Work Text:
Clint isn't sure how he started hanging out with Erik Selvig. He thinks it might have been after they bumped into one another at HQ outside the shrink's office -- Clint was coming, Selvig was going, and there was a little lift of recognition -- I am screwed up, you are screwed up. We should get drunk together.
So they did.
SHIELD had acquired a handful of bars in different cities across the country over the years. New York has three and they are all named after gas stations or ex-field agents who'd been killed in action: Elliot's, Sinclaire's, and Daudry's. Possessive tense, each and every one of them. Clint used to haunt Elliot's when he was younger -- it's where the cadets and new recruits tended to hang then, and it still retains its reputation as a general hell hole where the legality of some of the things that happen there is called into question at a debriefing once every few weeks. Sinclaire's was where you graduated. You came naturally into it, and you never came a day early, never a day late. It was the most crowded, the loudest, and the one that Clint had been stealthily avoiding since they'd finished the city-wide clean-up.
It's the one where they won't stop staring, and it's starting to make Clint break the non-aggression pact he made with his shrink on a daily basis.
He's already put one agent in medical. He should probably stop while he's behind.
Daudry's is named after some poor sap who took a bullet to the back after a particularly bad run-in with some Doom Bots. It's arguably the slowest of the three bars, the quietest, and the one where no one seems to watch Clint like he's going to set the place on fire every time he walks in. The bartender's name is Tom and he always knows what you want.
This is where Clint and Selvig meet, every Thursday night, a few hours after they've both seen the shrink. Every Thursday night, they lay it out in quiet, amicable murmuring at a booth near the back, folding up each thought and putting it away. In some ways, it's better than actual therapy. Other days, it makes Clint mad as hell and he can't go home because he's scared of what he'll do, what he would think, what he would want -- he is scared of himself and the things he is capable of doing and that might be the worst part of it all.
Tonight, though, he isn't scared of anything. Tonight, he is thrumming with a kind of optimism that he hasn't felt in months. Maybe it's because Erik was smiling when he met him, maybe it's because he's telling Clint the story of how he first met Bruce, ages ago at Culver, and how Bruce was this wiry, unsuspecting little geek who had managed to snag the most drop-dead gorgeous first year PhD student that anyone had ever seen.
"He couldn't string two words together without at least a dozen uh, um, uh's in there. He was a mess, and here he was, coming to these faculty dinners in a Cosby sweater and horn rimmed glasses with this absolute babe on his arm."
"Betty."
"That woman," Erik says, putting a hand over his heart, "could make bird shit growing in a petri dish sound like poetry. She was so passionate, so unabashedly sharp that she could talk the Dean under the table in less than a minute and still have time to polish off a bottle of bad Moscato. She was brilliant. She still is, she teaches. I might attend a lecture soon. Catch up. Talking to her was like talking to sunshine. Bruce adored her. He worshipped her. Never seen anything like it." The conversation does not manage to go south after this, even though Clint is writing out all the different ways it could in his head. "You got a girl, Clint?"
"Huh?"
"You heard me. Girl, boy. Whoever."
Clint shakes his head, laughing and taking a long sip of his beer. "No girl for me. Not for a while. Record's pretty spotty, doc."
Selvig nods. "You and, uh. The red-head. Natasha."
"Never a thing." Selvig doesn't press him. "I try not to date SHIELD girls."
"Natasha hardly seems like a SHIELD girl. Or a girl."
"True. Very true." He looks into the bottom of his glass. "I'm gonna grab another."
"I'm gonna grab a cab. Think I'll go home, catch up on some reading." Selvig hasn't picked up a journal in months. He's told Clint it just doesn't feel right, doesn't feel like it used to. Clint raises an eyebrow. "I wanna start teaching again. Shrink thinks it's a good idea."
"Go for it." Clint clasps him on the back, walking with him as far as the bar and waving as he goes. He takes a seat, passing his empty glass over to Tom.
"'Nother PBR?"
"Yeah."
"Ironically or unironically?"
Clint turns to the source of the voice and frowns. "Pardon?"
The woman asking the question angles herself toward him on her stool and grins. "Ironically. Or unironically. The PBR."
"Uh." Clint drops a couple bills down. Takes the glass. "Neither. It's cheap and it tastes alright."
"Tom."
Tom smiles. "Bobbi."
"Please get my new friend something else to drink. Put it on my tab?"
"Sure thing, doll."
Clint huffs. "Hey. Look. I'm not here to get loaded. I'm just--"
"Right. I know. You're here to unwind. It's cool."
"I'm not a big drinker," Clint says flatly. "Tom, I don't--"
"If you don't like it, I'll take care of it." She -- Bobbi, whatever -- keeps her eyes on him as he raises the glass to his mouth and takes a sip.
"Rum and coke." Clint fucking loves rum and coke. "Fuck you, Tom."
She grins. "Tom always knows. Come on, sit." Clint sits. "You're Barton, yeah?" He opens his mouth to bite something out, something awful that he would regret later, he's sure, but she interrupts him. "I saw you on the news. Last year. I mean, I've seen you around before that, obviously. And after." She takes a sip of her drink, something pale like grapefruit juice. "And I see you in here all the time. You ditch Sinclaire's?"
"Too loud."
"Yeah." She looks at her drink. "Something like that." Clint doesn't ask what she means. "I didn't mean to interrupt you or anything. I just..." She looks around. Before they started talking, they were the only solo acts in the room. Clint gets it. The need to be with someone, in whatever capacity you can manage. "I'm Bobbi Morse."
"Clint Barton." He sticks out his hand and she shakes it, firm and friendly, and Clint reads absolutely nothing from it because her face is placid, peaceful, and so very different than anything he's felt in a year. He finally turns toward her. "How long you been with SHIELD?" he asks.
And that's all it takes.
He starts seeing her there every week, after Erik leaves. At some point, the two men miss their regular night, and Clint ends up spending the entirety of it with Bobbi in a booth a little closer to the center. At another point, they decide to meet on a Friday at a different bar, no SHIELD, no agents. There's a band and she takes his hand and asks him to dance with her. Clint can't remember the last time he danced. Had to have been the circus. Had to have been for a mission, maybe with Natasha, that one time with Phil -- he laughs then, and she laughs with him and neither of them really knows why, but they meet in the middle and she presses her lips to his fervently, quickly, laughter still bubbling out of her mouth as she pulls him to the middle of the floor.
"Dance with me, Hawkeye," she says, and he does.
He dances.
In the middle of her bedroom, Clint undoes the zipper of her skirt, watching it pool at her ankles while his hands roam over her sides and hips. She steps out of her clothes, pulling him to bed.
"Where'd all my chatter go, Miss Mockingbird?" He still coos over her codename, still teases her endlessly about her taunting, her loud, dry wit and snark. She kisses him.
"You just miss the sound of my voice."
"I do," he murmurs. "When you're not around. I think about the way you sound." Clint dips his head, presses his lips to her neck. "I think about you all the time."
"Stop that."
"I do."
"Clint--"
He'll think about the way she sounds when he touches her for days, the way she sighs as he fills her, one leg hooked over his shoulder, the other wrapped tight around his waist. He will think about the noise she makes as she comes, the first and the second, the way she is so loud on the third and how she manages to keep him on the edge for so long that he almost screams when he finally lets go.
He'll think about all of it even after the second time he spends the night, and the third and fourth and--
"Where's this from?"
"I was trying to impress one of the trapeze girls. Evangeline."
Bobbi smiles. "And this one?"
"Pass."
"This one."
"Pass."
She kisses the scar over his heart. "This one?"
Clint swallows. "Pass."
Bobbi swings a leg over his lip, rolls the condom over his cock and drops. It's lazy, skipped-work, middle-of-the-day sex and Clint can see everything absolutely everything that she does. Every roll and twitch of every muscle, every limb that flexes under his hands --
"Where's this from?" he asks, tracing a scar just above her hip. She moans. Clint keeps drawing his fingers over it, finds another that is a clean cut between her breasts and touches that one, too. She swears, falling forward and catching herself on the headboard, the wood smacking against the wall every time Clint rolls his hips and every time she takes him. "Come on, Birdie."
"It's from Paris, two years ago -- fuck." She covers the hand over his hip with her own. "Stupid fucking friendly fire, couldn't walk right for days--"
"This one?" He reaches one hand between her breasts, the other at her clit, stroking her in time with his thrusts. Bobbi throws her head back, lets loose this beautiful noise that Clint wants to bottle up and listen to forever -- the way she sounds when she comes undone. She clenches around him and Clint rolls her over, pushes in once, twice -- he groans, hand rattling the headboard as he rides out the last of it. Immediately, he drops his mouth to the skin between her breasts, laving his tongue over the ridged tissue, dragging his teeth. "This one?" he asks again.
She pushes him away. "Pass."
He's given his SHIELD apartment back, after he stopped being able to sleep in it a year ago. Tony tried to give him a floor of the tower, but it was too big and Clint thought he was going to pass out in the elevator, had run as far as he could until Tony dragged him back, showed him a different one, a smaller space and hadn't said a word about it.
Bobbi's still impressed.
"This is the nicest bed I've ever slept in," she says the first morning she's there. He's made food and brought it to her and she's sitting up, not bothering to cover herself as they share a screwdriver and some eggs, passing the glass back and forth. "Like. Have you ever been to that one hotel, the one in Barcelona SHIELD puts everyone up in?"
"Nope."
"It has the nicest beds ever. Like, hands down. But this is a thousand times nicer. I swear."
"You absolutely swear."
"I double swear." Clint grins and tossing a grape into her mouth. She catches it. Clint moves the tray and crawls over her. "I could spend all day in this bed."
"So spend all day in it." He kisses her. "With me."
She grins against his lips. "Don't try so hard to convince me, Agent Barton."
He really has to stop putting agents in the hospital.
"You want to get fired?" Bobbi paces back and forth in her living room, arms wild, hair falling out of the braid on her head. "Are you fucking stupid, Clint?"
"Don't you start with that, too. Don't you start with the crazy talk, I'm not--"
"You're scaring me!" she shouts. Clint stands very still and she crosses the room to him, puts her hands on his cheeks. They're cool and his skin is hot it's so hot he's burning up from the inside out. He lets her kiss him and he doesn't know why she wants to. "I love you. Please tell me what's wrong. Don't say nothing." Her voice bites out, snaps forward like a belt. "If you say nothing is wrong then you'll have to leave." She presses closer.
"Everything is wrong."
"Everything."
He closes his eyes. "I can't start or stop at one place. I gotta make it all happen at once."
"Clint--"
"People keep saying. They coulda fought it. Coulda said no." She presses her lips together. Clint shuts his eyes. "They don't know and I can't...I don't want you to know because I am so tired. I am tired all the time, Birdie." He opens his eyes again, but she presses her thumbs to them, presses her lips to them, and she says, "Come to bed."
Clint follows her. He goes without asking and she stretches out next to him, keeping his head under her chin.
"People are wrong," she says. Clint wonders how she knows that. "You're the strongest person I know. People are wrong. They're wrong about you. They're wrong about everything."
She has never told him, but Clint knows some things. Never approach her from behind. Never surprise her.
He isn't sure if she'll ever tell him, but he thinks he knows.
Bobbi doesn't ask about Loki. She only asks about the after. About the now.
Clint doesn't ask her what happened. He only does what she wants, gives her what she needs. Doubts that it will be enough.
Selvig raises his glass in the bar. "To the women who saved us."
"You got a girl I don't know about?" Clint smiles around the rim of his glass. Erik grins.
"Science is my lover. And a cruel one indeed."
Clint laughs. "Good luck with that."
"And to you, Barton. And to you."
She disappears for a couple of days, which he doesn't worry about. She works for SHIELD, he works for SHIELD -- they both understand how it is.
He's not expecting her to somehow get into the tower, onto his floor and strip, crawling into bed with him.
"Bobbi--"
"I need you. I need you right now, please, just--"
She's acting strange, sitting up in bed and staring at the wall.
Clint reaches out, runs a hand down her back. "Birdie."
"I have to go."
"Okay. I'll be--"
"No. No I mean..."
Clint sits up. "Oh." He looks down at his hands. "How long?"
Bobbi lays back, her head in his lap. "Not sure. Long enough. Too long." She looks up at him. "I love you. I don't...I didn't want this."
"I know." He presses his lips to her forehead.
"You're not going to give me any peace, are you?" She looks up, and the words sound awful, but she's smiling.
"I don't see why I wouldn't." Clint lays back down and she pulls herself over him, looking down fondly. "You gave me back mine."