Chapter Text
When Clint had first met Phil, he wasn’t sure what to think. The guy was level 7 at a super-secret spy agency, and he looked like Clint’s high school principal. There had to be more to him than met the eye.
So Clint watched him.
He made himself as unobtrusive as possible and just watched.
It didn’t take long for him to see that Phil was quietly badass. He was competent and capable, and he was so…mundane about it. It impressed Clint in a way that very few things did.
But the first time Clint admitted to himself that Phil was sexy was the first time he saw him on the range.
He was due for a firearms recertification, which was why he was on the general range rather than the area he usually used for his bow practice, and Phil was there walking a couple of juniors through their first training.
He shot like he did everything else—calm, competent, controlled—and Clint couldn’t take his eyes off the man.
When he’d emptied his clip, he looked over at Clint and smiled faintly, a little more genuine than his usual smiles, his face slightly flushed, and Clint was a goner.
It was several months later that Clint and Phil had their first assignment together. Clint had worked his way through the other handlers almost systematically and no one else would take him on. When Phil agreed to go on a mission with him, Clint found himself more excited than he had cause to be. He wanted to see Agent Coulson in the field, to watch that competence in action.
He wasn’t disappointed.
The op went south, and they were working off plan. Clint ended up out of his hidey hole and in the action, and he made a rookie mistake and found himself on his knees with a Beretta to his head and some asshole making threats he couldn’t possibly follow through without his boss’s approval.
Except this guy was too on edge, to antsy. He had an itchy trigger finger, and for a moment Clint actually thought this might be it for him.
And then he heard a gunshot and the guy dropped to the floor. Clint was on his feet in half a second, and the fight started up all over again.
Eventually they completed the mission and got everyone out that needed out. Clint got stuck in medical and sat through his debriefing and half-assed his mission report, and the whole time he couldn’t get the picture of Phil’s face as he stood there, holding his smoking sidearm, out of his mind.