Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Snapshots on the Long Road Home

Epilogue

After the battle, after the shawarma, after someone had told Clint that Phil was dead and he’d tried to get to Nick Fury’s office to demand proof. After he’d been held in an interrogation cell for 42 hours (he’d counted) and slept for none of them. After three SHIELD psychiatrists, two doctors, and a bunch of the guys from the research labs had run every test they could think of and agreed that as far as they could tell, Clint was… Clint. After he’d made a formal request to see Dr. Waite (he knew he’d be spending a lot of time talking to a psychiatrist, no matter what happened, and he’d rather it be someone he already knew, and trusted), and one to see Director Fury, and one to see someone from the legal department about the fact that he and Phil were each other’s next-of-kin, and didn’t that mean he was entitled to… something...

After he’d held it together because he couldn’t let go, not yet, not before he knew for sure… Nick Fury himself told the guard to open Clint’s cell, and jerked his head for Clint to follow him down to a dark corridor at the very back of the medical wing.

Fury stopped at a door and turned.

“Everybody says that as far as they can tell, Loki’s completely out of your head, and you’re you again. That true?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes. I mean, when he was in my head everything was blue. Now it’s not. I could feel him there, now I can’t. Can’t tell you it’s not a big trick, because it could be, but I don’t think it is. I think he’s really gone.”

Fury stared at him for long enough that Clint considered leaning against the wall for support, because he wasn’t sure how much longer he was gonna be able to stay upright on his own.

“Do you love Phil Coulson?” Fury’s one-eyed stare was the darkest, most dangerous thing Clint had ever seen in his life, and that was saying a lot, but he held it steadily.

“With all of my heart and soul.”

Fury stared at him some more, then nodded to himself. “Come on then.” He ran a swipe card through the lock on the door and strode in. Clint followed.

Lying in a hospital bed connected to enough machinery to fly the space shuttle was Phil. Or, rather, was a body that would have looked just like Phil, if it hadn’t looked more dead than alive. But the machinery beeped and whooshed, and Clint could see Phil’s chest rising and falling rhythmically and the little peaks of the readout on the heart monitor dancing evenly across the screen.

“Is he really alive, or is this just…” ‘So I can say goodbye,’ was the next part of that sentence in Clint’s heart, but his head knew that SHIELD wouldn’t have done all of this just for him.

“Barely. The doctors have done everything they can, it’s up to him now, to choose to fight and live. Talk to him. Tell him to fight,” Fury said. “Tell him…” he fell silent looking at his friend lying in the bed. Clint liked Nick Fury more in that moment than he ever had before.

Clint crossed to the bed and carefully picked up one of Phil’s hands, the one that had fewer tubes attached. He leaned over and kissed it softly, then started to talk.

“Hey, Phil. I’m here. I’m okay. Nat knocked some sense into me, as usual. We, uh, won. You would’ve been so proud of how we fought together. Like a real team.” Clint’s voice broke on the last syllable and he swallowed a sob. “I need you to get better, Phil. I can’t lose you. Not now. I love you, Phil.” He ran out of words and kissed Phil’s hand again. There was a scraping sound behind him. Fury had pulled up a chair and put it by the bed.

“Access, 24/7, unless the doctors say otherwise for medical reasons,” Fury said, dropping the keycard on the bed.

Clint knew his eyes were red when he looked up, but he didn’t care. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, well. I need my one good eye back.”

Clint slept in the chair next to Phil’s bed for three days. On the fourth, Natasha showed up with clean clothes for him, followed by an orderly carrying a cot and setting it up in the corner of Phil’s room. Clint didn’t know if Fury had told her about Phil, or if Nat had just figured it out on her own though a combination of spying on people and intimidating them, the way she usually did. Anyway, he was grateful, and said so.

“How is he?” Nat asked, looking at Phil’s motionless figure.

“The, uh, doctors are keeping him in a medical coma for a week to help everything heal. We won’t really know anything until they try to wake him up,” Clint said tiredly.

Natasha nodded. “I’ll sit with him for a bit. You go take a shower and eat.”

“I’m okay.”

“You are not. You stink.” He expression softened. “He needs you to be strong for him, Clint. You have to eat and sleep.”

“Yeah. I guess a shower would be a good idea.”

With Natasha bullying him to eat and sleep and work out regularly and Dr. Waite talking him through his guilt and fear, Clint was as prepared as possible for the day the doctors tried to rouse Phil from his coma.

“Touch him and talk to him,” one of the nurses said gently. “It will help him find his way back.” Clint thought that was an odd way to phrase it, but it made sense. Clint knew only too well what nightmares Phil might have been living through for the past week.

“Time to wake up now, Phil.” Clint said, holding Phil’s hand and stroking it. “Come on, you’ve slept for long enough. I need you to wake up for me now.”

Phil’s eyelids twitched and his grip on Clint’s hand tightened.

“That’s it Phil. You can do it, I know you can. Open your eyes for me.” Clint desperately tried to hold back his tears. He didn’t want the first thing Phil saw to be him crying.

“Clint.” Phil’s eyes were still closed, and his voice was a harsh whisper, but the noise he had made was definitely Clint’s name.

“I’m here Phil. I’m okay. You’re hurt but you’re going to be fine. We won. Loki is gone.”

“Not dead?” Phil still hadn’t opened his eyes.

“No. We, uh, captured him and Thor took him back to Asgard.”

“Fuck.”

Clint laughed at that. “Yeah, well, they have more experience dealing with the slimy little bastard, and a prison that can actually hold him.”

Phil finally opened his eyes and turned his head a fraction so that he could look at Clint.

“You’re okay? It’s really you?”

“It’s really me. Nat and Fury and a half-dozen doctors and scientists say so. I love you Phil, I love you so much.” Clint stopped fighting the tears then, and let them slip down his face. Phil’s hand tightened further on his.

“Hey, hey c’mere,” he said and weakly tried to tug Clint towards him. With a sob, Clint laid his head carefully on the undamaged side of Phil’s chest. The feeling of Phil slowly petting his hair made him cry even harder. After a minute he sniffed and swallowed and tried to pull himself together.

“Sorry. You’re the one that’s hurt. I’m supposed to be taking care of you,” he said, lifting his head to look at Phil.

The slow, gentle caress of Phil’s fingers through his hair didn’t stop. “How about we take turns taking care of each other?” Phil said with a small smile.

“That sounds just about perfect.”

The next six weeks were full of endless tests and agonizingly small steps forward. Of daily physio and Phil pushing himself too hard and getting frustrated. Of Clint hating to see him hurting but learning when to stand back. After the first couple of weeks, Clint moved out of Phil’s hospital room, but still refused to go back to their apartment at night, instead he stayed in a spare room in the SHIELD barracks. There he got the occasional sidelong look from an agent who’d been on the helicarrier during the battle, but Clint had long ago learned how not to worry too much about what other people thought of him. Phil trusted him. And Nat, and Fury. Everyone else could go fuck themselves.

He was too busy, anyway, between his own training, and being there to help for Phil’s physio, and his appointments with Dr. Waite, and various follow-ups that some of the science-types wanted to do. It was annoying, to have electrodes attached to his head for a few hours every week while they tried to see Loki’s ghost in his brain waves, or whatever the hell it was they were trying to do, but Clint put up with it. He wasn’t in the stockade, and Phil was alive. Everything else, as far as Clint was concerned, was gravy.

And at last, the glorious day came when Phil could walk a mile on the treadmill without getting out of breath, and the doctors said that he could go home.

“So, what do you want to do first?” Clint asked as soon as their apartment door was locked behind them and he’d tossed their bags into the bedroom.

“I don’t know, just…” Phil was looking around the room a little dazed.

“Just what, Phil?” Clint asked gently.

“Could we maybe just cuddle on the sofa for a bit? I’ve missed that.”

“Me too. So much. How’s this?” Clint had thrown himself into the corner of the sofa and spread his arms open wide.

“Perfect.” Phil sat down and leaned against Clint’s chest. “Even though I have to go back to Medical tomorrow, and the day after, and they day after that, for god knows how long, still, this is… It feels so good to finally be home.”

Clint hummed his agreement into Phil’s hair and planted a soft kiss on his temple. “I never said it, ‘cause I thought you might… well, anyway. The reason I stayed on base with you until now is that in my head this is still your apartment, and it’s only home to me when you’re here. Because you’re here. Something like that.”

Phil nodded against Clint’s chest. “I know ‘home’ isn’t… easy for you. Maybe in a while, once everything’s back to normal, we should look for a new place together? One that we both choose? Your name on the lease with mine? What do you think?”

Clint thought that sounded like something he wasn’t ready to think about yet, and he told Phil so. “I don’t mean I’m not ready to get a new apartment with you. I mean I’m not ready to think about when things are back to normal, whatever that means.”

“I understand,” Phil said, and he picked up one of Clint’s hands from where it had been resting warmly on his hip and kissed the back of it. Then he yawned.

“It’s been a long day for both of us,” Clint said. “Are you about ready for bed?”

“I think so.”

“I came in last week and washed all the sheets and towels and everything, so nothing’s funky.”

“Thank you.” Phil was already heading for the bedroom, stripping off his tie as he went.

“Thank Nat, she was the one who mentioned that it would be a good idea. You grab the bathroom first. I’ll lock up.”

When Clint finished his turn in the bathroom and padded into the bedroom in his underwear, he stopped short at the sight of Phil shirtless, and in the process of taking off his boxers.

“Phil?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“Sleeping in my own bed with the man I love for the first time in far, far too long,” Phil said.

“No, I mean what’s up with, uh…” Clint felt silly gesturing at Phil’s body, afraid to say ‘with you being naked’ as if Phil would suddenly notice and freak out, but he did it anyway.

“I can put some clothes on if you prefer,” Phil said with the little quirk of a smile that made it very clear he’d been planning this.

“No, I mean, not unless you want to, obviously. So you’re, uh, okay with…” Clint floundered again.

“With you seeing my scars? Yes, considering that you saw them every day for two weeks when I was still hooked up to a bunch of tubes and sleeping most of the time.” Phil climbed into bed and patted the pillow next to him in invitation.

Clint still hesitated “Yeah, but that was… I guess I figured that was because you were in Medical. You told me, a long time ago, that you were okay being naked for the docs in medical, and I just figured that you felt safe there, and that was why…”

“It was. But now that you’ve seen everything there is to see…” Phil sighed and leaned back against his pillow. Clint gave up his dithering and climbed in next to him which seemed to make Phil relax. “That’s not all of it, of course. Dr. Waite has been poking quite hard at that particular corner of my psyche for the last few weeks. There’s stuff about my upbringing, and internalized homophobia, and my self-image as a man, and how all of that relates to my reaction to having been raped all those years ago, and my decision to go up against Loki alone armed with an experimental weapon–”

“Which I’m still mad at you for, by the way. Which Dr. Waite says is understandable, but I need to work through,” Clint grinned.

“Of course. And there’s even some more philosophical and esoteric stuff about dying, and coming back from the dead, and being reborn, and the new scars overwriting the old ones, and we can talk about all of it tomorrow, if you want to. But right now, I just want to curl up with you and feel your skin against mine, and fall asleep together.”

“I’d,” Clint’s voice broke, and he cleared his throat. “I’d like that a lot.”

Phil leaned in and kissed him, then said, “Roll over.”

Clint did, and felt Phil spooning behind him, pressed close, skin against skin from shoulders to knees. Phil’s arm came around his chest and held him snugly.

“This okay?”

“Perfect. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Just promise me you won’t be disappointed if I don’t, ah…”

Clint grinned. “Rise to the occasion? Don’t worry. You explained all about the blood pressure medication. Twice. So I get that even though the docs cleared you for sex, it might not actually work yet. I’m still game to try if you are.”

It had been six months since Loki. Six months since Clint had unwittingly led the attack on the helicarrier. Six months since Phil had died, and then come back. Six months since an army from outer space had rained terror on New York and a motley band of unlikely heroes had saved the world. It had been six months since Clint and Phil had had sex.

As soon as he was able, Phil had offered Clint a hand job, and after refusing the first few times, Clint had relented and allowed Phil to pull him through a fierce orgasm. But until today, sex had been on Phil’s ‘banned activities’ list (along with ‘lifting anything that weighs over 50 pounds,’ and ‘going after deranged demigods with experimental SHIELD weapons.’)

On this bright Saturday morning, they lay in bed naked and facing each other, legs tangled together, kissing slowly. One of Phil’s hands was in Clint’s hair, longer and shaggier now that he hadn’t been on an active mission in months. Clint’s hands were on Phil’s back. He had touched Phil’s chest a few times, but it still made them both a little nervous, and besides, most of the scar tissue didn’t have any sensation, so there wasn’t much point. Instead Clint kneaded the smooth planes of Phil’s back where atrophied muscles were just starting to return to their former definition.

Clint was already mostly hard, his cock digging into Phil’s abdomen. Phil took his own still-soft cock and Clint’s hard one in his free hand and stroked them together slowly.

“I’m just going to do this for a bit and see if, ah, anything happens,” Phil said, feeling self-conscious about his own lack of response.

“Sure. Whatever you want.” Clint went back to kissing him.

But when a couple of minutes of slow stroking still didn’t produce any results, Phil made a frustrated noise.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Clint said, tilting his head back so that he could look Phil in the eye. “I’m not disappointed or anything.”

“I am. No… not disappointed. Frustrated. Annoyed. I feel cheated, again. We’d just started having some kind of sex regularly when–”

“When everything went to hell, and I got compromised, and you nearly died. I know. It’s not fair.” Clint stuck out his lower lip in an exaggerated pout.

Phil smiled and leaned his forehead against Clint’s, his hand still curled around both their cocks.

“Is there anything I can do?” Clint asked.

“Talk to me.”

“Okay, about what?”

“Tell me about one of your fantasies.”

“Wow. Um, okay. Let me think for a minute here…”

“Why, got so many that you need time to choose one?” Phil leered at him.

“Well, I’ve got a few, yes, but… Okay. So, after we started having sex like this,” Clint glanced down to indicate Phil’s hand around their cocks, “Which I really, really like, by the way, I, uh, kinda started thinking—promise you won’t get upset?”

“Promise.” Phil’s hand started to move again, stroking slowly, by way of assurance.

“I kinda assumed that this was probably what we’d be doing for… for a while. So I started thinking about the future. Our future. This was before the most recent major unfairness, of course.”

“Of course.”

“So I have this fantasy where it’s maybe ten years from now. We're older, obviously. We're doing different jobs at SHIELD: you've taken over from Fury and I'm doing mostly tactical planning stuff rather than fieldwork, but we still go out into the field from time-to-time when they need a couple of badasses to save the world. But in my fantasy, we're not saving the world—we just did, and now we've got some time off, and it's a lazy Sunday morning, and we've just woken up after some awesome sex the night before and a solid 8 hours sleep, and we roll over to face each other, just like this, and we kiss.” Clint paused and leaned forward to take Phil’s mouth in a deep kiss, and Phil moaned. His cock twitched in his hand.

Clint kissed him for another minute, then pulled back. “It’s easy and familiar,” he said, breathless, “but still completely wonderful, just like this. And you wrap your hand around both our cocks, and stroke us both, just like you’re doing now. And I’m looking into your eyes and thinking about how lucky I am to have you. How glad I am that we got here. How much I love you.”

Phil looked into Clint’s shining eyes and couldn’t help but surge forward to kiss him again and again, hard and demanding, conscious of what he’d—what they—had almost lost; not to Loki, but to his own fear of taking this chance. Phil was fully hard now against Clint, his hand moving faster, pumping them both frantically.

“Clint.”

“Yeah, Phil. Yeah. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

“Yes. Oh, Clint. Yes.” Phil’s body went taut in Clint’s arms and Clint pushed into the slick warm wetness chasing his own release. It only took a couple of thrusts until he was coming into Phil’s fist as well.

They both lay panting for a couple of minutes, until eventually Phil rolled onto his back.

“Well, that was okay, then,” he said.

Clint looked over at him with a grin. “I’d swat you with a pillow, but I can’t move right now.”

“Well I’m sure as hell not getting up to get a washcloth.”

Clint flailed for a the box of tissues on the nightstand. He dropped it on Phil’s chest and helped himself to a couple. Phil giggled.

“What?”

“I’m better.”

“Well, yeah.”

“No, I mean, you just dropped a box of kleenex on my chest as if my heart hadn’t been stitched back together by three surgeons. You really believe that I’m okay.”

Clint looked at him, eyebrows raised. “I guess I do,” he said, and smiled.

“Good.”

“Yeah.”

They got out of bed and Clint cooked brunch and they ate. Then Phil washed the dishes and Clint did the laundry. Later they curled up on the sofa, Phil sitting up with a book and Clint with his head on Phil’s lap and a game on his tablet. When he was turning a page, Phil glanced down to see that the tablet had gone to sleep in Clint’s hand, and he was staring off into space.

Phil marked his page and put his book down. “You’ve been quiet all day,” he said, putting his hand on Clint’s arm and stroking gently with his thumb.

“I’m not sure I'm ready to talk about it.” Clint put his tablet down, but his eyes stayed on the far wall.

“I understand. You know there's nothing you could say, nothing you could tell me that would make me feel any differently towards you. I love you,” Phil said.

“I know. I love you too, Phil.” There was a long pause, and then an audible breath. “My fantasy, there was more to it.”

“But you're not sure if you're ready to tell me the rest,” Phil said quietly.

"Yeah."

“That’s okay. I understand.”

“You really don’t. But I know what you’re trying to say.” Clint took another deep breath. “I think I need to tell you though. It’s going to make me crazy otherwise.”

“If that’s what you want.”

Clint nodded, and snuggled against Phil’s arm for a minute, then started to talk. “In my fantasy, after we come, you roll onto your back, gasping for air, smiling. And then you put out your left hand. And I'm lying on my stomach, looking at you all sated and happy. I’m so happy I could burst. And I put my left hand in yours, and I say, 'I love you and I want to be with you.' We've said it so often now, for so long, but it still makes me thrill every time I say it, and every time I hear you say it back to me.”

On cue, Phil said, “I love you and I want to be with you.”

“I love you and I want to be with you,” Clint said back to him softly, then was quiet again for a long time. Phil wasn’t sure if he was going to say anything else, but he kept slowly stroking Clint’s arm with slow sweeps of his thumb. Then Clint’s head tilted up so that he could look into Phil’s face, and very softly he said, “And in my fantasy I look down at where we're holding hands, and we're wearing rings.”

Phil didn’t say anything for a moment, taking his time to choose his words very carefully. “I’ve thought about it. Us getting married, I mean. I've thought about it. I… I didn't know if it was something you'd want.”

“I… if you…” Clint seemed to flounder, but Phil waited. In an even smaller, quieter voice, Clint said, “I think… I think maybe it is.”

"We could start talking about it."

“Yeah. Talking. That would be good. Maybe not right away, though. It might take me a while to deal with having told you it's something I want.”

“I'm not going anywhere. Take all the time you need.”

Clint reached across to where Phil’s hand was resting on his arm, and threaded their fingers together.

"I love you, and I want to be with you."

"I love you, and I want to be with you."