Chapter Text
To his credit, Phil doesn’t know that it’s going to happen until it does.
He doesn’t plan it, doesn’t intend to blackmail a junior agent into coming home with him for Christmas, he just... panics.
It’s Beth’s fault really, when you think about it. If she weren’t so perfectly domestic, with her husband and her two-point-five children and her dog, Phil wouldn’t look so pathetically alone by comparison. If she weren’t so good at the whole holiday thing, helping their mother turn a one or two-night Christmas celebration into a week-long event, he probably could’ve just sent his sincere apologies and skipped out. Unfortunately for him, Beth’s always been an over-achiever and far too nosey for her own good.
Well, for his own good really.
She actually sends out embossed invitations, the whole family included, and the subtle threats that come by phone a week later aren’t actually that subtle at all.
Nothing for it then – he has to go, and not even his longstanding friendship with one Nicholas R Fury will save him.
It would be better if he truly were distanced from his family, if he didn’t care all that much about what they thought or what disappointed them. Working for SHIELD should have done it years ago – all the secrecy and missed calls and endless holidays away – but somehow the Coulsons have always managed to keep him close. He Skypes with his parents, writes letters back and forth to his younger brother RJ, and Beth’s never been shy about crashing in on him with her entire brood whenever she possibly can. He’s the squeaky wheel in an otherwise normal family, the problem-child in the otherwise tightly knit group, and while they’ve always been loving and supportive of everything he does, the guilt still sits heavily on his shoulders.
You see, his family doesn’t know exactly what it is that he does for a living, not the full extent of it anyway. They don’t know the danger he puts himself in, the frequency with which he’s sent out of the country at a moment’s notice. There’s only so much he can he possibly tell them, only so many stories he can weave, and as each holiday season passes, it becomes more and more difficult to come up with a reason for his absence. Now, his mother has gotten it into her head that the real reason he hasn’t been home for Christmas in years is not that he’s a very important secret agent within a shadowy government organization, but rather that he’s got a partner he doesn’t want to share with them, and she’s somehow managed to drag everyone else into the delusion with her.
It’s a ridiculous notion. Phil’s always been discrete about his personal affairs, but he’s never considered himself to be in the closet, never made an effort to hide the fact that he was gay. That he would avoid his family at Christmas just to hide a boyfriend from them is somehow both better and worse than the truth that his job is simply more demanding, more important sometimes than they are. He might even have appreciated the ready-made excuse if his mother hadn’t staged a teary intervention with his father and both siblings, promising him that they loved him no matter what and that they would never, ever think less of him for who he loved in return.
Phil had sat through the conference call with exasperated fondness and done something truly, monumentally stupid in an effort to reassure his mother that he knew her better than that, that he had never feared the loss of her love.
Now he’s barreling in to clean up a milk run that’s spilled over with less than sixteen hours to spare before he and his non-existent but still-promised partner are due at the family lodge for the start of Beth’s Christmas festivities.
He’s doomed.
He could put it down to stress, he supposes.
Unfortunately, the thought has been lingering at the back of his mind that the only way he’s going to pull this off is to hire an escort or promise to fast-track one of the junior agents through Undercover 103, so he can’t claim complete innocence.
The only problem, he muses as he leads an extraction team into a shoddy little underground bunker, is that he would rather chew off his own arm than do either. He doesn’t know any of the junior agents, doesn’t trust them, and while he could probably bribe his good friend Jasper Sitwell into playing the part, he knows he would never hear the end of it.
Doomed then, and resigned to disappointing his mother once more, until he kicks in the door of the basement where a SHIELD tracker has been steadily blinking out a silent alert and is struck dumb by the sight of his salvation sitting half-naked and completely high, cuffed to a chair and warbling Jingle Bells like he can negotiate his own release just by being an obnoxious pain in the ass.
“Barton!” he says sharply, a warning both to the agent and himself. “Sitrep!”
“Oh heeeeyyyy, sir,” Barton snickers, having finally realized just who’s broken down the door and cut himself off mid-verse. “You came to get me!”
Phil blinks, his stomach doing a low, sick roll.
He hasn’t worked with Barton all that much since he’d recruited the young man two years ago, but he’s kept close tabs on his progress. The archer burned his way through the junior ranks with incredible speed, setting some records along the way, but not all of them have been good. He’s been through more handlers than any other agent in the history of the organization, has more red flags for insubordination in his file than Phil has ever seen, and is notorious for pulling stupid, risky stunts to get himself out of trouble whenever he inevitably falls into it. Half his evaluations call him cocky and over-confident, but that, that one sentence and the pure, honest surprise behind it is enough to convince Phil that it’s exactly the opposite.
He’s not over-confident; he’s scared.
He believes he’s worth so little to SHIELD that he doesn’t trust them to send someone after him.
It’s an understandable assumption, though rather unforgiveable. Barton had fucked up but good when he’d disappeared off one of Maria Hill’s ops a few months ago and come back with the Black Widow in tow. She’s still on lockdown back at HQ, and while Barton had been let off base for this particular milk run, he’s being watched like the proverbial hawk in the meantime. Fury had been making noise about leashing them together on a two-man Strike Team so that when it all goes bad Barton will bear the brunt of the fallout, but he’s yet to find a handler willing to take them on and the whole thing is still a long way from getting off the ground. Romanov will have to prove herself first and Barton’s still being punished, made to sit through the gamut of intro classes he’d been allowed to skip or test out of in the beginning: Vehicle Maintenance, Morse and Other Codes, Beginner’s Undercover...
Shit.
He thinks the thought before he can stop himself and once it’s there in the back of his mind there’s no pretending it never happened. Phil’s all about efficiency and this solution kills a few birds with one stone, so it’s hard to argue the logic of.
Still, he shakes his head, angry with himself that he’s even entertaining the idea when Barton’s been compromised and is clearly vulnerable, beaming at him from his chair wearing nothing but a pair of dark purple boxer-briefs that definitely aren’t SHIELD-issue.
“Come on,” he sighs, stepping forward to help Barton to his feet. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Can’t,” Barton mumbles, a bit sadly as he hangs his head, lower lip trembling and slightly swollen.
“Are you injured?” he asks, immediately on the alert.
“Nuh-uh. But they stuck me with somethin’ an’ I can’t...”
Barton frowns, wriggles, shifts his massive shoulders, then looks up at Phil with a huff and a huge pair of puppy-dog eyes that suggest he should know what’s wrong.
Rolling his eyes, Phil circles around behind him and has to bite down hard on his tongue to stop himself from barking a laugh. The bindings that have thwarted Barton’s efforts are a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs obviously meant for... other activities, and have somehow resisted his normally adept lock-picking skills. There’s a bent bobby pin lodged in the keyhole, and it would all be rather unforgivably hilarious if Barton weren’t six sheets to the wind on whatever they’d shot him up with.
To make the picture that much worse, Barton’s arms aren’t threaded through the back of the chair, he’s just sat down on it.
“Up,” Phil commands, tugging gently on his elbow, and Clint rises to his feet gracefully and obediently, only to turn around and blink at the chair with wide-eyed astonishment.
“Cool!” he whines in a high-pitched voice, “How’d you do that Sir?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Phil says insincerely, already dragging him toward the door as a dull boom echoes somewhere nearby. “Come on, we’ve overstayed our welcome.”
He should take the handcuffs off.
It’s probably the professional thing to do, especially once they’re all safely on the quinjet and heading back to New York. Phil’s read Barton’s file though, and he knows exactly what the man is capable of, even when drugged. His penchant for escaping medical like some kind of long-incarcerated conman is legend, and with the way he’s acting he needs to be seen before he’s allowed to do anything else.
“Didn’t know you were so kinky Sir,” Barton snickers when Phil releases one of his hands from its cuff and clips it to his own instead.
“I learn from others’ mistakes Agent Barton,” he replies flatly, sitting down beside the archer and pulling out his tablet to start work on his AAR. “You won’t be disappearing on me before you’re seen by medical the way you did with Agent Hand.”
Barton doesn’t reply, just sticks out his lower lip in another pout and huffs once more before slouching down in the seat next to Phil and closing his eyes, his hand resting on Phil’s thigh to give him room to move. Someone’s found him a spare pair of sweats to tug on, but Phil hadn’t thought to get him a shirt while he was loose, so he’s just going to have to suffer through the endless muscles and the burning heat of the archer’s body pressed all down his side until they land. He feels like a lech for being aware of the younger man’s nakedness at all, but he dares anyone to be confronted with a half-naked Clint Barton and not have some kind of reaction.
Lord, he’s a terrible person.
Sighing, he pages through the blank documents loaded onto his tablet and pulls up the paperwork he’ll need to file to transfer Barton from Gorby’s supervision to his own.
AVAVA
Clint wakes up slow with the kind of rolling headache that warns him he’s been recently drugged. His body is achy and his tongue is all dried out and stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his stomach is rumbling like he hasn’t eaten in days. Breathing slowly, he takes quiet stock of himself and the room around him, and quickly realizes that while he’s not on that stupid chair anymore, he’s definitely still handcuffed to something. Maybe if he...
“...Never seen him react so poorly to being drugged before,” a low voice says, one that Clint would recognize anywhere, even if he doesn’t get to hear it all that often.
“Agent Barton has a documented reaction to Benadryl,” another voice says – female, calm... he knows her too. “It was mixed in with the cocktail they gave him – luckily the side effects of that are the worst he should experience.”
“Aren’t those bad enough?” Clint rasps, blinking his eyes open to the bright white world that is SHEILD’s med bay. “What'd I do this time doc?”
“Well, you couldn’t quite pull off your own daring escape,” Helen Cho says, coming forward with a smile on her face and a clipboard in her hand, gesturing to the - fuzzy, pink, what the hell? - handcuff keeping Clint clipped to the bed rail. “But Agent Coulson assures me that the worst of the humiliation was just a bit of Christmas caroling.”
Clint groans, sinking back into the pillows and flopping his free arm across his eyes.
“At least I kept my clothes on this time, right?” he whimpers, trying and failing to console himself that he hadn’t acted like a total idiot in front of...
“Not all of them,” Coulson says quietly, and Clint’s heart thumps extra hard, but it almost sounds like the guy is smiling so it can’t be that bad right?
Sneaking a peak from beneath his elbow, he’s disappointed to find the senior agent straight-faced and utterly ignoring him, scrawling away at his tablet with a little black stylus. Sighing, resigned to his fate, he relinquishes his free arm to the doctor, who quickly checks his blood pressure, looks over his vitals, and shines a little hell-light into his eyeballs before handing him a Styrofoam cup of cool water.
“How do you feel?” she asks, pressing down on Clint’s fingernails to check his circulation.
“Hungover,” he grumbles bitterly around the bendy-straw. “Same as last time.”
“Plenty of fluids,” she councils, wagging her pen at him sternly, and Clint toasts her with the cup. “I’d prescribe some rest too if I thought you’d listen.”
Reaching into the pocket of her lab coat, she comes up with one of the peppermint lollipops she has R&D whip up for patients with queasy stomachs and hands it over.
“Aw, you’re the best doc,” Clint praises, all boyish smirk and wheedling tone as he takes the sucker and rattles his cuff at her. “Any chance you’d sweeten the deal even more?”
“Ask your handler,” she replies with a smirk of her own, and then she’s turning her back on his stunned expression and waltzing out the door.
Clint blinks a few times, sure he heard wrong, because last he knew, he didn’t have a handler here at SHIELD. A handler was something you earned, a senior agent who picked you out of the pools, and no one had ever wanted Clint.
He’s used to that - drop-out orphan carney hick ya’ know - so he’d never let himself hope that one Phillip J Coulson, Level 6 Agent of SHIELD and all-around BAMF would look at him twice after bringing him in.
Clint feels his cheeks heat with a painful blush and ducks his head, focuses on unwrapping his candy.
The guy had left a mark ok, more than just the one from the bullet.
“Sign this.”
Clint looks up, startled that Coulson’s managed to get out of his chair, cross to the bed, and step right up beside him without his noticing. Course, that kind of competency is half of what gave Clint the hots for the guy in the first place, and he’d kinda been ignoring him on purpose...
“What is it?” he asks warily, jamming his sucker into the pocket of his cheek before he can say anything else, like one of the twelve horrendously embarrassing thoughts running through his head.
“Transfer of supervision,” Coulson replies easily, handing the tablet and stylus into Clint’s free hand. “You and Romanov are both going to need a handler to keep you out of trouble once Fury pairs you up.”
“You...”
Coulson finally looks at him with those kind blue eyes Clint remembers so well and quirks an eyebrow.
“Unless you’d rather someone else,” he says carefully, no emotion leaking through at all.
“Wouldn’t you rather someone else?” Clint practically yips, stunned that Coulson would be willing to take on him let alone him and the Black Widow. “Have you read my file?”
“Quite thoroughly Agent Barton,” he says calmly, looking Clint dead in the eye. “You’ve done almost as well as I’d hoped. With the right handler, you have the potential to do even better.”
Clint’s jaw drops, but Coulson’s turned to go back to his chair, sitting down and crossing one ankle neatly over his knee, the picture of ease and surety. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, or to let a moment of insanity pass when he could take all advantage of it, he quickly scrawls his name across the screen and then taps through the document, adding his signature to all the dotted lines without reading a damn word.
“It will be a pleasure working with you Sir,” he quips, tossing Coulson the tablet and a sharkish grin, more to cover the racing of his heart than anything.
“Yes, I expect it will be quite interesting,” Coulson replies, looking him over slowly with an intense gaze.
Clint tries not to squirm, unsure what that means, and lifts his chin in challenge.
Coulson blinks, shakes his head as if brushing away a thought, then presses a button that causes the tablet to make a swooshing sound and send the paperwork off into whatever ether it exists.
“So, what’s the plan Boss?” Clint asks, subtlety toying with the handcuff. “Where to next?”
“You are going to stay here,” Coulson replies with a frown, setting the tablet aside and pulling out a cell phone. “You need to be monitored, and I have to... go.”
“No fair,” Clint immediately protests, Coulson’s reputation as a hard-ass and a robot suddenly resurfacing with a vengeance. “Why do you get to leave?”
“Because I wasn’t recently drugged with an unknown cocktail of chemicals containing something I have particularly bad reactions to,” he explains.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Clint huffs petulantly. “Didn’t work anyway – I didn’t tell ‘em anything.”
“I know that Barton,” Coulson says, everything about him suddenly going soft, and Clint’s heart thumps in his chest.
“Yeah, well,” he mumbles, licking his lips nervously. “You could at least take the handcuff off. Or stay and suffer with me – med food sucks.”
“The handcuff stays until you can pick it,” Coulson scolds, something like amusement dancing around the corners of his mouth. “I’m a big believer in learning through experience.”
Clint scowls at him – it's not funny; stupid, fuzzy, sex cuffs!
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a bobby pin handy,” he snarks, and Coulson rolls his eyes.
“I seem to have left them all in my other wig,” he says dryly, and Clint tilts his head, surprised by the joke, as lame as it was.
“Fine,” he grumbles, wriggling around to get himself into a position where he can lean over to swipe the stylus off the bedside table. Coulson’s conveniently dropped it just a little too far out of reach, but he can recognize a challenge when he sees one. “Anyway, doesn’t explain why you get to leave and I have to stay. You’re my handler now – isn't that what you’re supposed to do? Handle me?”
Coulson arches an eyebrow and Clint blushes, chastised by that single, silent expression.
“Supervise me,” he amends, mumbling and embarrassed.
Jesus Barton, scare the guy off why don’t ya?
That's gotta be a record; losing your first handler to sexual harassment within what? Two minutes?
Normally he wouldn’t care – he’s tested his supervisors in the past with nearly that exact sentence. It’s important to him to be able to trust the voice in his ear, to know that he won’t be asked to put out or go to his knees for a mark or for a meal. But he needs a handler right now, him and Nat both, and he knows the kind of hot water he’s in with the organization as a whole. He’s lucky anyone is willing to take him on, let alone...
“Normally I would.
Clint blinks, stops maneuvering toward the stylus on the table because he’s nearly forgotten what he’d asked in the first place.
“I have rules and expectations for my assets Agent Barton,” Coulson says slowly, with a heaviness and an aggressive eye contact that tells him exactly how serious this is. “But I hold myself to those same standards. You will never wake up in medical alone if it is in my power to be there, or to send one of your teammates. And Barton...”
Clint swallows hard, forces himself not to drop his gaze, even as his instincts suddenly start screaming at him to run.
“I will always come for you.”
It’s as intense and honest and heartfelt a statement as Clint thinks he’s ever been given before. His heart starts pounding in his chest, he can’t breathe, and for all of a minute it feels like his whole, crappy history is written all over his face. Clearing his throat, he lets himself drop his eyes back to the table, his fingertips inches away from the stylus, the little piece of metal that, with a snap and a twist, will be his literal key to getting out of this handcuff and out of this conversation.
“But not this time,” he says, because he has to say something as he tries to reel everything back in where it’s safe and hidden, a jerkish sort of comment to break the crazy tension hanging between them. “Not a great first impression, taking off as soon as you sign me on. I’m starting to see a pattern there Coulson.”
The man makes a noncommittal sound and Clint’s heart sinks, both because of the sick, I-told-you-so triumph bubbling up in the pit of his stomach and because, despite being right, he kind of feels like a dick for pointing it out.
“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, trying to save face by pretending to misinterpret Coulson’s little hum. “I suck at first impressions too.”
“To be fair,” Coulson says calmly, “You were drugged this time. And bleeding the last.”
“Who’s fault was that?”
“I told you to stop or I’d shoot,” Coulson says, getting smoothly to his feet and scooping up his tablet, along with the stylus Clint’s been struggling toward.
“Hey!” he yelps, dismayed.
"I hope you’ll truly learn to trust me one day Agent Barton,” Coulson says thoughtfully, tucking the stylus into his pocket as though Clint isn’t glaring at him and trying to burn a hole through his suit with the power of his gaze alone. “I’m a man who proves that I always mean the things I say.”
“I don’t even know you,” Clint argues, because something inside him twists at the idea, wants so badly it hurts. “You shot me the day we met, and now you’re leaving me tied to a bed with kinky sex cuffs while you disappear to do who-knows-what...”
“I have to go home for Christmas,” he says, sharply and suddenly but not with anger.
Clint blinks, stares, and if he didn’t trust his eyes more than anything in the world, he’d think he was imagining the pink blush that dusts across Senior Agent Coulson’s cheeks for all of a second.
“I would stay with you,” he says, and it’s insistent in a way that Clint doesn’t understand, makes him uncomfortable. “But I have to go home for the holiday, and with the Director and my sister both conspiring against me there’s no way I can get out of it.”
“The Director...” Clint mumbles, because ok, now he’s confused.
Coulson just waves his hand dismissively, like that isn’t the most interesting thing Clint’s heard all week.
“The point is, you need someone to check in on you, at least for the next twenty-four hours,” he says. “And since I can’t be here to do it, I’d much prefer that you stay in medical so that Dr. Cho can.”
“Obviously you need to take another look at my file Coulson,” Clint says, licking his lips nervously before he starts looking around for an alternative lockpick. “I don’t stay in medical.”
“I’m aware,” Coulson says, and the frown is so obvious in his tone that Clint actually snaps around to see it on the guy’s face.
Coulson is standing beside his bed in near parade rest, shoulders pinned back like his spine has gone to steel, his fingers tapping at the edges of his tablet in a strange and (probably) intentional display of nerves.
“That sounds like a third option,” Clint says slowly, curious but wary. “But I gotta say this whole hesitant-silence thing is kinda freaking me out.”
Sighing, Coulson screws up his mouth, looks for all of a minute like he’s not going to speak before he finally spits it out.
“I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Clint’s heart stops in his chest.