the haze of Stark’s sangria, he’s thinking about grabbing Coulson by the shirt collar and kissing him ‘till neither of them can breathe.
Coulson’s his boss, and he’s the new guy.
Coulson’s a fucking brilliant lawyer, the chief assistant district attorney, Fury’s go-to guy, and Clint’s—
“Clint,” Coulson says, again. It’s a murmur, something caught in his throat. “It’s not a problem.”
“Yeah,” Clint forces out, but it’s—breathless. All the coffee in the world won’t fix the way his head’s swimming. He presses his palm to the metal handrail, clutches onto it like he’s trying to keep from drowning.
But Coulson’s hand is on the rail, too, and Clint doesn’t realize how close they are until their hands brush.
Bump, he corrects, because it starts out a bump. Accidental contact, but then it builds into a brush, deliberate and gentle, and all while Coulson’s eyes are trained perfectly on Clint’s face.
The sides of their hands press together, and Clint feels goose flesh rise along his arm.
“I—want to,” Coulson says, but not in his usual tone. It’s deeper, and Clint wonders exactly what he wants.
Coulson’s his boss, he reminds himself again. He’s three weeks into the job, they hardly know one another, and—
And he can smell Coulson’s cologne, a bite of spice, in the night air.
He jerks back, trying to step onto the concrete porch, but he misjudges the distance. His bare heel catches against the rough stone, scraping off a layer of skin, and he hisses in pain. He somehow manages to keep his sandal and catch himself from falling.
He’s leaning on the rail and half-panting, but at least it’s another foot of air between them. Breathing room, he labels it. Thinking room.
But instead of breathing or thinking, he immediately looks back down at Coulson.
Lawyers learn, early on, how to be neutral. They learn how to keep their expressions steady, even when they want to scream. Coulson’s one of the best lawyers in the office, one of the best lawyers Clint knows—but right now, his face isn’t neutral. There’s something—caught, right then, captured by the light.
“I need to— Coffee,” he stammers. It’s not even a sentence.
Coulson nods. “I’ll pick you up,” he says. It’s quieter than Clint expected, but it’s not—cold. It’s still kind, still familiar.
Cold would’ve been easier, right now.
“Yeah, thanks.” Neither of them moves, and Clint suddenly realizes that he doesn’t wanna run off. He doesn’t wanna lock himself in his apartment like a coward, leave Coulson standing on the steps with that—soft, searching look on his face. He swallows and adds, “I’ll see you Monday.
Coulson nods, and Clint watches his arm work when he grips his keys. “Goodnight, Clint.”
“‘Night, boss.”
He says it normally, says it the same way as he does any day of the week, and even manages a little smile—but it doesn’t matter. ‘Cause as soon as the words tumble out of his mouth, something in Coulson’s face twists. It’s subtle, almost too small to notice, but Clint spends a lot of time looking at that face.
And now, he knows how those lines wear disappointed.
He stays there, on the concrete porch, until he hears Coulson’s car pull out of the lot and onto the street. Then he stays longer, long enough that the security light thinks he’s gone and switches off. He can see stars, in the dark, and he starts up at them while he listens to the rustle of the wind in the trees.
When he finally goes inside, he sends Barney a text message that reads stop sending me messages, you know the answer. Then, he turns off his phone and shoves it into the bedside drawer with the expired condoms and forgotten magazines. He slams the drawer hard enough that the whole nightstand rattles, and he listens to it settle in the darkness of his bedroom.
He thinks that’ll help, that the silence will fix something. It doesn’t.
He lies awake, staring at the ceiling, and spends too much time thinking about the stairs, the near-dark, and Coulson.
Natasha picks him up Monday morning, instead.
Previous chapters: Disclaimer | Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
