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Clint woke slick with sweat and fighting for breath, a scream buried in his throat and the unfamiliar feel of breasts against his back. Nat’s arms tightened painfully around his chest.
“It’s me,” she said.
“I know.”
“Phil’s fine.”
Shattered ribs. Collapsed lung. A hole in his heart large enough to drive a Buick through. Even months later, SHIELD still made Clint see him with an escort. Well, there may be more than one reason for the escort. Clint closed his eyes.
“I know,” he lied back with a sigh and kicked the covers off his legs. He ran a hand through his hair. His hand was steady, of course. He was still Hawkeye. But inside he was quaking and that was just as bad. “I’m going for some water.”
Nat snorted but didn’t bother trying to stop him. She rolled away and took most of his covers with her.
“Midnight snacks will make you fat.”
“But that’s why I’ve got you, babe.”
It was a silent testimony to their friendship that, instead of killing him, Natasha Romanoff went back to sleep. With a skill borne out of years of practice, he pulled on a pair of boxers in the dark, hoped they weren’t Nat’s, and shuffled out.
He walked into the Avengers’ communal kitchen to find Cap and Stark already in possession of the premises. Stark sat at the center island, mostly upright with the help of the countertop. Cap stood at the stove, frowning intently down at whatever the hell it was the man was stirring in a pot. Neither of them looked up at him but Clint felt like he was intruding on something important anyway. Life with Natasha had taught him to slide into these situations slowly and feel out the landscape cautiously. Months of cohabitating with the group of screaming lunatics otherwise known as the Avengers had taught him to just clear this shit up at the start already.
“Do I need to leave?” he muttered, tugging the freezer bin open.
Cap and Stark both shook their heads and Clint decided to believe them. He pulled out his box of Fat Boys (clearly marked with his name, thanks Thor) and selected an ice cream bar. He didn’t bother offering a treat to anyone else; there were rules about these things, after all. A minute later, with Cap still stirring and Stark still yawning, Clint’s patience cracked like an egg.
“Are we knitting?”
“We are making hot chocolate,” Stark informed him, handsome mouth turned down at the corners in annoyance. “On a stove.”
“Feeling nostalgic, Cap?”
Cap smiled briefly, not one of his USO specials but one of his small, wry ones that – for some insane reason - he usually reserved for Stark though the asshole never quite seemed to notice. Even now, Stark just folded his hands, dropped his chin, and snorted.
“Hah. Our fearless leader is the proud product of World War II rationing, Robin Hood. Why do you think the heathen doesn’t need coffee in the morning? No, this is him trying for a Norman Rockwell moment in our otherwise terminally dysfunctional lives. I don’t think he’d even seen one of those tiny marshmallow things before tonight. Had you seen one of those—?”
“Yes, Tony,” their fearless leader sighed and started pouring the pot out into three mugs. “I bought them.”
Stark rambled on, driven by nerves and insomnia, restless intellect and ghosts Clint never wanted to hear anything about.
“What I don’t get is the stove part. I mean, is it supposed to be a test? What’s the advantage to stirring things with sticks over a heating element instead of just using the microwave already? Does it taste better? Is it another personal statement thing? I eschew—”
Cap laughed and pushed a mug over to Clint who swallowed the last of his ice cream and accepted the offering without an ounce of guilt.
“Eschew - that’s a big word for you.”
“Not nice, Boy Scout. Besides, I was channeling you now shush. I eschew modern technology for it represents the worst of today’s society and its slavish devotion to crass pleasure seeking ways and desire for immediate gratification.”
Cap leaned back against the counter, folded one arm across his chest, and sipped his hot chocolate with the sort of sly smile usually reserved for the cover of porn DVDs. Or maybe that had more to do with how his plain gray t-shirt stretched over sculpted muscles Clint would never achieve even if he spent every minute in the gym from now until his death. If it weren’t for Phil – and the fact that Clint was pretty sure Stark would take him out with a repulsor blast to the face, Pepper or no Pepper – he’d give that a go just on principle. Since there was a Phil – and please, god, let there always be a Phil - Clint took a sip of his drink instead and decided it wasn’t half-bad. It was a little sweet and he wasn’t entirely sold on the little marshmallows that kept bobbing against his upper lip and looked a bit like slowly decaying disembodied teeth but otherwise—
Around him, the bickering ran on as usual.
“I don’t use words like ‘eschew’. Thor maybe,” Cap said.
“Okay. Case in point. Thor likes the microwave.” Stark slurped his hot chocolate absently. “In fact, he watches it for hours – which, I grant you, is a little creepy but I’ve been told that many people find watching popcorn pop mesmerizing. Although most of them are probably high at the time, an argument could be made that Thor is perpetually high on life so.”
“Thor likes reality T.V., Tony. I think he sees the microwave as just a more hands-on version.”
“Lies. The guy’s a god – okay, fine, don’t do the eye roll thing. It looks unbelievably wrong on you - he’s the leader of an advanced alien culture. I’m sure he gets the difference between a television and a microwave. I’m telling you, the man’s playing us with that act—”
“Whatever keeps him out of trouble and spares me from hearing about his love life,” Cap muttered, sounding surprisingly calculating and a little heartless and nothing like the bleeding heart Captain America Clint had grown used to seeing at debriefings and anything involving Nick Fury. “Pass me your mug.”
“Aww, honey. Are you going to do the dishes, too?” Stark batted his eyelashes – how wrong was it that the man had the sort of insanely long eyelashes that made that move work – but passed his crockery along anyway. “You realize there’s a dishwasher right there at your knees, right?”
“It’s two mugs, Tony.”
“It’s right at your knees, Steve.”
“Please. I can’t live through this argument twice in one night. Bed. Now.”
“You say the sweetest things, buttercup. And you wonder why people think you’re still a virgin,” Stark snapped back but slid off his seat anyway.
“I’m not a virgin,” Cap sighed and blushed, making the answer as completely unintelligible as every other time the point had come up.
“Whatever. Like I’m about to do anything about it one way or another after hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows anyway. Night, kids.” Stark disappeared down the hallway with a placid wave.
Clint sat back and watched Cap rinse mugs, dry mugs, and put mugs away. He wasn’t Nat but he wasn’t bad either and, eventually, Cap turned to frown at him unhappily. For the first time in – well, ever – Clint looked back and thought ‘Steve’.
“He couldn’t sleep. It’s been a few days and I promised Pepper—”
Yeah, not touching that relationship quagmire with an eleven foot pole.
“So Tony Stark’s kryptonite is hot chocolate?” Clint grinned. “Or are you slipping little bits of Valium in among the floating marshmallows?”
“It’s not the hot chocolate. It’s making him sit still long enough to stop thinking about everything else.”
“So – the pot stirring.”
Steve shrugged uncomfortably and stared off at absolutely nothing.
“It only takes a minute and fifteen seconds in the microwave,” he said, as if that explained anything at all, and Clint suffered a sudden revelation.
“Do you even like hot chocolate?”
Steve turned and started washing the pot in reply.
Clint stayed in the kitchen long after Steve went back to his rooms. He sat and watched the first pink fingers of dawn trace their way across the sky, feeling jealous and off-balance and insanely angry with Steve for reasons he didn’t want to look at too closely. In the end, he plopped the still mostly full mug into the microwave, punched the numbers, waited for the ding, and dumped in a handful of tiny marshmallows before taking the drink back to Nat. She’d like the marshmallows, he thought.