Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Phil scanned the crowd, double-checking the system-flagged faces. On the monitor, Bobbi and Clint trailed their two targets at a respectable distance. Neither appeared to have been alerted to their presence, and the two agents were indistinguishable from the crowd of returning tourists. Clint’s limp was barely noticeable, and Bobbi was cheerfully pretending to chatter away on a cell phone. He switched to a different feed and examined one of the additional possible hostile agent’s jawlines. After a few seconds, he unflagged the man. The faces were passably similar, but his glasses had confused the algorithm.

“Morning, Romanov,” he said without looking up from the monitor.

“The heels?” Natasha asked from behind him, glancing down at her stilettos.

“The perfume.” He switched to a third angle. “You’re exceptionally stealthy in those heels.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.” She hovered behind him, her hands settling on the back of his chair as she examined the feed critically. “Clint hasn’t been sleeping.”

Phil stifled a sigh. It was there in the slope of his shoulders and the curve of his spine and the slight shadows under his eyes, painfully obvious and, at least for the time being, none of his business.

“His knee’s looking better,” he said instead.

“According to the last status report from the physical therapist, he should be cleared for full field duty by the end of the month,” Natasha replied pointedly. He shot her a tired look. “Sorry.”

“We’ll get him back when we get him back,” he told her quietly. “I’m not particularly thrilled about him being reassigned either, but Sitwell knows what he’s doing, and Barton wouldn’t be a good match for this detail anyway.”

She managed a half-smile. “You don’t think Clint’s temperament is perfectly suited for Stark-sitting?”

Phil grunted noncommittally.

“At least Pepper’s nice?”

He raised his eyebrows at her, and she looked away.

“You do realize you’re not going to be able to take her with you when we’re done here?” he asked, his lips quirking up briefly. “That was actually in the briefing, I think. ‘No keeping Pepper.’ We’d have a Justin Hammer whose projects actually worked if she weren’t ballasting Stark.”

“Ouch.” He tilted his head, and she shrugged. “An accurate assessment, but still. Ouch.”

“I had to threaten to tase him to get him to cooperate, and then he started sulking when his detail got pulled off to deal with something more important.” Phil tapped the screen, absently zooming in on a stray passenger. “It does not leave one with the best impression of Mr. Stark’s mental state. Nor do any of your own reports. Does this woman look familiar to you?”

Natasha leaned over his shoulder, a few locks of hair falling against his face. He brushed them away gently, focusing on her eyes as she studied the person he’d highlighted. She frowned.

“Helsinki. That close call with the plutonium and HYDRA. She was in the cafe right before the bomb went off.”

Phil tapped the console, forwarding the alert, then pulled up the casefile and linking the alert to her profile.

“Well done, Natasha.”

She squeezed his shoulder lightly. “You haven’t been sleeping, either.”

Phil snorted. “It’s going around.”

It was a deflection, but hardly a lie. Too much had happened too quickly. There were days when it seemed like the world was coming down around their ears, and then there were days when it seemed like the world had already come down around their ears. Nobody was sleeping particularly well. He absently rubbed the knotted muscle between his thumb and forefinger as he watched the updates and cross-referencing on the HYDRA agent spool across the screen. The national security business had never exactly been a cakewalk, but it had been a damn sight easier when assets weren’t loading themselves into rocket-powered suits of armor and skipping the continent or indulging in off-label uses for gamma radiation. He let himself unwind slightly when the woman Natasha had identified was diverted. It was one less thing to worry about for the moment. Once Barton was back, there’d be even fewer.

*****

“Agent Barton. Right on time.” Maria looked up with a cold smile. “Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Clint focused on the folder in front of her and put his hands in his lap. His knee twinged, his head ached, and the two aspirin tabs he’d washed down with the worst espresso he’d ever tasted outside of an ex-Soviet bloc country weren’t doing a damn thing for either one.

“I’d like to preface this by saying that it’s completely optional, and if you choose to pass on this assignment, it will neither compromise the operation nor be reflected in your record.” Clint did his best Coulson impersonation, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She slid the file across the desk and nodded for him to open it. “That having been said, I think you’re the best choice for this.”

Clint flipped the jacket open and read the first paragraph. He felt his brows furrow and deliberately relaxed his face, aware that Hill was watching him carefully. He read the first page twice before he looked back up.

“You want me to pretend to be Agent Coulson’s boyfriend and case a tech conference undercover, badly, to provide cover for another covert team.”

“You shouldn’t need to do a full Keystone Cops routine,” she assured him. “Not with the amount of exposure Stark’s antics have gotten Coulson lately. Just be obvious enough about it to pick up any tails or floating security who might impede the real team’s progress. Of course, if you’re not comfortable with the requirements, we could find someone else.”

Clint paged through the rest of the file. He saw none of the telltale vocabulary or tense usage that might have indicated Phil had a hand in its construction. He considered the data available.

He and Jasper had spent the last three months misreading each other’s cues, stepping on each other’s toes, and stubbornly trying to force a rapport that eluded them while subtly angling for a restoration of their old assignments. One bad landing after a fall from a fire escape, and he’d been effectively benched. One petulant billionaire weapons developer making a little too much noise, and the rest of the team had been whisked off on a new project. He hadn’t gotten to so much as pass Coulson in a hallway since he’d been temporarily transferred to Sitwell. Even his contact with Natasha had been confined to strictly “personal” topics, as if they had anything to discuss that didn’t touch on the trade.

Now Hill was dangling Phil in front of him like bait on a hook. Her expression was purely professional, almost to the point of looking innocent, but he figured the odds of her not knowing about the sexual component of their handler-asset relationship were somewhere between zero and nil. She cleared her throat, obviously having expected a response already.

“I’d be interested in hearing what Agent Coulson’s input was,” he said cautiously.

Hill cocked her head, a little surprised. “Coulson has yet to be briefed on this. This interview is, to a certain extent, off the record. If you pass on it, he won’t be informed.”

Clint nodded. So almost literally bait on a hook. A tiny part of his brain kicked against the thought of Phil being used like that, but it went with the territory. And, from a strictly pragmatic standpoint, he was the beneficiary this time. He just wished he could see what the hook was, and whether or not he was going to wind up on it regardless. He shook himself. It was Hill. Of course he was. Never mind the fact that if he passed, somebody else was going to be given the green light to paw at his handler.

“Sign me up.”

“Good to hear you’re on board, Barton.” She scribbled a few notes on a transfer order. “You’ll receive a full casefile before the next briefing. Do your homework. Dismissed.”

He gathered the file and limped back to his quarters, torn between wanting to flop down on his bed and sleep for a week and wanting to scour off the last of the travel grime before flopping down on his bed and sleeping for a week. He settled on a shower first.

Clint tossed the brief on his bed and glanced around his quarters. Nothing was out of place, though of course he’d had no expectation that it would be. The only one who rifled through his things without asking first was Bobbi, and she’d been trawling Estonia for plutonium dealers with him. Natasha had left a book she’d borrowed on his nightstand, a post-it note with “Thank you” in her graceful cursive stuck to its front cover. He wondered if he could sneak it back onto Phil’s bookcase without him noticing exactly how long “a couple of weeks” had turned into before discarding the idea. Of course he couldn’t. The way things had been going lately, he’d be lucky if it didn’t spontaneously combust as soon as he touched it. He stripped off his rumpled clothing and tossed everything at the hamper before climbing into the shower.

He sighed softly when the warm spray hit his skin, the last residual bit of tension draining out of his spine. Home, or as close to it as he got. It had its own minefields to navigate, but it came with its own brand of safety, its own type of family. Clint scrubbed the smell of stale air and unwashed clothes and other people’s cigarettes and burnt coffee and airline peanuts from his skin and tried to think. He needed to see Nat. She’d know if there was some poisonous ulterior motive for this assignment. He wanted to see Phil, but that would have to wait until after he’d talked to Natasha. His cock thickened at the thought of getting to touch him again, and he let himself entertain the idea that him pulling this job was just a matter of trying to allow for agents’ personal preferences. He closed his eyes and braced his forearm against the cold tile wall, then rested his forehead against it and let the water drum against his back.

He’d deliberately tamped down any thought of Phil since it had become clear his reassignment was to be for the duration of his recovery. It had been an attempt not to drive himself nuts, not to remind himself of what he couldn’t have, not to feel like such a failure with Sitwell. Now...within 96 hours, he was going to be pulling him close, kissing him, and not letting go until everyone in the zip code got a good look at them. Clint grunted softly as he stroked himself, his cock already rock-hard and leaking.

They’d be sharing a hotel room, sleeping in the same bed. He could pull him close and hold him until they fell asleep. They’d be spending three days together. Three days of casual little intimacies. Three days of laughing at each other’s stupid jokes, finishing each other’s sentences, slipping his hand into Phil’s while they were walking, letting him lean against him on the elevator. He pumped harder, biting his lip as he felt his orgasm building. Three days of falling asleep to the sound of Phil’s breath in his ear. Three days of maybe waking him up with a kiss, maybe joining him in the shower, maybe getting him off hard and fast before the water got cold, maybe getting to leave a mark or two above the collar.

Clint groaned and came, every nerve in his body tingling. After a few seconds, a wave of warm fatigue rolled through him, and he turned the water off. He could plan after he’d gotten some rest. He dried off and crawled into bed, falling asleep almost as soon as he’d burrowed under the covers.

Chapter Text

“You want me to pretend to be Specialist Barton’s boyfriend,” Phil said flatly, looking up over the edge of the file at Maria. She didn’t blink.

“Given your history, he seemed like the presumptive choice.”

Phil snorted. Presumptive was about right, he thought.

“That injury sidelined him at a particularly bad juncture, Hill. I haven’t even seen him since you punted him to Sitwell. If you’re married to this plan--”

“I know it’s a dinosaur, but we’re going for obvious with this,” she interrupted firmly. “Full-bore, shaken-not-stirred obvious.”

“Then I’d prefer you move on to the next candidate on the list and leave him out of it for now,” he sighed. The last thing he needed was for Clint to feel like there was a price tag attached while he was trying to reintegrate him with the team. It was terrible timing.

“Too bad. He already accepted.”

Phil sat back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. She held up a hand to forestall whatever argument he was about to field.

“He was informed in no uncertain terms that he was free to decline the assignment and that you wouldn’t be made aware of it if he did so.”

“And?”

“And he jumped on it so fast I was afraid he’d break that knee again.”

Phil gave her a look. “Poor taste, Maria.”

“He’s fine, Coulson. You’re both big boys. You can handle this. Stop fussing and just appreciate the fact that he wants to come back to the nest.”

“This is the sort of thing that needs to be handled with some delicacy,” he grunted. “You know that.”

“And if or when the time comes, I’m sure you will.” She shrugged. “His performance under Sitwell has proved nothing if not the extent of the positive influence you’ve been on him. Before you, he’d have made it maybe a month before crashing and burning and probably landing in the brig and washing out. Not to mince words, they’re a fucking disaster together. I’ve never seen two otherwise extremely competent agents be so dysfunctional when trying to act in concert. If we weren’t so short-handed, I’d have mothballed him until he’d recuperated completely and moved Morse and Sitwell onto a training detail until we could scrounge up a third wheel. And he stuck it out. Without grumbling, without getting catty about it, without taking it personally, without any of the impulsiveness that made him so inconsistent before. You got the diamond out of the rough.”

“Thank you,” Phil said. “Please don’t ruin it by implying that he just needed to be properly motivated.”

“I wouldn’t. I know you spent a long time sweating blood over him. It paid off. I’m asking you to trust that it’s going to keep paying off, and that he’s not going to go feral if you look at him wrong after a few months away.” She eyed him critically. “I think you know better than that.”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “You might have come to me first.”

“I might have, but I considered the situation and made a different call. The decision was his to make, and he made it. Unless you’re objecting to the mission parameters themselves, which it didn’t sound like you were a minute ago, you’ve got your assignment.”

“I suppose I do,” he grunted. “Dismissed?”

“Don’t look like I just rained on your parade, Coulson. You’ve got your sniper back, he’s on track to be cleared for full duty by the time this wraps up, and you’ll be off Stark-wrangling detail soon.”

“It’s like Christmas came early.” Hill leaned forward, her face settling into a silent question, and he spread his hands. “We’ve been doing this a long time. In all those years, I’ve never had an uncooperative asset turn around and actively pout because we weren’t paying enough attention to them. It would be disconcertingly narcissistic even if that target wasn’t a genius inventor with a self-destructive streak a mile wide and a bid in for every armament contract in the western hemisphere.”

“Stark is truly one of a kind,” she agreed, shaking her head. Her lips twitched up in what passed for a smile. “But if it makes you feel any better, he only has a bid in for eighty-three percent of the armament contracts in the western hemisphere.”

Phil rubbed his eyes. “Eighty-two and a half. But who’s keeping track?”

“You need a breather,” Hill said, her tone coming deceptively close to gentle. “And he needs to reacclimate. And Romanov needs a few more days to worm her way back onto Potts’s Christmas-card list.” She rapped her knuckles on the file. “Full briefing’s tomorrow at thirteen-hundred sharp. Dismissed, agent.”

Phil snapped the jacket shut, got to his feet, and made his way back to his office, where he dropped the folder as if it were radioactive and began pacing furiously. Maria was right, of course. He did need a breather. He’d been stretched too thin for too long without enough time to let go and remember what it felt like to not have people’s lives riding on every call he made. But this? This was not a rest-and-relaxation mission. This was a catastrophe in the making.

He leaned against his desk and closed his eyes. He’d been leery of getting physical with Clint since that night in his hotel room, and for good reason. It had become increasingly difficult not to second-guess himself on what was appropriate contact necessary to perform effectively in the field and what was inappropriate contact that served only to ground him and reassure himself of Clint’s proximity.

Clint hadn’t seemed to mind and hadn’t ever seemed uncomfortable, but then, Clint and Natasha both relied on him to be operating in good faith. Just like he was currently relying on Hill to have been operating in good faith when she’d settled on the mission outline. Behaving in a way that compromised that was corrosive to the unit, their objectives, and the organization as a whole. Now he was tasked with finding a way to participate in the fiction of being romantically entangled with Barton without letting their sexual entanglement blur the lines between what should and shouldn’t be happening.

Phil took a deep, steadying breath and tried to focus. He needed to get laid. The only action he’d gotten since that night with Clint had been a pair of anonymous, deeply unsatisfying encounters that had barely taken the edge off at the time, never mind being enough to tide him over through something like this. If he wanted to navigate the minefield of pretending to be dating someone he was attracted to and in command of, he needed his libido as quiescent as possible.

*****

Clint poked unenthusiastically at his lunch and reviewed the talk schedule for the conference. There were a handful that hovered right at the sweet spot where attendance, subject, and presenter values intersected to make it look like the pair of them would be up to something besides distracting security. He took a bite of his sandwich and underlined another tentative match. Just reading the descriptions made his eyes glaze over, and he thanked whatever luck he had left that he’d have Phil to keep him occupied.

“Welcome home, Clint,” Natasha said, touching his elbow gently. She slid into the seat across from him and wrinkled her nose at the discarded pickles stacked on his plate.

“Hey, Nat.” He grinned at her, and she returned a quick smile. “Is Phil back yet?”

“He’s still coordinating with the ground team. Apparently Operation Public Make-Out Session got more complicated.”

“Please tell me they’re actually calling it that,” he snickered.

“It’s the official unofficial name. I wouldn’t mention it to Phil, though.”

“Oh?” He paused, sandwich halfway to his mouth.

“He’s been crabby and out of sorts since you’ve been gone, and he’s not happy about this mission,” she told him. Clint’s heart sank, and he put the food down, his appetite vanishing.

“He said that?”

“No, he said ‘It’s fine,’ and then made that face that’s about midway between a smile and a grimace.” She demonstrated, then crossed her arms. “And he’s been too tense since he got back from his meeting with Hill. I think he was hoping we could switch back to slightly lower-profile gigs now that we’re off the Stark situation. With you getting dragged out into the open instead of us getting further out of it, it doesn’t look like that’s how it’s getting played.”

“What’s even going on there?” Clint asked, rubbing his knuckles. “Are he and Phil...?”

Natasha’s jaw dropped slightly, and she recovered almost immediately.

Clint flushed. “On second thought, maybe don’t answer that.”

“The complication is that Stark’s going to be at the conference,” she said. “I’m probably beating your mission update by about ten minutes. The original plan was for Stark Industries to be represented by a sizeable detachment of mid-level scouts and a few higher-ups for show. Now Stark’s going to be there in person--at least until he gets bored--Potts is scheduled to be there four out of the five days, and the head of R&D flew in yesterday and won’t be leaving until the wrap-party in a week. Not to mention the extra corporate cloak-and-dagger types pulled in to run defense, with a side of intellectual property theft.”

Clint whistled. “So this just mushroomed.”

She nodded, and he considered the situation. On the one hand, upping the noise-to-signal ratio was likely to work out in their favor. On the other hand, there were more opportunities for accidental or casual detection, and missions had gotten scrubbed by less. It also made it that much harder for any SHIELD-sponsored distractions to properly distract anyone. Unless, of course, Stark was the jealous type.

“Is he going to make a big deal about it?” he asked carefully.

“He’s going to make the biggest deal he possibly can about it.” Natasha shook her head slightly. “You two aren’t going to have to do anything but share a hotel room, announce your cover identities, and let Tony see you together. He’ll practically broadcast the rest over the PA system. In fact, there’s a strong possibility that he will literally broadcast the rest over the PA system.”

“So they are?” A twinge of jealousy shot through him, and he did his best to smother it.

It was all part of the game, he told himself. Whatever Phil was doing to provoke Stark into the preening, look-at-me behavior he’d seen on C-SPAN during the last round of congressional testimony, it was as much in his job description as whatever he’d done to develop the cozy companionability he had with the leggy redhead actually running the company.

“Not even a little. Stark’s just a piece of work.”

“Wait, what?”

“You’ll see,” she warned.

“That sounds...ominous.”

Natasha shrugged. “He won’t like you, and he’ll do everything he can to needle you, and the second you act like you’ve found something more interesting than him, he’ll start flirting and strutting and trying to get all your focus right back on him.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“That sounds extremely specific. And I haven’t even seen him in person yet. Maybe he’ll take a shine to me. I mean, you’ve met me.” He brushed the crumbs off his shirt with a flourish. “You know how incredibly debonair I am.”

Natasha laughed quietly. “Maybe if he met you on your own, but you’re going to be with Phil. And he’s borderline pathological about being the center of attention.”

“So it’s not anything to do with Phil, specifically,” he said, trying and failing to keep relief out of his voice. “They haven’t, you know…”

“Clint.”

He looked away. “That obvious, huh?”

“You’re not doing so great with hiding it right now, no,” she sighed. He rubbed his neck and slumped down in his chair.

“I’m sorry. I’ve missed you both.” He gave her a wry smile and shrugged. “A lot.”

“We’ve missed you, too.” She smiled thinly. “A lot.”

“I don’t suppose you happen to have heard anything about why, uh, Operation Public Make-Out Session is even happening?” he asked.

Natasha cocked her head. “You know it’s not exactly a secret?”

“Of course I know it’s not exactly a secret,” Clint said, coloring. “I mean, I don’t go around having loud conversations about it in the break room, but I’ve never tried being more than just discreet. It seemed a little pointless, around here.”

“The detail we’re circumventing falls into that annoying space between competent enough to deal with directly and so incompetent that a single team could waltz right past them. They’re strictly civilian, and geared to deal with corporate espionage almost exclusively, so most of their ideas about what to expect from us come from over-priced training seminars run by guys from Utah calling themselves Vlad and Ivan and James Bond films. This gives them what they’re already looking for. And you and Phil are already...comfortable being physically intimate, so there’s no potential for interpersonal fallout from the tactic.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“No byzantine plots?”

Natasha’s eyebrows rose.

“No byzantine-even-by-our-standards plots?” he amended.

“No.” She tilted her head a few degrees and arched an eyebrow, and his lip twisted.

“Don’t give me that look. It’s reasonable to be cautious.”

“No, I take your point. It’s perfectly understandable to get an all-expenses-paid vacation with your boyfriend and immediately start trying to determine what dark and nefarious motives are lurking behind it.”

Clint groaned. “You understand that your deadpan’s so good that I can’t tell the difference between you being ironic and you being serious anymore, right?”

She smirked and nudged his shin with the toe of her boot.

“And Phil’s not my boyfriend. We’re just...you know.” He looked away.

“Screwing around?” she supplied.

“Is how Bobbi has probably put it, yeah,” he said, and her smile softened.

“Path of least resistance, Barton. Sometimes it works out in our favor instead of booking us on multiple consecutive red-eyes through the worst airports Australasia has to offer.”

He laughed. “God. Those really were terrible airports.”

“Yes, yes they were.” Her gaze slid to the schedule he’d marked up. “It doesn’t have to just be screwing around, Clint.”

“Come again?”

“If you wanted more, I’m pretty sure you could get it.” She picked up the schedule and flipped through it. “It’s an option. Something to think about.”

“Did you get a different version of the rules and regulations? Because mine says no dating within the chain of command. Believe me, I checked a couple of times.”

She looked at him, exasperated. “It’s not that difficult to transfer to a parallel track, Clint. If you two get serious. If you want to give it a real shot.”

“I just got back, and you’re already trying to transfer me to the post office,” he grumbled. She wasn’t wrong, but the thought of losing what they had made his pulse race.

Her eyes rested on him for a beat too long, then she shook her head and tossed the schedule back to him.

“It is good to have you back,” she said after a moment. “Even if you’re an idiot sometimes.”

“How’d their security get tipped off that we were going to take a run at them, anyway?”

“Hammer picked up some chatter without realizing what it was about, then got hacked. Someone going through the resultant data-dump twigged to it, knew somebody who knew somebody, and tried to get his buddy an in with the boss.”

“So rotten luck.”

“More like it took everybody working together to foul it up,” she pointed out. “That second presentation you’ve got circled?”

“Yeah?” He glanced back at the schedule.

“Skip it. Even odds are Stark’s going to hijack it.”

“Come on. This guy can’t be that big a trainwreck. Sure, he stuffed himself into a rocket-powered personal tin can, but it’s a rocket-powered personal tin can that works. And he ran rings around that Congressional committee.”

“That’s part of the problem, Clint,” she explained. “He’s absolutely that big a trainwreck, and he’s quite frankly brilliant on top of it. I’ve seen people who can walk through a room and leave a bigger trail of destruction, faster, but…”

“But they did it professionally?” he asked.

She nodded. “He seems fundamentally incapable of turning it off. So do me a favor and don’t stick your tongue down Phil’s throat in front of him until I give the signal.”

“I, uh. Wow. Do I even want to know?” Clint blinked at her.

“There’s a third prong of attack.” She bit back a tiny smile. “I may need him out of the way for a few hours. Or all night.”

“I didn’t see anything in the brief?”

“It’s discretionary.”

He sighed and crossed off the event. “Be careful, huh, Nat?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Careful has nothing to do with it. It’s a mutual...empathy. An understanding.”

“That is possibly the most Victorian euphemism I have ever heard,” he said sincerely.

“It’s a euphemism for both of us knowing the score and doing our best to use each other to get what we want,” she informed him crisply.

“Okay, then that’s possibly the most Cold War euphemism I’ve ever heard.”

“All I’m asking is that, if you can’t resist throwing a grenade, at least wait until it’s going to do the most good.”

“I think I’m a little insulted, here.”

“You’ll understand once you’ve met him,” Natasha assured him.

Clint threw his hands up. “He can’t possibly be that bad.”

“Care to put your money where your mouth is?” she asked.

“Not anymore?”

“A bottle of room-serviced champagne to the winner.”

“Okay, I’m in.”

She smiled triumphantly. “You can send it to Suite 2184 right after you break down and sweep Phil off his feet to prove a point.”

“Do I even want to know who’s in Suite 2184?”

“Pepper Potts.”

He stared at her. “You’re trying to poach Stark’s CEO? No wonder he’s freaking out, Nat.”

“Of course I’m not trying to poach her. Honestly, Clint. It’s practically vital to national security that she stays right where she is. I’m just trying to keep her sympathetic to SHIELD’s objectives and long-term goals.”

“And what does she get out of it?” Natasha narrowed her eyes at him. “Apart from the obvious, I mean.”

“Apart from the obvious, she gets the opportunity to keep me sympathetic to Stark Industries’ objectives and long-term goals.”

“So it’s basically going to be a marathon, round-robin, politically-influencing sex-off?” he asked.

“Well, that’s what I’m hoping for,” she said. “What it turns out to be might depend on how long you can keep Stark occupied.”

Chapter Text

Phil forced himself to relax as he scanned the lobby. He was not going to pace like an animal in a cage. He was going to wait patiently like a normal person who’d shown up a little early for a meet-up with a loved one. He grimaced as he smoothed out the packet of schedules and brochures the polite but harried woman at the check-in table had given him. He’d wadded them up without noticing.

At least, he thought, any shaky acting on his part was unlikely to draw much attention. Tony Stark making a last-minute appearance had given the whole conference the air of a poorly-planned circus. The other conference-goers were either bewildered or acting like kids on Christmas morning. The staff were hanging onto their glazed smiles and mechanically chipper attitude by their fingernails or outright frantic. The security staff circulating in the public areas were evenly split between the suits, who looked like they were bracing for a blitz, and the plainclothes, who were conspicuously failing to mill around like agitated cattle or look anything like a typical attendee. He scanned the lobby again. Still no sign of Barton.

Phil shuffled through the schedules. Most of them were stickered over with last-minute amendments, and one had an addendum stapled to the back of it. He and Clint would need to review their strategy as soon as they were alone. Getting anyone’s attention in the midst of this sort of chaos was going to be an order of magnitude more difficult than the original plan had called for, and he’d been dispatched to case the scene immediately after their one briefing. He hadn’t even had an opportunity to confirm Hill’s account of Clint accepting the assignment with him before he’d been bundled onto the first flight out.

He adjusted his badge--“Michael Smith, GTS, Inc.”--and casually elbowed his way toward the door. When a hand closed on his shoulder, it was difficult not to give in to instinct. Instead he turned, expression a careful mix of curiosity and irritation, and arched an eyebrow at the suit standing next to him.

“Mr. Coulson? If you could please come with me?” the man asked, sounding slightly nervous.

He managed a pained smile and tapped his badge. “I’m afraid there’s been some mistake. My name’s Michael Smith.”

“I’m going to need to see some ID, Mr. Smith,” he insisted.

Phil sighed, letting the curiosity bleed out of his smile, and pulled out his wallet. The man’s shoes were high-quality but well past broken in. His suit wasn’t particularly expensive but was well-tailored. His personal grooming screamed high-end private security, the sort of bodyguard who was expected not to upset the guests or attract any unwarranted assault and battery charges from the press. Most likely, he was there courtesy of Stark Industries. Phil didn’t recall his face from any of the files he’d reviewed on the flight; odds were he was a new hire of Stark Industries. He shoved his fake driver’s license and fake concealed carry permit and fake staff ID card into the man’s hands and waited impatiently while he examined them.

“Two forms of government-issued ID and one form of employer-issued ID, as per conference guidelines,” he said. “Was there a problem with my registration? I just spoke to a staff member, and she had everything under the correct name.”

“Are you currently armed, sir?”

“No. I only have that just in case, for bank deposit runs.” He paused. “And that one time we were pretty sure the installation site would turn out to be a meth lab.”

The suit--Phil had given up on trying to spot a badge or nameplate--shot him a look.

“Did it?”

“Nope. Both neighbors were, though,” he said blandly. “Turned into a heckuva mess a few months after we were there. Made the papers all the way to Tulsa. Is there a problem with my registration?”

“No.” The man grudgingly handed back his cards. “Mr. Stark was positive you were someone he knew, though.”

“Mr. Stark? Tony Stark?” Phil waited for the man to nod before shrugging and shaking his head. “If I knew Tony Stark, I can guarantee you I wouldn’t be running cable up grain silos and installing wifi in curtain-barns.”

“Why would anyone want wifi in a barn?” He figured from the slight twitch of the man’s lips that he hadn’t meant to actually ask that question.

“It turns out pig-farming is a remarkably complex endeavor,” he told him. “And if you want to keep looking at sausage the same way, I strongly suggest you never ask a farmer about pig-breeding.”

“I’ll...take your word for it.”

Phil craned his neck and looked around the floor again. No Tony, no Clint. “I don’t even see Mr. Stark. Unless he’s incognito?”

“He saw you on the security feed. I apologize for the inconvenience, Mr. Smith.”

“No harm, no foul.” Phil shrugged again. “I’m stuck here until my better half gets in anyway. Good luck with...patrolling? Crowd control?”

The man muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘babysitting’ before thanking him for his time and trying to disappear back into the crowd, his efforts hampered by a handful of starry-eyed techs who’d heard him say ‘Stark’ a bit too loudly. As they moved in, all diffidence gone with the possibility of an inside scoop on Tony’s schedule or location on the line, Phil picked out a spot that was somewhat protected from the flow of traffic by a column and an awkwardly-placed table and checked his watch.

So, Tony was already at the conference--unannounced, or the hubbub would be five times worse than it already was--and had spotted him. He strongly doubted the suit had really bought it, and there was a good chance he’d just been flagged by half of Stark’s security detail without even really trying. If the new guys were just temps, they’d likely spend a fair amount of their downtime networking with security staff from other outfits, ingratiating themselves and showing off their sources where they could. Not bad for ten minutes’ work, he thought.

He drummed his fingers against his phone through his jacket. It would be easy to text Barton and suggest another location for their rendezvous. Stark’s detail would register him quickly enough if they flagged Phil as a person of interest; they wouldn’t be working separately for this assignment if it could possibly be avoided. A small deviation from the plan wouldn’t earn him much more than an irritable grunt from Hill. Clint wouldn’t bat an eye at it, which made him reassess the wisdom of it. He leaned against the pillar and looked around the room again. Stark’s suit was drawing a small crowd, each emphatic non-statement about Tony Stark only adding to the problem. He wondered when it would occur to the man to touch his earpiece, put on a serious expression, mutter “On it!”, and bolt.

Phil shook his head at the scene and decided to ask Natasha to tell Pepper to have a word with whoever had been in charge of vetting the temps. If he wasn’t deliberately chumming the waters--and his body language spoke eloquently of discomfort with the impending feeding frenzy--then he was badly out of his depth. Phil pulled out his phone, pulled up Clint’s number, and tapped out a hasty message to meet him in a spillover location. The reply came almost immediately: “c u in 10, tiger,” followed quickly by “missed u, u wearin somethin sexy? :)”.

He stared at it, blinking, and then almost dropped the phone when a third text came through. Clint’s bare, well-muscled torso filled half the screen. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket, thanked whoever was listening that it hadn’t been a cock-shot, and stalked toward the new rendezvous location. Leave it to Clint to take the mission as an opportunity for outrageous flirting under the cover of verisimilitude. Everything he wanted, laid out in front of him with every excuse to indulge. He rubbed the back of his neck and dodged a knot of buzzing technorati trading word that Tony Stark was expected in the lobby.

If it wasn’t completely ridiculous on the face of it, he’d suspect Hill of deliberately sabotaging his efforts to get off-base and into someone’s bed in the few spare hours he’d had. He was paranoid, edgy, and second-guessing himself, and the operation hadn’t even properly started yet. Maria was right about Clint not going feral if he looked at him wrong, but a big part of what the three of them had was based on their confidence in each other to make the right call. That included not taking advantage. He ducked around another, larger group making a direct line for the lobby and frowned. He’d have given it maybe another three minutes before things really started getting out of hand, but then, this entire crowd was likely constantly scanning twitter for conference updates, presentation teasers, and industry gossip. News traveled that much faster. He filed the information away for future use and grabbed a bottle of water from one of the concession tables before picking a visible spot and loitering expectantly.

When Stark ambled in through a side entrance, three harried bodyguards trailing in his wake and a megawatt grin on his face, Phil nodded to himself. Of course. Why not? He could introduce Barton directly to Tony. They could have their pictures up on the Stark Industries page for conference news, helpfully captioned “secret government agents.” They’d spend the rest of their careers doing nothing but distracting semi-professional goons from the real operation and atoning for whatever they’d done to deserve this sort of luck. He arranged his face into a suitable facsimile of star-struck awe and figured it was probably either the entire Budapest incident or the time he’d scolded a god for trying to retrieve his own property.

“Agent Coulson!” Tony waved at him, his smile broadening.

Phil obligingly feigned confusion and looked behind him. By the time Tony was too close to pretend he was talking to anyone else, he was shaking his head and pointing to his badge.

“Michael Smith,” he corrected. “I don’t think we’ve met, Mr. Stark. Though it is a spectacular honor to meet you in person--”

“Oh, I get it.” Tony threw his arm around Phil’s shoulders over the half-strangled, half-growled objections of his staff. “Undercover. Nice. Can I call you Mike?”

“I mostly go by Michael,” he said firmly, trying to twist out from under Tony’s arm without being obvious about it.

The scattered attendees who’d been too out of the loop or too overwhelmed to head for the lobby were openly gaping at them, and they were being recorded on at least thirty individual cells. He kept the dazed smile painted on his face as Tony dug his fingers into his shoulder and squeezed. Tony waved at them cheerily before flashing a peace sign.

“So, Mike, you’re probably definitely not here with SHIELD, right?” Tony asked, his tone conversational. “Never heard of them? No Such Agency and so forth?”

“I’m with GTS, Incorporated--” Phil tried to angle them slightly away from the recording audience only to have Tony start walking without relinquishing his grip on his shoulder.

“I swung by the good old spook-booth a little earlier. Fantastically disappointing. I think they were actually using an Enigma machine. Which, yes, props for keeping it old school, real, etcetera, but I really think our national security is worth a little bit of effort in the updating department, you know?”

“I wouldn’t know, honestly,” Phil broke in, trying to get a word around Tony’s non-stop chatter. Pepper had a knack for having conversations with him in spite of Tony never actually pausing, but he had yet to master the skill.

“But you’d agree that no expense can be spared to protect this great nation of ours?” he challenged, posing briefly for someone with a proper camera. Phil spotted press credentials clipped to the man’s belt.

“Sure, sure,” he said quickly. “National security is very important. Big fan of it.”

“Great to hear!” Tony chirped, steering him toward the exit. “Have you had lunch yet? We should have lunch. I’m starving. Bob tells me there’s a great sushi joint on the top floor. You like sushi? Hell, even if you don’t, I’m sure they serve other stuff that’s just as good.”

“Uh, that sounds great, but I’m actually waiting for my boyfriend. He’s supposed to be meeting me here any minute.” He managed to dig in his heels without being too blatant about it and brought them up short.

“Really? I’d have thought the company frowned on fraternization. Or is he your honest-to-god real-life boyfriend?” Tony seemed to consider the problem, then abruptly started walking again, dragging Phil with him. “No, wait, don’t tell me. We should leave an air of mystery about the whole thing, make it more interesting. I’m sure he can spare you for a few hours, right? The war games can go on without you? Or are you field-marshalling this whole mess? You’re usually Codename: Mama Duck, right? How much supervision do agents usually need, though? Karate-chopping a guy in a trenchcoat and stealing microfilm strikes me as the sort of deal that requires a hands-off management-style, you know? Well, of course you know. I’m guessing you guys go for real self-starters who don’t need a lot of close management and provide the optimal amount of plausible deniability. Natalie-or-whatever-her-name-is certainly didn’t seem to need too much direction. Oh, hey, do you outrank her? Can you get her to stop trying to headhunt my girlfriend? I kind of need her to run my company. And could you get her to apologize for stabbing me in the neck that one time? That really hurt, even if she did do it to ultimately make me feel better. And she didn’t ask first, which was rude, or sterilize the injection site, which was just unsanitary.”

“I’m sure I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about at all,” Phil sighed. “Or why you can’t at least use your inside-voice while you’re saying it, because it sounds like the sort of thing that could send stock prices plummeting.”

“We could continue this conversation over sushi,” Tony suggested brightly. “I think you need to have a pretty strict inside-voices-only policy to keep your three-star rating, Mike.”

“Mr. Stark--”

“Please, call me Tony. I insist you call me Tony, in fact. And Pepper will be there. You remember Pepper, right? You’ve met Pepper, haven’t you? Of course you’ve met Pepper. You two kept sneaking off for hot dogs during all those Congressional meetings.”

“I’ve never even been to Washington--”

“Were you the one who kind-of sort-of blew up the labs when I got locked out of them after it turned out Obie tried to kill me?”

“No, I--”

“She told me once, but I was kind of busy, and to be honest, you sort of blend into the suit-parade when you’re all paperwork and cover stories. God, those meetings were dull. Except for the parts where I looked like a genius. Those parts were great. And Rhodey’s ass in a uniform. That was also great, but that’s always great. He just has one of those asses. You probably haven’t met Rhodey, though, have you? He won’t be at lunch. He’s just a good guy to know in general, even if he did steal my stuff and fly off with it and then trick it out like a lowrider with weapons that turned out to not even work, which I could have told him would happen, if I hadn’t been dying and really hung-over at the time.”

“That sounds like a personal problem?” Phil said, doing his best to look baffled.

“Mike. Mike, Mike, Mike.” Tony paused, his lips twisting. “What’s the word for when something starts sounding like it’s not a real word anymore? Is that a real thing?”

“Semantic satiation,” one of the bodyguards supplied.

“Thanks, Bob.” Phil glanced behind them. From the expressions on the bodyguards’ faces, he’d lay good money on none of them being named Bob. “Mike. It was absolutely a personal problem. We should discuss it in detail over food. Especially since if you’d gotten government approval to taser me this time, I’m pretty sure you’d have done it roughly thirty seconds ago, so it’s probably off the table, right? Bob, that was a joke. Kind of. Please don’t get all...security-detailish. I’m pretty sure Mike was created in a government lab where they taught everyone five ways to kill a man with a paperclip before turning them loose on the enemies of the free world, and Pepper would be extremely upset if you got paperclipped to death by her hot-dog-buddy Mike. I mean, I’d also be upset. I don’t mean to imply that I’d just take it all in stride. But it’s important to me that Pepper not have any extra worries this week, and I think that would probably count double since--”

“Mr. Stark, I can confidently say that tasering you has never, not once in all my life, crossed my mind,” he said, cutting him off. However much they were paying Tony’s bodyguards, it wasn’t nearly enough. He hoped fervently that Barton had arrived, assessed the situation, and realized that he required an extraction.

“Not once?” Tony asked, eyebrows raised.

“Well, I might have wished some vague unpleasantness on you when our 401ks took a hit after your announcement that you didn’t want to make guns anymore,” he confessed blandly, “but at the time I’d have recognized your circuit boards faster than I’d have recognized you. What’s it like being Iron Man?”

“It’s absolutely, positively, utterly beyond great. Though I guess I could deal with people not shooting rockets at my head, if it came down to that.” He picked up his pace, and Phil grudgingly let himself be dragged along. “Of course, on the other hand, people were shooting rockets at my head before I put on the suit, and I’ve got to say, it’s way easier to deal with in the suit than out of the suit. I mean, the armor takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Getting hit with a car or shot at or blown up without it? A lot less pleasant. Not that it’s, strictly speaking, pleasant in the armor--I’d still prefer people not do it at all--but you get what I’m saying, Mike.”

Phil nodded and wondered where the hell Barton was. “Of course, of course.”

He managed a completely bewildered, star-struck grin for another journalist with a camera and comforted himself with the thought that Clint could just check twitter for his location.

*****

Clint waded through the press of bodies, pausing only briefly to watch a young, high-end bodyguard inadvertently trying to incite a riot. He shook his head and muttered, “Stick to premieres and celebrity watering holes, bro.”

He was a few minutes late, time lost unexpectedly to a fender-bender in the loading zone, and Phil was nowhere to be seen in the crowd. He got the feel of the situation and could see immediately why Phil had directed him to a fallback location. Trying to meet here would likely get them booted from the conference entirely or land them both in holding overnight once the inevitable fracas broke out. He slipped to the side and skirted the densest parts of the throng.

Clint let his eyes play over the crowd before giving up, every middle-aged white man who could be Coulson reminding him that he was looking for Phil as he was before he’d gotten reassigned, not Phil as he was at the moment. He frowned, marking room numbers as he moved down the hall. It had been an unpleasant shock to finally see him at the briefing, and he’d hoped to get some time alone with him before Phil had been practically airdropped into the conference. He’d lost weight, because he hadn’t been eating properly. He looked older, because he hadn’t been sleeping properly. Clint hadn’t seen the wry smile he used to defuse situations once in the entire meeting, even though everyone there had clearly been a bit on edge. He’d wanted to make a few jokes of his own, but every time he’d glanced at Phil and taken in the unusual sharpness of his shoulders and cheekbones, it had died in his throat. He’d have been tempted to bring it up with Natasha, if she hadn’t been in roughly the same boat.

Clint dodged around a few conference security staff and muttered meaningless apologies, waving his badge airly in their general direction. Natasha hadn’t shown any of the obvious physical signs the way Phil did; if there was one thing she didn’t do readily, it was let people see her weak spots. But it had been hard not to notice the way she’d sat a little farther away from everyone else than she normally did, the subtle tension in the way she held herself that was normally absent when she was on base or in a confirmed safe house. She was on higher alert than the situation demanded.

He found the secondary rendezvous point just in time to see Phil getting manhandled away from it by Tony Stark in front of an audience of deeply conflicted bodyguards. Clint tilted his head and experienced a wave of sympathy for them. Protocol demanded breaking the whole thing up immediately, but it looked like getting Stark’s hand off of Phil’s shoulder might require an actual crowbar. And while Nat had told him enough about Pepper Potts that he’d lay good money on her having made it clear to everyone involved that Stark didn’t have the authority to fire them, he’d lay even better money on them all being uniquely aware that Stark made a habit of punching out tanks and firing grenades at things. Being CEO had its perks, yes, but so did being Iron Man. For his own part, Clint just wanted him to stop trying to climb his handler.

He pulled out his phone, flipped through his contacts until a picture of Phil in a Sooners cap popped up, and hit the call icon. A snippet of cool jazz came from Phil’s pocket, and Clint snorted to himself.

Cool jazz? he thought. Who picked that one?

“Marco!” he called.

“Polo!” came the answer. He turned around and pretended to be shocked at Coulson looking for all the world like a billionaire superhero’s long-lost best friend in the middle of a knot of security guards.

“Babe!” He broke into a grin at the relief evident in Phil’s posture. Inspiration struck, and he butted between him and Stark, swept Phil into his arms, and kissed him. Clint could have kicked himself as Phil’s mouth softened and opened under his, and Phil’s hands curled around his back, his fingers bunching the fabric of his tshirt. The last thing he wanted to do was let go now. After a flurry of shutter-click noises, he straightened and reluctantly relaxed his hold.

“Agent Boyfriend!” Tony chirped, sticking out his hand. Clint stopped, the picture of bewilderment, did a double-take, and then looked at Phil. He flattered himself that the look of dazed lust wasn’t an act.

“Uh, do you know Iron Man, hon? And did he really just call me ‘Agent Boyfriend’?” he asked.

“Uh, Mr. Stark is under the impression that I’m someone else,” Phil said awkwardly, taking a half-step back. “Mr. Stark, this is my boyfriend, John Tanner. John, this is, uh, Mr. Stark.”

“Tony,” he corrected. “Pleasure to meet you, John. You a fan of sushi? I was just asking ‘Mike’,” he paused to make little air-quotes with his fingers, and Phil rubbed his forehead while Clint’s brows furrowed, “to join me for lunch.”

“Uh…”

“Well, actually asking isn’t the right word for it. I need you both to join me for lunch. Fate of the American empire depends on it.”

“What?” Clint asked, staring at him. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to need to act much around Stark, if this wasn’t out of character. He glanced at Phil, looking for some sort of cue.

“I don’t think that’s strictly true, Tony,” Phil sighed. “I handle tech issues for small businesses, and John is a wildlife photographer.”

Clint jumped when he found Tony looping his arms around both of them and consciously bit back every reflex he had.

“If two undercover representatives of one of our most underhanded black-ops outfits can’t join a tax-paying citizen in good standing for incredibly good food, then the America I grew up loving and believing in is in grave danger indeed,” he said firmly, leading them back toward the elevator. “So, wildlife photographer, huh? You do anything I might have seen?”

“You remember that narwhal spread in Nat Geo a few years back?”

“That was you?”

“Nope! The lemur collection that got bumped out of the prime slot for the narwhals was me.”

Tony blinked at him, then started laughing. “Looks and humor. I think you’ve landed yourself a keeper, Mike.”

“We actually haven’t seen each other in a couple of weeks, Mr. Stark,” Phil managed, glancing over his shoulder at the security detail. “We were kind of hoping for a little time to ourselves before the conference got into full swing in the morning. And I don’t think we’re all going to fit in this elevator. Maybe we could just leave you here?”

“Nonsense. The weight limit is pretty much a suggestion only. Believe me, I’ve tested these hotel elevators on many an occasion--”

“From the weight of the suit?” Clint asked.

“A football team’s worth of professional cheerleaders,” Tony answered instantly, turning back to Phil. “He doesn’t really think I’m responsible, does he? Agent Coulson, are you dating a junior agent? Does Fury know about this?”

Phil ignored him and looked back at one of the bodyguards. “Is there a pill you should be giving him?” he asked in a stage-whisper.

His response was a long-suffering, silent glower.

“That’s just hurtful. Especially since having lunch with Tony Stark, famous inventor and former head of Stark Industries, would be a phenomenal opportunity for--” He picked at Phil’s badge. “--Mike Smith of GTS, Inc. What the hell does GTS even stand for?”

“General Technical Solutions,” Phil said.

“Mike Smith, John Tanner, and General Technical Solutions. Your cover-story department is absolutely phoning it in this week, aren’t they?”

“It would have been Delacroix Tech, but the boss decided against it on account of how many people can’t pronounce it properly,” Phil returned blandly.

The elevator slid open, and Tony steered them onto it. “Even your cover stories have cover stories. You’re totally the one who blew up that lab, weren’t you?” He looked over at Clint. “Your secret-agent SHIELD-assigned fake-boyfriend is a badass. You know that, right?”

Clint spread his hands. “I have absolute no idea what’s going on anymore, but I am aware that my boyfriend is a complete badass, yes.”

“So, Mike, what exactly does GTS, Inc. do? Besides, you know, not really exist? I feel like I could probably use you on one of my teams. Unless you’re a big fan of sashimi. I think if you’re just going to get raw meat on a plate, you should probably have to fight the animal to the death first.”

“I’m not entirely sure fighting a tuna to the death would present that much of a challenge,” Phil said, watching one of the bodyguards select the floor. He glanced apologetically at Clint, who cleared his throat.

“Bluefin tuna can actually weigh up to a ton,” he said quickly. “And it can take multiple days to land one large tuna if you’re using a traditional hook-and-line fishing approach.”

Phil and Tony both stared at him for a moment.

“I covered the Atlantic migration one year,” he explained. “Before we met. It was actually pretty cool, but then we wound up stopping over in Sicily to check out the tonnara system, and it kind of put me off tuna for, like, ever. Tuna and Italian wine.”

“Was that the trip with all the pictures of the…?”

“Yup.” Clint did his best to look smugly pleased with himself. He thought of getting to spend the next few hours nonchalantly helping himself to all the small, casual intimacies they weren’t allowed as teammates and smirked.

“Then I think tuna and Italian wine were a sacrifice worth making,” Phil said.

Clint grinned.

Chapter Text

Clint shut the door and leaned against it, laughing. “Okay, so exactly what pictures of my time in Sicily were worth tuna and Italian wine?”

Phil shrugged. “I’m sure they involved ton-weight tuna, whatever they were.”

“Heh.” He caught the questioning look in Phil’s eye and shook his head. “You remember the first day in the hospital after that spill I took? My roommate wanted to watch the Discovery channel. Then he fell asleep with the remote, and I wound up watching I think twelve hours of nothing but nature documentaries.”

“One of which involved tuna.” Phil shook his head.

“One of which involved tuna. It’s amazing what sticks with you when you’re hopped up on painkillers and existential panic.”

A flash of something unidentifiable lit Phil’s eyes, and Clint ran his fingers through his hair.

“I’m sorry about this whole Stark thing,” he said abruptly. “I know winding up on Gawker’s splashpage isn’t what you signed up for when you accepted this assignment.”

Clint shook his head. “Nat warned me about him. I just didn’t expect to have to pry him off you that quickly. Or tell that many stories based on vaguely-remembered Animal Planet specials.”

“You did good. Stark can be a handful. God knows I didn’t do as well the first time I got stuck trying to wrangle him.” Phil hesitated for a few seconds, trying to figure his next move. They’d both gone easy on the sake, in spite of Tony refilling their cups at every opportunity--“You’re like on spy-vacation, right?”--and Clint didn’t look too tired. Now would be as good a time to broach the subject of how Hill had offered the assignment to him as any.

Then Clint leaned in close, smiling impertinently, and Phil forced himself to keep still. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that smile. A memory of the kiss Clint had laid on him when they’d met up made his lips tingle, and he lost his train of thought.

“We could give them a bit of a show,” Clint suggested, throwing the deadbolt and guiding him gently back against the wall. He leaned into him lightly and unknotted his tie, then tugged it off lazily and tossed it on the bed without shifting his position. Phil could feel himself blushing as Clint’s fingers found the top button of his shirt and started working at it. He was already getting hard, and, given the way Clint was pressing his hips up against him, he’d be able to feel it before long. He needed to rein himself back in.

Phil sighed and gave Clint a level look. “Or we could close the blinds and not have to listen to half an hour of Stark subtly discussing exhibitionism at tomorrow’s panel.”

“I think we’re in for half an hour of Stark subtly discussing something inappropriate no matter what,” he said, moving on to the next button. “Exhibitionism might be preferable to photogs who have romantic reunion dinners and then just watch tv and go to sleep, in spite of the established badassery of their boyfriends.”

“He’d be hard-pressed to tell that with the blinds closed,” Phil grunted, swallowing hard when Clint casually ground against him. He could almost feel his brain shutting down as his cock stiffened, and part of him was desperately trying to wrest control back before he crossed a line he couldn’t even see anymore.

“Stark doesn’t strike you as the sort of asshole who’d resort to thermal cams?”

“He would, but he’d have a hell of a time working that into conversation without Pepper coming down on him like a ton of bricks,” he muttered. Clint made his way to the next button, and Phil caught his hands, closing his fingers gently around the archer’s wrists. He could feel the rapid beat of Clint’s pulse, and he inhaled deeply, trying to steady himself. “Barton.”

Clint shook his head.

“Tanner,” he corrected firmly, dipping his head to kiss Phil’s jaw. His breath whispered across Phil’s throat. “John Tanner, who hasn’t seen his boyfriend in weeks. John Tanner, who’s been looking forward to doing this too long to care that the curtains are too sheer to provide a lot of privacy or that half the hotel can guess exactly what’s going on in here. John Tanner, who can tell his boyfriend’s been missing him, too, because it’s been maybe two minutes and he’s already got a hard-on the size of the Washington Monument.”

Phil closed his eyes and rested more of his weight on the wall, his knees suddenly feeling weak. When Clint kissed him, he parted his lips and moved his tongue against Clint’s, his hands coming up to cup the back of his head and feel the stubble on his jaw. Clint seized on the wordless invitation to continue, and he undid the rest of the buttons and started on his belt with eager fingers. Clint’s hands were warm against his skin, and rougher than he remembered. He’d been spending more time out at the range, Phil thought. The insistence in his touch was reassuring and grounding, and Phil wrapped his arms around him and held him close, losing a bit of himself in the kiss. It hadn’t just been his smile he’d missed. They were less than their best selves without him. Natasha curled back in on herself and grew sharper, and he got...colder. Quieter. Clint brought them both back out of themselves.

Clint kissed his way down his throat as Phil felt his belt being tugged from its loops. He teased Clint’s shirt out of his jeans and went to pull it off him, but he refused to budge. Phil dug his fingers into the small of the archer’s back in surprise when he latched onto a patch of now-bare skin just under the collar-line and sucked a bruise onto it. Phil flexed his shoulder and angled his head away at the sting of it, hissing a warning. Clint grabbed his hips, rutted against him, and ran his tongue over the mark, his breathing quick in Phil’s ear.

“I’ve needed this so badly,” he panted. “God, I’ve needed you. I’ve been going out of my mind.”

Phil hugged him close and stroked his back gently. He was still tense, his muscles tight as one of his bowstrings, and Phil tried to focus on that instead of his aching cock. “Things haven’t been the same with you gone.”

“Is that as close to an ‘I needed you, too’ as I’m going to get?” Clint laughed softly and ran his hands over Phil’s ribs.

Phil closed his eyes and squeezed him harder. The past few months had been a sharp reminder that they had to remain functional outside of the unit as well as within. “Yes.”

“Just Tanner’s luck to get stuck with an emotionally-stunted son of a bitch like Smith,” he chuckled. Phil snorted and relaxed his hold, then nudged Clint back until he could meet his eyes. He ran his thumb over Clint’s cheek and studied his face for a few seconds before dropping his gaze and trying to compose himself.

“We all have to be able to stand on our own,” he said carefully, looking back up, “but without you, we’re not...what we could be. We’re not what we were meant to be.”

Clint blinked at him a few times, clearly startled, and then broke into a broad grin and pressed back into him, pinning him hard against the wall and kissing him hungrily. Phil wished he’d insisted they close the blinds when Clint’s hand closed around his cock; if Clint hadn’t already half-driven the air from his lungs, he’d have groaned aloud. Clint withdrew just enough to get his pants unbuttoned and unzipped, then leaned back against him, sucking at his bottom lip and slipping his hand between them. He moaned when Clint’s fingertips stroked his length and then gently circled his glans before pumping back down again with his whole fist. Clint peppered his neck with kisses and left another bruise below the first, flicking his thumb over Phil’s slit to distract him as he bit down carefully.

Phil realized that he was shivering only when Clint dropped to his knees and left him with nothing to hold onto. He threw back his head and swallowed a groan when Clint’s mouth closed around him, the heat and suction and feel of his tongue combining to be immediately and completely perfect. His fingers crooked against the wall, automatically looking for purchase he wouldn’t find, and he gasped when Clint relaxed his throat and took his entire length. Clint’s hands found his and gently brought them to his head. His fingers curled over his own, encouraging Phil to guide him.

I’m not in control enough for this, he thought. The past few months had left him too frayed, spread too thin, and this was the breaking point. He didn’t trust himself with it.

He shook his head and pressed his palms flat against the wall. Clint settled his hands lightly on Phil’s hips, then pulled back for a moment.

“You okay?” he asked, his eyes searching.

Phil nodded. “Just not with that. Not right now.”

“But with the rest of this?” he persisted.

“Yeah.” Phil nodded again, getting a handle on himself.

“Good.” Clint smirked. “Just remember to get the right one when you’re screaming my name.”

Phil scoffed, relaxing again. “Don’t get ahead of you--”

The rest of it was lost in a gasp when Clint sucked his length back into his mouth, paying particular attention to his foreskin this time. The spark in Clint’s eye was somewhere between victorious and impish, and Phil almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. As if Clint would ever have any particular difficulty inspiring lust in him. He pulled slowly back, his cheeks hollowing, and fire shot along Phil’s nerves. He kept himself carefully still even as a desperate need for more clawed at him. Clint worked him for what seemed like an eternity before beginning in earnest again, and Phil felt as if he would split out of his skin by the time he climaxed. The cresting wave left him dazed and groaning, and Clint swallowed easily before releasing him.

“What were you saying?” he asked innocently, tilting his head and wiping his mouth.

“It seems to have slipped my mind,” Phil said dryly. He took a few deep breaths to cover how wrung out he was and wondered what Clint had in mind for himself.

“Must be old age finally catching up with you,” Clint suggested. His smirk was replaced with a grimace when Phil pulled him to his feet, and he leaned heavily on the wall, favoring his left knee.

Phil winced in sympathy. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I wish you’d said something. Here, let me help.”

“I’m not spun glass,” Clint grunted.

He threw his arm around Phil’s waist and drew him close, and Phil braced him, trying to take some of the weight off his leg for a moment. He felt a stinging flash of regret for not realizing that Clint wasn’t even the least bit hard. Clint jerked his head toward the bed, and Phil helped him to it. He sighed and pulled his clothes into some semblance of order as Clint sank down onto the mattress and gingerly straightened his leg.

“Why don’t you close the blinds and come to bed? I seem to remember us having an early morning tomorrow,” Clint asked, embarrassment coloring his voice.

“I thought you could take the bed,” he said. He pulled the blinds closed and then snapped them shut, waiting for the argument he strongly suspected was coming. “I can take the couch.”

“That’s not a couch, it’s a loveseat. The last thing I need is you getting eighty-sixed with a bad back right when I’m about to get cleared. Sitwell and I wouldn’t survive another month with each other, and that’s assuming Hill or Nat didn’t kill me on purpose.” Clint glowered at him mulishly, and Phil kept his expression carefully neutral.

“My back is fine, it’s definitely a full couch, and I’m a light sleeper.” He knelt and examined the injured joint clinically, checking for swelling and warm spots.

“Your back’s not going to be fine if you try spending a night on that thing, and I promise not to steal all the covers,” Clint retorted. Phil frowned and pulled his hands back when the archer hissed and dug his fingers into the bed at a gentle prod. “No, that was good. Really good, actually. Could...could you go back to doing that? Just a little bit gentler?”

Phil paid closer attention as his fingertips moved over Clint’s flesh, but he still couldn’t detect any signs of renewed trauma. Clint sighed happily after a moment, though, and some of the tension drained out of his shoulders and arms.

“Hang on. The seam’s pinching a little,” he muttered. He wriggled out of his jeans and kicked them off before sitting back down with a suddenly exaggerated degree of care that Phil found more than a little suspicious.

He shot Clint a measuring look, and Clint responded with a completely guileless one of his own. Phil returned to his previous position without looking up at him and ran his thumbs over his kneecap. Relief that Clint seemed interested after all mixed uneasily with genuine concern about his knee. Clint made a strangled noise when he moved up his leg and squeezed cautiously.

“That’s not a word, Barton. Good? Bad?”

“Good,” Clint gritted, curling forward. “Christ. What are you doing?”

“That’s just the tendon. It doesn’t feel swollen, but--”

“It feels unbelievable,” he muttered. “If my physical therapist had done this, I wouldn’t have complained so much about all the exercises she had me doing.”

“Yes, you would have,” Phil sighed. He worked his way up another inch, and Clint grunted appreciatively. “If I’m remembering my emergency medicine training correctly, this would have practically nothing to do with your actual injury. You’ve probably just been overcompensating.”

“I’ll check in with medical as soon as we wrap up here,” he promised. “Up and out just a little?”

Phil moved his hands further up Clint’s thigh and massaged gently, trying not to let Clint’s rapidly-tenting boxers distract him. Clint groaned softly when he dropped his hands back down to his calf and rubbed carefully around the base of his knee. After a few minutes of gentle, methodical kneading, he glanced up to see Clint watching him with a startlingly intense look of want. Clint looked away, suddenly developing a keen interest in the print on the opposite wall.

“Maybe, uh, up a little bit?” he suggested. Phil stopped just above the joint, and he coughed slightly. “A little bit more?”

Clint’s fingers tightened on the blankets as he massaged his thigh.

“You all right there, Barton?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Apart from never having needed a blowjob so badly in my entire life?”

“Apart from that, yes.”

“I’m not above begging,” Clint said thickly, leaning forward.

Phil let his lips quirk up a bit. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Oh, thank god.” He grinned, and Phil was struck by a sudden, ridiculous urge to kiss him. “I may not be above begging, but I’m really terrible at it.”

He prodded Clint’s hips, prompting him to slide toward him a little, and then rested his fingertips on his knee. “Comfortable?”

Clint nodded, and Phil slowly eased his cock out of his boxers. He curled one hand around Clint’s hip and the other pumped around his shaft, his touch deft but feather-light. Phil waited until he was squirming with the need for more, then drew his tongue slowly over the tip. Clint whimpered and arched, and his fingers tugged gently at the back of Phil’s head, urging him to take him in deeper.

“Please,” he panted, screwing his eyes shut. “Please don’t tease me. You have no idea how badly--”

The rest was lost to a low groan when Phil relaxed his jaw and slid down his length, then a wordless gasp when he drew back, sucking firmly. Clint’s fingers twisted in his hair, and he dropped his hand to Clint’s balls, caressing lightly as he bobbed forward again.

“Just like that,” Clint panted. “Please, just--keep going, I can’t--”

Phil closed his eyes and tried not to think of pushing Clint back and riding him until he came, tried not to think about how hard Clint would buck up against him, how Clint’s fingers would dig into his hips, how Clint’s shoulders would feel under his hands, how hard he’d come with the cock currently sliding down his throat stretching his ass instead. He could feel his own cock getting hard again, and told himself to snap out of it. It had been a long day. They were both too tired and too aroused to think clearly.

He started working Clint’s length with short, fast strokes, his tongue darting and lapping and pressing until the archer’s groans started alternating with incoherent muttering. Phil tried to will his body to stop responding. All he had to do was get Clint off and then take a long shower. Clint would fall asleep, he’d take the couch, and tomorrow they’d both be in a more reasonable frame of mind. Tomorrow they could start re-establishing a sustainable version of ‘normal.’ He flattened his tongue against the underside of Clint’s cock and pulled back slowly, drawing a long, low cry from him.

“Open your eyes,” he whispered. “Please, I need to see your eyes--”

Phil looked up at him and he fell silent, his own eyes dark with need. Phil couldn’t remember a time when he’d looked so gone, and when his fingers tightened on the back of his head, he let him lead. He kept his gaze locked on Clint’s face as he took the rest of his length. He didn’t break eye contact when Clint came, and he’d barely swallowed the last of it when Clint dragged him up onto the bed. He found himself pinned against the mattress, and any thought of being sensible collapsed under the weight of Clint’s body and the fierceness with which he was kissing him. Phil let himself enjoy the muscular frame practically vibrating against his for a few more seconds before he nudged him off. Clint rolled to the side and pulled him close, still shaking slightly from the aftershocks of his orgasm.

Phil slipped his arm under Clint’s head and let him rest against his shoulder.

“I meant it when I said I missed you,” Clint murmured, breaking a silence long enough that Phil had begun to think he’d drifted off.

“I meant it, too.”

“You’re not sleeping on the loveseat.”

“Am I going to have to pull rank on you, Barton?” Phil sighed.

“God, I love it when you talk dirty.”

Phil flushed scarlet, and Clint laughed softly and curled closer, running his hand over Phil’s stomach and nuzzling his chest.

“What would you even write me up for? Perfecting our cover?” he asked.

“I’m sure I could find something.” Phil caught himself carding his fingers through Clint’s hair and stopped self-consciously. “But I need a shower, and I’d like to think you’ll come to your senses before disciplinary action is involved.”

Clint gave him a filthy smile. “I’m usually not into the rough stuff, you know, but for you I could make an exception.”

“Go to sleep, agent,” Phil chided, carefully disentangling himself.

“Only if you’re safe in bed instead of risking a herniated disc with that glorified armchair.”

“We’ll see.”

Chapter Text

Natasha glanced at her phone, frowning.

“better hurry, champagne on its way”

The text was from the dummy number that had been assigned to Phil, who made a point of at least trying to use standard punctuation and capitalization when it wasn’t an emergency, and Natasha sighed.

“What did you do?” she texted back. The reply was in link form, and opening it landed her on a gossip site currently being taken up by a picture of ‘Tony Stark’s gay mystery date’ ending in ‘drama and heartbreak’ and divers columns devoted to wild speculation concerning the three men featured.

“God damn it, Clint,” she muttered to herself, double-checking the timestamp on the last post and doing a quick mental calculation to adjust for the time-zone. She had at most a few hours before the furor died down and Tony got bored with teasing the press.

Clint and Coulson could handle themselves, and it sounded as if their part of the run was off to a quick start anyway. Now she just had to devise a way to slip past security and gain access to Pepper’s suite without either upsetting Pepper or alerting anyone who’d crash the party. Not that she expected it to be difficult. Electronic locks had almost taken all the fun out of breaking and entering when it came to hotels.

*****

Natasha smiled at the attendant as she signed for the cart. She added a generous but not instantly-memorable tip and examined the champagne. Clint had picked very well, which probably meant that he’d asked Coulson what would be appropriate. That the fruit arrangement conspicuously lacked strawberries was another tell. Clint was good at what he did, but looking up food allergies before sending payment on a bet was a bit of a stretch, even for him.

She draped a towel over the bottle and popped the cork, then poured two glasses and nestled it back in the ice. She scanned the room for recording devices one more time, then arranged herself carefully in a chair and tugged the hem of her skirt up just enough to show the barest edge of her stocking cuff.

That move had been the one to first let her know that Pepper was truly hooked; she hadn’t been able to keep her eyes off her legs during the entirety of a two-hour late-night paperwork session. Natasha flushed and shifted her hips at the memory of Pepper’s darkened eyes and flustered distraction. She’d barely waited until she was alone in the guest suite to bring herself off that night, fantasizing about how Pepper would be doing the same in the master bedroom just down the hall. She’d gotten to revisit the fantasy in the flesh less than two days later, when Pepper had finally thrown all caution to the wind and kissed her. She reached out and tilted the lamp’s shade so that it left her in a bit of shadow, throwing her features in sharper relief.

The condensation had scarcely started to bead on her glass when Pepper walked through the door. She couldn’t quite see her from her position, but she’d become intimately familiar with Pepper’s footsteps and the small sigh of relief when she first took off her heels at the end of the day. She was alone, as well. That had been a gamble, albeit a small one. Pepper would have thanked her for waiting, apologized for keeping her, and dismissed any company she’d brought with her, but it might have raised some eyebrows. Natasha deliberately let the champagne flute clink against the bottle, and Pepper moved quickly and cautiously into the room. A soft smile lit her face when she registered who it was, and Natasha smiled back.

“Miss Potts,” she said, raising her glass. She let Pepper get a good, long look at her before standing and offering her the second flute.

“Miss Rushman,” Pepper chuckled, accepting it. The way she had of purring ‘Miss Rushman’ when they were alone like this made her spine straighten and her heart beat just a tick faster. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Business,” Natasha said simply. She let her eyes wander over the sapphire sheath dress clinging to Pepper’s every curve before she looked back up at her face. For her own part, Pepper was watching her sip her champagne with an intensity that made her breath hitch.

“You know, if SHIELD wants to de-incentivize my putting the brakes on Tony’s misbehavior, they’ve definitely found the right way to do it,” Pepper murmured.

Natasha suppressed a smile and took another drink just to see the color blossom across Pepper’s cheeks when she did. “Your country thanks you for your service.”

“I’m developing the strangest reaction to hearing that phrase,” Pepper laughed, sliding closer.

“Oh?” she asked, lifting the glass to her lips. Pepper took it from her hand gently and set it down on the table.

“Mm-hmm,” she hummed, leaning in and dipping her head.

Natasha kissed her gently and pulled her close, her hands settling on Pepper’s hips. It was always like this for the first minute or two, a slow remapping of each other’s bodies after however many weeks of strictly professional co-existence or complete absence. It was a satisfactory middle ground between the unsustainable high--a high fueled by Pepper’s need for distraction and release and Natasha’s need to get everything she could before her cover was blown--and the complete absence that had followed, before Tony and Pepper had worked out their ground rules, before Pepper had decided that she could trust SHIELD enough to take up with one of their operatives. Natasha thought she had Phil to thank for at least some of Pepper’s decision. He’d wasted a reasonable amount of her time on bullshit assignments that had put her right there with him when he’d just so happened to run into Pepper, a subtle way of vouching for her with a woman he’d been cultivating as a sympathetic party.

Natasha relaxed as Pepper’s arm circled her shoulders, her other hand tangled loosely in her hair. The faint spice of Pepper’s perfume was surrounding her, and Pepper’s body was warm against her, and then her tongue slipped between Pepper’s teeth, and Pepper squirmed against her.

“The absolute strangest reaction,” she breathed, pulling back slightly.

Natasha smiled, all teeth and need, and let her hands drop to Pepper’s ass. “I think I might be able to do something about that.”

“You think so?” Pepper asked archly. She shook Natasha’s hands off and turned, languidly moving her hair out of the way of her zipper in wordless invitation.

Natasha swallowed, her eyes sweeping over Pepper’s slim form again. Then she closed the distance between them, her fingertips skimming over smooth skin and silk as she unzipped Pepper’s dress and her lips on the nape of Pepper’s neck. Pepper made a soft, needy noise, the way she always did when Natasha kissed her there, and the sound went straight to her cunt. Natasha shifted her weight, checking a sudden impatience to have Pepper on the bed and writhing under her, and ran her tongue over the delicate skin just below the hairline.

Pepper shivered against her and slipped out of her dress, her hand curling around Natasha’s and guiding it down her hip, over her mons, past the split lace edge of her thong, and to the already-slick cleft between her velvet thighs. Pepper’s soft moan vibrated through Natasha’s chest, and every muscle in her body tightened with need.

“Tell me what you need, Miss Potts,” Natasha murmured, stroking with a teasing slowness.

Pepper arched and groaned. “You. Naked. Now.”

She smiled, her lips pressed into Pepper’s shoulder, and gently brushed her thumb over her clit. Pepper sucked in a sharp breath and froze, her hand tightening around Natasha’s wrist.

“Was I unclear?” she asked deliberately, and Natasha thrilled at the hard, demanding edge to her voice. Pepper was at her best when she was being unapologetic about what she wanted.

“No, Miss Potts, you were very clear,” she said, reluctantly pulling her hand back. She turned Pepper around and guided her to the bed, then maneuvered her into a sitting position and took a step back.

Natasha unbuttoned her blouse slowly, enjoying the way Pepper’s eyes followed her fingers, eager to catch sight of her breasts. She unzipped her skirt and made a show of draping her clothes carefully over the back of a chair, and she could feel the burning impatience rolling off the woman in waves. Not that she was immune to it, herself. Her hands ached to spread Pepper’s thighs, and her lips parted a little at the mere thought of running her tongue over her folds. If there wasn’t a reward in making her wait just a few more seconds, she’d have already been on her knees in front of Pepper, sliding into her and sucking at her flesh and making her keen with it.

As soon as she was in reach again, Pepper caught her by the waist and rolled her onto the bed, pinning her neatly.

“You’ve been practicing,” Natasha said approvingly.

“It’s amazing what having the right motivation can do for sticking with a new regimen,” Pepper smirked. She ran her hands over Natasha’s hips, up her belly, and over the sheer silk of her bra. “I thought I specified naked?”

She pinched Natasha’s nipples lightly, making them harden further, and Natasha rolled them over and straddled her hips.

“You did.” She pretended to frown thoughtfully. “I’ve found that even CEOs sometimes have to take matters into their own hands, though.”

Pepper pushed herself up onto her elbows and licked her lips. Natasha tilted her head and arched an eyebrow, the same coy little challenge that had reeled her in when things had been different, and then Pepper was wrapped around her, fumbling with the clasp and tugging it off and gasping when she felt Natasha’s tongue on her neck. Natasha was small but solid in her arms, the shift of muscle under skin a reminder of the sheer destructive force she was capable of unleashing, and Pepper had never felt quite so safe playing with fire.

Natasha shimmied back slightly, giving herself room to get a hand between them, and Pepper arched when her fingers found her cleft again. When Natasha kissed her, her lips gentle even as her touch was remorseless, she slid her tongue into her mouth and tasted champagne.

“How long until they need you back?” she asked, breathless.

Natasha traced the edges of her folds, slicking her fingers, and rolled her clit between her fingertips. Pepper hissed and dug her nails into her back as she clung to her. She was torn in that moment between wanting to come immediately and wanting to stretch it out, to see Natasha’s face wet with her juices, to taste herself on Natasha’s tongue when she kissed her and made her writhe in turn.

“They don’t need me back,” Natasha murmured. She didn’t vary her stroke at all, keeping her on edge without letting her fall. “I’m only here for you.”

“You always know just what to say.” She rested her forehead against Natasha’s shoulder for a moment and hissed, “I’m going to burst into flame, Natasha.”

“Tell me what you want.”

Pepper kissed her again, sucking her tongue into her mouth, and then released her to lie back against the pillows. Natasha resettled herself between her thighs and indulged herself for a moment, kneading and stroking the soft flesh of Pepper’s legs, before lowering her head. She stopped short and spent a moment drinking in Pepper’s scent, letting her breath raise gooseflesh and letting Pepper’s restraint snap. Perfectly manicured fingers tangled in copper hair, and Natasha smiled to herself when Pepper tugged her forward with an urgent, demanding noise that made her own cunt ache with unsatisfied desire.

She traced a small, slow circle around Pepper’s clit with the tip of her tongue, and she arched off the bed under her. Natasha hooked her arms under Pepper’s thighs and held her close as she set to work giving her everything she needed.

Pepper made herself let go and dug her fingers into the blanket instead of Natasha’s hair, mindful of the way Natasha could drive her half out of her mind. She’d practically had an out-of-body experience the last time they’d done this. When Natasha’s tongue pressed more firmly against her, a slow, wet drag that lit up every nerve in her body, she moaned and bucked. It wasn’t long before Natasha had her incoherent and thrashing, her knuckles white as her fists clenched around the pillows and her thighs like steel around Natasha’s shoulders. When she came, she felt as if she’d been swept away in an undertow. Natasha didn’t let up for a moment, and the breathless white blur behind her eyes seemed to last forever. She shuddered and nudged Natasha away when she finally reached her limit, her oversensitized flesh protesting any further stimulation. The warm, damp kiss Natasha pressed against her thigh made her shiver.

“Come here,” she growled, her voice hoarse from moaning. Natasha gave her a filthy smile and went to wipe her mouth. “Don’t you dare, Miss Rushman.”

“You have got to stop calling me that,” Natasha scolded, crawling up the length of her.

Pepper drew her into a tart kiss and dragged her nails lightly down her back, and Natasha arched against her and let her eyes close as Pepper sucked at her throat. She was unbelievable like this, all unmet need and overheated lust, and Pepper could almost believe for the moment that she was hers, that the pet name of her old cover identity didn’t just paper over the way neither of them could tell what tomorrow would bring. She rolled Natasha onto her back and kissed her way down her chest. She paused over her sternum, her hands coming up to rest lightly on Natasha’s breasts, and then sucked gently at the delicate skin just in from her nipple.

“Can I?” she whispered, flicking her tongue over the spot.

“If you like,” Natasha laughed, winding her fingers through Pepper’s hair and pressing her mouth closer.

She smiled and sucked a small, dark bruise into her flesh, marking her in her own small way. Natasha’s bra might cover it, but it wouldn’t wash off with a quick shower. Pepper dug her teeth gently into the skin around the bruise and brought her hand up against Natasha’s cunt in a quick caress, and she bucked underneath her.

“More?” she asked, kissing the curve of her belly.

“I may have to amend your psychological profile if you keep this up,” Natasha warned, her lips drawing into that perfect cupid’s bow of a half-smile that had driven Pepper to distraction when she’d still been pretending to be a PA. She snorted and surged up to kiss it, a leftover urge from when she’d been convinced she couldn’t. She slid a finger between Natasha’s folds and rubbed at her entrance, her thumb teasing her hood without quite slipping over her clit. Natasha let her head fall back and groaned, and Pepper slid back down between her thighs.

“God, you’re gorgeous.” She ran her nails gently over Natasha’s skin, and Natasha shivered against her. “Stay the night.”

“We’ll see,” Natasha breathed, her smile a promise and a dare all in one.

*****

Natasha stretched and slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Pepper. She rolled toward the empty spot Natasha had just vacated and made a soft noise, and Natasha bent to brush a soft kiss over her temple. Much as she might like to stay curled around her until the sun came up, she didn’t think it was particularly wise at the moment. She could hear half of Stark’s security detail skulking around in the adjoining suite, and the press would be working diligently to infiltrate the upper levels. Not to mention that there was nothing like a prolonged conversation with Tony to spoil the afterglow. She collected her clothes and dressed quickly, then padded back to the bed one last time.

“Sleep well,” she murmured, brushing Pepper’s hair out of her face.

Pepper mumbled something that might have been “Come back to bed” before she drifted off again, and Natasha made her exit.

Chapter Text

Clint woke up gradually as he became aware of the increasing hum of activity outside their room. He grunted to himself and opened his eyes, tensing slightly when it dawned on him that someone was curled up against him. After a moment he realized who he was wrapped around and smiled to himself. He carefully moved his hand up to Phil’s chest, trying not to wake him. Not that it was particularly inappropriate to have his hand on Phil’s belly, but Phil had made it clear he wouldn’t appreciate any sleep-groping when he’d grudgingly agreed to share the bed, and it wouldn’t do to even hint at breaking that agreement. He pressed his nose against Phil’s shoulder and nuzzled him gently.

It wasn’t technically required that they be affectionate with each other behind closed doors on this sort of mission, but he’d take what he could get at this point. Just seeing Phil linger over a good meal and hearing his relaxed breathing now while he slept were small reassurances that the rough edges could be smoothed back over, whatever the damage the last few months had done. He edged closer, slotting more firmly against Phil’s back, and kissed his neck. Maybe he’d let him drag him into the shower later. Right now, he was loose-limbed and comfortable and half wrapped around the man he’d been missing for what seemed like forever, and they’d probably trot past the mission’s finish line just by walking out the door of their room. He reached for his phone and checked his messages, grinning when he saw Nat’s petulant little “Thanks for the warning.”

He texted back a brief congratulations before looking at the clock. He had another hour before either of them needed to be out of bed, and he intended to spend it memorizing the way Phil felt when he was asleep in his arms.

*****

Phil blinked blearily at the alarm. The clock read seven-thirty, with the little red dot next to the AM label illuminated. He blinked at it again, trying to remember the last time he’d actually needed the alarm going off to wake him up. Clint shifted awkwardly against his back, and he finally registered the arm coiled around his chest, the fingertips digging into the back of his shoulder, and the grip Clint had on him. He was vulnerable and more than a little exposed, and he waited for the inevitable, involuntary tension coiling up his spine and the surge in his heart rate. When neither one came, he slowly let go of the breath he’d been holding. Clint made a small noise in his sleep and pulled him closer, and Phil reluctantly elbowed him away.

“Muh?” he grunted, rolling over onto his back.

Phil turned the alarm off and glanced at his phone, quickly flicking through dozens of status updates.

“Just the alarm, Clint,” he said. He sat up and swung his legs off the bed. “You can go back to sleep if you want.”

“And leave you to attend ‘Novel Applications of Positronic Microinterfaces’ by yourself?” Clint asked, rubbing his eyes. “No way. That place is like a meat market. I’d wake up to a dear-john text.”

Phil huffed and shook his head fondly. “We’re skipping it in favor of joining Pepper Potts for breakfast. Apparently Michael Smith made quite an impression on Mr. Stark, and he wants Ms. Potts to meet his latest discovery.”

“That seems a little low-key, doesn’t it?” Clint yawned and stretched, his eyes glinting mischievously when Phil’s expression went slack for a moment.

“It would if Pepper had picked the venue, but Tony booked a table at one of the more see-and-be-seen restaurants in the center.” Phil shook himself. “If you want to shower first, I’ve got at least fifteen minutes worth of check-ins and updates to go through.”

Clint grinned and reclined against the pillows, practically inviting Phil to look.

“Or you could join me,” he suggested.

“I showered last night,” Phil said, flipping determinedly through his messages. His boxers weren’t going to hide his erection if he spent another second thinking about Clint showering, and then Clint would feel compelled to do something about it. He looked up to find Clint pouting at him.

“I happen to know I spent the entire night stuck to you like glue. If I need a shower, so do you. Also, it’s better for the environment. Saves water, right? And my knee is still kind of stiff from yesterday.” He made a show of flexing it and grimacing. “I think you kind of owe me a hand. I might slip and fall without someone there to catch me.”

“You’re shameless, Barton,” Phil gritted.

“Maybe just a little,” he admitted. “Could be worse, though.”

“Oh?” He recited the infield fly rule to himself and read the same message three times in a row in an attempt to coax his cock into behaving. Clint sat up and shimmied closer, his arm wrapping around Phil’s waist as he leaned his chin on Phil’s shoulder.

“Mmm-hmm. Tanner was strongly considering trying to talk his boyfriend into a good old-fashioned elevator dry-hump.”

“In the glass elevator.” Phil swallowed and tried to remember the form number for requisitioning office supplies valued at less than ten dollars per discrete unit.

“Yup.” Clint’s voice vibrated against his shoulder blade. “Might have wound up all over the internet.” His arm tightened. “Everybody and their brother would know exactly who Smith was going home with, billionaire playboys be damned.”

Phil couldn’t suppress a shiver, and Clint chuckled and nipped his throat.

“And apparently Smith really likes it when Tanner gets a little possessive.”

“Don’t push it, Barton,” he grunted. He just needed a little space, a few minutes to jerk off, and some semblance of a return to sanity. He already felt better after a decent night’s sleep. A moment or two to himself to get his head on straight didn’t seem like so much to ask. Clint’s hand drifted lower.

“Our cover identities are on vacation,” he purred. “Come on. Humor me.”

Clint ran his tongue along his earlobe, and Phil wondered exactly when he’d forgotten how to say no to him. He let Clint tug him to his feet and guide him into the bathroom, then leaned back against the counter while the archer fussed with the faucets. It wasn’t as if Clint had never been difficult about things before. He’d been known to alternate flirting and pouting for a full week if he genuinely wanted something. Phil had generally just refused to take the bait. Now when Clint leaned in close and kissed him like he was desperate and moved to pull his t-shirt off, he let himself be manhandled out of his clothes and into the shower.

Part of it, he thought, was the way Clint just seemed to need it so badly. The hands on his back and the mouth on his neck and the body pressing him back against cold tile--there was a starved quality to all of it, like Clint had gone without since the last time they’d touched. He rutted against him, and Phil slipped his hand between them and curled it around Clint’s shaft. He paused and nipped Phil’s ear.

“I’m gonna wind up coming all over you if you keep that up,” he warned, his voice low.

“We’re already in the shower, Barton,” Phil pointed out. “It’s not like I’m dry-clean only.”

Clint laughed softly and leaned against him. “You don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

It seemed to be all he’d been waiting for, and a second later he was wrapping his arms around Phil, holding him so close that Phil could barely move his hand, and thrusting quick and shallow into his fist. Clint mouthed at his neck in between muttering filthy bits of encouragement, and Phil threw his free arm around Clint’s back just to steady himself. There was something unexpectedly exciting about the way Clint had boxed him in and was focusing entirely on him, something about the way Clint looked at him that kept his guard from going back up. Clint’s muscles flexed rhythmically under his hand, then finally relaxed when he came, spilling hot and thick across Phil’s stomach.

“Jesus,” he muttered, his voice rough.

He let his head rest against Phil’s shoulder for a long moment before reaching up to tangle his fingers in Phil’s hair. Clint held firm and kissed him hard, his other hand sliding between them to stroke Phil’s neglected cock. He pulled back a fraction of an inch when Phil shivered against him.

“Good? Keep going?” he breathed. Phil nodded sharply, and the hands cupping his ass gripped more tightly when he started up again. Clint grinned and went back to kissing him, determined to wring every last sigh and moan out of him he could before the water went cold on them.

*****

"So, what's the gameplan, sir?" Clint asked, glancing toward the window. He made a show of stretching, then slid his hands behind his head and smirked at the way Phil tried not to stare. He’d made him come so hard he’d barely been able to stay on his feet for a few seconds afterwards, but it still looked like he could be talked into another round if he played his cards right.

Phil flushed a little when he looked away. "Well, our first move involves you not calling me 'sir' for the rest of the trip, Barton."

"Is our second move you not calling me Barton?"

Phil's lip twitched. "Might be. Third move is arranging for a distraction."

"I didn't exactly pack any of my trick arrows, sir." Clint arched an eyebrow and smirked.

"You know, the more frequently you mention those arrows, the harder a time I'm going to have when I have to deny any prior knowledge of them," Phil told him with a grimace. "But no, the distraction is going to be courtesy of the tech department. They're modifying a file photo and planting a false report of Stark giving an armor demonstration in Conference Room 5. Anyone just interested in digging up news on Stark will head to the presentation area."

"Are we no longer worried about giving hotel security heart attacks, then?"

"As much sympathy as I may have for their current working conditions, they are still technically considered hostile operatives under mission parameters," he pointed out.

"God, I love it when you talk dirty." Phil’s flush darkened as he snorted uncomfortably. "And I can't believe I just made you blush."

“Put your pants on, Barton. We need to be ready to move once they clear out, or we’re going to have a lot of company for breakfast.”

“You worried about pissing off Stark’s girlfriend?”

“Pepper Potts is a valuable contact and someone I happen to be a bit fond of. And if I piss her off unnecessarily, I will be hearing about it from multiple quarters in addition to regretting it for personal reasons.”

“So put my damn pants on and be ready to move out.”

“In essence, yes.”

As it happened, he barely had time to make himself presentable before their window of opportunity presented itself. Most of the press corps decamped for the phantom demonstration, leaving a handful of awkwardly milling, painfully fake reporters to snap photos and trail them to their meeting with Pepper. Clint was having flashbacks to some of the worst training sessions he’d ever been through by the time they’d spent more than five minutes going through the motions of trying to ditch them. Three towers and several display floors later, and they were no longer even pretending to take pictures of them.

“This is worse than that time we got conscripted to help train the agents who train new agents,” he muttered as they looped into and then back out of yet another storefront.

“Really? I was thinking it was more along the lines of that surveillance scene in Ishtar.” Phil sighed at Clint’s blank look. “Two leads walking-and-talking, being tailed by three separate cars?”

“Yeah, sounds about right. Where are we actually going?”

“Two floors down, two doors over. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Clint took the opportunity to slip his hand over Phil’s and tangle their fingers together. Phil gave him a small, tender smile and laughed quietly, and he blushed.

“What’s so funny?” Clint demanded, looking away quickly. He hoped the answer wasn’t his handler being able to make him blush just by smiling at him.

“I bet if you broke right and I broke left, at least half of them would just crash into each other.”

Clint glanced at a the reflection of their entourage in a nearby window as he considered it. “Might actually be closer to three quarters of them. They’re really...not great.”

“No. No, they are not.” Phil drew him to a halt in front of a small jewelry store.

“Just to warn you, if Smith’s going to pop the question, Tanner’s going to make a big production out of saying yes,” Clint said quietly.

“Tanner’s a drama-queen,” Phil snorted. “Bobbi’s birthday’s in two weeks.”

“Tanner’s a romantic,” he corrected. “Bobbi hates everything I have ever bought for her, and you know it. I have an unerring taste for exactly what Bobbi would never, ever get for herself. In the bad way.”

“Which is why I’m going to pick something out, and you’re going to pay for it.”

“And we’re both going to refrain from snickering at the eight linebackers trying to look casual in a tiny shop with minimalist decor and extremely aggressive salespeople?”

“We’re on vacation. Feel free to congratulate them all on having found such handsome life-partners and tell them we hope to look as happy when we make it official,” Phil told him.

Clint tilted his head. “Can I tell blue-shirt buzz-cut and black-socks-with-sandals that I think they’re making a mistake, and breaking up will be painful now but they’ll save themselves a mountain of heartache in the long run?”

“Be nice. Not everyone’s cover identities’ imaginary relationships can be as happy as our cover identities’ imaginary relationships.”

“Did you just make a joke?” Clint asked, grinning. Phil chuckled a little and shook his head.

“I may have made something approaching a joke. Let’s see if we can find Bobbi a present in the,” he checked his watch, “forty minutes before we’re supposed to meet Pepper, shall we?”

“That’s kind of a generous window,” Clint said, surprised.

“Tech made sure we had plenty of time to get moving for the presentation. I don’t think they got the memo about it being canceled in favor of breakfast.”

He guided Clint into the shop, blithely ignoring their small herd of observers. A saleswoman looked up from her phone, her bored expression disappearing behind a mask of keen professional interest as soon as she saw them. The phone disappeared into her pocket.

“Good morning! Can I help you find something?” she chirped.

“We’re looking for a birthday present for a friend. Do you have any cameo necklaces with gold settings?” Phil asked, returning her smile.

“Of course!”

She led them to a case with a number of necklaces before noticing the knot of people loitering outside. “Please excuse me for one moment, gentlemen. I’ll be right back.”

Clint took the opportunity to lean against Phil’s back and wrap his arms around his waist. Just outside the shop, the saleswoman was giving pointed directions back to the conference areas.

“Cameos?” Clint asked, looking over Phil’s shoulder. He cringed a little at the price tags, but Bobbi had put up with enough just by being in the same room with him and Sitwell that he figured he owed her at least a fancy thank-you present. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t pulling in enough to cover it. He pressed a quick kiss to Phil’s neck just under his ear and whispered, “Is she really running off our tail?”

“Mm-hmm,” Phil answered. He crossed his arms over Clint’s and leaned back a little. “Bobbi lost her favorite one on the trip before last.”

“She told you that?” he asked, his brow furrowing. He didn’t remember Bobbi having mentioned it around him, and she wasn’t particularly close with Phil.

“She filed for lost personal property, and the description matched her favorite cameo necklace,” Phil explained.

Clint nodded as if it didn’t surprise him in the least. Phil had been keeping tabs on them, then. He tightened his grip a little and kissed his neck again. “Which one do you think she’d like best?”

“I’m sorry about that,” the saleswoman said, coming up behind them. “Whenever there’s a big conference like this, there’s always someone who winds up lost and wandering around trying to get back to it. It’s like they get shell-shocked. Now, were there any that you’d like to take a closer look at?”

“These two, I think,” Phil said. He dropped his hands and stepped away from Clint. “The second in from the right, with the filigree along the top, and the blue enamel one with the diamond accents.”

Clint nodded along while Phil and the saleswoman went back and forth about which would be more suitable for a brunette with warm skin tones and pretended to be satisfied rather than vaguely confused when Phil decided on the one with the filigree and paid with a wad of cash.

“She’ll like it?” he asked, once they were clear of the store.

“She’ll like it,” Phil confirmed.

“Did you just clear out the reimbursement request in the guise of a birthday present?”

Phil shot him a pained look. “The request was cleared two weeks after it was filed. It was costume jewelry, and she got thirty bucks. You may have heard a few complaints about ‘cheap bastards’ and ‘I’ve seen the budget around here.’”

“Ooooh. Yes. Yes, I did.” Clint frowned. “Why are we replacing costume jewelry with expensive jewelry?”

“Because we’re adults who draw a reasonable salary and look weird going to Hot Topic.”

“We are?”

“Yes, John, we are.” He spared a glance behind them as he angled them toward the elevator. A pair of actual reporters had joined the knot following them and looked like they were trying to talk shop. “What do you think? Fashionably early?”

“I think Bobbi’s going to know this is from you,” Clint grumbled. “And I could eat a horse right now, so unfashionably early works, too.”

Phil took his hand and shot him a smile. “Just remember to be nice to Pepper.”

“Pepper’s a career opportunity? Pepper could change our lives?”

“Pepper’s charming, and you’ll feel bad if you’re a jerk now once you’ve gotten to know her.” He paused and waited until the doors slid closed behind them, their shadows too far away to pile in with them without making it too obvious that they weren’t real reporters. “Natasha will see to it, I’m sure.”

Clint leaned back against him and closed his eyes for a moment as the elevator started moving. Phil shifted so that they were both more comfortable and stroked his arm. “Did black-socks-with-sandals seem a little twitchy to you?”

“Yeah. He’s definitely got more riding on this than the others. Or he thinks he does, at least.” Clint shook his head and pretended that Phil’s touch wasn’t raising goosebumps along his arms. “And he has no goddamn idea how to conceal a pistol under a polo shirt.”

“No, he doesn’t. Funny how that didn’t spook the two paparazzi that started chatting them up, isn’t it?”

“You think they’re just better at blending in?” Clint asked, reassessing their earlier behavior.

“Worth keeping an eye on.”

The doors slid open, and Phil nipped his neck gently. Clint swallowed and felt intensely grateful for the fact that he’d already gotten off once already. He didn’t need to walk into an interview with a friendly independent in a public venue sporting a massive hard-on from a little bit of PDA.

Chapter Text

“So, this isn’t your usual style,” Pepper observed. She peeked over the top of her menu at Phil, and he shrugged.

“Strange days, Ms. Potts,” he sighed. “We missed you at lunch the other day.”

“You did?”

“Mr. Stark said you’d be there. Promised, actually,” Clint said. She snorted, and Phil shook his head.

“I’m sure it was just an oversight. Did you sleep all right? You look a bit tired. I hope the conference isn’t getting to you already.”

“Not the conference.” She hid a smirk behind the menu, and Clint glanced from Phil to Pepper and back again. “Try the brioche french toast. I hear it’s amazing.”

“I think I’m just going to have an omelet and some toast,” Phil said. Clint pouted at him. “But you should have it, John.”

“Only if you split it with me. You know what they say. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” Clint grinned at him.

“I don’t think anyone actually says that anymore,” Phil said blandly. “And you could use a little extra padding sometimes. The last time you came back from Antarctica you looked like a hat rack and wouldn’t let me set the thermostat lower than seventy-eight.”

Pepper’s eyes narrowed. “Are you two really…? I thought this was just some weird espionage thing. Good going, Mr. Smith. And congratulations, Mr. Tanner.”

Clint’s grin widened, and Phil put on his best neutral expression. “I’m sure we don’t know what you’re talking about, Ms. Potts. Thank you again for breakfast. This restaurant is lovely.”

“Pepper, please. Call me Pepper. And you know exactly what I’m talking about, but I won’t harass you for details if you’re still on the clock,” she said. “Tony said he was interested in recruiting you, which I think was just his way of suggesting we all go out for breakfast so that he can do something horrible in the meantime.”

“Horrible?” Clint asked, his eyebrows rising.

“Surely not that bad,” Phil said hopefully.

Pepper’s lips twisted, then she put down her menu and smiled at the waiter. Phil and Clint did the same. They ordered, then waited for the young man to gather their menus and move on to the next table before continuing the conversation.

“He’s really rather impressed that you guys made it out and decided to put some people on the ground,” Pepper explained. “I think he feels almost obligated to put on a show and make it worth your while.”

“We’d really prefer he just do whatever comes normally in this sort of situation,” Phil said, frowning. “Without making a big fuss out of anything.”

“What comes normally is making a big fuss out of everything,” Pepper explained. “Please don’t tell me that escaped your notice.”

“Well, now that you mention it, no. It did not.”

“I think the armor’s really neat,” Clint volunteered. Phil shot him a slightly alarmed look, and Pepper pursed her lips and frowned.

“Mr. Smith, please, please tell me you didn’t just haul your actual, non-spy boyfriend along on a mission,” she hissed, lifting her water glass to obscure her lips.

“I would never do something that grossly irresponsible,” Phil assured her. “Unlike exposing certain people to power-armor and repulsor technology. Apparently.”

“I’m allowed to think the armor’s neat,” Clint protested. “Everyone else does.”

He favored Phil with his most innocent smile and rubbed his foot along the edge of Phil’s ankle, enjoying the way his cheeks had turned slightly pink. Pepper thought they could pass for real lovers, Phil already looked a little healthier, and it looked to him like Natasha had gotten just as lucky as he had.

“Do I even want to know what I’m unwittingly facilitating here?” Pepper asked. “Because it's not too late to call the waiter back and have several extremely large mimosas added to the order.”

“Nothing of any terrible importance,” Phil told her, shrugging. “But we do appreciate it, nonetheless.”

Pepper smiled at them both, then snagged the bread basket. “You know, if...the hell did you say you worked, again?”

Clint scoffed and then winced when Phil nudged him sharply under the table.

“Whatever.” Pepper waved a hand vaguely and then buttered her bread. “If you ever get tired of working for them, there’s always a place for you with Stark Industries. We even offer spousal hiring programs. Sort of a friends-and-family benefit.”

She beamed at Phil, and he chuckled.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

*****

“She likes you,” Clint observed, walking just slowly enough that their unpaid and uninvited entourage was forced to loiter alarmingly around shopfronts.

“Mm-hmm,” Phil agreed noncommittally. “You know, if we hurry, we can catch--”

Clint caught him around the waist and dragged him into a kiss.

“If we sneak into the stairwell now, I bet we could tie these idiots up for half an hour before they realized we were just messing with them,” he murmured, his lips brushing Phil’s ear and his voice pitched low.

“To what end?” Phil sighed, his mouth grazing Clint’s neck.

Clint shivered. “Um, the good of the mission?”

“Is anyone even in position to take advantage of this?”

Clint cleared his throat quietly.

“I see.” Phil rolled his eyes, took Clint’s hand, and led him around the corner.

Once they’d made it down one flight of stairs, Phil pressed Clint gently up against the cold concrete wall, wrapped his arms around him, and kissed him. He was grateful the stairwell was at least clean, and that Clint had gone easy on the aftershave. He didn’t need any extra distractions as he split his attention between Clint’s lips and listening for their tail. If they were smart, they’d have agreed to cooperate on this assignment. The knot of operatives would split up into mixed partners to avoid the inevitable scramble once it was every man for himself and cover the next three or four floors, with someone staying on-site to prevent them from doubling back and someone else taking the ground floor to pick them up if they tried to abandon the building entirely. He didn’t particularly expect them to be smart. Then Clint reached down and grabbed his ass, pulling him close, and he realized that he might be overthinking it.

Clint’s tongue rubbed against his, insistent and firm, and Phil sucked at his lower lip. Clint turned his head and huffed a little, his face glowing.

“We might be here a while if you keep teasing me,” he said quietly. “At least, assuming we want to keep things decent when we’re out in public.”

“I promise I’m not teasing you,” Phil whispered, mouthing at his throat. Clint let his head fall to the side and closed his eyes. Phil’s breath was warm, and his tongue was wet, and he hadn’t been back long enough that he wasn’t getting hard just from that.

“Unless you’re planning to blow me in this stairwell while we’re under surveillance, you’re teasing the hell out of me,” he complained. Phil chuckled, and Clint smiled at the sound. “And you wonder why I want to show everybody whose you are.”

Phil stiffened in his arms, and Clint reflexively checked the stairs above and below them before realizing that Phil’s reaction might have been to what he’d said and not any impending danger. Then Phil was reaching into his pocket, and Barton heard his phone buzz again. They glanced at the text.

“Am I reading that right? Did our elite security goons really just get regular security called on them for suspicious loitering?” Clint asked.

“So it would seem,” Phil murmured. “I think now would be an ideal time to sneak into the miniaturization talk in the least stealthy way possible and ask a number of questions about long-range listening devices.”

“You are such a troll sometimes.”

“You weren’t getting snotty about my looks a minute ago,” Phil protested.

“I...you…”

“Yes, I’m teasing you. For real this time, as opposed to the spurious accusation levied a few minutes ago.” Phil smiled a little. “I’m not that much of a luddite.”

“Would I be a bad agent if I suggested we just stay here and make out for a little longer?” Clint asked.

“Yes. Definitionally.”

“Fine. Spoilsport.”

Chapter Text

“So, I was thinking Peruvian. You know, for that dinner you owe me?” Clint raised his eyebrows and elbowed Phil companionably.

“I’m not entirely sure that bet still stands,” Phil said, grimacing, “and we should split up for the next hour or so. You take Mendoza, I’ll see if I can get Dr. Abbing to talk to me.”

“How does the bet not stand? You didn’t ask the impact-resistant electronics guy about the possible application to shoe phones, I get to pick where we eat tonight,” Clint insisted, flipping through his program. “Ultra-telescopic lens guy with the Stark-stache?”

“Mm-hmm. And I would have if he hadn’t refused to take any questions from me.”

“But you didn’t, so we’re having Peruvian,” Clint said, a satisfied smile lighting up his face. “It’s not my fault the presenters are sharing intel on problem audience-members, ergo it doesn’t affect the terms of our agreement.”

“It’s a confounding factor that makes it impossible to complete the terms, ergo it does affect them.” Phil checked his watch. “Meet back up at the quantum computing forum?”

“Punishing me for winning the bet isn’t fair, Michael,” Clint said loudly. A few of the closer attendees glanced at them, startled. Phil shot him a look and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Clint lowered his voice and continued, “Are we actually interested in anything this guy’s got on offer, or am I just batting my eyes at him and annoying the rent-a-spies?”

“Batting your eyes at him,” Phil told him. “Be obvious about giving him your card, tell him to call you any time he’s interested in doing some attention-grabbing work that would look great on his resume. Don’t go nuts, but keep their eyes on you. Call home if you run into trouble. If you happen to see Stark, evasive maneuvers.”

“Are we expecting trouble?” Clint asked.

“From Stark? Just the usual. But how long does it usually take glorified muscle to get frustrated on surveillance duty?”

Clint snorted. “Right. Good luck.”

“Same to you,” Phil murmured, pulling him in for a quick hug

He could still feel the warmth of Clint’s chest against his as he made his way through the thin crowd. Dr. Abbing would be wrapping up a Q&A session after moderating a panel on lasers and the future of home-use solid-state media, and all he’d need to do was be patient and wait in line. He walked slowly, giving anyone who cared to take the bait plenty of time to fall in. He didn’t have to wait long; the sound of someone about twenty feet behind him matching his pace was difficult to pick out but still there. Phil paused, pretending to check one of the directional posters against his schedule, and his tail paused as well. He checked his watch, looked around the room, and started off again. One of Stark’s security guards--the one who’d confronted him and then started a near-riot the day before--was in about the right position to be the one following him. He gave no sign of having registered the man’s presence and hid his irritation at the fact that it was one of Stark’s people instead of someone it would be useful to distract. He was in the middle of shuffling his notes and itinerary when a large hand closed around his arm.

“Excuse me?” he snapped. He looked up peevishly, then let the expression slide into confusion. “Um. Haven’t we been through this already, Mr. …sorry, I’m really bad with names. I usually try to remember people who accost me in public.”

“Johnston.”

The man didn’t remove his hand, and Phil shook his arm free, the confusion on his face shading back into dislike.

“Okay. Mr. Johnston. Haven’t we been through this already?”

“Mr. Stark would like to see you,” the guard sighed.

“Mr. Stark would--” Phil frowned. “Do you ever get the idea you’re working for a Bond villain?”

“About once every twelve hours,” Johnston said flatly. There was a hunted look in his eyes that might have moved Phil to pity if he didn’t know the staff was being very well compensated for putting up with Tony.

“Please tell Mr. Stark that I am flattered by his offer of employment, but if this is what I get when I’m not working for him, then accepting the offer seems like a bad idea. Needless to say, I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Mr. Stark said you might say that.” He leaned forward a little, edging more into Phil’s personal space, and gave him a cold look. Phil was keenly aware of both the fact that Johnston had almost seventy pounds of muscle on him and the likelihood that Johnston would go down like a sack of potatoes if it came to a fight. He carried himself like the type who’d been relying on his size too much for too long to compensate quickly if it turned out not to yield its expected advantage.

“This conference does have an anti-harassment policy, Mr. Johnston,” he said, pointing to one of the prominently-posted signs. Johnston looked from him to the poster and then back again. Phil wondered if this was the man’s first job as a corporate goon. He seemed to be genuinely at a loss. “I’d strongly prefer it if neither you nor your boss contacted me again. If you do, I will contact the management and have you removed from the venue. Thank you.”

Phil turned on his heel and stalked off, leaving Johnston to trail after him or not. It was hard not to laugh when he heard a muttered “What the hell?” behind him.

Dr. Abbing turned out to be quite a bit blonder than the photo of her in the promotional packet led him to expect, and he’d barely managed to give her his card before she was narrowing her eyes and tilting her head.

“Just to be clear, I don’t want to talk about the adult film industry.”

“I...okay?” Phil said, hiding his confusion behind a cheerful smile.

“Because the adult film industry isn’t the motivating factor in home media consumption that it once was.”

“Oh.” Phil nodded, feeling fortunate that it at least hadn’t been a random statement. “Of course.”

“Not to mention the fact that demographics studies and surveys have shown that--” She eyed a passerby suspiciously and dropped her voice. “--the bulk of pornography is purchased or rented by a very tiny minority of prolific users, which can no longer support any sort of sea change for overall media consumption, especially since the more dedicated users are more comfortable and more financially able to supplement their non-pornographic media devices with a dedicated system solely for their explicit films.”

“Makes sense.” He found that it took an effort to remain stationary. Every instinct he had was screaming at him to run. “I actually wasn’t going to ask--”

“It’s a trend that goes back as far as the separate projectors and screens maintained for group-viewing of blue movies, and--”

“Dr. Abbing, I promise you I didn’t come here to ask you about porn,” he interrupted, smiling nervously.

“Oh. Really?” She almost looked disappointed.

“Really.”

“Because it’s actually a fascinating topic.”

“I’m sure it is. I was hoping you might be able to answer a few questions about the encryption capabilities inherent in the medium itself, to augment any content-driven security features.”

“Well, if you take the example of one recent adult film company’s production line…”

Phil stifled a sigh and nodded to himself. He’d hope that Clint was having better luck, but at least to anyone watching it would appear that he and Dr. Abbing were having an intense conversation about something nefarious. He couldn’t have designed a better outcome, though he had to admit it was uncomfortable to experience personally.

*****

“How’d it go with Abbing?” Clint asked innocently. He rocked from the balls of his feet back to his heels and stuck his hands in his pockets. Phil rubbed his chin, trying not to think of what Clint’s innocuous act was likely a prelude for.

“Enlightening,” he said vaguely. “Unfortunately so, you might say. Mendoza?”

“Is having dinner with us tonight,” Clint mumbled, his voice barely audible over the background noise from the hall next door. “Hey, you want to grab some pretzels or something? I think there’s a teaser screening for Nerd vs. Wild on in ten minutes--”

“What?” Phil asked.

“Um. It’s that show where they take like engineers and biologists and those guys who are way too into paintball and set them up in wilderness survival situations. I’ve kind of gotten hooked on it.”

“Not the show,” Phil said, exasperated. “Before that.”

“About Mendoza joining us for dinner tonight?”

“Yes. About Mendoza joining us for dinner tonight.”

“Well, it turns out that Mendoza is a huge environmentalist and might have some daddy issues and long story short, I might have accidentally hit the sweet spot with the wildlife photographer for National Geographic routine.” Clint looked away and rubbed the back of his neck. “And I couldn’t exactly turn him down when he said he was really interested in getting together later and talking more.”

“What part of ‘don’t go nuts’ sounded like ‘go completely apeshit’?” Phil sighed.

“You’re seriously asking me that?” Clint asked, frowning. “And why is Natasha texting me about SHIELD’s interest in porn distribution?”

“Never mind,” Phil grunted. “Let’s just hope Mendoza’s not expecting this to be a date.”

Clint managed a forced laugh and shifted uncomfortably. Phil took a deep breath.

“Please tell me Mendoza does not expect this to be a date.”

“Well, I made it clear that my fiancé would be joining us.”

“And?”

“And he seemed really excited by that prospect.”

Phil nodded to himself. Of course he had. “So he either expects this to not be any kind of a date and will be asking a multitude of questions you’re not prepared to answer or he expects this to be the prelude to a three-way.”

“Yes.” Clint looked apologetic. “If it changes anything, he’s actually really cute?”

“It doesn’t, because he’s an uninvolved civilian,” Phil said evenly.

“Did you really threaten to have Stark’s bodyguard removed from the convention?” Clint asked, staring at his phone.

“Yes. Why are you asking that?”

“Natasha planted a bug in Potts’s room or something, and Tony is complaining about it. Or laughing about it. I can’t always decipher Nat’s emoticons. I mean, what’s 8==D even supposed to...Oh. It’s a dick.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t give me that look,” Clint said, flushing and leaning against him. “Not everyone can go around installing wifi in barns and knowing what emoticon dongs look like.”

“I’m not giving you a look,” Phil said evenly, edging closer. He met Clint’s eyes, and Clint’s gaze flicked to a spot about twenty feet past them at seven o’clock. “Why would I give you a look?”

Phil rested his forehead briefly against Clint’s and scanned the crowd at Clint’s back. Nothing jumped out at him, and he wrapped his arm around Clint’s waist and steered him toward the courtyard.

“You know, for a milk-run, this is turning into an awfully weird mission,” Clint muttered.

“It’s the Stark effect,” Phil told him. “Add a man who may or may not be sober but is definitely capable of flying straight through a wall, and everyone decides it’s time to cross stuff off their bucket list.”

“Does that mean I can make a few special requests after dinner tonight?” Clint asked, raising his eyebrows. Phil stifled the impulse to jump when Clint slid his hand into Phil’s pocket.

“I’m not having a ménage à trois with some poor bastard you accidentally seduced with promises of saving the polar bears.”

“You say that now, but wait until you get a look at his smile.”

Chapter Text

Phil grunted and wrestled open the door to their hotel room. Clint leaned against him heavily, and the door kept trying to swing shut of its own accord, but at least they’d seen Dr. Mendoza to his door without serious incident.

“You smell nice,” Clint said loudly, his nose buried in Phil’s collar. A thrill ran down Phil’s spine at the feel of Clint’s breath on his neck.

“And this is why that third pisco was a terrible idea,” he huffed, covering his sudden nerves with irritation. He shifted Clint’s bulk by an inch or two and took the opportunity to glance down the hallway. He was reasonably sure they hadn’t been tailed, but they hadn’t earned their reputations by being careless.

“Pretty sure I don’t think you smell nice because I’m tipsy. Not that I’m tipsy,” Clint protested automatically, his voice carrying. Phil sighed again as more of Clint’s weight came to rest on his shoulder. “I only had the three.”

“You had five. Because you couldn’t remember why four or five were a bad idea after you finished the third.”

Phil maneuvered him into the room and closed the door firmly. There was something about the way Clint fit perfectly against him that made him feel like his nerves were fraying.

“Was hamming it up to that extent really necessary?” he asked, throwing the bolt.

Clint straightened smoothly, grabbed the front of his shirt, and pushed him back against the wall. “I felt very strongly that this entire floor should know you smell nice.”

Phil’s counterargument was cut off when Clint’s lips met his, warm and wet and still carrying the faint taste of the liquor they’d been drinking. Phil felt his resolve crumbling and told himself to shake it off. They’d finally picked up some backup; another two teams had shown up at the restaurant while Clint had been making best friends for life with their third wheel. They hadn’t made it obvious, though, and Phil would lay money on the main mission having been completed sometime around sunset. Clint had noticed--he’d never have ordered a round in the first place if he hadn’t--and the implication couldn’t have escaped him. They’d likely have plane tickets waiting for them in the morning and a debriefing scheduled for half an hour after they touched down. Phil tensed as Clint’s tongue darted between his lips.

Clint rocked back slightly and let go of Phil’s shirt. His eyes were searching as he scanned Phil’s face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, shifting his weight onto his back foot. Phil appreciated the space it put between them at the same time that he wanted to ignore his instincts and haul Clint back into the embrace.

“You do realize that the plug’s been pulled, right?” Phil’s voice sounded tired even in his own ears.

“Yeah, I kind of figured,” Clint snorted. “Our guys back at the bar weren’t exactly subtle.” A smile crept across his face, and he tilted his head toward the bed. “I thought we might make the most of Tanner and Smith’s last night together.”

Phil swallowed. Clint managed to be more beautiful than anyone had a right to be after an awkward night of drinking and watching soccer and talking earnestly about overfishing and climate change and long-range surveillance of soft targets. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted anything so badly as another few days of this.

Clint’s smile widened when Phil met his eyes, and Phil’s stomach clenched.

“No.”

“Wha--?” Clint blinked, his expression going blank before confusion furrowed his brows. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Of course not,” Phil sighed. He shook his head sharply at the idea. “It’s not you, Barton.”

“Are you really going to use the old ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line on me?” Clint demanded. He took another step back and crossed his arms. “Really? Look, if I did something--”

“You didn’t,” Phil said firmly, his lips twisting. “It’s not that. Or rather, it’s not personal. I’m your handler, and this thing...it’s gotten out of hand.” He could feel his heart in his throat as he hesitated in the face of his next few words, and he felt like a coward. Clint deserved nothing less than the truth, however unflattering it was to Phil’s image. He coughed. “I’m no longer...I’m no longer confident in my ability to separate our sexual activities from our professional lives. I thought I could continue to be impartial and exercise good judgment in the field in spite of it, and I’m questioning that assessment now.”

Clint looked as if he’d been punched. “You’re putting in for a transfer?”

“I’d prefer not to,” Phil told him, silently grateful for the breathing exercises that were keeping his voice steady. “But I can’t keep having sex with you. It’s eroding my ability to keep you and Natasha safe in the field, and I can’t let that happen.”

“You’re breaking up with me for my own good?” Clint asked, his eyes narrowing.

Phil leaned back against the wall and looked down. He’d take Clint’s anger over the dazed betrayal that had flashed across his face before.

“I’m terminating one aspect of our relationship to prevent it from undermining another aspect of our relationship,” he said, grimacing. He sounded like he was justifying a questionable call to one of the senators in charge of their funding, not like he was trying to convince a trusted friend. He took a deep breath. “Clint...I don’t think I can keep this up. I gamble with your well-being too much already. I’m not going to add to that without a damn good reason.”

“What if I told you I trust you? That I trust you absolutely and completely to make the right call?” Clint demanded, spreading his hands. “Nothing’s changed. It’s you, Phil. You’re not going to screw a mission because we’ve got a thing on the side.”

“If you trust me, then trust that I’m making the right call now,” Phil murmured.

Clint started to say something, then closed his mouth and shook his head.

“Permission to take a walk, sir?” he asked, his voice rough.

“Keep your phone handy. Call for backup if anything looks out of the ordinary,” Phil said mechanically.

Clint shot him an unreadable look, nodded, and stalked out of the room. Phil moved to the loveseat and sat down heavily. He’d handled things badly. If he’d been thinking clearly, he’d have enjoyed one last tryst with Clint, or found some excuse to put him off, and then done this after they’d debriefed. Instead, he’d pulled the trigger before he’d even developed any sort of plan to contain the fallout.

This was a prime example of exactly what he’d been trying to explain. His emotional stability had been compromised to the point where he was reacting instead of acting where Clint was concerned. He closed his eyes and tried to think, but his heart was beating too fast for him to feel anything but restless at the inactivity. A walk wasn’t a bad idea. A walk, or a fistfight, or a foot-chase...Phil pulled out his phone and tapped out a quick message to Natasha asking her to get eyes on Clint. If he was feeling stupid and reckless, having a little bit of insurance on hand in case Clint was feeling even more so wouldn’t be a bad idea.

*****

Clint jammed his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders forward, his pace only slackening when he reached a deserted stretch of sidewalk. His stomach was roiling, and his mind was racing. He reviewed the past few days, trying to find something he’d done, some slip he’d made, anything to explain Phil’s sudden decision. He’d been clingy and aggressive, certainly, but most of it had been justified by the demands of the mission, and Phil hadn’t seemed uncomfortable with any of it. The only shred of comfort he had was that Phil had said he didn’t want to transfer and was trying to preserve their handler-agent relationship. Phil wasn’t just washing his hands of him.

A twinge in his knee forced him to slow even further, and he swore softly to himself.

“I’m a fucking idiot,” he muttered. Phil wasn’t trying to offload him. He’d been so wrapped up in the immediate impact of what Phil had been telling him that he’d missed the reason. Phil couldn’t keep having sex with him and stay professional in the field. Phil was too invested. Phil cared about him too much.

“No arguments here, but you still might want to elaborate,” Natasha said blandly.

Clint jumped and spun around. He hadn’t heard her coming, which wasn’t especially unusual, but he also hadn’t noticed her standing behind him. He tried to be better than that. She gave him a crooked little smile and held up a pocket flask.

“Thought you might need some company,” she explained.

“You saw this coming, didn’t you?” he sighed, looking around. He spotted a bench and made his way toward it, with Natasha falling into step beside him. She pushed the flask into his hands, and he took a quick sip. Her taste in vodka was impeccable, as always.

“He worries about us. It’s his job,” she explained with a shrug.

“You might have warned me,” he grumbled, handing the flask back. She sat down before drinking, and he settled next to her, his elbows on his knees and his eyes roving over their surroundings.

“I thought it would break the other way. I was wrong.”

“But you had a plan b,” he sighed.

“I always have a plan b.” She took another sip. “How stupid are you going to be about this?”

“Probably pretty stupid,” he admitted. “It’s...I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s just easier to breathe when I’m around him. The only other person I’ve ever had that with is you, but it’s different with him. It’s like I can think about what he’d tell me to do in a bad situation, and it’s almost like having him there.”

Natasha arched an eyebrow. “You don’t think about what I’d tell you to do?”

“I do, but it’s terrifying. That’s why I need you actually there with me in person.” Clint laughed softly and blinked back tears. She handed him the flask wordlessly, and he took a long pull. “I don’t know if us still working together makes it better or worse. I’m not losing him, but I’ve already lost him. You know?”

She chewed her lip for a moment before answering. “There’s the transfer.”

“But?” he prompted. She cocked her head, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I can hear it. ‘There’s the transfer, but...’ Finish the sentence, Nat. I’m still trying to fill in the gaps in a conversation that ended half an hour ago.”

“You could pursue a real relationship. Fall in love. Be together forever.” She tapped her fingertips against the flask. “But you’d see each other less. I know you. You wouldn’t transfer to the post office. You’d still want to do what we do, which means you’d only have each other when your schedules permitted. It would be infrequent.”

“So no sex, no dating, but we see each other constantly, or sex and dating but only on the third Tuesday of every other month, assuming the stars line up correctly,” Clint said, his shoulders slumping. “Great choice.”

“We work with what we have,” Natasha told him. “We always do.”

“You know what the real kicker is?” he asked.

“That you just got a taste of how good everything could be in a different life?” she murmured.

Clint looked at her, looked down at the flask, and then shook his head. “You’re right there with me on this one, huh?”

“It gets a little easier the second or third time you get off the roller coaster,” she said.

“No mystery about which option you picked.” Clint screwed the cap back on and left it on the bench between them. “What would you do, if you were me?”

Natasha snorted and leaned back, stretching her arms across the back of the bench. “I’d sleep on it for a few months.”

“Is that what you did, or what you think I should do?”

“What I did was go undercover, become her PA while targeting her boyfriend, and then turn out to be a spy with an organization she doesn’t particularly like or trust even though we’ve saved Stark Industries’ bacon twice that she knows about.” Natasha kicked a pebble into the street. “It seems a little elaborate for what you’re going through, though. For one thing, we’d have to find Coulson a boyfriend.”

Clint choked out a laugh. “I think that might have been the problem. I acted too much like a boyfriend and freaked him out.”

“He’s our handler, Clint,” Natasha said gently. “Being more than that is a balancing act, and you know it. If this made him feel like he was slipping, better you both find out now on a cakewalk than the next time something huge blows up in our faces.” She stretched her fingers and rotated her wrists. “If it’s any comfort, I imagine him realizing that he hated having you around like that wouldn’t have resulted in this conversation.”

He shrugged. “I assume we got what we needed?”

“Yeah. In and out. Between you two and Stark being himself, I think half the security staff was critically demoralized, downing alprazolam cocktails, or getting dressed down for unprofessional conduct by the time we were in position.” Natasha shook her head. “They were a disaster.”

“Glad to know we made a difference,” Clint sighed. “Did Phil send you to talk me down?”

“He wanted friendly eyes on you. Talking you down is me taking initiative and being a team player.” She looped an arm around his shoulder and pulled him against her side, and he let his cheek rest on her shoulder.

“This is going to be hard, Nat.”

“Yup.”

“You sure I can’t get you to lie to me just this once?” he asked.

“You’ve done harder things,” she said, kissing the top of his head.

“And they all really sucked.”

“And yet here we are.”

“Nat?”

“Mmm?”

“Thanks.”