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Some Christmas, Phil thought to himself, idly looking through Clint’s scope at nothing but endless mountains of beige sand. Clint was out back taking a piss, and Phil could hear it hitting the corrugated iron of the shack they’d been holed up in for a week now.
He wandered back in, the door slapping closed like a screen door on a hot day in the south. God, what Phil wouldn’t do for a lemonade. He swigged some warm water that tasted like plastic and sat back down at the tiny melamine table, watching Clint stretch and peel his thin t-shirt from his chest before wafting it back and forth to try to create airflow. Good luck with that, Phil thought. Clint was getting a farmers tan. It looked good on him.
Phil was a little more disciplined with the suncream, but he would still get the questions once they got back to snowy new york: “Coulson, did you go on vacation?!”
He cracked the back of his book and read about lawyers in the rain, which all the books Clint ever read seemed to be about. Why was it always raining in those books? Why did everyone live in a goddamned house boat?
“It’s so fucking hot,” Clint whined helpfully, draping himself over the chair opposite Phil. He was wearing some shorts that must have been from the 1980s, tiny little things, and his thighs were shiny with sweat. Phil didn’t stare. “Happy Christmas,” he replied, and Clint snorted.
Just then, Phil’s phone buzzed across the table and they both jumped, Clint dashing to the window to look through the scope as Phil lunged for it to see what the message from their contact was.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Phil spat out, “you can relax, Clint, it’s just Stark being an idiot.”
“Are you kidding?!” Clint said, whipping his head around to see Phil huff and throw the phone onto the table. “There are fifteen different proxies on this thing. Fifteen. And Stark bypasses them all just to send us a stupid text,” Phil sighed, leaning back and knocking his head gently on the wall behind him a few times.
“What did he say?” Clint asked after a moment.
“Seasons greetings. Look, he sent a picture-” Phil picked up the phone again and held it out so Clint could see the picture of Tony lounging in front of a fireplace wearing a Christmas hat and looking smug. “Jackass,” Clint grumbled.
They sat in silence for minutes that dragged by, til Clint suddenly leapt up. “When is this thing gonna go down!?” He was full of adrenaline after the false alarm and practically buzzing after so long of doing nothing whatsoever.
“I really don’t know, Clint. Trust me, I can think of other places I’d rather be,” Phil said. It wasn’t entirely true. As boring and as uncomfortable as it was, Clint was there.
Clint paced around for a bit before sitting back down and drinking half a bottle of water, getting a good portion of it down his shirt so it stuck to his skin again. “Where?”
Phil snapped his eyes from Clint’s chest where they’d somehow ended up to look at him. “Where what?”
“Where would you rather be right now?”
Phil looked around himself. It was hard to think about Christmas in this dusty place. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know... I guess back home with my parents when I was a kid. My mom would make a big meal, my brothers and I would decorate the tree, we’d sing carols, the whole bit.” He thought about the huge wooden table they’d all sit around. A table that was the very antithesis of the one he was currently trying not to stick to.
“What about you?” Phil asked. Clint tipped his water bottle between his hands to watch the remaining water in it slosh back and forth. “Eh, somewhere less hot. I don’t really,” he shrugged, “give a shit about it, you know? I just like the time off more than anything.”
“But you didn’t even leave base last year,” Phil said, realising as soon as he said it that it gave rather a lot away. The heat must be getting to him.
“Neither did you,” Clint replied, and then they looked at each other. Phil was suddenly incredibly tired.
“Do you think they’re going to come today?” Clint asked.
“Probably not,” Phil admitted.
“Do you wanna go sunbathe on the roof?”
Phil looked at him for a blank moment before resigning himself, “sure.”
Which is how they ended up on the roof, still scoping out the horizon but laying on towels and telling each other the plots of movies the other hadn’t seen. Phil tried not to think about it when Clint rubbed lotion into his back, and when he did likewise for him. There was the tiniest promise of a breeze outside which almost made up for the lack of shade. It was actually kind of nice.
“Tell me about what you used to do at Christmas?” Clint asked, when they’d been silent for a while. Phil told him about the glorious picture-perfect glazed hams, glimmering centrepieces, the scent of pine needles and cinnamon. It all felt a million miles away from the dry heat of the desert and the deep blue sky above them.
Once the sun started to dip into the horizon and the heat began to drop off, Phil fought against it but fell asleep anyway. He woke up alone, with a shirt draped over his back and the barest sliver of orange smouldering on the edge of the world.
“Clint?” Phil called, dropping down onto the still warm ground. “Oh wait! Hold up,” Clint said, hurrying out to Phil holding a cloth. “Uh, stay there for a sec, ok?” Phil massaged the tight skin on the back of his neck and shrugged ok, watching Clint go back in and close the door. A lizard ran across his foot and up into a crack of the one brick wall of the building and Phil could hear Clint spraying something. “Ok, you can come in!”
Clint was standing in the middle of the room, hands splayed wide and an expectant look on his face. Phil looked around to take everything in. On the table was a spread, for want of a better word, of Meals Ready to Eat, laid out and just that: ready to eat. Empty bottles of water had been cut down to make glasses. In a corner was a stack of pieces of junk in a vague christmas tree shape, pairs of balled socks placed about it like baubles. The top of it appeared to be graced with an MRE tin folded into the shape of a star.
“Happy Christmas, sir!” Clint beamed, laughing at Phil’s reaction. He handed him a clean shirt. “Please, take a seat, I’ll carve.”
“What is this, Clint?" Phil laughed, "Is that a christmas tree? Did you just spray deodorant?”
“For the pine fresh smell! And yes, it totally is a Christmas tree, obviously.” Clint grinned as he sat opposite him at the table. “Did you clean?” Phil asked, running a fingertip across the usually dusty table. “Of course!” Clint replied, mock offended.
“White meat or dark?” he asked, brandishing a throwing knife to cut into some sort of brown meat. Phil laughed again, “Gee, I guess I’m gonna have to go with... dark.” Clint cut into it and placed it onto Phil’s plastic dish before serving himself. The rest of the food was apparently serve-yourself and Phil played along with the whole act. “You know this is enough food for at least two days.”
“Hey, if you can’t have a little indulgence on Christmas, when can you?” Clint replied, dishing some more green bean-y stuff onto Phil’s plate for him.
The ration food was somehow better than it usually was, presented with Clint humming festive songs before breaking out into Mariah Carey. For dessert they ate M&Ms. Clint was always the best when he was in this kind of gleeful, silly mood, and Phil drank it in. Clint practically beamed at him everytime he looked up. Phil was in so much trouble.
Clint made them bitter coffee on the tiny portable gas stove. The air was cold now, and the close cosiness of the shack was welcome. Windows were closed and sweaters were pulled on, and the sparse candle light felt rather appropriate for their faux festivities.
Clint suddenly gasped and Phil had a momentary panic, swiftly replaced with amusement when Clint clutched invisible pearls to his chest and exclaimed, “I do believe Santa Claus has paid us a visit!” Grabbing one of the balls of socks from the ‘tree’ and handing it to Phil. “How did you know?” He said, like socks were his favourite thing in the world. “No, open it!” Clint said, and Phil did so, pulling the socks apart to find a single golden bullet that had ‘the bad guy’ written on it in sharpie. Phil had to turn it around in his fingers to read the whole thing, laughing the whole time. “I love you,” he muttered, face suddenly going slack when he realised what he’d said.
“What?” Clint said after a decade or so had passed in silence. Phil started to open his mouth and shake his head to - to what, he didn’t know. Backtrack? “You love me?” Clint said before Phil could run out into the night and die of exposure.
He realised he was nodding his head and stopped himself, but suddenly the wall was the ceiling and the floor was the wall, or something, because Clint was over him boring those hawk eyes of his into his soul. “Really?” He was looking up and down between Phil’s eyes and his mouth, and god damn him but he licked his lips and that was it. Phil barely nodded but it was enough, and Clint was kissing him. Chapped, cracked lips rough on his own, both tasting like acrid coffee and dust. It was perfection.