Chapter Text
Clint was extremely comfortable.
The beach was beautiful, the sun was hot, and Clint was blending in with the filthy rich tourists with ease. This was in spite of the fact that he was hiding a stitched-up laceration under the hip of his shorts, which meant he wouldn’t be investigating the crystal-clear waters of the Italian beach he’d made his destination.
The spy business had its perks, and one of them was Cala Granara, Sardinia.
Of course it had its downsides too, like getting stabbed.
Win some, lose some.
Clint was good at what he did though, one of SHIELD’s best, and he got stabbed slightly less often than most. Natasha had once got shot so thoroughly that she couldn’t even wear a bikini anymore. At least Clint’s scars had mostly healed to nearly-unnoticeable.
Dr. Cho’s fancy-ass regeneration machine helped with that, though, Clint was forced to admit.
So he’d had a little weekend getaway in Macau, where he’d acquired a nice SIM card full of highly incriminating information, and then he’d flown first class to Spain and hopped a train to Italy. Finding himself in Sardinia was just good planning on his part. He needed to wait for the heat to die down, and what better way to do that than to play the indolent tourist in Italy, just about as far from SHIELD as he could get?
And the scenery was very, very pretty. It wasn’t a nude beach, but the suits were skimpy and the eye candy was plentiful.
The ocean itself was nice too, clear blue water and miles of white sand. When people pictured a hedonistic, tropical beach getaway, they pictured something exactly like this.
A man strode out of the water, slicking his hair back, gaze hidden behind dark sunglasses and yeah, the view was very, very good.
He was maybe a little taller than average height, but he was ripped like a professional swimmer, great pecs and abs, in the tiniest black swim shorts Clint thought he’d ever seen. They clung in all the right places, and the bright sunshine reflected off his tanned skin until it was nearly blinding and-
And he had a really interesting prosthetic.
His entire left arm, from the shoulder down, was matte black with gold accents, and it moved smoothly with the man’s body, like a natural limb, and Clint found himself swallowing roughly. The man’s gaze turned on him, and he gave Clint a secretive little smirk, like he knew exactly what Clint was thinking.
In fairness, Clint had been staring just a bit longer than was polite.
Clint, brazen as ever, raised his glass in a silent toast.
The man’s smirk widened, and he turned Clint’s way, unhurried but predatory in a way that struck Clint as vaguely familiar. It reminded him, actually, of the way Natasha approached-
Oh.
Oh, someone out there had finally realized that all the pretty women they kept flinging at Clint in exchange for secrets or the opportunity to rifle through his bags weren’t going to be adequate. Someone, somewhere, had figured out Clint had a type.
Well, this could be interesting.
The man came to a halt next to Clint’s lounger, eyeing the way he was sprawled over the chair, the chilled limoncello in his hand, the light blue shorts he’d shimmied his way into. Clint knew what he looked like, and he raised an eyebrow at the other man. “Can I help you?” he asked, the Italian sliding off his tongue easily. One of the many, many reasons Coulson had recruited him had been a gift with languages.
And deadly aim.
But Clint liked to think the languages helped.
The man pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head, pushing his slightly-longer-than-respectable hair out of his face, where it dripped onto his shoulders and Clint wanted to lick it.
“Maybe,” the man said, in English, a low, rough drawl. “What’s a guy like you doin’ in a place like this?”
Clint snorted a laugh. He looked around, gestured expansively. “Vacationing,” he said, “same as everyone else. What about you? Here for business-” he paused, let it linger, “-or for pleasure?”
“Little of column A, little of column B,” the man assured him, and he turned, reaching for the towel on the previously-unoccupied lounge chair not far from Clint. He ran it haphazardly over his chest, ‘drying off’ only if smearing seawater around and drawing Clint’s attention back to his abs was the definition of ‘dry’.
“Mmm,” Clint said, tilting his head back on the chair and closing his eyes. He kept a firm grip on his glass, swapping it to the hand further away from the other man, ‘cos he was more than familiar with how spies liked to slip things into drinks. “Well column B sounds more enticing, I have to tell you.”
There was a husky chuckle and then a creak as the man settled himself into the chair he’d liberated the towel from. “What’s your name?” he asked, after a few minutes of silence.
Clint pondered the question for a half a second, debating with himself. The man was obviously here for the information Clint had retrieved. Everything about him said secret agent to Clint’s instincts. But the fact he’d so easily pegged him made him feel a bit better about it, and anyway, he was overdue for some kind of assignation with a foreign agent. Everyone knew spies all slept with each other, it was practically a rule.
“Felix,” he finally said. “Felix Leiter.”
That earned him a snort of laughter, something genuine and cut-off like it wasn’t allowed, and the reaction made Clint smirk a little. He sipped his drink. Anyone who got an obscure Bond reference was either a spy or a spy-novel aficionado, and either one was Clint’s kind of people. “What’s yours?” he asked, when Tall Dark and Handsome didn’t immediately offer up the information.
“Simon Latrelle,” he answered, without the slightest hesitation, and Clint laughed outright.
Simone Latrelle, better known as Solitaire, had been an infamous Bond girl when Clint was a kid back in the 70s. She’d been a psychic, a tarot card reader, under the control of the big baddie in the movie. Clint could appreciate the guy’s sense of humor, anyway.
They didn’t speak again, though, both of them lying only a few feet apart in bright sunshine on warm sand, and Clint wondered just what kind of game the guy was playing.
**
Clint found out much later, when he wandered into the bar of his overly pricey and classier-than-he-deserved hotel, and found Simon - or whatever his real name was - sitting at the bar, a martini glass in hand. There was a thin curl of lemon rind in it, and the cocktail stick that had probably held olives was sitting on a bar napkin nearby.
“Could you be any more cliche?” Clint asked, smile curling the edges of his lips as he sidled up to the edge of the bar and waited for the bartender to notice him.
Simon turned in his seat, looking Clint up and down as he sipped his drink.
“Sure,” he said. “I could be you.”
And to be fair, Clint was wearing a black dinner jacket.
“I didn’t order a vodka martini,” Clint pointed out. “Did you get it shaken?”
Simon rolled his eyes. The bartender chose that moment to approach, and Clint ordered himself scotch on the rocks. In another life, on another day, he might have ordered a martini too, if he were being honest, but now there were appearances to maintain. Reputations on the line.
The quiet laugh Simon huffed told Clint he’d seen through the whole thing, but Clint couldn’t find it in himself to care that much.
He’d moved the SIM card from the hidden, sewn-in pocket of his suitcase to between the little-used pages of the hotel-supplied Bible, just in case he did get lucky with Simon tonight. That certainly seemed to be the direction this was going in, and anyone worth their salt as a spy or a thief would check the safe, but who would suspect the dusty Bible in the top of the closet? No one, hopefully, and especially not Simon.
Clint was fully prepared to let himself be seduced. For the good of the mission, of course.
And also because he really, really wanted to get laid.
Plus, any intel he could take back to SHIELD about a possible competing agent was good information.
His drink slid smoothly across the bar into Clint’s hand, and the bartender asked for his room number to add it to his bill.
“465,” he answered, still staring at Simon, almost like a challenge, like a dare.
“Guess that answers the question of your place or mine,” Simon responded, rising to the challenge, his eyes dancing like he was laughing at Clint.
Clint shrugged. “Only if you’re interested,” he said lightly.
“Oh, I’m interested,” Simon assured him, licking his lips and looking Clint over again. But he settled more into his seat, leaning against the bar on his elbow as he drank his martini with excruciating slowness. “So what do you do, Felix?” The laughter was still there, under the dark edge of interest, and Clint couldn’t help but smirk in return.
“Investment banking,” Clint told him, promptly. It sounded boring, rich, and Clint knew just enough about it to bullshit his way through a casual conversation.
The laughter on Simon’s face was like a live thing. He reached out and smoothed the edges of Clint’s dress shirt, just beneath where it was open at the collar. “Investment banking, huh? Sounds riveting.”
“Oh absolutely,” Clint assured him, leaning into the touch. “Couldn’t be more fascinating. Could talk about it for hours.”
“Let’s not,” Simon suggested.
“Okay,” Clint said easily. “What do you do?”
“Oh me?” Simon asked, feigning surprise. “Trust fund baby. Absolute wastrel. I spend half my time on my yacht and the other half jet-setting around the world, contributing nothing of any importance.”
“Sounds fantastic,” Clint told him honestly. He doubted that was what Simon did at all, except maybe the jet-setting around the world part, but the rest of it - it was a lifestyle Clint could get behind, if he were being truthful.
Something in Simon’s smirk softened, and then he tossed back the rest of the martini.
“Buy you another drink?” Clint offered, only about two-thirds of the way through his scotch.
“I can think of better things we could be doing,” Simon told him, shifting closer, until his leg was hooked around Clint’s shin.
“Mmm,” Clint agreed, sipping his drink. He was considering his options, most of which were centered around how fast he could get Simon naked. “I guess we aren’t going to pretend this is leading anywhere other than bed?”
“Not really,” Simon told him, edges of his mouth still curled and amusement dancing in his eyes. “If you’d prefer to be romanced a bit, I can put in a little more effort. Offer you dinner first.”
Clint snorted. “No thanks, I don’t really do romance.”
Something passed over Simon’s face, something dark and a little hard, there and gone almost before Clint noticed it. “Maybe you should,” was all he said, but by then Clint had finished off the scotch and left the glass on the bar.
“Shall we?” Clint asked, standing up.
Simon huffed a little, but he got up without complaint. Clint was startled to find he was a head taller, not quite towering over Simon, but the height difference was unexpected. Simon seemed like a man who took up a lot of space, was maybe a little larger than life, especially the way he’d loomed over Clint on the beach, and the way he’d leaned into the bar when Clint had arrived. Clint had expected him to be his height, or maybe taller, and it was interesting to realize he could step into Simon’s space and just about rest his chin on top of his head.
Clint smirked down at him, and Simon rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, straightening his shirt, “you’re tall, I got the memo.”
“Good things come in small packages,” Clint told him, like the absolute asshole he was.
Simon’s eyes flicked down to the front of his trousers. “Let’s hope not,” he said, and then sauntered out of the bar, heading for the bank of elevators with Clint trailing behind him.
They didn’t touch one another in the elevator, each of them leaning in opposite corners and watching the numbers tick upwards. Four floors was a short trip, but it was long enough for Clint to observe Simon in the reflective gold of the doors, to see how he held himself deliberately loose, slouched against the wall with his hands in his pockets. He was good, Clint was forced to admit. He almost had Clint doubting his initial instincts, but those instincts had saved his life on more than one occasion, and he wasn’t about to get sloppy now. Sure, he wanted Simon, wanted to get laid, wanted a lot of things, but not enough to die for them and certainly not enough to let the information he’d retrieved fall into the wrong hands.
Clint slid the key to his room out of his pocket, passing it over the card reader and twisting the knob, all the while Simon stood behind him, close enough that Clint could feel the heat of his body through their clothes, that he could almost feel Simon’s breath on the back of his neck. It was more the impression of it than actual sensation, but it made Clint shudder anyway, a trickle of anticipation down his spine.
They were barely in the door before Simon was on him, pressing Clint back against the wall and slotting their mouths together, the bitterness of lemon and vodka mixing with the smoky flavor of scotch on Clint’s tongue. He groaned into it, wrapping his hands around Simon’s waist and pulling him in closer.
“Bed,” he panted against Simon’s mouth.
Not that Clint had anything against wall sex, but he did have stitches in his hip, and there was a bed right there.
Simon smirked against his mouth, but he obligingly backed towards the bed, falling onto it lazily, one leg drawn up and leaning on his elbows. It punched the breath out of Clint, the way he looked, draped across the light grey of the duvet, with moonlight dancing through the window and painting him shades of silver.
Clint climbed over him, ignoring the twinging pull at the skin of his hip, until he was draped over Simon’s body, the raised knee at his waist and their mouths hovering inches from each other. Clint looked down at Simon, eyes tracking across his face. There was something calculating behind the heat in Simon’s eyes, but he mostly looked hungry and faintly amused, like he knew something that Clint didn’t. It made Clint pause, just for a second, just to acknowledge the fact that he was playing with fire here.
Then again, Clint was in the spy business because he was an adrenaline junkie, not because he was apt to be careful. He performed best in high-octane situations, and the little thrill of danger that was zinging up his spine only made this encounter that much hotter.
Clint fitted their mouths together, licking his way into Simon’s and pushing the other man down until he was flat against the bed. Simon’s arms came up, shoving Clint’s jacket down off his shoulders, and Clint shook it off, dropping it onto the floor where it was going to wrinkle irreparably, and then Simon’s hands were fumbling at the buttons on his shirt.
Mimicking his movements without ever taking his mouth off of Simon’s, Clint propped himself on one elbow and set about yanking at Simon’s shirt, unbuttoning the first few before he got impatient and pulled the shirt apart, the last few buttons popping off and scattering. Simon huffed a laugh against Clint’s mouth.
“Impatient,” he remarked, his voice low and heated as he pushed Clint back far enough that he could strip the shirt off.
“I can slow down,” Clint offered, sitting back on his heels. He tossed his own shirt aside and then trailed just his fingertips across Simon’s chest, brushing across nipples and down to trace his abs. Simon’s chest was almost unreal, just as attractive - hell, more attractive - in Clint’s bed as he had been on the sunny beach. Up close, his left arm was practically a work of art, warm to the touch and fully articulated, and Clint could see the join of where it was connected to his shoulder, perfectly fitted to his body. There was old, white scarring around the edges, but it didn’t look painful, and Simon didn’t even pause when Clint let his fingers take a detour to explore before moving on, down his ribs and across the smoother skin of his side. Clint paused at the waist of Simon’s trousers, then deliberately pressed his hand against the erection tenting the soft fabric. Just pressed down and held it there, until Simon was arching up against him.
“You want me to go slower?” Clint asked, cupping Simon’s cock. “I can go as slow as you want baby.” He gave a gentle drag from the base to the tip, making Simon’s hips jerk.
Simon made a little noise in the back of his throat. “I didn’t say impatience was a problem,” he ground out, reaching for the button on Clint’s pants. He deftly unbuttoned them, even dragged the zipper as far as Clint’s spread thighs would allow, alleviating the pressure that Clint hadn’t even realized was strangling his cock. Clint gave Simon another stroke and then lifted up on his knees, undoing Simon’s pants as well and dragging them down along with the tight black briefs he was wearing underneath. Clint had a moment of regret that he wasn’t taking this slower, because Simon deserved to be savored, but he was also achingly hard and this was just a one-night stand, not a grand romance.
Clint took the time to appreciate the view as he climbed off the bed and stripped his own pants and underwear off. Simon’s eyes flicked to the bandage on Clint’s hip, but Clint didn’t offer an explanation and Simon didn’t ask. He looked like a fantasy come to life in Clint’s bed, tanned and muscled and hard, his cock straining up towards his navel. Clint wanted his mouth on it yesterday.
He leaned over, pulling condoms and lubes out of the nightstand drawer and tossing them on the bed near the pillows, then crawled back up, pressing naked skin to Simon’s, careful to keep pressure off of the painful cut on his leg.
“Hi,” he said, grinning as he propped himself over Simon. “Come here often?”
Simon rolled his eyes again, and Clint was pretty sure the only person who had ever rolled their eyes at Clint more was Natasha.
“I haven’t come at all, yet,” Simon told him, reaching down to wrap his hand around Clint’s dick. It was warm and strong, and faintly calloused, and Clint briefly wondered how the other hand would feel, before Simon squeezed meaningfully.
“You will,” Clint reassured him. He reached for one of the condoms and tore it open with practiced ease. He gave Simon one last, biting kiss, and then he was rolling the condom down Simon’s dick and following it with his mouth.
Simon made a surprised, punched-out sound, like he hadn’t expected Clint to put his mouth on him, or like he hadn’t expected to like it, and Clint set about giving the best blow job he possibly could, alternating the pressure and suction until he settled into a rhythm that had Simon clawing at his shoulders and arching off the mattress.
Even if he was here for information or to try and ferret out Clint’s secrets, there was no way he was faking the pleasure he was experiencing. His thighs were flexed and his stomach was clenched, and every noise Clint tore out of his throat felt like a hard-won victory. Clint fumbled at the sheets until he managed to get his hand around the lube, pulling it back towards his chest. He released Simon’s cock with a filthy sound, then propped his chin on Simon’s hip. Simon lifted his head, his chest heaving, to glare balefully down at Clint.
“Can I fuck you?” Clint asked, without preamble.
Simon let out a shuddery breath, his head flopping back onto the mattress again as he made a wrecked noise. “Yeah,” he said, and Clint could see his throat working as he swallowed. “Yes, please.”
That was all Clint needed to hear, and he lowered his mouth back onto Simon’s cock even as he fumbled the cap on the lube and squeezed a probably unreasonable amount onto his fingers. He rubbed it between his fingertips, warming it at least a little, then reached down to press at the clenched muscle of Simon’s ass. Clint rubbed tight circles there until Simon’s thighs unclenched and his body relaxed as he breathed into it, and then Clint was able to slide a finger in easily, groaning around the cock in his mouth at the tight, wet heat of it.
“Fuck,” Simon breathed above him, sounding winded and punch drunk, and Clint pressed the advantage, sucking hard at his cock as he stroked him from the inside, curling his fingertip as he searched for the soft, sensitive spot inside Simon’s body that would make this worth it. When Simon gave a shocked little gasp, Clint knew he’d found it, and he doubled down on the motion. Simon was arching into his mouth and rocking back onto his hand in a series of jerky motions, like he couldn’t decide which sensation he liked better, and there was another breathy little sound when Clint slid a second finger in beside the first.
“Okay?” Clint asked, easing off with his mouth and gentling his fingers a little. “Or is this too fast?”
The glare Simon gave him could have peeled paint, but Clint just grinned, crooking his fingers again and making Simon’s eyes flutter closed. It was really unfair how hot the guy looked, even when he seemed to be contemplating murder. Clint managed to work a third finger into Simon’s body with only a little resistance, just until Simon took a deep breath and seemed to force himself to relax into, while Clint dragged his tongue over his balls and sucked kisses up the hard line of his dick.
“I’m good,” Simon finally panted, reaching down to pull at Clint’s shoulder. “I’m good, just fuck me.”
“Now who’s impatient?” Clint said, grinning, but he obligingly moved up until he was poised above Simon and reaching for a fresh condom.
Simon rolled his eyes again, and Clint decided he was going to fuck the sass right out of him, the only eye rolling that was going to happen from here on out was Simon’s eyes rolling back in pleasure. He tore the condom in his hand open with his teeth and slipped it on quickly, spreading what was left of the lube on his hand over himself. He used the other hand to press Simon’s leg out and up, until he was bent at the hips and his knee was nearly on his shoulder, and then Clint worked the head of his cock into Simon’s body.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he managed, when Simon finally relaxed around him and let him slip inside, when he was being squeezed by tight muscle and surrounded by impossible heat. “I think I’m gonna die.”
Simon smirked up at him and shifted his hips so that Clint slipped a little farther inside. “Not today,” he said, like that was some kind of inside joke. He wrapped his other leg around Clint’s waist and gave a tug, pulling him in even deeper. “Today you’re gonna fuck me.”
Clint eased back and then thrust forward, sinking a little deeper each time he thrust, until he was shoving himself as far as he could go and wishing it was farther, that he could push his entire self into Simon and just stay there forever. Simon was writhing underneath him, arching his back and pulling Clint in with his thigh and the heel of his foot, begging for it in all but words, and Clint wanted to deliver. He ignored the sharp pain in his hip with the ease of someone who’d ignored far worse injuries for far less pleasurable reasons, rolling his cock into Simon in smooth, even strokes, angling to make it the best possible experience for both of them.
It was so tight and hot and good that it was all Clint could do to focus on making it good for Simon and not coming immediately, surrounded as he was by excruciating pleasure. Simon looked as incredible as he felt, arching into Clint’s body and covered in a thin sheen of sweat. He had his lower lip tucked between his teeth and his eyes nearly shut, just the glint of them under his lashes watching Clint. Clint pushed his knee up even higher, until Simon was bent nearly double, and shoved his hips forward, hard and sharp, and Simon keened underneath him, like Clint’d finally managed to get the angle just right.
He reached between them, gripping Simon’s cock and divesting it of the now-unnecessary condom and tossing it aside so that he could wrap his fist around his bare cock and jerk him off in time with his thrusts.
Simon groaned, low and strangled in his throat, his head arching back to expose his throat and Clint leaned forward to bite at the smooth expanse of skin.
Something about the change in position or Clint’s teeth in his skin must have really done it for Simon because he made a high-pitched sound and then his entire body clenched up as he spilled all over Clint’s hand and his own stomach. He dragged Clint right over the edge with him as he squeezed down impossibly tighter in rippling shudders. It was mind-numbing bliss, a few precious seconds of forgetfulness brought on by a wave of intense pleasure, and Clint enjoyed every blank, deliciously satisfying moment of it.
He held himself up, poised over Simon, for long minutes, until he could breathe evenly again, and then he eased out and off of him, rolling onto his side. Simon let his leg slump onto the bed, hissing a little at the stretch of muscle. They didn’t touch, just lay side by side on the mattress, close enough that the steaming heat of their overworked bodies could be felt even without skin contact, and then when Clint’s heart rate returned to normal, he levered himself off the bed and into the bathroom.
Clint deliberately left the door open. He could see Simon in the mirror, still sprawled across the now-wrecked bedding, with come splattered across his chest. He looked absolutely shattered, loose and slack on the bed, like he didn’t have a care in the world. Clint ran warm water over a couple of washcloths, wiping himself down with one and tossing the used condom in the bathroom trash can, and then taking the other back into the main room to hand to Simon.
Simon took it with a knowing look, wiping down his own chest and thighs, before handing it back. Clint tossed it into the tub without really looking, and then stretched until his back cracked, his entire body throbbing with satisfaction.
“You’re bleeding,” Simon said, levering himself up on his elbows and nodding towards Clint’s hip.
Sure enough, the previously white bandage was stained with dark red spots, but Clint just shrugged. “All bleeding stops eventually.”
Simon snorted at him in response. “You should probably take a look at that.” He sat up, scratching at the edge of his throat, where Clint had left a dark purple mark. “And I can take a hint, no need to let me down gently,” he added, smiling like this was the most fun he’d had all night. “I can see myself out.”
Finally it was Clint’s turn to roll his eyes. “I’m not exactly throwing you out on the street,” he pointed out. “I never even said you had to go.”
The fact he’d been planning to didn’t need to be mentioned.
“I can read a room,” Simon assured him, reaching for his discarded pants. He hitched them up over his hips but didn’t bother with the button before he stepped in close to Clint and pulled him down into a deep, unhurried kiss. “Something to remember me by,” Simon said, grabbing his shirt as he backed away, and then Clint watched him saunter out the door, still half naked and sporting the marks Clint had left on his skin.
Clint didn’t think he’d be forgetting him anytime soon.
Chapter 2
Notes:
ETA: squadrickchestopher very kindly took time out of their own day to recreate Bucky's Powerpoint for all of our enjoyment - sound on for best results! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m_4WH-BOdAXdencnvTLwVMrJrgo0A61z/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for the giggle, friend!
Chapter Text
He also didn’t see Simon anytime soon, despite his subtle and less-than-subtle attempts. Clint went back to the hotel bar both nights he was in Sardinia, and to the same beach as well, forgoing his usual attempts to vary his routine and not be in the same place twice, but saw neither hide nor hair of the man.
Whose name wasn’t even Simon, Clint knew, but he hadn’t got any other name for him.
He hadn’t got his room number either which, if Clint were more honest with himself or perhaps put to extensive torture, he might have admitted considering the idea of turning up there, ready, willing, and eager to have another go.
He’d put the stitches back in his hip, after all, a bit tighter the second time, and it would be a long time before he forgot the tight clutch of Simon’s body, or the way his back arched and his eyelids fluttered when he came.
When Clint packed up to leave, however, he had a whole new reason to wish he’d got more information, and a whole new way in which Simon was unforgettable.
The micro SIM card Clint had taken great pains to steal wasn’t between the pages of the Bible when he went looking for it. He tore through the thing, eventually turning it upside down and shaking it out over the bed in desperation, but the small blue card didn’t fall out onto the duvet.
Clint then tore through his room - he checked his toiletries, the lining of his jacket, inside his shoes and still came up empty. He was frantic and frustrated, angry and kicking himself for his own stupidity when he stumbled across an identical blue card tucked back into the sewn-lining of his suitcase. Clint sat on the edge of the bed and eyed it suspiciously, flipping it between his fingers.
It wasn’t his card.
He knew that instinctively, had known it as soon as it turned up where he knew he hadn’t put it. Clint was a lot of things - including occasionally forgetful - but not about work, never about work, and he feigned much more incompetence than he actually suffered from because it suited him. It made other people - even the people he worked with - underestimate him in ways that gave him the upper hand.
But he also knew it wasn’t his card, because Clint had dropped his card not long after Tony handed it to him, and then he’d scraped up the side of it picking it up off of the concrete floor of the weapons room.
This card was pristine, and absolutely identical to the standard SHIELD-issue data SIMs that all the agents used.
Someone had done serious homework.
Clint picked the Bible back up, thumbing through it more meticulously now. He didn’t find anything unusual until he hit the New Testament, and there, in Ephesians, someone had meticulously circled a single verse in black, waxy grease pencil - the same kind of grease pencil Clint carried on jobs because it would write on nearly anything, a habit he’d picked up from Natasha.
He who steals must steal no longer; but rather he must labor, performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to share with one who has need.
He laughed. God help him, Fury was going to fire him, Nat was going to murder him, and Tony was never, ever going to let him live it down, but Clint laughed himself nearly sick over the circled words. There were tears pricking at his eyes when he finally stopped chuckling, and he tossed the Bible into his luggage, even though he knew there was no way Simon - and it had to have been Simon, there was no other explanation - had left any evidence behind.
Clint carefully repacked his things, hanging the dinner jacked in a garment bag and tucking his toiletries away. The SIM card went into an RFID-protective sleeve and into his wallet where airport security would hopefully not be interested in it, and then he checked out of the hotel. The entire flight back to New York found Clint ping-ponging between existential dread and a kind of black humor that had him snickering at inopportune moments, all of it intertwined with a kind of residual anxiety he couldn’t shake.
He had fucked up.
He had fucked up in a major way, and Clint prided himself on completing his missions professionally. He’d never failed to complete a mission, not even the one that was supposed to have been a milk-run with Natasha, ascertaining whether or not he was fit for Level 7 SHIELD agent promotion. It had been in Budapest, and they’d both been shot, and Clint and Natasha had half-dragged, half-supported one another getting the hell out of dodge despite copious bleeding and even more copious swear words, but Clint had done his part and done it well enough to earn Fury’s respect.
And now this.
Clint sighed, tried to drift off as his plane took him swiftly over the Atlantic, but mostly failed.
He landed in New York with serious jetlag, hours of debrief ahead of him, and a SIM card that wasn’t his own. He had no idea what it even contained, because he hadn’t brought his laptop on the mission with him. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have risked opening the file without Tony or one of his other tech geniuses, like Parker, around to at least back him up. He took a taxi straight to SHIELD headquarters, not even stopping to stow his carry-on case, simply dropping it in the locker room before taking the elevator to Natasha’s office.
“I fucked up,” he announced, striding in without knocking, and she peered at him over her computer screen with a frown.
“Explain.”
He brandished the SIM card at her. “This isn’t mine.”
“What do you mean it’s not yours?” She leaned back in the chair and observed him cooly. “It’s a SHIELD-issue data card.”
Clint stopped lurking in the doorway and walked over to collapse in the chair across from her desk instead. “It looks like a SHIELD-issue data card, but it’s not mine. Trust me, I know.”
“What’s on it?” she asked, holding her hand out.
He dropped the little card into her palm. “Hell if I know,” he said, “but I’m betting it’s not the data I got in Macau. I haven’t tried to open it, but I know it isn’t the one Tony gave me when I left. Mine had a scrape on the side.”
She turned it over in her hand looking at it closely. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
Natasha inserted the data card into a multi-reader attached to her computer and began typing furiously. After a few seconds she frowned and then glanced over at Clint. “What’s your password for the card?”
He rattled off the series of letters and numbers that had been given to him for the assignment, and he watched as she dutifully entered them in. Then she did it again. And once more, just to be sure.
“I told you it wasn’t mine,” Clint sighed.
Telling her hadn’t meant he hadn’t hoped to be wrong. It sucked to be right, at least in this particular instance.
Natasha stood up and walked around the desk, beckoning for Clint to follow her, She strode to the elevators and then overrode the codes so that it would take them straight to the lab level, where Tony could meet them.
“Tell me what happened.”
Clint shrugged. “I don’t know. I-” he swallowed, then took a deep breath. “I met someone - a man - while I was in Sardinia, and we had… an encounter. But he was never out of my sight, he didn’t sleep over, and I only saw him the one time. He’s the only one it could have been, but damned if I know how he knew I even had the card, much less where to find it. I hid it in the Bible.”
She snorted at that. “It’s a good trick,” she agreed. “Though obviously not foolproof. Fury isn’t going to be happy.”
Clint knew that, didn’t need Natasha to tell him. “I know,” he sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Natasha laid a hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. From her, that was practically a hug. “Everyone messes up sometimes, Barton. Suck it up, put on your big girl panties, and let’s go find out what we’re dealing with.”
Squaring his shoulders up under her touch, Clint straightened out of his slouch just as the elevator dinged and the doors slid smoothly open.
Natasha hummed the funeral march under her breath as they walked into the barely-controlled chaos that was Tony’s lab.
Tony Stark - genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist as the papers often referred to him, among other more unsavory things - was also the unofficial, deeply classified head of SHIELD’s R&D department. He plied the agents with the good toys, the cutting edge technology that kept them alive, and the weapons that kept their enemies less so. He recruited the best and the brightest, often snatching them from places like MIT and Cal-Tech even before they graduated. Peter Parker was one such acquisition, and Clint wasn’t entirely sure that Tony wasn’t paying for the kid to fly back and forth for classes even as he worked on developing tech for SHIELD. His latest contribution was some kind of sticky webbing that immobilized its victims without injuring them and could be shot from a distance.
Half the lab guys were now calling him Spider-Man, but Parker seemed to thrive under the attention.
“Barton,” Fury barked, striding across the room while his duster flapped in the non-existent breeze. “About time you brought your ass back here, I hope you enjoyed your little vacation.”
Clint swallowed hard. He had enjoyed his vacation, and that was part of the problem now wasn’t it?
“We may have a situation,” Natasha said cooly, holding the SIM card up for inspection.
Fury sighed. “I hate situations.”
**
The three of them followed Tony into an enclosed conference room off of the main lab. It had holographic tables and projectors, and seats with lumbar support and it was, ostensibly, for Tony’s use with the senior lab partners. The idea had been that they’d make it a collaborative room, a place where ideas could be bandied about, but both Tony and his partner in the science division, Bruce Banner, tended to do better in real time on the workshop floor than in a closed-off room, so the conference table saw little use.
Today, however, it was going to see plenty.
“Gimme,” Tony said, holding out grabby hands and nearly missing when Nat tossed the data drive to him. “Looks like one of ours,” Tony muttered to himself. Just as he was getting ready to insert the card into the reader that was built into the table, Steve Rogers - Nick’s secretary, supposedly, but Clint had always suspected he was a bit more than that - slipped inside and shut the door behind him. He was slight, blonde, and thin, with a whole host of health issues that Clint could pick out just from looking at him, but he also had a keen mind and a witty sense of humor and took absolutely no shit off of anyone.
Clint kinda half-loved the guy, when he wasn’t the one Steve wouldn’t take any shit from.
If Steve didn’t want you getting at Nick’s office, you didn’t get at Nick’s office - simple as that.
Sighing, Clint slumped further into his chair. It couldn’t be good if Steve were here to take notes.
Tony slotted the card into the appropriate reader and then began typing furiously, using his skill to try and break through the passcode function on the card.
“So,” Natasha said, and Clint tensed, “tell us more about this man you met.”
Clint tried unsuccessfully to melt into his chair. Fury stared at him in frank disbelief, and Steve let a quiet snort.
“Uh, he was… kind of average height, like 5’9”, brunette, muscular build, and uh-”
“Did he have any identifying marks?” Fury interrupted, looking more put out than usual.
“Um, he had had a metal arm?” Clint flinched, waiting for their response. He was expecting some kind of reaction, but the stark silence and absolute stillness of the room that his announcement brought wasn’t it. “What?” he said, glancing around at the pained expression on everyone’s face - except Steve who looked vaguely smug and triumphant and was trying to hide it by glaring down at the tablet in his hand.
“Only you, Barton,” Natasha said, sounding exasperated.
“What’d I do?” he asked, baffled. He’d never heard anything about an enemy operative with a metal arm - if he had he’d obviously have steered clear of the handsome man on the beach. Clint was reckless but he wasn’t stupid. Sure, he’d suspected the other man was some kind of intelligence agent, but he hadn’t known, and knowing was different from suspecting.
“Congratulations,” she said, a mixture of wistful and annoyed that Clint didn’t entirely understand, “you met the Winter Soldier.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Clint said, eyes widening.
Tony gave a disgruntled huff, then scooted out of the way for Steve of all people to try his hand at the file.
Steve gave the blinking cursor a long, contemplative stare, then reached down and keyed in a rapid series of keys before hitting enter with a flourish.
Whatever Steve had entered, the card responded smoothly, opening to what would be a directory page if it had contained all of the information Clint had downloaded from the computer he’d hacked in Macau.
Instead, it contained a single file, entitled SHIELD’s Annual Performance Review, and it was a PowerPoint document.
If it were anyone else - any other agent in Clint’s predicament - he would have laughed. As it was, he could only feel searing embarrassment and dread as he watched his career dissolve in front of his eyes.
The Winter Soldier was a legend within the intelligence community. Everyone had heard whispers of his existence, knew that he’d been trained by the best, had more completed assassinations under his belt than any other operative - hell, he had damn near killed Nick Fury on a sunny afternoon in Washington, DC without even being properly identified - and every agent both dreaded and worshiped his reputation. The Soldier was what most agents aspired to - deadly, anonymous, and overall respected.
He was also a ghost story - no one knew who he was, where he’d come from, or who had trained him.
At least if Clint was going to have his career nuked from orbit, he’d been demolished by the best.
It was a small comfort.
Steve couldn’t seem to hide his glee as he clicked on the file and let it load.
The PowerPoint opened with a truly horrendous midi file of Vitamin C’s Graduation , and a title page in Comic fucking Sans.
Tony groaned theatrically.
SHIELD’s Annual Performance Review the slide read and - when Steve clicked through - by retired Agent Barnes transitioned in on a horrible swirl and a door-slamming sound.
“Oh god,” Tony said, burying his face in his hands.
Steve clicked again.
The next slide was in searing neon colors, the title in rainbow lettering.
Quality of Agent Barton:
Clint slid lower in his seat, his face suffused with heat. He didn’t think it could get more embarrassing than being rumbled by what he thought was a junior agent, but this-
This was fucking awful .
Steve clicked again.
9/10
That was honestly better than Clint had expected, all things considered. Until Steve clicked, and then a bullet point list began to appear.
Pros:
- Excellent infiltration skills
- Efficient data retrievement
- Professional concealment location (too bad I invented that trick)
- Top notch oral skills
Clint let his head drop into his hands.
Tony choked down some kind of high-pitched sound, and Steve let out a snicker.
Then he clicked, and the sound of typing filled the room.
Cons:
- Sleeps like the dead
- Snores slightly
If there was a god out there and they were listening, they would strike Clint dead in this very moment. He’d struggled with his hearing nearly his whole life, and he’d dedicated half his career to proving it wasn’t a hindrance in the field, that he could perform as well or better than every other agent at SHIELD even with hearing aids, and now he’d found out that he’d slept through being rumbled by another agent.
Fucking busted eardrums.
The slide transitioned.
Quality of Honeypot Operation: 10/10
(thanks for the know your audience tip, Widow, you were right)
Next to him, Natasha made a small, slightly amused noise.
Pros:
- A good time was had by all parties
- Information was retrieved successfully
Cons:
- Lacking in afterglow
Clint snorted. He couldn’t actually argue that one, and at least it made him look a tiny bit better.
The slide transitioned again, this time with the god-awful whoosh noise that reminded Clint vaguely of the time he’d tried out community college.
Quality of SHIELD Overall: a poor 4/10
Nick actually growled at this. Clint wondered just how often the Soldier pulled stunts like this that Fury was so riled up already. He himself felt only vaguely affronted; it wasn’t like Clint had made a good showing of SHIELD agents on this op, after all. He was fairly certain he deserved the shitty rating.
Pros:
- None - points awarded only for cool gadgetry
- The garrotte watch was especially spy-noir
- Tell Tony to work on the dagger shoes, the left mechanism is sticky
Cons:
- Not providing agent of record with crucial op knowledge such as the fact that a rival operative was in the area and looking for the same information.
- We’ve talked about this, Nick, get it together
Clint couldn’t really contain the snort of amusement that escaped him. Fury was notorious for withholding what he considered need-to-know information, preferring to keep his agents in the dark, and in the past Clint hadn’t questioned that but-
In this particular instance, he was more than a little concerned.
The slideshow ended with a sad-kazoo sound that made Clint laugh, and Fury gave him the stink-eye.
“You think this is funny, Agent Barton?”
Clint shrugged. Honestly, yeah, he kind of thought it was a little bit funny, but Fury wasn’t going to be happy if he said that. But seriously, he’d got made, seduced, and robbed by the best spy-assassin in the business, and then said spy-assassin had sent them a grade-school PowerPoint critique.
It was kind of funny.
The fact that he was probably about to be fired wasn’t funny. But Clint had been through enough shit in his life that he was pretty sure he’d be able to manage something else. Hitman, maybe. Circus performer - he’d done that one and been pretty good at it, actually.
“Motherfucker,” Fury grumbled, climbing to his feet.
“Language,” Steve said, primly, as he collected his tablet and stood as well.
“I’ve heard you say worse before breakfast, Rogers,” Fury said, turning to leave. “Barton, debrief with Romanoff, keep your goddamn pants on from now on, and turn your weapons in before you go home.”
Clint blinked at his back. “I’m not- I’m not fired?”
He didn’t want to question Fury’s notoriously-lacking mercy, but this was far too easy.
Natasha rolled her eyes.
Fury glanced back over his shoulder. “Did you want to be?”
“Not… really, no.”
“Good, because your next mission starts in seventy-two hours. I suggest you sleep off your jet lag.”
Chapter Text
When Clint reported back to work three days later, Steve was smirking at him over the desk while he waited for Fury to finish up whatever conference call he was on. Clint had already endured all the smirks he could stand, to be perfectly honest. Tony hadn’t even tried to keep a straight face when Clint deposited his weapons stash in the armory, though he’d done a fair bit of grumbling over the dagger shoes. In between weapons commentary, he’d kept up a running one-sided dialogue of speculation about the Winter Soldier, AKA Bucky Barnes, AKA a file Clint didn’t have enough clearance to open. Tony had met the guy once apparently, before he’d gone rogue, and Tony had all sorts of salacious ideas for what he thought Clint and Barnes had got up to.
Natasha wasn’t any better, making sly comments and giving Clint appraising looks. She hadn’t said much, but what she had said had been weirdly approving. Clint didn’t know what to make of it.
And now Steve Rogers, Fury’s goddamn secretary, was giving him funny looks.
Clint slumped lower in his seat and stared at the ceiling instead of Steve’s face.
“He was a good Agent, you know?” Steve said, into the silence.
“Huh?” Clint sat up a little straighter, turning to look at Steve again.
“Barnes. He was a good agent. One of the best.” Instead of a smirk, Steve now had a grimly determined look on his face, and he glanced behind him to check Fury’s door was still closed.
“Yeah, I gathered,” Clint said, rolling his eyes.
“Don’t take it personally,” Steve told him, quirking his lips a little. “He trained Natasha, and she trained you. Just because he taught her everything she knows doesn’t mean he taught her everything he knows.”
Which… that was fair.
“Anyway,” Steve continued into Clint’s contemplative silence. “He was a good Agent, and what happened to him was not his fault.” Steve said it vehemently, like it was a point he’d argued so often that he was already prepared to have a fight about it.
Then again, Clint had always thought Steve Rogers had been born to fight the world. Rogers was slim and pretty and Clint liked making him blush by flirting outrageously, but he was also absolutely ready to throw down at any moment. He was notorious for it. Steve had hit at least three people with a tray in the cafeteria, to the point where they’d swapped the heavy metal trays for a lightweight acrylic alternative. Then he’d unionized the cafeteria staff for higher wages, seeing as how SHIELD had been able to afford brand new trays. Agent Rumlow had given him a hard time in the locker room once, and in complete and total coincidence Steve had given him a dislocated knee at the company softball game by planting himself in front of Rumlow’s slide into second. Steve had ended up with twelve stitches in his calf, but he’d somehow still managed to emerge as the victorious half of that altercation.
So Clint was well-aware of Steve’s propensity for fights, and he recognized all the signs of Steve gearing up to have one.
Clint was in no mood to fight with Steve Rogers about anything, especially not a former agent that Clint had been seduced and then embarrassed by.
“I don’t actually know what happened to him,” Clint pointed out, hoping to derail the argument. “I just know he humiliated me in front of the entire agency.”
“Not the entire agency,” Steve hedged. “Just four people.”
“Just the four most important people.”
Steve sighed. “It wasn’t about you.”
“Right,” Clint said bitterly. “I was just collateral damage.”
That got him a sharp-eyed look and a snappish retort. “You made a bad call, but you weren’t collateral damage. If anyone can say that, it’s Barnes.”
Clint cocked his head at Steve, intrigued. Obviously the guy had had a metal prosthetic, so something had happened to him, but his record was sealed seven ways to Sunday and Clint hadn’t been able to open it even with Natasha’s passwords. It was locked to everyone but the Director.
“Well?” he said, after several long moments of silence.
“Well what?” Steve grumbled, now squinting at his computer screen over a pair of thin-rimmed glasses.
“Well, what happened to him?” Clint couldn’t tell if Steve was fucking with him at this point or if he’d crossed some sort of line.
Steve sighed and put his glasses down before rubbing the bridge of his nose. He swivelled his chair so that it faced Clint a little more and settled his elbows on the desk. He regarded Clint for a long moment, as though weighing him up, then glanced at the phone and the little red light that indicated Fury was still on his call.
“Barnes went on a deep cover op in Eastern Europe - one of those little countries that’s been swallowed up and spit out by the USSR and Russia and surrounding areas so many times that it’s had half a dozen names in the last twenty years and is always ripe for unrest.”
Clint nodded. He’d been on a fair few of those himself.
“He went off the grid, but no one took much notice - it’s not unusual for any agent to fall out of contact for a bit, and it wasn’t unusual for him to disappear entirely for long stretches of time. It was months before anyone thought to look for him, and when they did it was like he didn’t exist.”
Steve sounded like he was trying to be matter-of-fact, but under that was a thread of anger and grief so thick that it made Clint’s chest hurt. He rubbed slightly at his sternum as Steve continued.
“About nine months after his last contact with a handler, Barnes turned up - in DC, masked, with a metal arm, and trying to kill Director Fury with a rocket launcher.”
“Holy shit,” Clint breathed.
Nodding grimly, Steve pressed his lips together. “He’d been held by the Red Room the whole time - lost his arm in some kind of explosion early on, that was how he’d got captured - and they spent months perfecting a program designed to ‘remodel’ the brain on him.”
“Brainwashing,” Clint croaked. Red Room was a notorious terrorist organization. SHIELD was constantly trying to infiltrate and exterminate it, but they hadn’t successfully embedded an agent, ever, as far as he knew. Apparently they’d stopped trying after Barnes.
Steve gave him a jerky nod.
“Brainwashing,” he confirmed. “Though of course they don’t call it that - brainwashing isn’t real, after all. Fury faked his own death. Natasha managed to apprehend Barnes and he spent weeks in a holding cell here being deprogrammed. When it was all said and done, SHIELD offered him a ‘retirement’ package and sent him on his way.”
“They gave him a retirement package?” Clint asked in disbelief. The guy had been imprisoned, probably tortured, definitely brainwashed, had lost an arm and they’d given him an early retirement. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
The look Steve was giving him was miles away from anything Clint had ever seen on his face before. Clint had seen him annoyed, downright pissed off, righteously angry, bored, so-done-with-this-world, and delightfully embarrassed by off-the-cuff innuendo, but he’d never seen him look like he did now. He was evaluating Clint like an entirely new species, like Clint had said something profound or done something Steve hadn’t thought him capable of.
“Interesting,” Steve said, almost like he was talking to himself, and Clint felt himself blushing for some inexplicable reason.
Before he could comment on it, Fury walked out of his office, looked at the two of them, and barked, “Barton, are you being inappropriate with my secretary again? Are we gonna have to go to HR?”
Steve snorted as Clint stumbled through a choked-out, “No, sir, of course not.”
**
Clint’s next mission took him to Budapest - a city he both loved and hated, especially after the mission with Natasha - where he was doing nothing more exciting than keeping an eye on the party-girl daughter of one of the bosses of the local underground crime ring - one which was rumored to be associated with Ten Rings. It’d been a boring assignment overall, and Clint would have thought he was being punished, except that SHIELD had put him up in a nicer-than-usual hotel and given him a spending budget beyond what he normally expected and he was starting to think it was actually some kind of fucked up apology from Fury.
He was starting to think that, right up until he was propping himself up on a crumbling brick wall in one of the impromptu pub ruins that popped up all over the city and suddenly found himself being crowded by a very hot, very familiar body.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Simon - no, Barnes - said, low and deep and directly into Clint’s ear. He pressed even closer when Clint stiffened up in response, though he was careful not to block Clint’s line of sight. “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
“It’s a gun,” Clint ground out, though it was nothing of the kind. Clint’s gun was in an unobtrusive holster at the base of his spine, not shoved into the front of his jeans like some kind of amateur. Although now that Barnes had him shoved against the wall, it wasn’t like he could reach it. Still, Tony hadn’t left him unprepared and the fancy Rolex on his wrist actually had a taze function Clint was fairly certain he could still activate. “Have you come to embarrass me some more, Barnes?”
Barnes leaned back a bit to look up into Clint’s face, his eyes narrowed. “Someone’s been telling stories, I see.” Clint read the words on his lips more than he heard them over the pounding bass of the club music.
Clint shrugged, the rough brick scraping through the thin linen of his shirt. “Not many.”
“That’s too bad,” Barnes said, leaning back in until his words were ghosting over Clint’s skin again and being picked up perfectly by his aids, like Barnes knew exactly how to pitch his tone for Clint to catch it. “They’re very good stories, or so I’ve heard.”
Almost against his will, Clint snorted out a laugh.
“But no,” Barnes continued, his fingertips sliding between the hem of Clint’s shirt and the edge of his jeans. “I’ve come to return something I borrowed. A little act of good faith, you might say.” His fingers dipped between Clint’s waistband and his skin, brushing low enough to make Clint suck in air through his nose and his dick perk up in his pants. A small, hard square of plastic pressed up against his skin, caught in the edge of his briefs, and then Barnes’ hand darted just a bit lower until it grazed the head of his cock. Clint’s hips jerked involuntarily into the touch.
Barnes scraped his teeth along Clint’s jaw, sucked a mark onto his neck, and then slipped away before Clint could get a hold on him, melting into the crowd and out of sight like a ghost.
When Clint got his breathing back under control, his target back in his sights, and his drink steadied in his hand, he reached down to pull out the offensive little piece of plastic. Holding it up in the faded neon lights of the club, he turned it over in his fingers to find it was the same SIM card he’d had in Sardinia, complete with the scrape down the side.
Clint sighed aggressively. Goddammit, Barnes.
**
“Bucky,” Barnes breathed into his ear. “I think we’re on a first name basis now, don’t you Clint?”
It was much quieter in their current environment. Gone was the pulsing bass and the flashing neon lights. Instead, Clint was kitted out in tactical gear, ass deep in an AIM base in Canada with a pocketful of stolen science notes and chemical samples. He’d been making his way towards the south entrance - where he’d disabled the cameras when he first slithered his way inside through the ventilation system - and his planned exit.
Right up until he’d been hustled into a supply closet by a black-clad and similarly outfitted familiar figure.
“Barnes,” Clint had growled, just after he’d tried to stab the man and experienced the teeth-jarring sensation of metal glancing off metal when Barnes blocked the blow with his left arm. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
It’d been nearly two months since Clint had last seen him in the club in Budapest, and he’d returned to base with his SIM card still full of the exact data he’d stolen in Macau. It was compromised, of course, because Barnes had had it and they couldn’t prove it hadn’t been tampered with, but so far all of it had been paying out as expected and they were cautiously incorporating into their known files. In fact, the card was precisely how Clint had ended up in this exact base, actually, though he hadn’t expected to see Barnes here. Maybe he should have, after their last encounter.
“Same as you, sweetheart, just picking up a few odds and ends.” He held up a compact padded bag, which meant his test tubes weren’t jangling around in his pockets. Clint gritted his teeth in annoyance. How come Barnes had all the cool toys?
“I’ve got smarter friends,” Barnes said, his smile a flash of white teeth in the darkness, which meant Clint must have accidentally made the comment out loud. “But I told you to call me Bucky.”
Clint huffed a laugh. “Bucky, then, since we seem to be seeing so much of each other.”
“Mmmm,” Barnes - Bucky - agreed. “I’ve seen just about every inch of you.” He leaned in close, ghosting his mouth over Clint’s, not even a true kiss, more the impression of one. “By the way, I’ve wired the whole place to blow in six minutes, so you might want to hustle. And take the east entrance, the south one’s been compromised.”
Before Clint could respond, Bucky was pressing their mouths together in a hot, demanding kiss. He kissed like he was desperate for it, nipping at Clint’s bottom lip until he groaned and gasped, and then Bucky licked into mouth like a tease, a combination of short, shallow dips and longer, more languorous tangling of tongues.
When he eased back, both of them were panting for breath, and Bucky’s mouth was swollen even in the darkness of the supply room.
“Five minutes left,” Bucky told him, reaching down to cup Clint’s ass and rock their erections together, and then he disappeared, darting down the hallway opposite of the direction he’d advised Clint to take.
Clint briefly considered trying to follow, but he didn’t know for sure where Bucky was planning to go out, and he couldn’t risk getting lost. He debated heading back to the south entrance just to spite the other man, but the east entrance was closer anyway. Sighing, Clint reached down to adjust himself in his pants before exiting the closet and heading to the left and towards the east door.
Why did he always seem to leave these encounters with a fucking boner?
**
The dive bar had a terrible cover band and equally terrible beer, but all of that just made Clint feel that much more at home. And actually he was in Brooklyn, so he really was home, except for the fact that he was in the bar for work and not for fun. Which was too bad, because it was really Clint’s kind of scene, especially with the ancient jukebox and the lack of microbrews. It was going to be a shame when he got kicked out for the fight he was about to have.
Clint was leaning against the bar with a Miller Lite in hand and his feet planted firmly on the floor when a face he never expected to see in Brooklyn - but had started to expect to see on missions - walked through the door. His last four missions had included encounters with Barnes, though two of them had only been at a distance, with Clint catching sight of his familiar jawline and grey-blue eyes in his rifle scope.
It gave him a weird swirling feeling in his stomach, watching Bucky walk into a bar on Clint’s turf, like he was just there to have a shitty beer and play darts.
Clint wondered if Bucky liked darts.
He sipped his beer and firmly quashed the thought.
There was work to do, after all.
Bucky caught sight of him, but didn’t look the least bit surprised; he just changed direction as though he’d come here planning to meet Clint, like this was some kind of date or something. He was wearing thigh-hugging button-fly jeans and a band t-shirt for The Kinks, along with some kind of sleeve or something over his left arm. It looked exactly like his right, hiding the matte black metal perfectly, except for how it was covered with the kind of tattoos that Clint itched to lick. They were a riot of color and design that Clint could spend hours exploring with his mouth, if given the opportunity, and boy did he want to be given the opportunity.
Plus, Bucky absolutely strutted across the room, like he was on a mission to either murder someone or fuck their brains out.
Maybe both.
A large part of Clint hoped it was option B and also that it was him.
Clint didn’t even say anything when Bucky arrived at the bar next to him - close enough to touch but not quite doing it - just arched an eyebrow as he lifted his bottle of beer to his mouth. Bucky didn’t say anything either, other than to motion at the bartender to get himself a beer. When Clint had drained half the bottle, he set it on the bartop with a thunk and leaned on his elbow to give Bucky an evaluating once-over.
“What’s a guy like you doin’ in a place like this?” he drawled.
Bad pick-up lines seemed to be their thing, after all, even though Bucky looked perfectly at home in the bar, worn-thin cotton t-shirt, tattoos, man-bun and all.
All Clint could think about was the way Bucky’s cock had fit in his mouth, and the way his body had felt wrapped around him in Sardinia.
If Clint was being perfectly honest, it was all he’d been able to think about for months. It was what he jerked off to in the shower and what he dreamed about when he woke up half-hard and panting.
“Blind date,” Bucky said blandly, lifting a beer that was already starting to sweat in the heat of the room.
Clint snorted. “How’s that working out for you?”
Bucky gave him a once-over, taking in Clint’s ratty jeans and purple t-shirt, the bruising on his forearms from a particularly vicious fight and the healing cut on his jaw. “Not too bad from where I’m standing.” He crowded Clint a little further into the corner of the bar and the wall, inching into his personal space and resting a hand on his hip. His thumb stroked small circles on Clint’s stomach, inching the cotton of his shirt up bit by bit until he was grazing bare skin with every pass and Clint’s breath was hitching in his chest from just that small touch.
“You’re a goddamn tease,” Clint told him, unhappy with how breathy he sounded.
“It’s not a tease if I plan to deliver,” Bucky assured him, tilting his face to nose at Clint’s jaw and along his throat, pressing a kiss against his racing pulse.
Christ, he’d been in firefights that hadn’t got his heartrate up so quickly.
“Is this delivery going to happen anytime in the near future or…?” Clint asked, tilting his head a little further to give Bucky better access, while still trying to watch the door through half-lidded eyes.
“Pretty soon,” Bucky rumbled, reaching for Clint with the other hand. To his surprise, Clint could still feel the hard press of metal against his spine, no hint of a glove in between. It almost distracted him enough to ask, until Bucky bit his collarbone hard enough to make him hiss out a low groan.
“You got made three blocks back,” Bucky told him, still in that same low, sex-drenched tone, and it took Clint a precious few seconds to process the words past the sound of them.
Clint heaved an irritated sigh and shouldered Barnes off of his chest, much as he wanted him to stay and continue what he was doing. “I know,” he said, annoyed and tired of being shown up as though he weren’t perfectly capable of doing his job. “What do you think I’m doing here? Having a celebratory beer? I’m the decoy.”
Bucky’s eyebrows rose a little, and then he grinned. “Want to have a celebratory fuck when you’re done?”
Unfortunately, the tracksuit thugs who’d been pursuing Clint all over the city had brought a few more friends than Clint had anticipated, and by the time he was done trashing them and the bar, he had a knife wound that needed stitches, a concussion, two broken fingers, and no Barnes in his bed when he poured himself into it later.
Chapter 4
Notes:
SMUT AHOY
Chapter Text
Clint hated black tie affairs on general principle. He hated them because he didn’t like being stuffed into a tailored tuxedo, the atmosphere of the parties, the poor excuse for small talk, or the insufferable attendees.
He especially despised doing black tie for work, because it almost inevitably meant he was either the honeypot or the thief or, in this case, both.
Sighing, he motioned towards the bartender. “Vodka, neat.”
The target in this case was Claudine Auger - notorious socialite and social climber - who also happened to be married to Jules Auger, patrician of the arts and known associate of Red Room. Jules wasn’t present, he was off on some ‘business trip’ in Switzerland, but Claudine was also known for a healthy appetite for men, and SHIELD suspected she had some fairly damning information about her husband locked away somewhere in the house she was currently occupying.
Clint’s job, therefore, was to convince her to show him the more ‘private’ areas, and for that he needed significantly more alcohol in his bloodstream. Thankfully, the bartender deposited a glass of high-end vodka in front of him and Clint tilted it back and swallowed it swiftly, not even wincing at the burn. He was about to order another when someone jostled him from the right.
“Liquid courage?” Bucky asked, sounding amused.
Clint turned to look at him, his mouth already half-open on a snappy response, and damn near swallowed his tongue.
It wasn’t the first time Bucky Barnes had left him speechless, and Clint very much doubted it would be the last, but Bucky Barnes in a tailored, all-black tuxedo was a different beast to Bucky Barnes in jeans and a t-shirt or even a tiny pair of swim shorts.
He had his hair pulled back, tonight, slick off of his head and tied tightly at the nape of his neck, leaving his cut-glass jaw exposed. He’d shaved the perpetual layer of stubble off of it too, and the tuxedo showed off broad shoulders, a trim waist, and thighs that Clint still dreamed of dying between.
Literally or figuratively, because damn, what a way to go.
“Something like that,” Clint managed, then reached out to brush an imaginary piece of lint from Bucky’s chest, dragging his fingers across the smooth fabric and firm muscle with a little more touching than was strictly necessary. “You clean up nice,” he noted.
Bucky smirked at him, glancing down to where Clint’s fingers were just glancing off of his side before he dropped his hand to hang loosely at his hip.
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” he said, reaching out and straightening Clint’s bow tie. Unlike Bucky, it had probably needed the attention. “Though you seem to be girding your loins for something.” The hint of humor in his voice was even stronger now.
Clint glanced across the room to where Claudine - and Clint could objectively admit that she was a beautiful woman - was draped across a settee holding court. She was tall and slender and most of her best attributes had been gifted under a surgeon’s knife, but she was far from the worst person Clint had ever had to extract information from. He just wasn’t excited about it.
“I wouldn’t bother,” Bucky told him, accepting a drink Clint hadn’t realized he’d ordered from the bartender. “It’s really not worth the effort.”
Confused, Clint blinked at the wry tone and pained expression on Bucky’s face, then felt a vague sense of affront that Bucky had already-
“Please don’t tell me you’ve already cleared out the safe,” Clint said, sighing. “I’m not really in the mood to go back to work and explain to Fury how you’ve stolen the information out from underneath me. Again.”
Bucky snorted and it was the least attractive thing Clint had ever seen him do, not that he wasn’t still sex on two legs. “No,” Bucky said, once he’d cleared the whisky out of his windpipe. “Not this time.” He gave a little jerk, and Clint shoved off the bar to follow him to a quieter edge of the room, close to a dark hallway.
When they were safely ensconced by an overly-large plant, Bucky leaned against the wall and swirled the liquor in his glass thoughtfully. Clint really should have been keeping a closer eye on Claudine - working his way into her circle and asking her to dance and hopefully convincing her to take him upstairs - but he was frankly much more interested in Bucky than he was Claudine.
“A few years ago,” Bucky started, looking into the glass as though it contained all the secrets of the universe, “I met Claudine at a party just like this one, but she was a Paluzzi then.” He glanced up to smirk at Clint. “She’s traded up, since. Signore Paluzzi met with an unfortunate accident not long after.”
Danilo Paluzzi had been head of an Italian crime family, back in the early 2000s if Clint recalled his SHIELD history correctly, and he’d died when he’d drunkenly fallen off a fishing boat in 2012, just as Clint was an up-and-coming rookie SHIELD agent, long before he was being scouted for the sort of work he did now. He’d been fresh out of Carson’s and cutting a deal with Coulson, not watching crime syndicates and assassinations, but Natasha had given him a rundown of some of the biggest players when she’d first started grooming him for promotion.
There had been a load of suspicion surrounding Paluzzi’s death, but his wife hadn’t even been on the boat at the time, and she’d done the proper mourning before she’d turned around and married an even bigger crime boss.
So SHIELD watched her, but she was considered low-level. More a source of information than a threat.
But now Bucky was saying he’d done this same op before, on the same woman at a similar party.
“Does she just enjoy fucking spies?” Clint asked, trying to make it sound like idle speculation and less like he was suddenly, irrationally jealous.
It’d been months since Clint had seduced - or been seduced by - Bucky in Italy, and Clint couldn’t even pretend that what they were doing constituted anything like a relationship, though he could truthfully say there hadn’t been anyone else since his encounter with Bucky. Regardless, he certainly should not be getting worked up about an assignation several years in the past with a woman Clint didn’t even have any respect for.
He really needed another drink.
Bucky was watching him closely, and Clint hoped the play of emotions wasn’t showing on his face. “She just enjoys fucking very pretty men,” Bucky said, finally, and gave Clint a once-over that left his skin prickling under the linen and wool he had on. “I suspect she’d be happy to take you for a ride.”
Clint shuddered dramatically, and Bucky laughed.
“Luckily,” he drawled, “I have it on good authority that she never changes her keycodes and I’m betting the ones I have will work for your needs.”
“You’re just going to give me the keys to the safe?” Clint asked, both eyebrows near his hairline.
Bucky shrugged. “I’m going to give you a keycode I think will work. Call it protecting your virtue.’
Clint snorted. He hadn’t had any virtue in a long time. “Sure,” he said, “why not?” Clint already knew where the safe was, after all. Getting Claudine alone had been more ruse than anything, an excuse to get behind closed doors, to talk her into telling him what he wanted to know or, failing that, breaking into the safe while she slept.
Stepping closer, Bucky sat his now-empty glass on the plant stand and put both his hands on Clint’s shoulders, smoothing over the lapels of his tuxedo and slipping a small scrap of paper in his breast pocket, patting more than was strictly necessary. “Come find me when you’re done, hmm? I think I have a debt to settle.”
Clint’s entire body flushed, fiery hot enough that he could feel his cheeks pinking up, and Bucky smirked up at him in return. He took a step back and collected his glass before sauntering back to the bar. Clint leaned against the wall Bucky had been occupying and took several deep, cleansing breaths, before ducking down the hallway into the quiet shadows of the house.
The entire enterprise took less than ten minutes. Madame Auger’s safe was tucked away behind a crystal vase and a ridiculous portrait of her smiling serenely up at her portly, aging husband, and the code was just exactly what Bucky had promised it would be. Clint took furtive snapshots of the paper contents, uploaded the files from the small drive he found there onto his own data drive, and locked it all back up as precisely as he had found it before making his way back to the party.
Bucky was still leaning against the bar exactly as Clint had left him, looking polished and beautiful and so far out of Clint’s league it wasn’t even funny, but he looked up as Clint eased into the room, his gaze so heated Clint thought he might spontaneously combust. Clint sauntered over, making every effort to appear calm and collected as he went.
Then he tripped over his own feet and ruined the image, stumbling a little as he caught his balance.
When Clint looked up, Bucky was grinning at him, amused tinged with fond, and Clint blushed for an entirely different reason.
“Shut up,” he muttered, when he was close enough to be heard.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You were thinking it,” Clint accused.
Bucky edged in closer, until Clint could feel the heat of his body even through the layers of wool, and rested his left hand on Clint’s hip. “The only thing I’m thinking,” he murmured, low and hot, “is where the nearest secluded spot is, so I can drag you there and ruin all this posh.” He used his other hand to flick Clint’s bow tie.
The sound Clint made was embarrassing - wanton and a little high-pitched - and he swayed into Bucky’s touch. “There’s a- there’s a bathroom off of the east wing-”
Smirking, Bucky let go of him, gesturing for Clint to lead the way.
Without another word, Clint swivelled on his heel and barely constrained himself to a sedate pace as he led Bucky from the room, out through a discreet exit near the glass doors that led to the gardens, and down a deserted hallway. There were a fair few turns as Clint led them deeper into the house, but Bucky never wavered, trailing behind Clint at the same leisurely place every time Clint glanced back to look at him.
The bathroom was immaculate. It was also large and ostentatious and private, and Bucky locked the door behind them with a decisive click before backing Clint up against the counter. He bracketed him in with his arms, craning his neck up until their mouths were tangled together, searingly hot and demanding. Clint reached up, digging one hand into the hair caught at the base of Bucky’s head and the other tearing at his bow tie, ripping the knot out of it and fumbling at the buttons of his shirt.
He should be worried that Bucky had him pinned against the marble sink, leaving him no escape route. He should be more concerned that his back wasn’t to the wall, that he was locked in a small room with a notorious assassin and no exits, that Bucky was manhandling him with ease, but he wasn’t. Clint wasn’t a small man - he was 6’3” when he slumped, and years of practice with a bow and then SHIELD’s draconian training regimen meant that he had the musculature to back it up. He wasn’t slim, he wasn’t lanky, and he wasn’t small, but Bucky was maneuvering him like it was nothing, pinning him against the counter with his left arm while his right deftly unbuttoned his jacket and then reached for the button on his trousers.
Clint hauled him in closer, until their bodies were pressed together and Bucky’s hand was wedged between them, low on Clint’s abdomen but not quite as low as he wanted it to be. He spread his legs a little, slouched a little lower until he could wedge his thigh between Bucky’s and rock against him.
“Is that a gun in your pocket,” he panted against Bucky’s mouth, “or are you just happy to see me?”
Bucky tried to lean back - probably to offer a snappy retort or roll his eyes - but Clint used the grip on his hair to pull him back in, locking their mouths together and biting aggressively at Bucky’s lower lip.
God, it had been too long. Months and months since Sardinia, weeks since their impromptu meeting at the bar and they hadn’t even kissed then, and Clint hadn’t realized how starved he’d been for Bucky’s mouth on his until this very moment. Some unreasonable part of his brain informed him that he could kiss Bucky forever, but his cock disagreed, straining against its cloth confinement as he rutted against Bucky’s thigh.
“It’s not a gun,” Bucky told him, breaking away to gasp for air.
He looked wrecked already, his mouth swollen and his eyes dark as he looked Clint over. He tugged against Clint’s grip on his head and Clint let him go, but not before snapping the tie in his hair so that it tumbled down onto his shoulders and into his face. Clint reached out and threaded his fingers through it for a brief moment, letting the smooth strands slide through his fingers, feeling them catch on his callouses, and then Bucky was dropping to his knees in front of him. He nuzzled at the front of Clint’s pants, breath hot and damp even through the layers of cotton and wool Clint was wearing. Clint’s hips jerked into the contact, making Bucky chuckle.
“This isn’t a gun either,” Bucky observed, reaching out to unsnap the trousers and drag the zipper down.
Bucky peeled his fly back and then leaned forward, mouthing at the bulge in Clint’s briefs. His very brief briefs - he’d dressed with the intent to seduce, and the tiny scrap of black fabric left very little to the imagination.
Which Bucky seemed to appreciate, as he pressed his hot, wet mouth against Clint’s cock through the fabric, edging up to graze over where the head was peeking over the waistband like a tease.
“Oh fuck,” Clint breathed, reaching back to hold himself up on one hand as his knees went weak.
“Yes, please,” Bucky said, dragging his tongue over Clint’s still-covered cock.
Clint’s brain briefly short-circuited. “I don’t have any condoms,” he managed to gasp out, his hand tangling in Bucky’s hair of its own accord while Bucky worked his pants down his thighs.
Bucky leaned back to give Clint a judgmental stare. “You came here to seduce a notorious maneater, and you didn’t bring condoms?”
“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that!” Clint groaned. He’d been hoping to simply slip something in her drink and then have free run of the place while she slept.
Bucky rolled his eyes. “Well, I guess it’s lucky your last physical was clean then,” he said, leaning back in to swipe his tongue across the exposed head of Clint’s dick.
The sensation of Bucky’s mouth on his bare skin was nearly enough to drive every rational thought from Clint’s head, but his brain helpfully pointed out that Bucky should not have known the results of Clint’s last physical - which had only been a couple of weeks ago.
“Did you hack my file?” Clint asked, disbelieving, and glanced down.
Which may have been a mistake, because looking at Bucky was just as distracting as feeling his mouth on him. Bucky on his knees at Clint’s feet - no care given to the state of his tuxedo or the fact that he was almost certainly scuffing his shoes - and mouthing at Clint’s cock was his every fantasy come to life.
Or it would have been, if Clint had thought to fantasize about it.
“Christ,” Clint muttered, running his thumb along the line of Bucky’s jaw.
Bucky turned his head to press a quick kiss to Clint’s palm. “I didn’t hack it,” he hedged, tugging at Clint’s briefs. “I just have a…hmmm…call it a back door into SHIELD’s systems.”
And wasn’t that alarming, except Clint didn’t have any ability to think critically anymore because Bucky was wrapping his lips around Clint’s cock and sucking it down. Clint’s world shrunk down to the hot slip-slide of Bucky’s mouth around his cock, the heat and suction and sloppy wetness of it all drowning out all sensible thought in his skull.
“I don’t have lube, either,” he said, nonsensically, as Bucky flicked his tongue against the sensitive underside of his dick and he groaned out the last word on a gust of air.
Bucky made a thoughtful humming sound that shot straight up Clint’s spine, making him arch into the sensation. He slurped his way off of Clint’s cock, the slightest graze of teeth against his skin mixing adrenaline in with the blatant lust. Clint felt like he was going to die.
“Next time, then,” Bucky murmured, his breath cool against the damp skin of Clint’s dick. “I’ll bring the supplies.”
Clint’s breath hitched at the idea of next time, and then Bucky’s mouth was on him again, working him at a rapid, steady pace that had Clint clutching at the counter behind him and panting at the ceiling. He almost couldn’t bear to look at Bucky, sure that it would be over before they’d barely got started, but he also couldn’t not look.
When Clint dragged his eyes away from the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, Bucky was looking up at him, his eyes heavy lidded as he watched Clint’s reactions, cataloguing the hiccupping breaths and the tightening of his abs. He’d got Clint’s shirt all the way open at some point, so when Clint looked down it was at his own half-naked body above Bucky’s fully-clothed one, Bucky’s lips spread wide around his dick and his thumbs stroking at the bare skin of Clint’s hips. When he noticed Clint looking, Bucky leaned into it, swallowing heavily around Clint’s cock until his lips were pressed up against his pelvis, his nose brushing Clint’s abdomen where Clint could feel his breath - hot and shallow - against his skin. He swallowed again and again, blinking back tears as Clint stared at him, before finally backing off enough to take deep, rasping gasps of air through his nose and around Clint’s cock.
Bucky’s eyes slid shut after that, like he was savoring the experience, like the feeling of Clint’s cock against his tongue and brushing the back of his throat was something he’d fantasized about, something he enjoyed and Clint couldn’t do anything except watch, couldn’t drag his eyes away, barely managed to blink when they started burning from all the staring.
He pried a hand off the counter so that he could put it on Bucky’s face, could feel his jaw working around Clint’s cock, and Bucky blinked his eyes back open, a little hazy, blown dark with arousal and that was it, Clint was done.
“I’m gonna come,” he rasped, just barely managing to get the words out around the tightening in his gut, the spiking of hot arousal in his spine.
Bucky hummed again and Clint’s eyes closed of their own volition as his hips bucked against Bucky’s hold and he came down Bucky’s throat.
“Ah, fuck,” he exhaled, barely more than a whisper, like it was wrung out of him the same way his orgasm was, wrenched from him almost against his will, because if he’d had his way he could have stayed with Bucky on his knees forever with his hot mouth around Clint’s cock.
When he opened his eyes again, Bucky was still crouched at his feet, mouth shiny with spit and come, and he was fumbling at his own trousers, a fine tremor in his right hand that even Clint could spot. Clint took a half-step forward, forgetting his pants were tangled around his ankles, and fell into a heap at Bucky’s feet.
Bucky was laughing at him, low, deep chuckles that Clint chose to ignore, instead moving to slap Bucky’s hands out of the way so that he could get his trousers open. He pushed Bucky until he toppled over, landing on the plush rug covering the floor, sprawled out with his tie askew and his pants half undone. Clint kicked his shoes and pants off as he went, crawling over Bucky to kiss him, tangling their tongues together and licking at the musky, bitter taste of his own come mixed with the taste that was intrinsically Bucky.
He reached between them, shoving at Bucky’s pants and underwear until they were tangled around his knees and he could wrap his hand around Bucky’s cock. It was thick and hot to the touch, a little damp at the head, and Clint thought about putting his mouth on it again - returning the favor - but both of Bucky’s hands came up to cradle Clint’s skull as they kissed and Bucky thrust up into Clint’s grip. He made a muffled groaning sound and did it again, so Clint shifted his arm into a more comfortable position and began languorously jerking him off, stroking over the head of his dick with his thumb on each up stroke and squeezing the base every time he slid down. Bucky’s hips rocked in time with his movements, and he made small, wanton little noises into Clint’s mouth and tangled his fingers that much tighter in Clint’s hair.
Clint got his knees underneath him so that he could hold himself up without breaking the kiss and then reached out to fumble Bucky’s shirt open, tugging at the tiny, smooth black buttons until he could get them through the loops and Bucky’s chest was exposed to Clint’s roving fingers. He tweaked a nipple, making Bucky arch and gasp, and then pinched it, coaxing a low, rumbling groan out of him.
Bucky wasn’t loud in bed, but all the little sounds he made - the wanton noises in the back of his throat and the little gasps and groans - all the sounds Clint coaxed out of him, drove Clint wild, made him want to see how far he’d have to go to get more and louder noises out of him, made him want to take Bucky completely apart, made Clint’s dick twitch in valiant effort despite having just come. He wanted to lay Bucky down and take him apart, piece by piece.
Which he couldn’t do in a bathroom on an undercover op, so he’d have to settle for the small, secret noises Bucky was making now, because they were just for Clint’s ears anyway.
Pulling away from Bucky’s mouth to nip at the sharp, smooth line of his jaw up to Bucky’s ear, Clint said, low and encouraging, “Are you gonna come for me baby?”
Bucky huffed out a laugh that was closer to a moan, and said, “Baby?”
Clint twisted his wrist, spreading the precome from the head of Bucky’s dick down the shaft to ease the glide, and Bucky hissed, arching his back. “Yeah,” he managed, levered up on his shoulders and straining into Clint’s grip. “Yeah, I’m gonna.”
Biting down on Bucky’s earlobe, Clint squeezed just a little tighter, leveraging his weight over Bucky’s body to pin him to the floor while he stripped his cock, working him hard and fast and rough. Bucky came on a muffled shout, his head pressed into Clint’s throat and his mouth hot and wet against his skin, biting into the meat of Clint’s shoulder as he painted both of them white.
Clint rolled off of him with a groan when Bucky nudged at his chest, flopping half on the rug and half on cold marble, before he started snickering.
“What’s so funny?” Bucky asked, sounding fucked-out and hoarse.
Clint was bare-assed on the floor in a bathroom that cost more than his apartment, his tuxedo more off than on, and he’d fucked the wrong target. What wasn’t funny about it? He turned his head to look at Bucky, who was sprawled bonelessly on the rug, his hair a tangled mess around his face, with come on his chest.
“There’s no way we’re getting out of here without drawing attention to ourselves,” Clint said idly, scratching at his belly.
“Wanna bet?” Bucky drawled.
In the end, Bucky wound up with Clint’s bow tie - which had somehow, miraculously, stayed in one piece - around his neck, his own around his hair which he’d smoothed back into order without even looking, Clint’s shirt fashionably unbuttoned at the collar, and both of them tucked and neatened faster than Clint could ever have predicted or done on his own. Probably faster than Natasha could have managed, even, and certainly more presentable than Clint would have looked if he’d finished the op the way he’d intended.
“Thanks,” Clint said, as Bucky sorted Clint’s hair back into some semblance of order.
“Anything for you, sweetheart,” Bucky said, the corner of his mouth curling. “There, I think you’ll do.” He pressed his mouth softly to Clint’s, almost chaste, a little bit sweet. “See you later,” he added, as he stepped back out of Clint’s reach and then ducked out of the bathroom, disappearing into the darkness of the hallway.
Chapter 5
Notes:
So this is the chapter with the uhhhhhh canon-typical violence and torture and memory wiping chair and just general not-great things, so please mind your mental health. I tried to keep it vague but still emotionally invested, but tread carefully. Skip to the end notes if you want a general sum-up of the chapter and you can then skip to the next bit. If you want to skip the angst, you can ctrl+f to get to "Clint’s next moment of awareness" and go from there for the dramatique rescue!
PS This chapter meets my Clint Barton Bingo square "Kidnapping"
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Clint woke up with a dry mouth and a pounding headache in a dark and unfamiliar room. His feet were tied tightly enough that his toes were tingling, and his arms were bound behind him at the elbows and wrists, like someone who knew something about him had been the one to do the binding.
Oh, this looked bad.
“Hey!” he shouted, and then winced when he couldn’t hear his own voice. Nudging his ear against his shoulder, he found that yep - his aids were gone. It would have been nicer if the batteries had been dead, but no, they were gone. Fuck. That meant this was so much worse than it first appeared. The fact that Agent Barton was deaf was top-level, need-to-know information. It wasn’t casual knowledge. And the aids he wore, even at home, were top-notch, near invisible devices that Tony had designed himself.
Fuck.
Clint had no idea how long he’d been there. No idea how long he’d been gone already, but long enough that his bladder was prompting him that he’d need a bathroom break soon or he’d be soiling himself, and long enough that his shoulders were already aching from their pulled-back position.
The last thing he remembered was walking down the street outside his apartment building, headed for coffee. He was still wearing the same jeans and t-shirt he’d left the house in, but his shoes and socks were gone, as was the boot knife he’d had strapped to his ankle and the holster he’d had at the back of his shirt.
“Hey!” he shouted, again, because what the hell. Couldn’t hurt. “Hey, I’m gonna need to take a piss soon!”
Nothing.
Not that Clint expected to hear anything. He couldn’t hear shit without his hearing aids, except for extremely loud noises, which translated more as muffled thumps and a vibration in his chest. He couldn’t hear his own voice, just feel the vibration of it in his jaw. But the door to whatever holding cell they had him in didn’t open, and not a trace of light seeped in underneath anything that might appear to be that door so that Clint could position himself more favorably in the event that it did open.
Clint shouted until he was a little hoarse, nonsensical things about how he needed to go to the bathroom, about how he was hungry, thirsty, tired, and sore. Eventually he started singing bar ballads, and, eventually, he fell quiet. It was pointless anyway, wearing his voice out before he even caught sight of a captor.
Not that Clint intended to tell them anything, but it wasn’t as satisfying to tell someone to fuck off if you didn’t have a voice left.
Eventually he rolled himself until he hit a wall so that he could at least take a leak somewhere he wasn’t already laying.
Eventually he got too weak to even do that.
By the time they came for him, Clint wasn’t even thirsty anymore.
He was so weak that he could barely stumble between two unremarkable guards when they cut his ankle bindings, but they left his wrists bound. His shoulders felt like they were on fire when the pressure of his elbow bindings released, but Clint bit back the groan he wanted to make.
They shoved him into a fairly standard - in Clint’s experience, at least - interrogation chair, untying his hands only long enough to bolt them to the arms of the chair and shine a bright light in his face. Clint waited in the silence for long enough that he felt almost like he dozed off, although that was probably the dehydration and pervading weakness more than an actual nap.
“Y’know,” he said, conversationally, “I can’t answer your questions if I can’t hear them.”
He waited a bit. “I know you know I can’t hear you, ‘cos you took my hearing aids, so that’s one big secret out. If you want any others, you’ll have to give ‘em back. Not that I’m planning to tell you anything, but it’d be helpful to be able to hear the questions before I tell you to fuck off.”
Clint sighed dramatically.
Villainous monologues were a lot less interesting when you couldn’t hear the monologuing.
Several excruciating minutes later - during which Clint developed an intense itch in his left calf that he couldn’t scratch due to the fact that his feet were tied to the chair - someone roughly fitted his hearing aids into his ears, and the minute sounds of the room came screeching into focus. There was the shift of booted feet, the sound of fabric on fabric, but no one talked.
“Well, that’s anticlimactic,” Clint muttered.
“We don’t need your secrets, Agent Barton,” said someone Clint couldn’t see because he couldn’t shift his head up far enough, and the light was intentionally blinding. “All of SHIELD’s secrets are our own. No, no. You’re not here for your knowledge.”
And that-
That was vaguely alarming. If they’d wanted to know what Clint knew, then there’d be reason to keep him alive and reasonably healthy. There’d be reason to feed him, to give him water, to not cut his most important bits off.
If they didn’t want information, Clint couldn’t imagine what they did want - what they’d kept him alive for but waited until he was at his weakest to get.
He wasn’t going to ask.
He waited in silence, fidgeting just slightly because his calf still itched, goddammit, but he didn’t ask.
There was a pained sigh. “Very well,” said whoever the monologuer of the week was. “You may begin.”
That wasn’t ominous at all.
The only thing that happened was that someone - and Clint still couldn’t see who was in the room with him, still couldn’t tell how many people were in the room or even what the room looked like - got close enough to his chair that Clint tensed in response, then forced himself to relax. If he was going to get hit, it always hurt less if he was lax first.
Instead of the punch to the mouth - or worse - that he was expecting, Clint got some kind of injection into his right bicep. Whoever had done it stepped back, and Clint had a painfully clear moment of relief just before it hit his system. Then it was like his entire body was on fire, his skin was crawling as he gasped for air, and he could hear people around him moving, talking, over him and around him but not to him, but he couldn’t make out a thing they were saying.
“What the fuck?” he gasped.
Another injection that left him feeling like his veins were coated in ice this time, so cold he’d never be warm again.
Another injection that left him fuzzy-headed and confused, and then faces started swimming into view. None of them made sense. He recognized a few - Agents he’d seen at SHIELD, people he’d sparred with or had been in his training classes. It wasn’t until he saw Secretary of Defense Pierce that Clint figured out he was hallucinating.
“Shoulda taken that Peace Prize,” Clint slurred at the man, who grimaced in response.
Rumlow showed up after that. “Does your knee still ache when it rains?” Clint asked him, grinning.
He’d never liked that asshole.
Rumlow did punch him in the mouth then.
Clint fell in and out of consciousness. He lost track of how many more injections he got, or what they did to him in-between. At some point he ended up strapped onto a table, staring up into the same sort of lights they had in medical back at SHIELD.
He was nearly lucid when they hauled him into another room and dumped him into something that looked like a dentist’s chair and a BDSM club had a nightmare baby. Nearly lucid but weaker than a newborn kitten, or so he thought, but he was obviously still hallucinating because it looked like Rollins who strapped his feet to the chair and Sitwell who was directing a small army of white-coated technicians around the room.
“I’m gonna need a lot more’n dental work when you guys are done,” Clint informed the room at large, his head lolling on the chair’s headrest.
“You never shut up, do you Barton?” Rumlow drawled from where he was leaning against a wall, semi-casually.
Clint shrugged as much as his bindings allowed for. “Sometimes,” he said, leering and giving him an exaggerated wink. “Depends on who’s askin’.”
Whatever else he’d been about to say was lost as someone - Clint didn’t recognize this one, but it didn’t matter anyway since his brain was clearly making half this shit up - shoved a rubber bite guard between his teeth. He gagged a little, made to spit it out, but Rollins shoved it back between his jaw and clamped a hand around his face.
“You’re gonna want that,” Rollins told him, smiling grimly. “If you wanna keep your teeth.”
Clint gave him what he intended to be a venomous glare, though he figured he probably looked more like enraged, drunk kitten in his current state.
It didn’t matter anyway because Rollins took a step back and whatever Clint had been thinking or trying or thinking about trying was washed away in a flood of painful electricity as a metal halo lowered around his head. It felt like someone took a brillo pad to his brain and tried to scrub all the stuff out of it.
It lasted for ten seconds or all of eternity or somewhere in the endless landscape between, but eventually the painful scrape of fire across his brain stopped, leaving Clint panting and sweating, gasping for air as the chair tilted forward and he was eye-to-eye with Sitwell, who, he was starting to think, wasn’t as much of a hallucination as Clint had previously thought. Which meant that most everyone in the room was probably also not a hallucination.
“Full name and date of birth,” Rumlow said, reaching out to gingerly remove the bite guard from between Clint’s teeth.
“Fuck all the way off,” Clint said, and then spat in his face.
“Wipe him again,” came the same tone from earlier, the one Clint had struggled to place, then shrugged off as a drug-induced hallucination, but now he was almost certain he really was hearing the United States Secretary of Defense, Alexander Pierce.
Rollins shoved the rubber bite guard back between his teeth, the chair reclined with an ominous whirring noise, and the terrifying hum of electricity started back up, almost loud enough to cover the sound of Clint screaming around the rubber in his mouth.
**
Clint’s next moment of awareness was one of jumbled confusion. There was a burned rubber scent in the air, and the lights of the room were flickering in and out. He could hear the faint groan of someone, the kind of pained, winded sound a person made when you put them down for good in a fight, though he wasn’t quite sure how he knew that.
Clint wasn’t quite sure of anything.
In fact, he wasn’t quite sure how he knew his name was Clint.
The room around him was smoldering ruins, and someone - a man with lanky hair and a mask and goggles covering most of his face, was ripping the metal restraints holding his arms down. It wasn’t until Clint caught the light glinting dully off the black metal of his arm that Clint even knew who it was.
“Now I know I’m hallucinating,” he slurred.
The man in the mask looked up, managing to convey curiosity even with his face covered.
“Cos the Winter Soldier is rescuing me,” Clint informed him, slumping forward as his arms were released.
There was a muffled snort.
“Can’t walk,” Clint informed him. He knew the guy, knew he was more than the Soldier, but couldn’t quite call the knowledge to mind, couldn’t quite connect the dots between what he knew and what he should know, prodding gently at the gaps in his knowledge. The Winter Soldier was an assassin. But he wasn’t a threat to Clint. How Clint knew that - other than the man was currently kneeling at his feet giving similar treatment to the manacles around his ankles - was a blank.
The soldier reached up and tugged the face guard down, leaving his mouth and jaw exposed, and pushed the goggles up, letting Clint get a good look at his face. Clint dragged his fingertips - his nails cracked from where he’d gripped the arms of the chair - across the familiar sweep of his nose, the angle of his cheekbones, and firm fullness of his bottom lip.
“Hi,” Clint said, nonsensically. He knew this face, knew the curves and ridges of it.
That full mouth split into a small grin. “Hi sweetheart,” the Soldier told him. “Let’s get you out of here.” He readjusted the mask and goggles to cover his face, much to Clint’s disappointed.
The Soldier leaned forward and caught Clint around the waist, hauling him over his right shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and began swiftly making his way out of whatever base they’d been holding Clint in for however long he’d been gone.
“Gonna be sick,” Clint informed the Soldier’s ass - it was a very nice ass - after several minutes of being jostled. They had so far encountered no resistance, the base strangely silent and still.
The Soldier sat him on his feet, pointed Clint in the direction of an empty corner, and let him heave up what little bit of bile and liquid was still in his stomach, supporting him at the waist so he didn’t fall over. When Clint was done he passed him a canteen to rinse his mouth out, let him have a few small sips-
“Just a little or you’ll throw it up again,” the Soldier warned.
-and then he was hefting Clint up onto his shoulder again and hustling them out of the base.
The surrounding area looked unfamiliar to Clint, but in that haunting, deja vu way that felt like he ought to know where he was and just didn’t.
The Soldier dumped him into the front seat of a sleek black Lexus, parked unobtrusively a few klicks away from the base, hidden under a camo net, and then drove them serenely out of the woods, ripping the mask and goggles off and tossing them into the backseat.
“How’d you know where to find me?” Clint asked, long after they’d hit the highway. He should be more wary of this, he knew, of following an unknown into the unknown, but he couldn’t make himself get worked up about it. For all he knew this was a plot by whoever had been holding him captive - his mind kept feeding him images of vaguely-familiar faces - but Clint couldn’t make his brain work hard enough to figure out how, and he was too tired to care. The Soldier wasn’t electrocuting him, and that’s all Clint cared about for the moment.
“I put trackers in your hearing aids,” the Soldier informed him casually, like that wasn’t a gross invasion of whatever privacy Clint had convinced himself he had.
On the other hand, if he hadn’t done that, Clint would still be stuck in that base getting his brain electrocuted to goo, so there was that.
“Thanks?” Clint said, uncertainly.
The Soldier smirked at him. He let go of the wheel with one hand, reaching over the cup Clint’s chin carefully and look him over critically. “You should rest,” the Soldier said. “You’ve had a hell of a week, and we’ve got a fair bit of travelling to do before we’re somewhere safe.”
“You should watch the road,” Clint told him.
The Soldier let go of the wheel entirely. “Nah, the car practically drives itself.”
The car actually drove itself, taking the curves in the highway with practiced ease, the speed never varying even the slightest bit, making for the smoothest ride Clint had ever been on.
“The seats recline all the way back,” the Soldier told him, and Clint fumbled for the side of his seat so that he could lean back. A nap sounded good, actually.
When he woke up, they were at a small, private airfield, and the Soldier - Barnes, Clint’s bruised, abused brain helpfully informed him - was moving duffles from the trunk of the car to the cargo area of a Bell helicopter that was painted a cheerful red and white.
“I hate helicopters,” he said, apropos of nothing when Barnes opened the passenger door.
“It’s a short flight,” Barnes reassured him, moving to sling Clint’s arm over his shoulder and help him hobble to the small ‘copter.
“I think they make me motion sick,” Clint said.
“I think walking makes you motion sick,” Barnes told him, boosting him up into the co-pilot’s chair and helping him fumble into the harness.
That was fair. Everything seemed to make Clint sick, but that was probably days of dehydration and lack of food more than any sense of motion.
Barnes took the time to move the car from the grassy field he’d had it parked in, to inside the hanger, hidden behind the doors. Clint could just make out him tossing a dust cover over it, and then he was jogging back out to the helicopter and climbing into the pilot’s seat.
“Do you know how to fly this thing?” Clint asked, skeptically. “Or is it a self-flying helicopter?”
Barnes gave him a sardonic look. “You must be feeling better if you’re sassing me. I can fly a helicopter just fine, as long as there’s not an asshole hanging on to the skid trying to keep me from taking off.”
Clint blinked at him in confusion. “I promise not to do that?”
“Nevermind,” Barnes huffed, almost sounding amused. “Inside joke. We’ve got a couple hours’ flight time ahead of us if you wanna try to sleep some more.” He pulled the pilot’s headset down from the ceiling as he started flipping switches to get the rotors started up. Clint mimicked him, settling his own headset down over his ears and fiddling with it until it rested comfortably over his hearing aids.
“I think I’ll sightsee for this trip,” Clint told him, when the crackling static informed him the headsets had been switched on.
“Suit yourself,” Barnes said, pulling on the yoke and easing the helicopter off the ground. He pointed them east, the setting sun behind them as Clint looked out over the landscape. They were miles from any city, he could tell, but nothing about it looked familiar. There was an edge of blue on the horizon that sparkled in the fading sun, some kind of coast, either of the ocean or a large lake.
“Where are we going?” Clint shouted into the mic.
“Offshore,” Barnes yelled back, not looking at Clint. He was studying the panels of the helicopter and making minute adjustments to their heading. “Somewhere they can’t find us.”
He didn’t mean to doze off, but Clint woke as Barnes was gently settling the helicopter onto the small, precise landing pad on the top of what appeared to be a very large and expensive French yacht.
“You know,” he said, yawning, as he took the headset off and the rotors wound down to nothing, “I thought you were joking about the yacht.” Then he blinked. Where had that come from, and what did he know about yachts? Clint spent a long, fruitless moment poking at his memory, but only came up with a hazy recollection of Barnes sitting at a bar with a martini glass in his hand, smiling slyly. “Why do I know you have a yacht?”
Barnes sighed, climbing out of the helicopter and then rounding it to come and help Clint down. Already Clint was feeling better than he had, and he was able to keep his feet under him as Bucky helped him down the ladder and into the main living space of the boat. Everything about it screamed ‘casually wealthy’ in an understated way that Clint was able to relax into, unlike…
Someone else’s living space? He couldn’t quite remember, but he could recall ostentatious decor and a red and gold theme.
His head hurt.
“My head hurts,” he informed Barnes as he was gently lowered onto the nearest sofa.
“Yeah,” Barnes said softly, “I know pal.”
“You called me sweetheart earlier,” Clint reminded him, as Bucky moved away and began pulling supplies out of a cabinet in the galley kitchen. He made a vague noise of affirmation. “Are we dating?”
Barnes laughed. “I wouldn’t call it that, no.” He sounded a little bit melancholic about it, under the amusement.
“We should be,” Clint informed him as Barnes came to kneel beside him. He pulled out a tourniquet and an IV kit, and Clint flinched.
“Just need to get you rehydrated,” Barnes told him gently. “Then you can have a bath and some more sleep.”
“Why can’t I remember things?” Clint said, soft, as Barnes inserted the needle and began squeezing a bag of fluids into Clint’s veins. He let his head fall back on the arm of the sofa and closed his eyes, trying to focus on anything except the dull ache in his skull. “I know you, but I don’t know you,” he said, feeling frustrated.
“The machine does that,” Barnes said grimly. “It takes away who you are so they can stuff somebody else inside. Somebody who does what they want.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Clint asked, sleepily.
“Yeah,” Barnes told him, brushing Clint’s hair off his forehead. “That’s what happened to me.”
Clint dozed under Barnes’ gentle touch, blinking awake when Barnes took the catheter out of the crook of his elbow and pressed a bandaid there instead. He felt more grounded already, less garbagey, and vaguely like he had to pee.
“Bathroom?” he croaked, lifting his head up.
Barnes guided him down the narrow hallway into a frankly opulent bath. He got Clint settled in the water closet, refusing to let him stand, and when the door was closed Clint could hear the sound of water running into the inset tub in the other room.
When Clint stumbled out of the water closet, the tub was more than half full of warm water, and Barnes was leaning on the edge of the sink, watching him carefully. He was still fully kitted out in tactical gear, a strappy leather getup that nudged at some distant part of Clint’s brain, familiar and unnerving.
“You’ve worn that before,” Clint said suddenly, visions of a small supply closet assaulting him. “You kissed me.”
Barnes snorted. “Yeah,” he said, smirking.
Clint let himself be manhandled out of his disgusting clothes and into the hot bath, let Barnes scrub him down with a soft cloth and lightly-scented soap, let himself drift aimlessly in the water and not think too hard about anything happening around him. There were… people he should notify, he thought. People who would be worried about him. Red hair and worried green eyes came to mind. An angry-looking black man with an eye patch.
Instead, Clint let his eyes slip shut as Barnes ran the washcloth down his thighs and between his toes, scrubbing away grime and sweat and fear-stink and whatever else while Clint lazed in the water between them.
Once the water started to cool, Barnes coaxed him out of the tub and into a fluffy towel and then a soft pair of cotton pants, then steered him into the bedroom - already dark with the shades drawn and the distant sound of water slapping the hull. Clint fell face-first onto the mattress, sprawled and ungainly and ready to pass out, until Bucky crawled up after him, stripped down to an undershirt and shorts, propping himself over Clint’s thighs.
He waggled a bottle of oil in Clint’s line of sight. “Can I rub your back?” Barnes asked, and Clint hummed an affirmative.
“Can do anythin’ you want,” he slurred. “Gonna pass out soon.”
“Just rest, sweetheart,” Barnes told him, already cracking open the bottle of oil and rubbing it between his palms to warm it up. “I got you.”
“I think I like you a lot,” Clint told him, already only half-conscious, but sure of this one thing.
Barnes paused, and then put his hands on Clint’s bare skin, rubbing carefully around sore spots and digging into the knotted muscles of his spine. He didn’t respond, but then, Clint hadn’t expected him to.
Clint fell asleep sometime between Barnes’ second pass over his shoulder blades, his metal hand warmed to body temperature, and his third pass over Clint’s lower back, tight with tension and pain. He sort of vaguely recalled the sheets being shifted over his body, and he caught the sound of the shower turning on in the bathroom, and then everything was blank, blessed silence - deep and dreamless and safe.
Notes:
Clint gets captured, injected with some drugs, his mind wiped by the Chair, several times, it is revealed that Hydra is part of SHIELD (Pierce, Rumlow, Rollins, and Sitwell all make appearances) and then there is a Dramatic Rescue by Bucko, and Clint is whisked away to Bucky's super-secret yacht for some very caring pampering.
PS you might have noticed the chapter count went up and this is because I am a dumbass who cannot count.
Chapter Text
Clint woke up less hazy than he’d gone to sleep. He also woke up to Bucky - oh look, his brain was filling in the gaps - in bed with him, watching him closely. He had a few blurred memories of Bucky plying him with sips of water throughout the night, room temperature but delicious against Clint’s parched, dry lips.
He felt almost human today, if extremely weak and still pretty well exhausted.
“Worried I’m gonna wake up and try to kill you?” Clint croaked, his voice sleep-rough and his throat sore. He shied away from thinking about the fact it was probably from all the screaming he’d done.
“Nah,” Bucky told him, clearly unconcerned. “They hadn’t made it that far yet.”
Clint swallowed. The ‘yet’ in that sentence was fairly alarming.
“I should go make some phone calls,” Bucky said, almost awkward in a way that Clint had never seen him. “SHIELD knows you’re missing, but so does-”
“What’s going on?” Clint asked, reaching out to catch Bucky by the wrist.
He was less hazy, but there were still gaps in his knowledge, bruised-feeling places in his memory where Clint was sure he was supposed to know things but didn’t. “Where was I? Who had me? How did you know to come get me? I mean honestly, I have a lot of questions here,” Clint told him, not letting go of his arm.
Bucky glanced down at Clint’s hand, bruised and bloodied fingertips wrapped around the matte black metal of his arm. He sighed.
“How much do you remember?”
Clint closed his eyes to think about it, but he didn’t release Bucky or ease his grip at all.
He still only remembered leaving his apartment, remembered heading to the neighborhood coffee shop, remembered- someone. Someone familiar talking to him on the sidewalk and then-
Nothing, up until he woke up in a locked room, tied and bound.
Most of what happened on the base he thought he recalled. Hours of injections and electricity and-
“I was hallucinating,” Clint said, opening his eyes.
“I doubt it,” Bucky told him, looking grim. “I thought that too, at first. But no, SHIELD is full of snakes.”
“Defense Secretary Pierce,” Clint said, almost afraid to give voice to the name.
Bucky shrugged. “If you think you saw him, then you probably did. When I went after Fury - you’ve heard the story?” Clint nodded. “It was days before I remembered anything other than my mission, and weeks before I was myself again, and even then- I had trigger words in my head, I was a danger to SHIELD and society. The only reason I’m not in a prison cell somewhere is because of-” He cut himself off.
“Because of?” Clint prompted.
Shaking his head, Bucky sighed. “I’ve got a few friends. I saved someone, once, in an explosion, and he offered his services to help with the… aftereffects of the brainwashing. His daughter got the trigger words out, made me a new arm. SHIELD let me go, gave me a ‘retirement package’.” Bucky rolled his eyes, but Clint could sense the undercurrent of bitterness he felt, though he wasn’t sure if it was at the early retirement or just what had happened to him in general.
“Is that how you get away with all the shit you do?” Clint asked, prodding gently. “Fury feel guilty?”
Bucky snorted. “I don’t think Fury’s ever felt guilty a day in his life. No, I’ve got diplomatic immunity.” His grin was cheeky where he was still lying on the pillow, mere inches from Clint.
“Diplomatic immunity,” Clint repeated, flatly.
“Mmm,” Bucky agreed, running his fingers through Clint’s messy hair. “I’m technically a Wakandan citizen. And I’m past due for my check-in.” He twisted easily out of Clint’s still-weak grasp and rolled out of bed.
Clint watched him go, torn between curiosity, outrage, and lust as Bucky wandered out of the room in nothing but boxer-briefs, the muscles in his back and the curve of his spine enough to make Clint’s gut stir in a sort of distant, lazy arousal.
Then his stomach gurgled worryingly around the small amount of water still in it, and he figured he should probably think about food before he started worrying about his dick. He still didn’t feel truly hungry, but that was just an after-effect of so much time without. His appetite would come back with a vengeance, Clint was certain.
“Pancakes?” he called out hopefully.
“Smoothie,” Barnes yelled from the front of the room. “We can talk about pancakes in a couple of days.”
“Coffee,” Clint bartered, rolling over on the bed and burying his face in Bucky’s pillow, where the scent of his body lingered.
“No,” Bucky told him, and if he said anything else it was drowned out by the sound of a blender.
He came back in the room a few minutes later and took in the fact that Clint had burritoed himself in the bedding, and was working his way towards a pillow nest. He handed Clint a smoothie that was a frankly alarming shade of green, complete with lid and straw. Clint took it with a hand that was only a little bit shaky, and had a cautious sip.
It didn’t taste nearly as bad as it looked.
He drank some more of it.
“If you keep that down, you can have soup for lunch,” Bucky informed him, smirking.
Clint gave him a sour look, but he also knew Bucky was right. Days of dehydration and starvation meant that a four course meal or something heavy like pancakes and syrup was only going to make him sick, that his stomach wasn’t ready for something that solid. He sipped the smoothie moodily. Bucky being right didn’t mean Clint had to like it.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Bucky assured him, then turned on his heel and headed back to the main living area.
He left the door open and after a few minutes Clint could hear the quiet sounds of casual conversation. His ears were itchy and gummed up from wearing his aids constantly for who-knew-how-long, but the thought of taking them out and being left in silence gave him a sense of dread so strong his stomach actually rolled around the newly-ingested fruit concoction in his stomach.
So.
Gummed up ears it was, then.
Clint could hear the deep, rolling sound of Bucky talking, the Brooklyn drawl Clint had picked out a few times when Bucky was feeling more casual and relaxed - or when he was really, really turned on - and the lighter, dulcet tones of a young woman, a hint of laughter like she was gently teasing. If he strained, he could make out individual words, but he didn’t want to intrude. Bucky had left the door open for Clint’s comfort, obviously, making a phone call he could have made at any time while Clint was sleeping but instead he’d elected to stay and keep watch. So Clint didn’t want to eavesdrop, but the sound of voices in the background that were calm and friendly instead of angry and giving orders eased his hypervigilant state of mind and helped him to relax.
The smoothie stayed down, and Clint fell asleep with his fingers still clenched around the cup.
Bucky woke him up for lunch, helping him prop himself against the pillows and producing a tray that consisted of soup, crackers, and ice water.
“You’re spoiling me,” Clint told him, only slightly sarcastic. “Canned soup and saltines? A guy could get used to this.”
Bucky rolled his eyes, even as he handed Clint the spoon and watched him slurp soup with an eagle eye.
No one had taken such good care of him in ever, as far as Clint could remember. Not that his memory was too reliable at the moment, but it still gave Clint a warm, fuzzy feeling in his chest that he wasn’t looking too closely at. Instead he grumbled about the food and being babied and anything else he could think of so that he didn’t have to examine his feelings.
He had Stockholm Syndrome, that was all.
By the third day, Clint was able to sit at the table for meals, eating simple fare that Bucky dredged up from a combination of dry storage and a few fresh ingredients that seemed easy and comfortable in a way that made Clint think this was how Bucky lived all the time. It was better than Clint usually ate, anyway, with a distinct lack of pizza and coffee, but including a fair amount of fresh vegetables and lean meat.
“Do you live here all the time?” Clint asked, glancing up from his plate. It was lightly seasoned chicken and white rice, plain in comparison to the same meal on Bucky’s plate but with extra roasted vegetables and some kind of sauce, but at least he’d graduated from sucking his meals through a straw.
“Yes,” Bucky told him. “It’s easier,” he said, not explaining further.
“Easier for what?” Clint asked. He felt like being on this boat with Bucky, sharing this much of their time together should mean he knew the other man better, but instead it felt like he didn’t know much of anything at all. He knew what - in a more intimate way than most, probably - Bucky had gone through, he knew where he lived and how he ate, and that he had daily conversations with the Wakandan princess, Shuri, on a kind of holographic interface that would make Tony Stark wet his pants, but he didn’t understand a damn thing about Bucky’s motivations.
“Everything,” Bucky told him. “Easier to be alone, easier to stay on the move, easier to get to my destinations when there’s something I need to take care of - it makes everything easier.”
“Plus you have diplomatic immunity,” Clint reminded.
“Plus I have diplomatic immunity,” Bucky agreed.
The Wakandans called him White Wolf, a title that both made Clint snicker and one which he thought suited Bucky better than Winter Soldier anyway. He was a lone wolf, on some kind of mission that Clint didn’t fully understand or even really know about.
“So when are we gonna talk about what happened?” Clint said, reaching for his glass. It was still water, no coffee in sight.
Bucky sighed. “We can talk about it whenever you want,” Bucky told him, sounding resigned.
“So,” Clint said, pushing his plate away. It was nearly empty anyway. “Someone was holding me captive. That someone was comprised of a select few SHIELD agents - which I’m doubt Fury is aware of - and they tried to brainwash me into being their new pet assassin. Am I about on target so far?”
“So far,” Bucky said, warily. He was obviously hesitant to involve Clint in whatever it was he was doing, but Clint was already involved, as far as he was concerned, so he wanted to at least know what it was he was tangled up in.
“That same someone took you captive, brainwashed you, forced you to turn against your superiors, and-” Clint paused, his brow furrowed. “I have to admit, this is where they lose me. What’s the goal here? Who’s the bad guy?”
“Hydra,” Bucky told him, grim and frustrated.
That-
Didn’t make any sense. Hydra had been eliminated after World War II. They’d been part of the Nazi regime, ideaologues at the center of the circle of power, and most of them had been tried and executed or imprisoned after the Nuremburg trials.
“You’re saying Hydra is part of SHIELD?” Clint said, slowly. SHIELD which had started as the Strategic Scientific Reserve, a portion of the Allied forces that had been formed in direct opposition to Hydra.
“I’m saying the SSR recruited key Nazi scientists as part of the post-war initiative and then nature took its course,” Bucky said, shoving his own plate away. “I’m saying I told Nick Fury that and he didn’t believe me - not that I blame him,” Bucky added, “it’s not like I was a reliable source of information, back then. And I’m saying that I got offered an early retirement and diplomatic immunity to stay out of it.”
“Yes, you’re clearly doing that,” Clint said, amused despite himself. “Seducing SHIELD agents and stealing their files and all.”
Bucky snorted, but the joke did serve to lighten the mood. “I borrowed the files,” Bucky told him. “I was just making use of a resource, since you went to all the trouble of stealing them. I just needed the bit on the Mandarin anyway. I didn’t bother with the rest.”
The Mandarin had turned up in Interpol’s custody only a couple of weeks after Clint had lost the files to Bucky in Sardinia, and the disk that had been returned to them hadn’t had any information on it about the Mandarin at all. Clint narrowed his eyes. “You used me for my information!”
Bucky raised an eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure we used each other, just for different reasons.”
Clint thought about conceding the point. “You used me for two reasons,” he said, instead.
He got a thorough once over and smirk, and then Bucky said, “I really don’t regret either of them.”
That was fair. Clint didn’t really regret them either.
And if the Mandarin had been captured because of it, well, so much the better.
“What about the rest of it?” Clint asked, because he had to ask. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, but he also couldn’t bear the thought that all of this between them had simply been a means to an end for Bucky.
“You know how I said I have a backdoor into SHIELD?”
Clint vaguely remembered that conversation, the memory tinged slightly with the haze that he was coming to associate with his time in the chair. “Sort of.”
“It’ll come back,” Bucky told him confidently. “The brain heals most traumas, given enough time.” He said it with the sort of authority of someone who knew, but it also sounded like he was repeating someone else’s words. Either way, Clint was willing to take his word for it. “Anyway, my source keeps me fairly well informed of your whereabouts. It was how I knew you’d been taken in the first place. The tracker told me the rest.”
“Aw, Buck, I didn’t know you cared,” Clint teased, “coming to see little ole me.”
Bucky gave him a steady look. “I haven’t been coming to see any other SHIELD agents,” he pointed out.
Clint swallowed hard. That was maybe a little more than he’d asked for, a little closer to a confession that he’d bargained on. He’d expected Bucky to blow him off, or at most admit that Clint was a passing diversion. Something to entertain himself with while he fucked with SHIELD.
This almost sounded like feelings, almost sounded like Bucky had been there because he wanted to be and not because of anything he could have got from Clint.
And come to think of it, the last several times they’d run into each other, Bucky hadn’t got anything from Clint, other than some stolen kisses and other, more intimate activities. He hadn’t taken any information, hadn’t bargained for more secrets. In fact, the last mission Clint saw him on, Bucky had helped him accomplish his task and still avoid one of the most unsavory parts of the job.
It was sobering to think that Bucky just liked Clint; especially since Clint was coming to the unexpected realization that he just liked Bucky.
What an absolute disaster, honestly.
“Now what?” he croaked, avoiding the subject altogether. Clint was a lot of things, but a master at avoiding his own feelings was probably his best skill.
Bucky rolled his eyes, but he gave Clint a pass. “Now I’m going to expose Hydra for what it really is, shoot Pierce, and rub Nick Fury’s face in it for the rest of forever.”
“I think you mean we,” Clint said, crossing his arms.
Bucky gave him an evaluating look. “You’re just a few days off of torture and starvation, I don’t mean ‘we’.”
“I think I deserve an opportunity to shoot Pierce, too.”
“We can’t both shoot Pierce.”
“We absolutely can,” Clint argued. “The human body can hold a lot of bullets.” Clint would know, he’d had a fair few of them in his own body. “Besides, I don’t think you can storm the SHIELD office all by yourself.”
“I’m not going to storm anything,” Bucky said, smirking. “I told you, I have a backdoor source.”
“I’m not sure an electronic escape hatch is going to help you much,” Clint said. “There’s biometric screeners at every door, and all the guards are armed. At least I can get in the building.”
“And as soon as you do, Hydra will know they’re compromised and jump ship like rats. Or there’ll be an unfortunate accident.” Bucky continued over Clint’s scoffing protest. “Anyway, I never said my source was electronic.”
That stopped Clint cold. “Wait, what?”
**
Of all the places Clint never expected to find himself - other than a yacht off the coast of Newfoundland - standing on the doorstep of an apartment in Red Hook was near the top of his list.
“I’m sorry, what is happening?” he asked, bewildered and caught off guard.
“You’re meeting my source in SHIELD,” Bucky told him, smirking behind his aviators.
Clint had borrowed some clothes - sweats that were a little short in the ankle and a t-shirt with the SHIELD logo on it that Bucky seemed to find immensely funny - and he felt worn out and frumpy next to Bucky’s black jeans and v-neck t-shirt. He’d also activated some kind of setting on the arm that made it look all normal-but-tattooed again, which Clint was finding immensely distracting.
He wished, suddenly, that they’d taken more advantage of their privacy on Bucky’s boat.
Bucky gave him a little sideways grin that made him think that he knew exactly what Clint was thinking.
Before he could say anything though, the apartment door opened and Steve motherfucking Rogers was glaring out into the hallway at them.
“It’s about fuckin’ time you showed up,” Steve told Bucky, stepping aside to let them in.
“Nice to see you too, punk,” Bucky said, strolling in as though he owned the place.
Clint gaped at the two of them for a long, awkward moment.
“Am I still hallucinating?” he asked, unable to stop staring between the two of them.
So much of the last several months slotted together in Clint’s mind, even as he kept looking at them, watching the familiar way Bucky moved around the apartment, heading straight for the coffee machine and turning it on, digging into the pantry and fridge for sugar and milk. The way Steve rolled his eyes in a fondly exasperated manner. He thought about the way Bucky always seemed to know where he was on missions, turning up at exactly the right moment because Steve had access to all Fury’s communications, including mission plans and status updates.
“What the fuck?” Clint breathed.
Both Steve and Bucky turned back to look at him, and then Steve hauled him into the apartment by the front of his t-shirt with surprising strength. Or maybe Clint’s shock had just rendered him powerless, hard to tell.
“Bucky and I’ve been pals since we were practically babies,” Steve told him, nudging Clint forward and onto a barstool at the tiny kitchen island. “We joined SHIELD together.”
Bucky snorted.
“Okay, I joined SHIELD and then I bullied Bucky into joining me after he got out of the Army,” Steve grumbled. “Same thing.”
“It’s really not,” Bucky said mildly.
“It’s really not,” Clint agreed. Not just because Steve sat behind a desk, relatively safe and protected, whereas Bucky - like Clint - had been out in the field. And what had happened to Bucky was a thousand times worse than what Clint had just been through.
“Yeah,” Steve said quietly, “I know. Glad to see he found you, Clint.”
“What, were you missing my ruggedly handsome face, Rogers?” Clint asked, falling back on old, easy habits.
Bucky glanced up sharply, eyes narrowed now that he’d pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head.
Steve rolled his eyes. “You can knock that off, Barton, you know you’re not my type and you look like three-day-old road kill.”
Clint made an affronted noise, but Bucky laughed, his shoulders relaxing.
“So what’s the plan?” Steve asked, perching on the available barstool. “You still haven’t checked in with SHIELD; I know because Natasha is panicking while trying to pretend she’s not panicking, and Fury is more pissed off than usual. If this has all been some elaborate honeymoon scheme, the least you could’ve done was warned me.”
Clint choked on nothing, but Bucky put a glass of water in front of him with a meaningful glance as he cracked open a beer.
“The plan is we go in, fuck shit up, and get out,” Bucky told Steve, tilting the bottle back to take several long swallows.
“So the plan is you don’t have a plan, as usual, and that’s why you’re here,” Steve concluded.
Clint shrugged, eyes watering from where he’d accidentally inhaled his own saliva. “Basically,” he said, roughly.
Steve sighed the deep and aggrieved sigh of the eternally put out. It was the same sound he made every time Clint turned in a half-assed mission report.
“I’m calling Tony,” Steve said.
Bucky groaned.
“You might as well call Nat then, too,” Clint told him. “It’s not like she won’t know, she’s got psychic powers or something.”
“She has Tony’s cellphone bugged,” Bucky told him.
“Same thing,” Clint said, dismissively. “We’ll need her help anyway."
Notes:
This whole fic meets the Clint Barton Bingo AND Winterhawk Bingo square 'Identity Porn' but this chapter in specific is just raging with it!
Chapter Text
In the end, the next morning found Clint strolling up to SHIELD headquarters as though he hadn’t been gone for nearly two weeks at all, except for the fact that he was a little skinnier than usual and he was still sore and bruised.
So not that unusual, really.
He signed in at the front desk, checked his weapons with the clerk, and headed straight for Fury’s office.
Along the way, he noticed eyes cutting in his direction, some curious and some hostile, and he made note of the latter. He caught the briefest glimpse of Rollins, too, darting into a hallway along his route and pulling a cellphone out of his pocket.
Steve kept him cooling his heels outside Fury’s office for longer than Clint thought strictly necessary, but Clint managed to maintain the thin veneer of their usual banter.
“The Director will see you now,” Steve told him, saccharine sweet.
Clint gave Fury the sanitized, edited version of the story they’d all agreed on in Steve’s apartment the night before: Clint had been picked up on the street - he didn’t remember by who, and he didn’t have any idea how they’d identified him - and held captive for several days. He didn’t remember much of his time in captivity, knew only that he’d been rescued by unknown parties and deposited in a small motel outside Ithaca. Eventually he’d recovered enough to make his way back to the city and to SHIELD headquarters, and here he was for debriefing.
Fury listened to all of this with the same barely-restrained impatience he always showed Clint’s post-mission reports, which were often rambling and inconsistent.
“Is that it, Barton?” Fury said, when Clint was done. “You don’t know who captured you, you don’t know how you got away, you don’t know where you were, and you aren’t entirely sure how you got back? Is that about accurate?”
“Yes, sir,” Clint said, just enough mutinous reluctance in his voice to pass muster, he hoped.
“Well, it just so happens,” Fury said, sounding irritated, “that Secretary Pierce is on site today, and he’d like to congratulate you on your miraculous escape.”
This, too, was part of the plan, and part of the reason Clint had turned up today instead of waiting a few more days to recover. Pierce had already planned an on-site inspection of SHIELD today, so it was a perfect opportunity for Clint to ‘conveniently’ run into him.
As much as he itched to just shoot the bastard, they were hopeful he would let something slip to Clint, something that could be used to prove his involvement with Hydra and his underhanded dealings inside SHIELD. Bucky had taken as much information as he could from the base he’d rescued Clint from, and he had years’ worth of stolen data and incriminating evidence, but most of it pointed to lackies and there was a sad dearth of evidence linking Pierce to anything substantive.
“Hit medical when you’re done,” Fury told him. “Agent Donne will escort you upstairs, and of course Steve will give you access to the administration levels.”
Clint blinked at Fury in barely-contained surprise. Edward Donne was Agent 001 in the Bond novels and-
Sure enough, Bucky stepped out of the shadows of the room in full-on SHIELD uniform, tac pants clinging lovingly to his thighs and Clint couldn’t help staring.
Bucky looked just different enough to pass a visual inspection; Tony had given him some kind of nano mask to alter his facial features enough that he wasn’t immediately recognizable and also input a false identity for him into SHIELD’s systems. His arm was covered with SHIELD-issued uniform sleeves and a glove, but Clint suspected Bucky had used the built-in system to make it look like a normal arm anyway. His hair was pulled up into a high topknot that probably wasn’t strictly in adherence with regulation, but the closely-shaven sides gave the impression of a military high-and-tight that would probably get him a pass. He held himself at quiet attention, but the look he gave Clint was anything but innocent.
Clint kind of wanted to take a detour to the locker room, where there were private shower cubicles that he could ruin the other man in.
When this was over he was going to either drag Bucky back to his apartment in Bed-Stuy or demand to be whisked away to the private yacht for ‘recovery’ purposes.
Thinking about it, Clint hadn’t been in his apartment in like two weeks and god only knew what it looked like.
The yacht it was.
Assuming Bucky wanted him there.
Clint was trying not to assume too much, but they’d spent the night curled up together in Steve’s guest room, Bucky plastered to his back and stroking lightly over his arms and Clint felt something that felt uncomfortably like hope stirring in his chest.
Honest to god if one of them got killed doing this, Clint was going to lose his shit.
They rode the elevator to the uppermost floor of the building, Bucky standing behind and to Clint’s left, with Steve near the elevator panel so that he could swipe his access card.
Pierce’s office was on the uppermost floor, with wide, panoramic windows that overlooked the city and a private staircase which led to the roof. Clint and Bucky had reviewed all of this with Steve, Natasha and Tony the night before. Natasha should already be stationed on the roof in case anyone made a break for it, while Tony was in the computer systems helpfully recording whatever conversation took place between Clint and Pierce. He’d also supplied Clint with some kind of fancy ass gun that didn’t have any metal bits to set off any detectors, which Clint fully intended to keep when this was all over.
In the center of the room, Pierce was seated at a wide mahogany desk, clearly designed for maximum intimidation levels. He was flanked by Sitwell, who was standing in the corner of the room in a mimicry of parade rest, and Rumlow, who was lounging in a chair nearby, clearly aiming for ‘just happened to be in the neighborhood’ and failing miserably.
Clint forced himself not to react to their presence.
They’d planned for this, he reminded himself. At no point had any of them expected Pierce to meet with Clint alone.
The only person visibly missing was Rollins, and Clint didn’t really expect that to last long.
“Secretary Pierce, you wanted to see me?” Clint asked, and if it sounded a tiny bit sarcastic, it wasn’t like Clint wasn’t known around SHIELD for his attitude problem.
“Agent Barton,” Pierce said, standing up to shake his hand. He sounded, for all intents and purposes, like a kindly grandfather, genuinely concerned for Clint’s health and wellbeing and happy to see him. “I heard you’ve had quite the ordeal.”
He was a much better actor than Clint would ever have given him credit for.
Behind him, Bucky stiffened up just slightly.
Clint shrugged as he shook Pierce’s hand. “Something like that, sir. I can’t say that I remember much of it.”
“A shame,” Pierce said, taking his seat. He gestured at Clint to sit in the chair across from his desk and Clint sat down gingerly, moving more slowly than was strictly necessary and overall just playing up his soreness and injuries. There was no need to give anyone in the room more information than they already had about the state of his health. “It would be good to know who thinks they can kidnap SHIELD agents off the street with no consequence.” He eyed Clint speculatively. “It’s amazing that you managed to get away.”
“I had some help,” Clint admitted. “Can’t remember who it was though.”
Pierce and Rumlow exchanged an unreadable look.
“We have reason to believe it might have been the WInter Soldier,” Pierce told him gently, like he was breaking some kind of bad news to Clint.
Clint furrowed his brow. “The Soldier is an assassin. Why would he rescue me and then dump me in a motel nearby?”
Another look passed between Rumlow and Pierce.
“We know he’s been… engaging with you on your missions,” Pierce told him, and Clint deeply regretted revealing any of the interactions he’d had with Bucky in his mission reports, even if he’d kept the full extent of most of them to himself. “We suspect he may be trying to gain your trust as a way to infiltrate SHIELD.”
Clint snorted - he couldn’t help it. As though Bucky had needed Clint to infiltrate SHIELD.
Pierce raised his eyebrow, giving Clint an open, friendly expression. “Is something about that funny, Agent Barton?”
“No sir,” Clint said, hurriedly. “It just seems ludicrous to me. He didn’t even stick around to say hello, I didn’t know it was him until you just told me, that’s not exactly a bedrock of trust.”
“Well, I’m not sure that’s the case,” Pierce told him, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together. “Seeing as how he’s standing in the room with us. Isn’t that right Soldat?” He turned his gaze over Clint’s shoulder to zero in on Bucky.
Clint jerked forward, one hand going to the armrest of his chair and the other behind him, where he wrapped his fingers around the polymer handle of the pistol Tony had given him. Steve was still in the room, halfway to the elevator.
Bucky reached up and pulled the Nano mask off of his face at the same time that he pulled his SHIELD-issued gun out of its holster.
“Ah, ah,” Rumlow said, already pointing a gun at Clint. “Put that down or your boyfriend gets it.”
Bucky’s eyes flicked to Clint apologetically, and he held the gun up, pointing it at the ceiling, with his finger carefully away from the trigger.
“That’s better,” Pierce said, still looking as relaxed as if they were on a picnic in the park. “I should be thanking you, Agent Barton,” he continued, barely glancing at Clint. “You’ve brought our missing asset back into the fold.” He turned to look at him more fully. “And I think we can add you to the roster, as soon as you’re fully healed from your injuries.”
Clint very specifically didn’t ask what injuries, because he really didn’t want to invite more injuries to his person at the moment.
“Желаниe,” Pierce said, pleasant and unexpected, the Russian rolling smoothly off his tongue.
Bucky flinched.
What ‘longing’ had to do with anything, Clint didn’t know.
“Pжавы,” Pierce continued, and Bucky looked pained.
Nothing about it made sense, the words were nonsense words, ‘rusted’ didn’t even-
It was then that Clint remembered Bucky saying he’d had trigger words implanted in his brain when Hydra had held him, and his fingers tightened around the pistol grip under his shirt. Obviously no one knew he had it, or he’d have been disarmed by now. He watched Bucky carefully, trying to decide if he should move or wait, fire or not.
Bucky gave him the slightest shake of his head, and Clint held himself still, waiting.
“Семнадцать, Девять, Один.”
Apparently they were going to let Pierce get through the entire list. A thin bead of sweat ran from Bucky’s hairline to his collar, and Clint wondered, suddenly, just how well-tested Bucky’s removed trigger words had been and if he was going to be facing down the Winter Soldier in just a few minutes.
Still, he held his ground.
He trusted Bucky, and never was that more apparent than in this moment.
Behind them, the elevator made a quiet ‘ding’ as it arrived, and Rollins stepped out, took in the mood of the room, and then herded Steve closer to Rumlow and within Clint’s peripheral vision.
“Рассвет.”
Bucky’s jaw clenched.
“Печь.”
His hand trembled where he was holding it above his shoulders.
“Доброкачественные.”
Bucky’s vibranium fingers spasmed around the grip of his gun.
“Возвращение домой.”
Clint ached to tell Pierce to shut up, to shut him up with his fist or the gun in his hand, to spare Bucky whatever agony he could see in the tense line of his shoulders, even if it was just the memory of what had been done to him before. He kept silent, though, because they were in uncharted water here, and he had to believe that Bucky had a plan, that he was putting himself through this for a reason. Clint couldn’t fuck this up, because it was their only chance to get Pierce.
Tony was recording it. Clint held that fact in his mind as he watched and kept still and silent. Tony was recording, and this was a far better admission than any confession Clint might have coaxed out of him. The fact that the man had memorized the Winter Soldier’s activation phrases was as damning as any evidence could be.
“Rрузовой вагон.” Pierce looked grimly satisfied, looking at Bucky expectantly.
“Ready to comply,” Bucky ground out, still standing stiffly.
“Excellent,” Pierce said, and it was unnerving how delighted he seemed, how he still maintained that same collected, paternal tone. “Shoot Agent Barton somewhere non-lethal, and then allow Agent Rumlow to take you into custody.” Bucky flipped the gun in his hand around until he was holding it in a firm, steady grip.
Several things happened at once.
Bucky tossed the gun from his right hand to his left, catching it deftly and firing through the wood of the desk, catching Pierce somewhere below the waist. At the same time, Steve reared back and smacked Rumlow in the side of the head with a heavy statuette he’d taken off a nearby shelf, dropping the other man instantly to the ground. Clint pulled his own gun out, caught Pierce neatly between the eyes as he slumped forward over his legs in pain, and as he did, Bucky turned and shot Rollins twice - once in the shoulder and again in the hip.
Everyone hit the ground within seconds of each other, just as Sitwell made a break for the stairwell, fleeing the scene.
Clint reached up and tapped his hearing aid, activating the comms.
“Sitwell is headed your way.”
“I got him,” Natasha said grimly, and then there was the bang of a slamming metal door followed by the muffled sound of a struggle.
“Well,” Bucky said, looking around, “that was anticlimactic.”
“Given that no one ended up dangling from a helicopter skid, I’d say so, yeah,” Steve grumbled, shaking the feeling back into his hands.
Clint snorted before bending over Rumlow to truss him up with his own cuffs. “Why do I feel like I need to hear this story?”
“You really don’t,” Steve assured him.
“You really do,” Bucky said, smirking.
“Tony, did you get all that?” Clint asked, speaking into his comms again.
“Got it, not that it matters since you shot Pierce in the face. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“He deserved it,” Clint grumbled, tightening the restraints around Rumlow’s wrists as he started to struggle towards consciousness.
“He may have deserved it,” Fury said, stepping off the elevator, “but you’ve made a hell of a lot more paperwork for me, Barton.”
**
Clint woke up, warm and well-rested, and being aggressively snuggled by the world’s deadliest assassin.
It’d be cute if he weren’t sweating his ass off.
Well, it was cute, but he was still sweating uncomfortably. He shrugged and squirmed until Bucky loosened his hold and Clint was able to roll over to face him. He looked relaxed in sleep, losing that careful, wary edge that he carried in all of their day-to-day interactions, even when it was just the two of them.
They’d spent days at SHIELD following the death of Alexander Pierce. Days of interrogations disguised as interviews, days of explaining data Bucky had acquired over the years, of reviewing the tapes and records from Clint’s brief stint as a prisoner of Hydra. There’d been a general weeding-out of SHIELD employees too - anyone whose name was mentioned in those files or who’d had a particularly close relationship with Pierce was given careful scrutiny. Rumlow was in a max-security facility and he was refusing to talk, but Sitwell was singing like a canary, especially after Natasha had threatened to kick him off the roof of the building. Rollins was still in intensive care but expected to make enough recovery to share a cell with Rumlow.
There were hundreds of others, agents Clint had worked with and many he hadn’t. A few he’d helped train, which left him feeling vaguely hollow and bitter.
Probably not as hollow and bitter as Bucky had felt, since he’d waited years for the vindication he was now getting. Fury was living up to his name, storming about the place in a righteous rage, promoting people like Maria Hill even as Hydra flunkies were being weeded out like the bad apples they were.
Finally, though, Bucky had been released as a private citizen, though it had taken at least one phone call from Prince T’Challa to the World Security Council to make it happen, and Clint had been put on ‘indefinite medical leave’ through some series of string pulling he didn’t understand and wasn’t going to question, and Natasha had flown the two of them back to Bucky’s yacht with a sly smile and pointed commentary.
Clint had thought they would fall on each other like starved animals, but Bucky’d coaxed him into a shower and into bed and into an embrace with minimal fuss. Part of him had been disappointed, and part of him relieved. As much as he wanted Bucky, Clint was still on unsteady footing, still recovering from two ordeals, still not sure what they were even doing. Maybe it looked obvious from the outside - to people like Natasha - but it didn’t seem all that obvious to Clint, especially at SHIELD where they were both wound up and on edge.
Here though, on Bucky’s boat, it was just the two of them, and a kind of peace Clint hadn’t often or ever got to experience. So he was studying the man in bed with him, trying to work out just what it was between them and where it was going to go. Assuming it went anywhere. Hell, maybe Bucky felt sorry for him.
“You’re thinkin’ too hard,” Bucky slurred, not opening his eyes.
Clint snorted a little. “No one’s ever accused me of that before,” he admitted.
Bucky cracked one eye open to look at him, evaluating him with that steel-blue gaze. “You’re in my bed, on my boat, sleeping with me. I’m not sure how much more obvious I can be,” he said, after a few seconds. “Mission’s over, you’re still here. What’s that tell you?”
Shrugging uncomfortably, Clint reached out to gingerly rest a hand on Bucky’s hip. “You like me?” he said, hating how uncertain he sounded.
Raising up on his elbow, Bucky looked down at Clint in frank disbelief. “You think?” He didn’t give Clint a chance to answer though, just leaned over to press their mouths together, soft and sweet and easy. “You’re an idiot,” he murmured against Clint’s lips.
Clint didn’t answer - he already knew he was an idiot, thank you very much - just tangled his fingers in the loose strands of Bucky’s hair and pulled him down for a kiss that was way less soft.
“I like you too,” he said, a little bit breathless when they broke apart.
Bucky grinned down at him, something blinding in the way the smile curled at the edges of his mouth and creased the corners of his eyes. There was nothing smirky in the smile, none of his usual snark or banter, just a genuinely happy look on his face that made something in Clint’s chest seize up.
Clint rolled them until Bucky was on his back and Clint was wedged over him, cupping Bucky’s jaw in his hand and draping his body half on top of Bucky’s, kissing him like he was dying for it. Bucky’s arms came up around his back to hold him closer as they kissed and kissed and kissed, sometimes soft, barely-there presses of lips, other times deep, devastating and thorough explorations.
Gone was the sense of urgency that had plagued their other encounters, the secrecy and lies they cloaked themselves in - instead, it was just the soft exploration of two people who were still learning each other.
“Can I?” Clint asked, tugging at the waistband of the shorts Bucky’d worn to sleep in.
Bucky lifted his hips and let Clint pull them off, tossing them off the bed.
Clint ran his hands over the exposed skin of Bucky’s flank and thighs and then eased in for more deep, drugging kisses. Bucky yanked at the hem of Clint’s shirt and he paused only long enough to pull it over his head and throw it away before he was back at Bucky’s mouth. Bucky was tugging impatiently at his shorts and those got kicked off too, until they were naked and pressed together from chest to knees. Clint tangled his ankles up with Bucky’s and stroked a hand along his thigh, coaxing him even closer. The movement brought their cocks together, brushing up against each other and making Clint gasp into Bucky’s mouth.
Bucky rolled his hips, dragging another sound out of Clint’s throat, making one of his own in return.
It was so easy, with the sheets kicked to the foot of the bed and their bodies moving in tandem, just the quiet motion of the two of them together on the bed, the small noises that Clint bit back and the slightly-louder ones that Bucky wasn’t trying to hide. Everything about it seemed simple in that moment, just two people who liked each other, just two bodies in a bed. Clint eased Bucky’s leg over his hip, giving both of them a better angle to rock into, and Bucky pulled back from Clint’s mouth to watch him with heavy-lidded eyes. He reached out and ran a thumb over Clint’s lower lip and down to his arms where Clint still had faint bruises. He tweaked a nipple with a smirk, before wrapping his hand around Clint’s hip and pulling him into a deeper thrust, rocking them harder together.
Clint dragged his nails up Bucky’s back just to watch him arch into it, and then buried his hand in his hair, letting the edge of his thumb graze Bucky’s cheekbone.
When he came it was almost a surprise, like he’d forgot that there was a purpose to the touching, the kissing, and the languorous thrusts, like those things hadn’t been a means to an end. And maybe, for once, they hadn’t been, because Clint came with a startled cry and wide-open eyes, Bucky watching him avidly as he rocked his own hips up into the warm, wet mess Clint left all over them.
When Bucky came it was a quiet thing, something small and trusting in the way he closed his eyes and gripped Clint’s arm with his head thrown back.
“You should stay,” Bucky told him, when they were both calmed down, when their heart rates were back to normal.
“For how long?” Clint asked, unwilling and unable to move, his eyes closed with his chin nestled on top of Bucky’s head.
“For as long as you want.”
Clint hummed. “What about work?”
He hadn’t fully decided if or when or what that would be, but Clint didn’t feel done yet. Maybe he wouldn’t go back to being what he’d been before, but he would go back to something. Bucky might be retired, but Clint didn’t think he was.
“You always have a place here,” Bucky said, calm and confident and everything Clint hadn’t known he needed, didn’t even know he’d been looking for.
But he had been looking for it, and he did need it. He thought of all the months he’d spent alone, broken up only by his little interludes with Bucky and how much he’d looked forward to them - how much Bucky had already brought into his life and how much he wanted to keep that, wanted to have it every day.
Wanted to wake up like this every morning.
Wanted to have Bucky in his bed every night. Or be in Bucky’s bed every night.
“You offering to be my Bond girl, Barnes?” Clint said, still wrapped up around him, content and warm and cautiously happy, cautiously hopeful.
Bucky snorted into Clint’s neck. “I think you’re the Bond girl in this situation, seeing as how I had to rescue you from the evil villain but sure, I guess. I’m retired. I can be the eye candy.”
Clint thought about lazy days spent on the sundeck, just the two of them, and mornings spent in bed and dinners and a million other sappy, ridiculous daydreams that Clint had never allowed himself to have before. Of having Bucky just off the coast of whatever country SHIELD sent him to next, waiting for Clint to come home.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I’m in.”
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