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Clint’s feet are cold. Pietro makes a face when they rub themselves against his calves but says nothing — Clint is hurt, after all. Whenever they get together intimately, Clint always seems to be hurt. Still, even though Pietro decides to not argue about Hawkeye's freezing feet, his fellow Avenger notices the frown on his face. “What? They’re not that cold.”
Pietro snorts and Clint’s face goes dark, offended. “C’mon, I'm hurt. I got really injured while fighting all those guys to defend my home. You gotta give me your abnormal heat for me to heal.”
“You are not hypothermic.” Pietro points out, but doesn’t move — even though he thinks the bed is way too small for one person, let alone two. Henry should buy larger beds for the infirmary in the Academy. However, thinking again, it would probably be a bad thing for around the teenagers. “Why are you here, anyway?”
Clint gives Pietro this weird look. “Because I’m hurt.” He answers as if answering someone as dumb as himself. It makes Pietro want to leave the bed or throw Hawkeye out of it.
“I can see that. I am asking why you are not healing at your own house.”
“Oh.” He says, and then stops there. Pietro sighs, already knowing the answer: “It’s because Steve thinks you will not find trouble in here, right?”
“Yeah.” And Pietro wonders again how having casual sex with an idiot like Clint Barton is now part of his life. Even Warbird had more knowledge than Clint, who was best known for having had sex with practically all of the world's female population.
Silence falls and Clint starts to seek heat again with his cold feet. This time, however, he is being bolder than before: Clint’s feet rub not only on his calves now-they are going up and up, taking the bottom of Pietro’s pants with him. And Pietro can't even start to talk about the cold hand that has just invaded his shirt and is roaming his back until it settles down on one of his sides. It is so intimate it makes Pietro go rigid, as if something is wrong.
The oh-so-perceptive Hawkeye does not miss this and sighs, before trying to formulate something to say to Pietro, not stopping his movements. “I, uh,” he starts, very eloquently. “I’m very glad you’re here with me.” But it’s so uncertain, that Pietro can hear the ‘I think’ that Clint left unsaid.
“May I ask what you are doing?” Pietro asks, feeling suddenly like a teenager who knows nothing of relationships — by his own personal record on the matter, it seems Pietro doesn’t really knows a lot about relationships, but he knows Clint well enough and knows something is up.
“I’m trying to cuddle with you.” Clint states the obvious and it seems to shock Pietro. Cuddling. He barely remembers the last time he did that. Crystal comes to his mind — Crystal and he, before Wanda’s madness, when they loved each other and lived together and Luna still talked to him — but Pietro shuts those thoughts away, deciding it’s just not worth it.
He makes a movement to leave the tiny bed, but Clint holds him there and kisses his neck. His mind runs faster than ever, trying to understand why Clint would need to cuddle right here, right now, when he could just have one of his many girlfriends do this—
—And memories of the afternoon fly to mind. Between Clint’s kisses, Pietro remembers the way Striker had cuddled with Finesse, who had no other choice than to seek his company since everyone she knew how to interact with was gone; and how Karolina Dean had cuddled with Lightspeed, both sobbing, on the stairs of the main building when the rest of the Runaways had showed up asking about the comrades that were missing too. All the students hugging, and its more intimate form, cuddling — the onlycommunication left when the words fail — to try to comfort each other. He remembers how Wanda and he had always cuddled in front of the fire when they were young and naïve, as an attempt to protect each other. It had been hard, having only each other, and their embrace had been the only way to give to each other the comfort that their words and promises could not. Life back then had been difficult, but at least it had been easier than now.
Clint, who had almost died protecting hispeople, feels lost because he couldn’t protect his own students, Pietro realizes. As a teacher and a mentor, to have his students fall right through his fingers, during a Christmas party that he didn’t even go to, was a crippling loss. And Pietro knows, he knows, how that feels, the feeling of impotence, of losing people he was ordered to protect first and foremost, before even himself. He knows better than any girl Clint has been dating how it feels.
The pieces of the jigsaw finally come together and Pietro feels like an idiot. Like all the others that sought comfort in arms they knew, Clint goes after Pietro (or rather, Pietro went to check on him, as Henry had asked him to, and ended up being dragged into bed by Hawkeye) to find someone who could properly understand what he was going through. And, apparently, Pietro is always the one who could understand Clint best. After all, who in this facility dares to say they knew Hawkeye better than he himself does?
Finally understanding Clint’s odd behavior, Pietro turns to look into the eyes of the man by his side. Before Clint can open his mouth to say something stupid, Pietro kisses him on the lips, disentangling himself from Hawkeye’s possessive grip — only to cover Clint’s body with his own. His jaw meets Clint's chest just as their eyes meet. They look at each other until Clint moves and lowers himself so that they are both lying down on the bed, Pietro covering Clint and giving him all of his warmth.
In the end, it is Pietro’s foot that rubs against one of Clint’s leg, at the same pace the callused hand of the archer rubs his back. It’s oddly comforting and it puts a smile on Clint’s face — a thin, sad one, but a smile nonetheless.
It takes little time to Clint to fall asleep, and so Pietro stops watching the archer. He lowers his head to Clint's chest and his ear finds the sound of his heart almost instantly.
It is only when their heartbeats become one that Pietro falls asleep too, hoping that the next time he cuddles with someone, Clint, probably, it will be because of better, happier emotions.
(01/05/2013)