Chapter Text
Coming down after a mission is always rough — the longer the mission, the rougher.
If Clint thinks about it like a drug trip, that's because it is. You can't inhabit that altered state of consciousness for too long, without having some problems readjusting to the ground-level viewpoint. And after a mission like this one, it's going to be even worse.
Hawkeye's been up top for 18 hours, waiting, jumping from one perch to another. He does what he can from the air, while on the ground, the situation progressively worsens. The agents are pushed back closer and closer to their own base, and the kingpin continues to stubbornly ignore their little trap, and show no sign of appearing. Eventually it takes Coulson himself, wielding a great big fucking hulk of a grenade launcher that Hawkeye has never seen before and instantly lusts after, to drop the five giant troll things that seem to act as field commanders. They fall one after the other, like dominoes, and then finally the Big Bad decides to show his face.
He pops in with a cheesy-as-fuck cloud of black smoke, Dr. Something-or-other, and falls over dead 1.46 seconds later, with an arrow driven so deeply into his eye socket that the tip of it protrudes from the back of his skull. With their master dead, the troll things all seem to turn into stone, or go dormant, or something. Point being, they stop trying to wreck downtown Manhattan. (And what is it with monsters and downtown Manhattan? Seriously, what do mad scientists have against Brooklyn and the Bronx?)
Point being, mission accomplished. Point being, Hawkeye can come out of sniper mode, can become Clint again, after 18 hours. Eighteen hours straight — it's a long time, to be inhabiting a world made only of wind speeds and angles, and breath after breath after slow, steady breath.
Point being, that isn't as easy as it sounds.
Clint can feel it starting already, as he swings down the side of the cell tower he was using.
He always pictures this post-battle feeling as fire ants running through all of his veins. It's like a sort of manic electricity that he can't use, and can't disperse. It's like all of the movement he would have been making and all of the thinking that he would have been doing is now built up and crashing, with no way to escape. All of it was given over to wind speeds and angles, to shot after perfect shot, and now it's all rebelling.
The 24 hours after long, intense missions are some of the shittiest times of Hawkeye's adult life. And that's saying quite a lot.
He refuses to let people see him like that. No one, not even Natasha, gets to see him lose control.
There's a place he usually goes to when they're in town, the attic of some abandoned house in a rundown neighborhood, where he shuts himself away and does pushups and pullups and handstands for hours, until his muscles are all screaming and he can't see straight. Usually that's good enough. Usually working himself to exhaustion makes the fire ants shut up and go away, and he can finally sleep.
Sometimes it doesn't work, on particularly bad days. At that point, Clint usually moves on to liquor, drinking until he blacks out. When he comes to after a night like that, he feels like absolute shit, but it's a sane sort of shit, so at least that's an improvement.
Once and only once, even that hadn't been enough. He'd woken up hungover, feeling like someone was drilling in his skull, and he still couldn't think or stop moving, or stop feeling like the world was pressing in on every side.
That time, he'd had to go in search of violence, get himself in the middle of a gang altercation and piss off both sides. The electricity finally dissipated while he was busy getting wailed on by eight gangsters, after he'd laid out twelve of their associates. He hadn't allowed himself to bring along knives, or his bow.
Luckily, he'd managed to escape from the hospital before they could identify their John Doe.
Today is feeling like it might be that kind of thing, again. Clint isn't looking forward to it, but it's nothing he can really fix. He readies himself to slip into a nearby alley with a lowered fire escape. It's high time to get the fuck away.
"Barton!"
Fuck.
He stops, because he recognizes that voice and knows that he has to, even though Agent Coulson is the last person he wants to see. Is the last person he wants to see him, right now.
Clint spins on his heel, whirling gracefully around and working to retain his semblance of calm, as Coulson —
Fuck.
Clint had noticed, while he was up top, that Coulson was wearing field armor. Of course he had. But when one is busy being wind speeds and angles, anything identified as friendly is pushed off to the side, put in the little box marked "extraneous factors".
Anything like, for example, the fact that Agent Coulson — who is notorious for always wearing a suit and tie, even in the field — is currently kitted out in extremely form-fitting grey field armor, with straps and buckles in olive green. Field armor that seemed intentionally designed to highlight his good features, such as broad shoulders, a flat stomach, well-formed thighs...
Clint carefully does not allow his eyes to flicker down Coulson's body. His handler is nothing if not observant; meanwhile, Clint is a sniper. He can see things without needing to look right at them.
Everything that he sees right now is making his mouth go dry, and causing the muscles of his stomach and thighs to clench. He swallows heavily, and hopes that Coulson doesn't notice. "Sir."
It's not as if his reaction comes as a complete surprise. Clint has been nursing a crush on Coulson for years, and it's only been growing over time. Phil — Agent Coulson is intelligent, capable, and wears a mask of mild blandness that Clint just aches to peel away. He wants to find out what's underneath, and then to write his name all over it. Every flash of humor that Clint has ever been granted, every glimpse of carefully-concealed emotion, just makes him hungry to know more.
And Coulson is a fellow agent and his handler, and has shown no signs that he would ever, ever be interested in anything close to the things that Clint imagines, night after night in bed. (And in the mornings in the shower, and occasionally during his lunchbreak in a supply closet, but that only happened twice so no one needs to know.)
He doesn't want Coulson to know that the sight of him now — outfitted, for once, like the deadly weapon that he genuinely is — feels like something out of Clint's most private fantasies. And he really doesn't want Coulson to know that he is trying to memorize every detail without appearing like he's looking, for future fantasies. And he really, really doesn't want Coulson to know that Clint is starting to develop a little (well, not little) problem down below, which could quickly become apparent to the casual observer, thanks to Hawkeye's own field armor.
"Barton, good work. I'd like to see you in my office in 30 minutes, so that I can debrief you about this mission."
That's odd. Usually Coulson does the ground troops and front-line agents first, before getting around to Barton, several days later. After all, they have a direct private channel at all times during missions, so Coulson's voice is always in Clint's ear, and vice-versa. Generally, what the one knows, the other does as well.
Clint is so thrown off by the vision before him that his mind can't even form a proper question. All he can do is mutter, "Yes, sir". He thinks he would probably agree, right now, to anything that Agent Coulson asked him.
He's proud of the fact that his voice still sounds calm and level.
Coulson nods again, turns neatly and precisely (everything he does is neat and precise, Clint badly wants to mess him up, make him lose control), and strides away. Clint carefully examines the windows of a building just above and to the left of Coulson's retreating frame, and pretends like he's checking angles and not focusing every atom of his body on the flexing curves of Coulson's (round, firm, incredibly attractive) ass as the agent walks away.
It's not until Clint is striding toward the closest safe building that he realizes he doesn't actually feel too manic, right now. The frantic energy crawling beneath his skin is lessened; he doesn't feel like he needs to move quickly and right now.
It seems that Coulson in field armor is an effective distraction, just like exhaustion or alcohol.
------
30 minutes. Alright, he can do this.
There's absolutely no way that Clint can go into Coulson's office with a raging hard-on. But the electricity of arousal is like a filter, transmuting his jitters into a pleasant rolling wave of heat that runs through his entire body, outward from his hips. Clint is in no hurry to let that alchemy go.
He barges into the makeshift restroom, locking the door and jamming the handle for good measure. Then he sinks onto his knees, and spends 5 or 10 minutes just running his hands up and down his thighs, over his stomach, across his chest. The uniform is tight, and though it would stop most bullets, he can feel every touch through it.
He focuses on his breathing, inhale, exhale, and stops moving whenever his arousal grows too strong. He tries to turn his mind away from devastatingly handsome agents in tight armor. Instead, he replays every shot that he's made in the past 18 hours, silently assigning each one a rating in his personal system. Nothing scores lower than a 7 out of 10 this time, which is good; he won't have to work himself too hard in correction. He reviews each shot carefully, and then files it away in the corner of his mind where he keeps every shot he's ever taken.
By the time he's finished, this familiar mental discipline combined with slow-building arousal have him in a relatively relaxed state. (He could still take down anyone who entered in 3 seconds max, leaving them flat on the ground, disarmed, with a knife against their neck. This is invariant.) It's only at this point that he allows himself to turn his mind back to Coulson, and to his new favorite image.
The thought of Coulson in his armor causes Clint to press his hands against his legs, and curl forward slightly. Heat arcs through his body as he runs his mind over the strong lines of Agent Coulson's body, the way the material — some sort of high-tech Stark Industries synthetic, fuck if Clint knows what it is — clung to Coulson all over, moving with him.
Coulson moves with the least hesitation of anyone that Clint has ever known, aside from Natasha. But the two are very different; her confidence carries a price, a necessity of detachment and a certain coldness. Phil, on the other hand, covers his well-earned confidence with an unassuming, inoffensive warmth toward everyone, all the while continuing to be a stone cold badass.
Clint's hands are curled into the waistband of his pants, digging against the sensitive skin there. Finally he allows himself to picture in great detail Agent Coulson's waist and thighs and hips and crotch. Clint has exceptional vision and an almost inhuman eye for detail, so it's no trouble to recall the exact curve of the fabric between Coulson's legs, the shading that indicated, ever so subtly, the contours of what lay underneath. Clint carefully presses one hand against his own groin, and lets out a harsh breath that echoes within the empty bathroom.
He closes his eyes then, ignoring the bead of sweat that trickles from one temple, and flicks open his belt-clasp. As he draws down the fly, he imagines curving two fingers through the zipper-ring that dangled, teasing, at Agent Coulson's neckline. He slowly draws down the front zipper of Coulson's field armor.
He's seen Agent Coulson shirtless, of course — naked, in fact — and Coulson's seen him, just as he's seen Natasha and Damon and Marcus and Tyrone. (You don't really get to be body-shy, as a field agent.) But the nakedness of a shower, or gods forbid a medic station, is very different from the nudity that Clint imagines now. This is nakedness slowly revealed, Clint's hands parting the fabric piece by piece to expose pale flesh thinly scattered with dark hair, a beautiful contrast against the thick grey fabric.
As Clint runs a thumb over the head of his cock, he imagines his own fingers — blunt, calloused, incredibly agile — teasing lightly over dark tan nipples that rise up into peaks beneath his touch. He imagines Coulson's stomach, flat and well-muscled, as powerful as the rest of the man, flexing as the agent moans.
He can't imagine Coulson's face like this, so Clint doesn't even try.
Now he's gotten to the part in this mental striptease where he peels the fabric away from Coulson's thighs, and Clint is sliding both hands slowly up and down his shaft. Hawkeye has formidable self-control when he so chooses, and it takes every ounce of it not to come when he imagines grinding his hips down against Phil's, feeling them touch and and slide and press together, flesh to flesh. Clint shakes and trembles at the image, losing himself for a moment in the imagined feeling of Phil moving with him, arching up to meet him.
Phil wraps his strong, powerful legs around Clint and pulls them together, so close together, as he throws back his head and comes with Clint's name in his mouth. Clint can actually feel it, hot and slick against his belly, and god it's good, it's something that he wants so badly. Clint loses it. He moans Phil's name back, not caring what he sounds like, along with something impulsive and silly like "love you, so much".
Then Clint makes the mistake of opening his eyes, and realizes that the come on his belly is just his own. To add insult to injury, he might have said those last few lines out loud. That was in no way part of the plan.
He curls over and just rests his head against the cool concrete floor of the bathroom, the silence reassuring him that no one is around. He breathes and stays like that for a long moment, waiting out the aftermath and the trembling and the weakness, letting it all pass through him and away.
He feels... okay. He really feels okay, for now. The frantic feeling isn't gone, but it's blunted, temporarily sated. He can already feel it starting to return, but for now, it's fairly quiet. Quiet enough that Clint can sit through a debriefing without making Coulson question his mental fitness. He thinks.
Because Clint has a clock in his brain — it's one of those sniper things, like the visual memory and his shot index — he knows when 25 minutes have passed. It's almost time to go see Phil — no, Agent Coulson. (He's got to get that right in his head.)
As he cleans himself up with a paper towel and cool water, he allows himself to finally imagine Coulson's face. As he zips himself up and checks that no part of his armor is out of place, he carefully calls to mind Coulson's hands holding a pen, scratching on paper, filling out incident reports, curled around a mug of coffee, tightened into fists as he punches a bad guy. Agent Coulson's voice in his ear, dressing Clint down for inappropriate chatter. His handler, his field partner, his commanding officer. (Even if Clint sucks at taking orders.)
Clint straightens up, clutches the edge of the sink tightly for 2.7 seconds, takes a deep, shaky breath, and prepares to go debrief.