Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

            Phil Coulson wakes up slowly with the sun warm on his face and a half-smile already on his lips. The sheets underneath him are clean and soft, and his body is deliciously tired in all the right ways. It’s going to be a good day today, he decides.

            And then he opens his eyes to find a loaded bow hovering half an inch away from his nose.

            Phil should probably know better than to be optimistic, by now.

            “Do you know what these things can do at close range?” asks a familiar voice above him, and yes, that’s last night’s one night stand, name casually never given, wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when he approached Phil at the hotel bar last night (goddamned sleeveless jacket and all) and holding a seventy-pound draw out without a single tremble in the thick muscles of his shoulders.

            Phil had been delighting in those muscles just a couple of hours ago. In that moment, naked and sore with an arrow brushing the tip of his nose, he promises himself that he’s never going to be as naïve again as to believe a man like this one would ever want him for his goddamned looks.

            “I imagine it would utterly shatter my skull,” he says. “Most likely pulverize my brain before it even hit the top of my spinal cord. I’d be dead before you could even paralyze me.”

            “You’re a smart guy,” says the man, and very gently places one of his booted feet on Phil’s hip, bare beneath the sheets. He’s getting dirt on the starched white linens. “I’ve heard you would be.”

            Phil doesn’t take his eyes off of people with deadly weapons aimed at his forehead, as a matter of principle, but for a moment he has to fight the urge to close his eyes in shame. This encounter wasn’t an accident. This man knew who he was even as he moved underneath Phil last night. He’s been slept with as a means of getting him vulnerable.

            After he kills this man, Phil is going to take a very long, hot shower and feel dirty and old and used.

            “So,” he says. “Why are you going to kill me?”

            “I’m not a comic villain, I don’t monologue.” The man pushes his weight down on Phil’s hip, and Phil can’t help but curl into it a little as his pelvic bone creaks underneath the strain, bringing his forehead bumping against the arrow. “I need some answers, Phil Coulson.”

            “It doesn’t seem very fair that you know my name and I don’t know yours,” says Phil.

            “Half an inch to the left and this boot is on your dick,” says the man.

            “You’re not making eye contact,” observes Phil. “You’re trying to dehumanize me. It hurts a lot less to blow someone’s brains out if they’re not actually a person, right?”

            “I’m crushing your balls if you don’t shut up.”

            “My name is Phil. We slept together last night. I sucked you off and fucked you and you wailed when you came.”

            The boot shifts dangerously and then leaves Phil’s hip altogether. “Listen, G-Man. I’m not here to kill you. No one’s put money on your head. I’m here because you’re hunting someone and I need to know what you know.”

            Phil’s always been fairly adept at putting two and two together. “You want the bounty for the Widow.”

            The man’s smile, just like last night, is gut-wrenchingly compelling. “Tell me what you have on her.”

            “You would’ve been better off trying to get me to talk during sex,” says Phil. “I’m loose-lipped mid-orgasm.”

            “You’re loose-lipped when you’re about to die.” That sustained draw has got to be killing his shoulders.

            “You know who I am,” says Phil mildly. “I’ve been trained to withstand the most advanced torture methods in the world. You’re not going to get anything out of me by pointing a bow at my face.”

            The man shoots.

            He twitches the bow up at the last minute, and Phil feels the arrow part his hair before plunging deep into the pillow, the plastic fletching scraping his scalp.

            Phil does not move.

            The man backs up a little, shoots twice more- one right beside his thigh, the other in the gap between his torso and right arm- and then steps off the bed. “Get up,” he says. “Get out of bed.”

            Phil stands on legs that are embarrassingly shaky. He’s still naked; there’s jizz crusted on his left thigh, his hair’s a mess, and he’s bleeding from where the second arrow nicked him.

            “Run,” says the man.

            Phil looks at him.

            “You heard me,” says the man. “Run.”

            Phil leaves all his belongings and just gets the hell out of there.

            Nick stares at him.

            “Hello,” says Phil.

            Nick continues to stare at him. His single eye is starting to twitch.

            “There were complications with the mission,” says Phil.

            “What the hell are you wearing,” says Nick.

            Maria, from where she’s standing in the corner pretending to be absorbed in making herself a cup of coffee, fake-coughs her way through a chuckle.

            “I was made,” says Phil. “An assassin found me in my hotel room. I had to leave without my clothes.”

            “He found you,” says Nick.

            “Yes,” says Phil. “That is what I said.”

            “He found you naked.”

            “You could assume that by conjecture, yes.”

            “Coulson, you know I hate to bust on you, but this isn’t the first time you’ve accidentally picked up an assassin at a hotel bar.”

            “With all due respect, sir, fuck off.”

            “Also, I think I would have rather seen you naked than in this getup,” says Nick.

            The man whose hotel room Phil broke into before getting the hell out of the building was a tourist with a penchant for bright colors and collared Hawaiian shirts, but naked men on the run from assassins can’t be choosers. “He threatened me with a bow.”

            “A bow,” repeats Nick.

            “That’s a notable weapon of choice,” says Maria from the corner.

            “Aren’t you supposed to be getting coffee?”

            “I notice you’re bleeding through those khakis, Phil. I’d be happy to make that worse for you.”

            “Thanks, Maria, point taken.”

            “You’re welcome. Maybe you’ve finally met Hawkeye.”

            Nick squints at him for a minute, then snaps his fingers. “This damn Black Widow thing just keeps getting better. If we manage to bring both her and Hawkeye in it'd be the biggest goddamn bust SHIELD's had in a year. You, get to a tech pronto and have them make a sketch of the guy.”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “I take that back. Change and then get the sketch done. Seeing you out of a suit is giving me conniptions.”

            “Whatever you say, sir.”

            “Hey, Coulson?” says Maria.

            “Yes.”

            “How was the sex?”

            Phil leaves the room, but not before Fury starts laughing.

            None of it adds up.

            Phil leans back in his office chair, twirling a SHIELD pen between his fingers and staring up at the ceiling. Phil really likes adding twos and twos and here he’s getting nothing but chicken scratches.

            Hawkeye’s been on SHIELD’s radar for years. He’s an assassin-for-hire with incredible aim and a highly distinctive weapon; his kills do not go unnoticed. No one’s ever seen his face. He’s a ghost, a figment, a name and a mask and no identity.

            So why would he seduce his way into an upper level SHIELD agent’s bed, threaten him bare-faced with a weapon that spelled out his identity better than any admission ever could, and then let him leave without any major wounds or effective threats? There are hundreds upon hundreds of ways to effectively torture someone using just an arrow. Phil would know.

            It’s just like Phil Coulson to be bothered by not getting tortured. Phil sighs and props his feet up against his desk. The wound on his thigh tugs painfully.

            The Widow file is on his desk, innocuous in its bland manila folder; Phil studies it for a moment, then slides it away into his briefcase. He’s not letting this one out of his sight.

            Phil’s apartment is dark and empty. The alarm system beeps quietly as he disables it; the table shifts slightly beneath the weight of his briefcase and keys, and his closet door creaks as he opens it to slowly tug away his suit jacket.

            He’s always lived alone, but for some reason his apartment feels particularly empty tonight. He undresses slowly, fingers gentle on the buttons, and feels inescapably old.

            He lets himself break down in the shower. Phil goes through a lot in his job, and he survives most of it with an impeccable poker face that has taken years to develop and more to perfect. Emotions don’t have much of a place in a position like his, but if he never lets them out, he’ll end up in the SHIELD psych ward before he ever hits fifty. These are all facts, so yes, Phil lets himself break down in the shower.

            Hawkeye didn’t want to have sex with him.

            Hawkeye did not want to sleep with him, but he did anyway- for the job, for the information, because he needed to. Hawkeye bit the bullet and sidled up to him at the hotel bar, bat his eyelashes over a glass of rum, chewed his lip and made himself look at Phil like he was something worth wanting. Hawkeye forced himself to touch Phil, to let himself be touched. Phil fucked a man who wasn’t enjoying it, who didn’t want it, who was faking every second of their encounter together.

            It had been his first time in over a year.

            Phil touches his face where a tear is leaking out of the corner of his eye, lost in the hot spray of the shower. This is the last time he will let this weakness compromise him. This is the last time he will ever believe that someone wants him for his company or even for his body. He’s not delusional; he knows what he looks like, knows he’s a balding statistical average, a bland faceless man in a suit. He should have known better. He will know better.

            He towels off aggressively, doesn’t meet his eyes in the mirror. When he gets out of the bathroom, skin damp and eyes itching, his briefcase is missing from the kitchen table.

            “I’m going to shoot someone,” says Phil.

            “Calm down, Coulson,” says Sitwell.

            “I’m not kidding,” says Phil. “I actually need to shoot someone right now.”

            Sitwell sighs and hands him his gun. “That guy across the room is a mole,” he says. “We were going to wait until tonight to take him down, we had a sting planned, but-“

            He goes down with a scream, clutching his right knee. The techies duck down beneath their desks; the agents draw and aim, arms swiveling as they look for the shooter. It only takes them a few seconds to find Phil, standing up above them on the Director’s perch, casually spinning the smoking gun in his fingers.

            “Stand down,” says Phil into the sudden quiet. The agents shrug and pack away their weapons; the techies near the mole help him up as another one runs off to get a medic.

            Sitwell takes the gun back with a sigh. “Feel better now?”

            “A little,” says Phil.

            “You waiting to talk to Fury?”

            “Yes.”

            “Is it about Hawkeye?”

            “Are you even cleared to know that?”

            Sitwell preens a little. “Level eight clearance as of Wednesday.”

            "Congratulations. I should have gotten you cake."

            "Hawkeye intel trumps even red velvet, Coulson."

            “I believe that he broke into my apartment this morning.”

            Sitwell’s eyes widen a little. “Oh. Shit.”

            “Stole my briefcase.”

            “What was in your briefcase?”

            “A newspaper. A package of donuts.” Phil sighs. “My file on the Widow.”

            Sitwell’s eyes widen a lot. “Oh shit.”

            “Yes,” says Phil. While he’d cried over Hawkeye in the shower, the man had broken in to his unfindable, unbreakable apartment and taken what he’d wanted all along. “Oh shit indeed.”

            There was tracker nanotech in the wound from Hawkeye’s arrow. Phil should have known that a graze from the best marksman in the world wasn’t an accident.

            The medicine they give him to flush the stuff out of his system is acidic and feels about as good as a sledgehammer blow to the back of the skull (Phil would know). Phil spends the next hour in the bathroom of the medical unit, puking until he can barely breathe.

            When he’s done and rinsing the bile and blood out of his lacerated mouth, Phil looks at his sallow face in the mirror and vows something to himself. Hawkeye might have ruined him, might have trashed his reputation and taken his apartment and used his body and stolen a year’s worth of work, but Phil Coulson is a deadly man. He will destroy Hawkeye. He will take everything from this man, and if what he wants most is the Widow then Phil will make sure as hell that SHIELD gets there first.

Chapter Text

            “Nice bazooka,” says Phil.

            The woman eyes him. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

            “Oh, just the ones who’ve stolen millions of dollars of SHIELD weaponry,” says Phil mildly. His eyes are burning (he hasn’t slept in thirty-odd hours) his hip is bleeding (grazed by a bullet) his holster is swinging empty by his side (no gun, this is a recon mission, dammit) and one of his best agents is sitting against the opposite wall with his head lolled back (knife to the sternum.) Phil is, to put it gently, fairly pissed off.

            The woman facing him down looks almost as angry as Phil feels. Her cropped blonde hair is slick with sweat and the jagged edges of broken front teeth glimmer in the low light as she snarls at him; she’s holding that bazooka on her shoulder like she knows how to use it. Her body is solidly between him and the stacks of crates behind her. “That's very clever, suit,” she says, “but stop trying to distract me from the fact that you're outgunned. There’s no backup coming. Stand down or I’ll-“

            “You’re right,” says Phil.

            “You can’t make me-,” the woman insists, and then pauses. For a moment, she looks almost frighteningly young; there’s still baby fat clinging to the curve of her cheekbones. She can’t be any older than twenty-five, and she’s the go-between that’s been transferring outdated SHIELD tech to terror organizations that are systematically destroying every scrap of peace Phil has fought for in this world. “Did you say you’re right?”

            “Yes,” says Phil, and very slowly shifts his hands up into a position that is uncomfortably familiar to assume; elbows out, palms up. I am unarmed. I come in peace. “I can’t do anything. Let me see my man.”

            “What?” The bazooka shifts slightly in her loosened fingers. She doesn’t want to shoot him. Phil’s gotten fairly adept at reading when people want him dead, and this woman is gratifyingly reluctant to blow his head off of his shoulders.

            “Let me see my man,” repeats Phil, and nods across the warehouse to where Agent Rollins’ blood is spreading in a slow pool from between his skewed legs. “I want to go to him.”

            She looks at him.

            “Please,” says Phil.

            She says, “You need to work on the puppy-dog eyes, suit,” but nonetheless the weapon droops slightly. Phil takes that for acquiescence and moves across the room to drop down in front of Rollins, immediately soaking the knees of his suit in dark blood. He puts one hand on Rollins’ neck, thumb to his pulse; the other he splays across the chest, fingers around the hilt of the knife.

            He presses forward to feel for a pulse while simultaneously giving the knife a gentle tug. It moves easily; it’s stuck in muscle, not bone. Unlikely for Rollins, it most likely slid right through his heart; luckily for Phil, it didn’t lodge in his ribcage.

            Phil lets out a shaky sigh, his hand dropping down from Rollins’ neck, and then in one fluid motion he wrenches the knife out of Rollins’ chest, swings around, and pitches it at the woman as hard as he can.

            It’s a little far to the left but still hits her wrist, hard enough for several important somethings to crack; she screams and loses her grip on the bazooka and with a mighty crash it falls to the ground beside her.

            Phil is on her in less than two seconds, undoing his tie with one hand and keeping her pinned with the other. “The less you struggle,” he grunts, riding her spasms with all the grace of a child clinging to a mechanical bull at a fair, “the gentler I can be.”

            She struggles even harder. This was definitely supposed to be a reconnaissance mission, thinks Phil, and snaps the tie tight between his hands.

            “Agent Coulson,” says the agent by the window as the van door slides open. “I was starting to get worried, did you oh holy fuck what the fuck.”

            Phil’s not positive what he’s reacting to. It might be the fact that Phil’s face is smeared in blood, or that the woman he’s dragging behind him with her arms bound with sky blue Armani is a few rapid breaths away from hyperventilation. Either way, Phil doesn’t have time to figure it out. “Listen to me.”

            The four agents in the van are already listening to him. One of them appears to have dropped a mug of coffee into their lap, presumably in surprise; the slowly spreading stain on the seat of the recon van is making Phil’s day impossibly worse.

            “You, call for backup. We have two agents dead in there and a cache full of weapons; I want medics on site to call it and techs to disable and load up. You, reboot the system. We’re being fed a loop on the security cameras, which would be why you didn’t see this woman threatening a SHIELD agent with a bazooka, which brings me to you, take her into custody. Cuff her. Keep her at gunpoint.”

            They’re all staring at him.

            “And you, clean up that goddamned coffee.”

            Phil leaves the van to take a calming three-lap loop around the vehicle. What he wouldn’t give for some competence in this hellhole of a government organization.

            “Agent Coulson,” says a tech, “I think you should see this.”

            The gray warehouse is swarming with SHIELD agents; the weapons are being systematically unloaded and taken out of their old, contraband wooden crates so that they can be packed away into new, SHIELD-approved wooden crates, where they’ll be loaded onto the government truck waiting outside. Agent Rollins has been removed from the room, but the blood stain he left on the floor is still fresh. It’s all very macabre, which leads Phil to wonder what the hell has some rosy-cheeked techie waving excitedly at him from across the room.

            “What,” says Phil.

            “Sir,” says the tech, smiling so wide she’s dimpling, “This was tucked into the back of one of the crates-“ She’s holding out a business card in her white-gloved hands. Stamped on a background of eggshell white is a single black spider with a red hourglass on its back.

            Phil stares at it for five seconds, and then a slow smile spreads across his face. He can taste blood on his teeth. Two agents lost their lives today; he will make absolutely sure they didn’t die for nothing. “Bag it separately,” he says. “We’re going to run that for prints.”

            “The Black Widow is dealing in black-market weapons,” says Phil.

            “Phil,” says Fury. “Stop it.”

            Phil pauses in the office doorway. “Stop what?”

            “Doing that. Smiling. You’re making me nervous.”

            “Sorry, sir, can’t do that.” Phil feels very nearly giddy. “We’ve got her. She left a card in one of the crates; no one’s touched it without gloves. We’re running for prints right now.”

            “That’s all very nice, Coulson,” says Fury. “I heard you left the van.”

            “Allegedly,” says Phil.

            “There are bloodstains on your suit.”

            “Circumstantial,” says Phil.           

            “Shut the fuck up, Phil. That was a recon mission for you; there were agents with boots on the ground for a reason. You went in unarmed.”

            “There was something wrong,” says Phil. “The feed was looping and the agents weren’t answering the comms. Someone had to go in.”

            “She held a bazooka on you.”

            “Allegedly.”

            “Coulson, it’s great that we arrested the dealer and got the weapons and recovered the agents’ bodies but if you ever leave the van without backup or a weapon ever again I will shoot you with a bazooka myself.”

            “Understood,” says Phil, and then, “Sir, we’re going to find her.”

            Sitwell knocks twice on the door before tripping his way in uninvited, mouth twisted in an earnest moue. “Sir, I brought the files for the- whoa. Is Phil okay?”

            “He’s smiling.”

            “Good god,” says Sitwell.

            “This is workplace harassment at this point,” says Phil.

            “Thank you, Sitwell. Shut up, Coulson. Everyone get the hell out of my office.”

            As Sitwell closes the door behind them, Phil says, “He’s excited. I can tell.”

            Sitwell adjusts his tie. “I’d pretend to agree with you, but we’re on equal clearance levels now so I don’t have to kiss your ass anymore. He looked pissed off. As usual.”

            “It’s all in the nostril flares,” says Phil.

            Sitwell pauses. “I’ve never really looked at his nostrils.”

            “And that,” says Phil, “would be why you’ve been on Level Eight for two weeks and I’ve been on it for two years.”

            Sitwell is just puffing himself up to respond when a lab tech skids to a halt next to Coulson, manila folder clutched in his blue-gloved hands. “Agent Coulson. I have the test results you requested be expedited, sir. The prints were a direct match to an individual registered in our database.”

            Phil lets out a breath. “Excellent, thank you.” He holds out the hand for the file; the tech hesitates. “In case it was unclear, that was your cue to hand the file to me, Agent.”

            “Sir, may I be frank with you?”

            Phil looks over to Sitwell, who quickly busies himself in picking nonexistent lint off of his suit, and then back to the harried-looking tech. “If you must.”

            “I’m pretty sure someone’s fucking with you, sir,” says the tech, and hands him the file.

            Every fingerprint on the card is indeed a match to an individual registered in the SHIELD database, because every fingerprint on the card is matched to a certain Philip J. Coulson.

             By the time Phil gets to his new safehouse of an apartment, he has a headache like a jackhammer rattling around inside his skull. All he can think of as he disengages the keypad lock, the fingerprint scanner, the retina scanner, the voice scanner, the second keypad lock, and finally inserts the physical key is that there’s a bottle of Advil and a bottle of whiskey waiting for him beside his bed. He'd thought they were so close; he'd felt a win just at his fingertips. Defeat tastes like copper on his dry tongue.

            The second he steps inside, he knows he’s not alone.

            Phil closes his eyes in exhaustion, just for a moment, before shutting the door softly behind him. He’s had this safehouse for all of two days and already he’s been compromised; Fury’s going to start making him pay the rental for the moving vans out of pocket if he keeps this up.

            He quietly toes his shoes off before gently sliding his gun out of the holster strapped to his hip.

            Phil’s a ghost when he wants to be. He doesn’t make a single sound padding into the living room.

            Phil’s instincts are correct, as he’s learned is usually the case; there’s someone sitting on his couch. Their back is to the door, so all Phil can see of the intruder is the brim of a black hat squashed onto a skull. Into the loud stillness of the room, Phil can hear them quietly whistling.

            Phil stands there for an endless moment, gun extended, breaths silent, arms shaking through an off-key rendition of the Entertainer. (He hasn’t slept in forty-odd hours.) Then the hat shifts, and with a sigh the stranger on his couch stands and turns to face him.

            “Phil,” says Hawkeye, and Phil shoots.

            His finger has just barely depressed the trigger when Hawkeye draws and fires off a shot as well; he doesn’t have a silencer on, and the bang echoes violently around the small room. It’s reflex for Phil to close his eyes. When he opens them, he expects to be swallowing around a slug of metal in his esophagus.

            When he opens them, he’s still standing unharmed. So is Hawkeye.

            “I think I might be hallucinating,” he tells the man across from him.

            Hawkeye looks at him for a moment, considering, then tilts his head to the left. “Over there,” he says.

            Phil does not lower his gun, but he does allow his eyes to drift to the side for a second. Off to their left is a small spot of scorched carpet. “No,” he says decisively. “That did not just happen. You did not just shoot my bullet out of the air.”

            Hawkeye smiles. He’s wearing a three-piece suit with a long rip down one side; his shoes are scuffed at the toes, and there’s a bruise on his right cheek. Phil had forgotten, in the month since he’d last seen him, exactly how good looking he was. “Phil,” he says, “you should sleep more. You look exhausted.”

            “Why are you calling me by my first name?” asks Phil, and then, “wait, no, why are you in my house?” and then, “wait, no. Drop your weapon.”

            “You should probably start with that one first next time,” Hawkeye advises.

            Phil narrows his eyes. “Drop your weapon.”

            “Alright, alright.” Hawkeye raises one hand in the air, uses the other to lower the gun and gently drop it to the carpet. “As a show of good faith.”

            Phil doesn’t lower his gun. “Why are you in my house.”

            “Aw, you’re making me sad, this definitely isn’t a house. Say it with me, Phil. It’s a bunker.”

            “Stop- don’t call me- tell me while you’re here and I’ll arrest you instead of killing you.” Phil might end up killing him by accident if he doesn’t start talking. His eyes are so dry they ache and his finger is twitching uncontrollably on the trigger of the gun.

            “I’m here to insult you,” says Hawkeye.

            Phil really should get more sleep. “Is this actually happening?” he asks, somewhat hysterically.

            Hawkeye continues blithely, as if Phil isn’t one muscle spasm away from shooting a hole in his heart. “Your intel sucked, G-Man. Those locations you had are burned. You’re at least a year behind in tracking her. Do you know how much work I had to do to get that file? And you give me a trail that’s been cold for months?”

            “Quit whining,” snaps Phil, “it doesn’t seem like it’s very hard for you to break into my apartment.” And then, before he can stop himself, “or to sleep with me.”

            Hawkeye’s eyebrows shoot up towards the brim of his stupid hat. “Wow,” he says, “you’re more sleep deprived than I thought.”

            Phil is very close to losing it. “Fuck you.”

            “You already did,” says Hawkeye.

            “I’m going to kill you,” Phil decides.

            “I should be the one killing you,” Hawkeye argues. “You’ve wasted my time. I overestimated your competence and risked everything for bad research and guesswork. Useless.” He shakes his head and tugs his hat down a little over one eye, bends down to pluck the gun from the carpet. “I’d’ve been better going after her on my own. Goodbye, Phil. Thanks for nothing.”

            “You don’t just get to-“

            “Oh, and one more thing?” Hawkeye turns back around, smirking. “You- Christ!” as he leaps into the air to avoid the bullet that smashes into the carpet where his calves had been. “What the hell was that for?”

            “What-“ Phil stares at him. “Are you serious? You were about to leave. I can’t let you leave.”

            “I was on my way out! I was about to deliver my parting shot!”

            “Well, that was mine.”

            “That’s funny, Phil, that’s very funny, I meant verbally, I meant with words. A zinger. You know? One last burn before I disappear into the ether-“

            “What,” Phil says, “you can’t monologue but you can deliver final quips?”

            “I’ve seen your bedroom and the clear boner you have for Captain America and I get why you’re obsessed with me now,” says Hawkeye, all in one breath, and then he leaps out of the room. Phil shoots again; he’s already disappeared down the hallway.

            “You have a thing for superheroes!” he hears from the front hallway, and then the door clicks shut. Hawkeye is gone.

            Phil stands in his living room for a moment, gun smoking in his trembling fingers, listing slightly to the left. Then he rallies and kneels down. Two feet away from where he was standing, set into the burnt patch on his carpet, are the two original bullets- his and Hawkeye’s- warped together, Hawkeye’s embedded in the side of his own like a bulbous metallic tumor.

            Phil stares at them for a moment, then picks the metal lump up clumsily and tucks it into his pocket.

            Nick is second on his speed dial. “Fury.”

            “Nick,” says Phil, “the safehouse was compromised.” He hangs up without saying goodbye. He’s asleep before he even hits the couch.

            He wakes up groggy, stuck in a cloudy state of partial lucidity, mind lost in strange dreams of pink lips smirking and stylish black caps and bullets hitting each other mid-air like in some goddamned comic book panel.

            It isn’t until he goes to relieve himself and something falls out of his pocket that he picks it up and realizes that none of it was a dream at all.

            “Oh, for Chrissake,” says Phil, exasperated, and drops the conglomerate bullet in the sink like it’s something revolting before taking what is easily the most aggressive piss of his life. Fucking Hawkeye.

            When Phil tries to leave the apartment the next morning, the armed SHIELD-issue guard outside blocks the doorway with his body.

            “I apologize, sir,” says the man, eyes blurry and distant through the thick glass visor of his protective helmet, “but I can’t let you leave.”

            Phil rolls his eyes and jerks down the sleeves of his suit. “I need to go into the office. I have business to discuss with Fury.”

            His departure is halted for a second time by an arm across the doorway. “I’m under strict orders from the Director not to let you leave until you’ve slept for at least twenty-four hours.”

            Phil really doesn’t want to incapacitate the guard. He won’t go so far as to give the whole this will hurt you more than me spiel, because it definitely won’t, but he’ll feel a twinge or two of guilt, he’s sure.

            “You need to stop costing me so much money,” says Fury.

            “Have you watched the security tapes?”

            “Keeping you on my staff requires finding you a new, secure apartment every single day, and now you’ve started making me pay medical costs for security details you don’t feel like cooperating with.”

            “Have you watched the security tapes from my apartment?”

            “You can’t find a new two hundred million dollar weapons bust every day, Phil, and eventually your accumulated revenue is not going to justify your insane fucking expenditures.”

            “Have you watched the security tapes.”

            “You’re obsessing, you know that?”

            Phil’s patience is fraying. “Nick.”

            “Coulson, I’m not a goddamn amateur. The tapes have been reviewed and analyzed.”

            Phil lets out a breath. “And?”

            “And he’s playing the angle with the hat the whole time. He knew where the camera was and he knew how to avoid it. There’s no clear shot of his face.”

            “Damn it.”

            “Phil,” says Fury.

            Phil doesn’t like that tone of voice. “Sir.”

            “He shot your bullet out of midair.”

            “I guess he’s called Hawkeye for a reason.”

            “When you find him, don’t kill him.”

            “Sir,” says Phil, “if you hire him, I’m quitting.”

            “We’ve talked before about threatening me, Coulson. Leave.”

            “None of this makes sense.”

            “Obsessing,” Fury calls after him. Phil just barely restrains himself from flipping his boss off over his shoulder as he leaves.

            None of this makes sense.

            Phil leans back in his office chair, winds a rubber band around his finger, and shoots it idly at the door. It hits with a smack and falls to the floor, and Phil wonders why nothing about Hawkeye ever seems to add up.

            A second shot, a second smack. Hawkeye doesn’t make useless moves. He’s a sniper and a strategist; he maps things out from a distance. Everything he’s done so far has made sense, so why break into Phil’s new safehouse just to tell him the files were useless? It’s so rash that it almost smacks of an act committed purely out of spite, but Hawkeye’s smarter than that. Phil refuses to underestimate people who have gotten past his security measures. Twice.

            A third smack. Had he just wanted to make Phil squirm again? Maybe he was a sadist who liked eyeing up men whose bodies he’d used.

            A fourth. And then there’d been the Widow’s business card with his own prints thumbed onto every inch of it. He’s being toyed with.

            Phil puts the rubber bands down and digs into his pocket until he comes up with the two bullets. He holds them up to the light.

            How are Hawkeye and the Widow connected?

            A card is planted in the weapons stash, perfect copies of his fingerprints there as a symbol that the Widow is ahead of him, that she’s watching him, that she knows him. Hawkeye shows up at his hidden safehouse, armed, calling him by name; Hawkeye shoots his bullet out of the air but doesn’t kill him. He stands there in his three-piece suit and tells Phil his intel sucked.

            Phil lowers the bullet. The three-piece suit.

            “I get it,” he says out loud, and then stands up abruptly, chair skidding back a little behind him.

            The copy of the Widow file is in the drawer of the filing cabinet where he’d left it, tucked away behind all his other spares. Phil flips it open with shaking hands, spreads the papers over the table; Prague, Shanghai, Budapest, intel neatly filed and catalogued. Theoretical sightings and hypothesized nests sized up and detailed in neat Arial size twelve.

            Hawkeye had been standing there in an ill-fitting and torn suit; not tailored, not custom-made, smacking of thrift. The man's not after money. He wouldn't know what the hell to do with twelve million dollars.

            Hawkeye isn’t after any bounty. He wants the Widow out of Phil’s crosshairs. He’s not hunting her; he’s protecting her.

            Phil’s not his competition. Phil’s his enemy.

            “Gotcha,” says Phil to the files spread across his desk, and then picks up the phone and calls for a SHIELD jet. If they push air traffic regulations, they can be in Budapest by this afternoon. Hawkeye had said that she wasn’t there. Phil’s going to call his bluff.

            Humiliation at the hands of Hawkeye is getting to be a little old. Time to change things.

            Phil cracks his knuckles one by one, then unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk and slides out his lucky handgun.

            During his catnap on the jet, Phil has a dream where he systematically snaps every bow Hawkeye owns over his knee while the man himself watches, helpless- “not the recurve,” he’ll cry, and crack it goes.

            It’s more fulfilling than all of the many Hawkeye related wet dreams Phil’s had in the past month combined. He wakes up smiling.

Chapter Text

            Phil has just ordered his favorite coffee (the Winter and Sunshine Latte, although he’ll be a dead man before he stops telling the interns he takes it nothing but black) and sat down to wait for his mug to be slid across the counter when a familiar voice says “Phil!” and startles him so badly that he very nearly smacks the fake jawline off of his own face.

            Phil takes a deep, calming breath, settles his hands into his lap, and squares his jaw beneath the thick facial prosthetic. Maybe if he doesn’t look at her, she’s not here.

            “Phil, baby, it’s you, I’d know those soulful eyes anywhere. Stop trying to pretend I’m not here.”

            It’s not working. “Please don’t ever call anything about me soulful ever again.”

            “Darling, don’t be like that. It’s been so long.”

            Phil takes a deep breath and turns to face her. She’s perched on the stool next to her, eyes bright beneath thin green-tinted sunglasses, gray hair pulled into a messy topknot. She looks tan and warm and healthy, and for all the eager little smile on her mouth says that she’s just complicated things by a factor of at least ten he can’t help but find the sight of her calming.

            “Hello, Mom,” he says, because there comes a time in life when the brave thing to do is to square up and admit defeat. “What are you doing in Budapest?”

            His mother shrugs and accepts the mug of chai the barista pushes across the counter towards her. “It’s really lovely this time of year.”

            It’s been raining nonstop for the past two days. “Bullshit. Try again.”

            “I had a lot of frequent flier miles added up and decided I might as well use them.”

            “You hate airplanes. Next.”

            His mother throws her hands up in the air, very nearly sloshing her chai onto the table. “Why am I the one answering questions here, Philip?”

            “It’s Jeffrey, actually.”

            “Can I call you Jeff?”

            “I prefer Jeffrey.”

            “The truth is, Jeff, I miss you.”

            “Mom.”

            “I haven’t seen you in six months.”

            “Work keeps me busy.”

            His mother meets his eyes and then very deliberately wells up. “You didn’t come home for Christmas.”

            “Something came up,” Phil insists. He’d actually spent last Christmas break in Malaysia being thoroughly kidnapped; while his mother had been wrapping his gifts he’d been tied to a chair and beaten with a cane, but his mother has never found out about that and if Phil’s luck holds she never will. “I told you I’d come by when I had a break, you didn’t need to fly across the world to have coffee with me.”

            “If I hadn’t flown across the world,” his mother tells him, “would I be here having coffee with you?”

            It’s a valid point. “Mom,” says Phil, “That might be true, but this is a hot zone. I need you to get out of here.”

            His mother waves a hand. “I know, I know, honey. Nick said-“

            “Nick said-“

            “Nick said that if I wanted to meet up with you I had to get out right after. My train leaves at four-thirty.”

            Phil blows out a breath. “Alright. I wish you weren’t on a first name basis with my boss.”

            She goes on as if he hadn’t spoken. “So, Jeff. Tell me why you’re here. Is it business? Or pleasure?” She takes off her sunglasses and leans in to squint at him. “Oh, you’re here to see a girl.”

            “I am most definitely not,” Phil tells her.

            “A boy.”

            “I’m here on a business call.”

            “It’s a boy,” his mother decides. “Is he handsome?”

            It’s because of his mother that Phil developed in the first place the poker face he is putting to use now. “What on earth would make you think I came here for anything other than a mission?”

            “Oh, honey,” says his mother, “You brushed your wig, and you’re wearing your nice facial prosthetics.”

            They do make his jawline look rather sharp. “You should probably be leaving soon if you want to catch that train, Mom.”

            His mother dusts two kisses to the plastic coating his cheeks and then stands, taking her cup with her. “We’re having coffee when you get back to the States,” she tells him.

            “Alright.”

            “Non-negotiable.”

            “Understood.”

            “Take care, Jeffrey,” she says, and gives him a long look before offering a smile. There’s a sad tilt to the corners. “Good luck with your man.”

            The barista slides over with his coffee, says, “Your mother is a nice lady.”

            “She is,” says Phil absently, and then glances over and eyes up the bartender, who is forty-something and has a smile like sunshine. “And she’s not single.”

            “Subtle,” the bartender tells him, and heads off to the register to greet the next customer.

            Phil takes a sip of his Winter and Sunshine. In his heart of hearts, he likes ‘em sweet.

            Jeffrey Danner is in Budapest for a two week business trip. He’s currently staying in a small hotel on a small street in a nondescript room that you would never guess from the outside had a highly advanced electronic alarm system recently installed into the door; if anyone checks the background of the room reservation, they’ll find a fully flushed-out identity, complete with a Facebook profile, LinkedIn, and email that responds with a vacation message if accessed. He’s unhappily married; he works for a software company; he has two vices, one of them being his several mistresses and the other his nasty gambling habit.

            There’s nothing wrong with a little indulgence so far away from home. Phil gently taps his card against his teeth. “I want to play at the back table tonight.”

            The woman at the front window doesn’t glance up from her Macbook. “That’s a one hundred grand buy-in,” she says, her Hungarian mumbled and indistinct; unlike most other venues Jeffrey has visited on his trip, this place isn’t trying to cater to foreigners. That is very likely a good sign.

            Phil grins at her, showing his canines, and slides the card in through the window.

            “We don’t take credit.”

            “It’s debit.”

            The woman looks up and meets his eyes.

            “I think we might be able to fit you in, Mr.-“

            “Danner,” Phil cuts in, and offers her a sickly smile. “Jeffrey Danner.”

            “I think we just might be able to find you a chair for tonight, Mr. Danner,” says the woman, and slides her manicured nails forward to take the card.

            Phil slips his sunglasses back over his eyes and leans back away from the window, into the dying afternoon sunlight. Hungary is gorgeous. He’s so close to the kill that he can taste blood on his teeth.

            “Coulson,” says Maria, on his phone call back into base, “you do realize that if Hawkeye’s there, you’re dead.”

            “I’m aware,” says Phil. All the new faces and heavy wigs and colored contacts in the world are going to buy him ten seconds at most if he comes face to face with the man whose name quite literally reflects the fact that he sees everything.

            “How sure are you that this is going to work?”

            “Fairly sure,” says Phil.

            “I’m looking for percentages here, Coulson.”

            Phil thinks about it. “Forty-five per cent that Hawkeye’s not there, twelve per cent I survive if he is, fifty-three I do if he isn’t,” he says eventually.

            Maria makes an impressed noise. “Those are good numbers,” she says. “You think this is a solid lead?”

            “I don’t think it’s a lead,” says Phil, “I think it’s the lead. This is it. She’s here.”

            “I think your guesswork might be writing checks your intel can’t cash,” says Maria.

            “Theoretically, if you were an assassin,” says Phil, “and you couldn’t take any more hit assignments because there was a major government organization after you- what would your side job be?”

            There’s a pause. “It is theoretically possible,” says Maria, grudging, “that I might choose to operate an illegal casino out of a Hungarian backroom.”

            Phil has to resist high-fiving himself. “Thanks,” he says, before hanging up, destroying the phone, and flushing the pieces down the toilet.

            Once he’s done in the bathroom, he pads out into the room stares at himself in the hotel mirror for a moment. He doesn’t recognize himself- the makeup and prosthetics make him look a good ten years older, while the hair covers more of his forehead than he’s used to missing- but he does recognize the smile he offers to the mirror. Phil Coulson has missed being a card shark.

            Budapest knows how to gamble.

            It’s a slick club, metal and leather and velvet, clinking glass and flashing jewels and the soft thud-click of stiletto heels on thick carpet; the lights are dim, the tables elegantly sloped, the decanters artfully iced. Thousands are lost in each soft scrape of chip piles across a table. A man throws down his hand and stands up, raking a hand through his hair, leaving a small fortune in tokens in his opponent's hands. Men in suits and women in heels stand around the tables, watching the slick slide of cards through the dealers’ hands.

            If Phil weren’t here on a mission, he would be having a lot of fun right now.

            The back room is accessed with a flash of ID, a check of a tablet, a quick pat-down for concealed weaponry, and a wave through a tinted glass door that swings open with the gentle silence of a well-oiled hinge. The man holding open the door, Phil notes as he slides past, has a bulge at the rear of his coat; he’s packing, and packing heavily.

            This is where the stakes get high, and this is exactly where Phil needs to be.

            Phil moves through the small crowd to the empty chair at a table. The man next to him shifts over a bit to make room, then glances back at him with interest.

            “You’re new,” he says in Hungarian.

            Phil smiles his shark smile. “Decided to try my hand at a game,” he says. His Hungarian’s a little rusty, but then so is his accent, which should lend authenticity to the travelling businessman story; the other man doesn’t look particularly bothered, just leans back with a speculative smile on his face.

            “Oh, you’ll be fun,” he says, in a tone of voice that says I’m about to bleed this patsy dry, and then to the dealer, “Shuffle him in.”

            “If you’re sure,” says the dealer, her voice light, and Phil looks up to make eye contact with the Black Widow.

            It’s a conscious struggle not to let the surge of elation that rushes through his body show on his face, but he manages it; he allows nothing more than the expected pupil dilation and mouth slackening of a red-blooded American tourist faced with a beautiful card dealer, and even lets his gaze drop for a moment to touch on her, admittedly fantastic, cleavage. The photograph in the Widow’s file is outdated. She’s filled out from the emaciated, skeletal creature she was the last time she was in captivity; her cheeks are full, her lips pink and healthy. She’s lost the signature red hair and gone for an ink-black dye job that hangs in elegant ringlets past her shoulders, but it’s most definitely her.

            Phil takes his cards with steady hands, but inside he’s very nearly ecstatic. Standing across the table from him is the culmination of two and a half years of work.

            Hawkeye is about to lose, and Phil’s going to make sure it hurts.

            The next time Phil checks his cards, he casually brushes his right hand against his opposite wrist, depressing the switch on his watch. In a nondescript van parked half a mile away, an alarm begins to beep.

            Phil takes the pot just as a runner walks into the room, face pale above his dark bolo tie, and leans in close to whisper in Widow’s ear.

            Phil calmly sweeps the pile of chips towards him as the man across the table curses and collapses back into his chair, tugging despondently at his necktie. Across the table, the Widow’s face goes absolutely still.

            “Is everything all right?” Phil asks, fingering a chip idly, and the Widow turns to look at him, to really look at him for the first time the whole game. Across the room, there’s the soft thud of an armed guard hitting the floor unconscious. The two of them are still locking eyes when the first plainclothes SHIELD agent moves into the doorway.

            The Widow looks away from Phil, sees the doorway- two agents standing shoulder to shoulder, hands on obvious weapon bulges- turns to look at the large, tinted-glass window, where another agent stands with legs slightly apart, stone-faced and visibly packing- turns back and is beginning to drop into crouch even as Phil presses the muzzle of a gun tossed to him by the agent behind him into the back of her neck.

            “Stand down, Natalia,” he says.

            “Oh wow,” says the man who just lost half a million to Phil, and then he's quietly slipping underneath the table to hide.

            The Widow is still for a moment, coiled like a trapped snake, and then she kicks back, sweeping Phil’s feet out from under him. He had expected it, and uses his body weight to bring her down with him; she’s too slippery for him to pin by himself, and were the fight one-on-one she’d be out the door and he’d been bleeding out all over the plush casino carpet in half a minute, but it’s not one-on-one because there are five six seveneightnine SHIELD agents descending, and through sheer bodily force and superior numbers the most proficient assassin of the decade is being held down, cuffed, disarmed and injected with a SHIELD tracker. There’s something vaguely inhumane about it, like watching a wild animal crumple underneath a swarm of hunters.

            Phil extracts himself from the melee and goes back to the table, where a small crowd is watching them, looking shell-shocked and vaguely intrigued. One woman is avidly taping the scene on her phone.

            “I’m going to have to confiscate that,” Phil tells her.

            “Ugh,” says the woman, and hands it over with the kind of apathy that speaks of possessing the kind of money cushion to routinely buy replacement iPhones without any fuss.

            “Thank you,” says Phil, and pockets it. He takes another look at the crowd, a few of who are studying him but most who are ogling the Widow’s takedown. “Most people run from things like this, you know.”

            Another woman in a sparkling orange dress says, “We like a show.”

            Phil smiles and takes a moment to peel off the facial prosthetics. “Well, then, we’re happy to give you one,” he tells her, and drops his jaw on the table before going to squat down in front of where the Widow is being held between two SHIELD agents. Her eyes are a little blurry, her hair a wreck; she’s clearly been forcibly sedated, although not before she’d managed to get her nails into two of the agents, if the blood dripping slowly onto her shoulders is anything to go by. It feels grotesque to drug down a woman who’d previously been so sharply alive, but Phil is refusing to underestimate the Widow in this operation. Lesser men than Phil Coulson have died at her hands for mistakes like leaving her in full control of her mental capacities when under capture.

            “Natalia Romanova,” says Phil, “you are now under SHIELD custody. I would offer to read you your rights, but I'll be honest. In this situation you don't have very many.”

            The Widow meets his eyes with a hazy stare, says, “Phil Coulson.”

            Phil feels perversely pleased to be recognized. “Well met.”

            The Widow stares him down for a moment more before slowly raising up her right hand to show him a very elegant, very polished middle finger.

            “Okay, what the fuck,” says the SHIELD agent behind her, suddenly scrambling to life, “I cuffed her, I swear, I did, what the fuck- where the fuck did they go-“

            Phil sighs and leaves him to re-cuff her, swearing profusely. What SHIELD lacks in competence, he supposes, they at least make up in sheer numbers.

            When Phil opens the door to his hotel room, Hawkeye is sitting on his bed, wearing a black leather sleeveless jacket and a terrifying scowl.

            “Oh, hell,” says Phil, and he’s just barely had time to let his briefcase drop to the floor before he’s being pinned against the door with a forearm across his throat and something blunt nudging none-too-gently into his kidney.

            “You fucker,” spits Hawkeye, and then the two of them are spinning across the room, grappling at each other’s throats, Phil trying desperately to remove the blunt arrowhead from where its forcibly depressing his internal organs, Hawkeye slipping through his hands so that he can’t get a good grip on the man’s throat.

            “What,” gasps Phil, when they steady again, Hawkeye up against the opposite wall and Phil twisting endlessly away from the steady agony of arrowhead in his side, “You’re jealous because I was ahead of you for once?”

            Hawkeye’s eyes flash and Phil hits the floor with the arrow clattering down beside him- a solid sock to the jaw, neat uppercut that hits right in the socket. Phil sees stars. “I fucking hate you. She didn't deserve you- your job is to ruin people’s lives-“

            “She has a kill list of over one hundred-“ Phil kicks up from the floor, gets him right behind the knees. He swings back, but Phil’s already up and across the room, breathing hard and tugging down the rumpled sleeves of his suit. “My job is to save people’s lives.”

            “She was paying atonement, you fucker,” Hawkeye hisses, and they go again, one block two block three hit with Hawkeye reeling this time, hands going up to push back the cartilage of his nose. “She was going legit. I’m going to get her out.”

            “No you are fucking not,” says Phil, and scrambles away from Hawkeye to get his hands on the gun he’s placed next to the Bible in the bedside table. “You’re done, Hawkeye, you’re never going to leave this room unless it’s in-“

            Hawkeye finishes resetting his nose with a crack and reaches back behind him. “These?” he finishes, dangling Phil’s SHIELD-issue handcuffs in front of his face.

            Phil goes a little cross-eyed, staring down the angle of his gun. “Stop playing tricks.”

            Hawkeye rolls his eyes and drops the cuffs. “Then stop posturing.”

            “There are three security cameras planted in this room,” says Phil.

            “Three compromised security cameras planted in this room,” Hawkeye corrects.

            “Ah,” says Phil, the gun steady in his hands, “that means that you don’t know about the six others then, including the one you’re facing right now.”

            Hawkeye’s expression doesn’t change, but something in his eyes goes a little flat.

            Phil lets his smile spread slow and steady across his face. “Once our facial recognition scans find a match, how long do you think your secret identity is going to last, Hawkeye? Even if you get out of here, we’ll make it so that there’s no safe place in the world. You’ll wish you’d been captured by SHIELD instead of the several mafias you’ve taken out hits against.”

            Hawkeye looks at him steadily.

            “Of course, all of that is a moot point,” says Phil, “because you’re never leaving this room.” And then he squeezes the trigger.

            The gun thunks dully in his hands. Phil stares blankly down at it.

            “Awkward,” says Hawkeye, and opens his left hand to reveal a palmful of bullets.

            Phil drops the gun. “I would have noticed the weight difference.”

            “I filled it with quarters,” says Hawkeye, giving a wan smirk, and then they’re slamming together again, Hawkeye squirming over him as Phil grapples to get a solid grip.

            The fight’s changed- Hawkeye’s on the defensive now, not the attack, out of tricks and desperate to leave now that he knows he’s been made- and Phil finally, finally has the upper hand. It’s a delicious feeling. He’s smiling even as he fits his hands around the other man’s throat and attempts to strangle him.

            With a mighty contortion of his body, Hawkeye flips them- Phil’s back goes slamming into the edge white-sheeted bed- Hawkeye says, “Jesus, you’re so competent-“

            “I know that-“

            “Unlike everyone else in your hellhole of an organization-“

            “I know that-“

            Hawkeye bites a sucking kiss onto Phil’s open mouth, and Phil is so thrown that he stumbles, hitting the bed and going down with Hawkeye on top of him, the hitman’s hands flying out to brace him and his mouth following Phil’s down, slicking his tongue across Phil’s even as he reaches behind him and dips a hand down the back of Phil’s slacks to pluck the knife from the holster in his waistband.

            Phil breaks away, spits, “Fuck you-“

            “I’m trying,” pants Hawkeye into his mouth, and flings Phil’s knife across the room before yanking himself away from Phil and taking a step back, breathing hard.

            Phil slowly props himself up on his elbows, raising his head from where it had fallen back against the bedspread. For a moment they are still, the only sound in the room the harsh echo of their breathing. Hawkeye looks utterly disheveled, his hair tousled and dark bruises beginning to form over the red plush of his lips; Phil knows that he himself is no better off.

            They lock eyes for the better part of a minute, and then Hawkeye very deliberately reaches down into his left boot, draws out a knife, and drops it on the floor beside him.

            Phil lets out a breath, then slowly slides a hand underneath his shirt and draws out the gun strapped into his shoulder holster. He weighs it in his hands for a moment before dropping it beside the bed.

            Hawkeye removes another knife, this time from his right boot; Phil strips the Taser from his calf; Hawkeye uncurls a garrote from his bicep, and Phil matches with a baton from his shoe.

            “You done?” Hawkeye asks.

            “Would you believe me if I said yes?” Phil says.

            “Fair point,” says Hawkeye, and steps forward to drop down over him again, Phil leaning back to let his head hit the bedspread as Hawkeye hovers over him, biceps bulging as he presses himself into a steep push-up to get closer to Phil’s face. “I don't trust you because you’re a fucking liar, but you’re good at your job. I think if you wanted me dead, I’d be bleeding out, not doing-“ their lips are close enough that they brush on his consonants- “this.”

            “And what is-“ Phil lets his tongue slip out to trace Hawkeye’s lips, and the man opens his mouth with a little grunt, lets Phil in for one warm moment of beautiful suction- “this, exactly?” It's hot between them, sweat beading on Phil's palms and Hawkeye's brow, and Phil wants to touch with almost feverish intensity, wants his hands on Hawkeye's skin and his mouth on Hawkeye's mouth and he wants Hawkeye.

            “Wow,” says Hawkeye, “it’s a little ineffective to be coy when you’ve already had my dick down your throat.” He sucks Phil’s lower lip between his teeth as he reaches down between them to fumble at Phil’s belt. For the first time Phil's ever seen, his hands are shaking slightly. “I think you’re a bad person.”

            “You kill people for money,” Phil breathes into the wet of their next kiss. He vaguely wishes the eager arch of his hips wasn’t quite as obvious as it is. The hard swell of Hawkeye's bicep is hopelessly enticing beneath his fingertips.

            “You kill people to get promotions in your organization,” says Hawkeye, like it’s a dirty word, and slips a hand down the front of Phil’s pants. “Pot, kettle?”

            Phil is rapidly losing the ability to form coherent sentences. “Ah?”

            “Say Clint,” says Hawkeye.

            Phil freezes, his hands pausing in their restless journey down Hawkeye’s leather-coated back. “What.”

            “Say Clint when you come,” says Hawkeye.

            “I,” says Phil, flexing his palms against Hawkeye’s ass, “I- your name?”

            “Ha, you're speechless,” grins Hawkeye, one hand tight around Phil’s dick, thumb pressing sweetly into the spot just beneath the head, “I surprised you, sucker,” and he laughs wet and a little giddy against Phil’s cheek and for a second Phil could almost forget what’s happening here and just lose himself in the moment.

            And then something thuds against the door.

            Hawkeye freezes on top of Phil, going from warm body to deadweight, hand going completely slack in Phil’s pants. Phil’s cock gives a painful throb in protest. He’s not breathing, so Phil stops too, and for a moment they lie still, pressed together from nose to ankles with chests aching and still against one another. Hawkeye’s eyes are pale and dilated and, Phil can’t help but notice, rather pretty.

            The lock clicks gently.

            Phil gets the privilege, honor, and shame of watching the light drain out of Hawkeye’s clear gaze from a scant two centimeters away. “You fucker,” he murmurs, voice absolutely flat, and then he resolutely peels himself away from Phil’s body, picks up the discarded gun from the ground, and moves across the room to put two bullets in the lock.

            When he turns back around, he comes face-to-face with Phil’s Taser.

            “You used sex to distract me,” says Hawkeye. Insanely, he sounds offended. His pants are unbuttoned, his cock a thick bulge between his thighs, hair an absolute mess and cheeks spotted with flush. “You dickhead.”

            There’s another bang against the door; as if from a distance, shouting.

            “Stand down, Hawkeye,” says Phil.

            “You’ve sunk that low?” says Hawkeye. “You’ll fuck killers just to stall for backup?”

            Another bang. The disadvantage to securing a hotel room to Phil’s standards is that when the system’s disabled from the inside, it’s pretty goddamn hard to get into. “That’s rich,” he says. “Coming from someone who’ll sleep with a G-Man just for information.”

            “I didn’t sleep with you for information,” Hawkeye spits. The gun is steady in his grip. “I could have gotten that without even unbuttoning your shirt, you prick.”

            “You’re so full of shit,” says Phil. He is, suddenly, exhausted. “Put the gun down, Hawkeye.”

            Hawkeye looks down to his Taser and back up to meet his eyes. “I slept with you because I wanted to.”

            Phil just wants this to be over. “Put the gun down, Clint.”

            “Aw, fuck off,” says Clint, and he’s shot and moved even as Phil depresses the trigger. The bolt goes wide, but Clint’s bullet doesn’t; Phil’s Taser crashes out of his grip and to the opposite wall. Phil’s sure if he were to pick it up, he’d find a bullet hole perfectly blown in the muzzle, but by the time he considers that Hawkeye’s already stalking towards him, wielding the gun like a club.

            “I hate being pistol-whipped,” says Phil, almost to himself.

            “I should shoot you instead,” says Hawkeye, says Clint, “it’d serve you right to die with a boner.” He doesn’t, but his blow is hard enough that Phil wishes he had in the half-second before he loses consciousness.

             “Clinton Francis Barton,” says Nick Fury.

            “Oh Jesus fuck,” says Phil, squeezing his eyes even tighter shut. His head throbs in steady synchronicity with his heartbeat. It’s not the first time he’s woken up in a strange bed, blind and with what is very obviously a severe concussion rattling around his skull, and he’s sure it won’t be the last. “Please tell me I’m dead.”

            “Aren’t you going to ask?”

            “Where the hell am I?”

            “That’s not what you want to ask.”

            Phil sighs and twitches his arms a little, feeling the tug of an IV drip in the crease of his right elbow. “Did he get away?”

            “Yes,” says Fury. “He got away.”

            “Maybe I’m dead,” Phil says to the ceiling hopefully.

            “Like being dead’s ever stopped you before,” scoffs Fury. “I’m here to tell you your mission was successful. The Black Widow’s in custody and Hawkeye might be on the run, but thanks to facial recognition we’ve got him in our database. It’s just a matter of time now. All that, and Hungary’s still standing. Good work, Agent Coulson.”

            Phil reaches up to feel his face and brushes thick swabs of cotton bandages. He tries to think of something to say, and eventually comes up with “He gave me his real name?”

            “Oh, Jesus, don’t get emotional on me,” says Fury.

            “I’m not,” says Phil. He pauses. “I don’t think. My head hurts.”

            “Don’t whine,” says Fury. “I just had to review tapes of you humping an assassin. Which of us do you think has had the worse day?”

            Phil clumsily reaches up to cradle in skull in his hands. “Me,” he says. “I think definitely me.”

            “One more thing, before I leave you to your little pity party,” says Fury.

            Phil sighs. “What.”

            “You’re a sentimental fucking idiot.”

            Phil contemplates homicide.

            “We had to get all your things from the hotel room before we flew you back to the States, and you know what we found in your personal bags? Right next to your cute little in-flight headphones and your back-up burner phone.” Fury presses a familiar piece of metal into his palm. “You compromised, lovelorn sack of shit.”

            Phil listens to him walk away and closes his eyes tighter against the weight of the bandages wrapped around his face. In his palm, the conglomerate bullet is cool against his flesh.

Chapter Text

            When Phil opens his front door that morning, there’s a stranger standing on his doorstep, making this particular safe house his fifth one compromised in four months.

            Phil sighs, drawing his gun. “Can I help you?”

            The man lets out a sob and holds out his wrists. They’re trembling, and when Phil takes a closer look at him it’s obvious he’s been crying for a while; his face is swollen and blotchy, and the collar of his shirt is soaked in tears. “Please,” he begs, “oh god, please arrest me.”

            Phil’s day goes downhill from there.

            “Let me get this straight,” says Sitwell. “A guy wanted for the murders of two SHIELD agents last week shows up at your door unarmed and basically does your job for you without you having to lift a finger.” He pauses. “And you’re mad about it.”

            “I am,” says Phil, stiffly prodding at the coffeemaker, “because things like this don’t happen for no reason. There’s always an ulterior motive, and I hate being played.”

            “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo,” says Maria from the corner. She was shot in the arm by a target she was pursuing last week- a graze, but it took a chunk of muscle with it and she’s been terrifyingly grumpy ever since. “Your targets politely ask to be arrested. That must be so hard.”

            “It’s suspicious as hell, is what it is,” says Phil, “and now I have to move, again.”

            “You should just give up,” says Sitwell helpfully.

            “Fuck off,” says Phil absently to the coffeemaker.

            “I bet he hasn’t unpacked since the last time, anyway,” says Maria.

            He’d actually stopped unpacking after the second time, but Phil flips them both off anyway as he leaves. He’ll schedule the entire senior staff for the most tedious workplace harassment seminar he can find and see who’s chuckling then.

            “No,” says Fury.

            “I haven’t even asked you for anything yet,” says Phil.

            Fury turns around, braces both hands on his black desk. The office is harshly lit in glaring fluorescents, because Fury prefers all of his interactions to be more like interrogations than conversations. “But I know what you’re going to ask, because I know everything.”

            “But-“

            “Everything.”

            Phil glares. “You owe me one.”

            “Actually,” says Fury, “I keep careful track, and you’re the one who currently owes me.”

            “I do not-“

            “Hotel bar in Mumbai,” says Fury.

            Phil opens his mouth. Closes it again.

            “You’re not getting a new safe house until I damn well feel like filling out the paperwork for one,” says Fury, “and I’m a little busy. All the time. Now get the hell out of my office.”

            If there is a day where Phil does not regret Mumbai, he has not yet lived it.

            Phil doesn’t keep a couch in his office, because that would give off the impression that he occasionally relaxes, so he sleeps in his office chair, head pillowed on his laptop. He wakes up scowling to a rhythmic knocking at his door.

            “Christ,” Phil grunts, and flips open the computer to check the time. It’s ten until seven in the morning. He’s gotten maybe three hours of sleep. He quickly flattens down his hair, tightens his tie, and stands up to answer the door.

            The agent there looks startled to see him. “Sir,” she says. “Are- are you alright?”

            Phil snaps shut his cufflinks and scowls at her. “Never ask me that again.”

            To her credit, she doesn’t skip a beat. “Whatever you say, sir. You’re needed down in the containment unit.”

            Phil has a bad feeling about this. “And why exactly is that?”

            “A prisoner arrived this morning,” says the agent. “He says he’s here for you.”

            “And by arrived-“

            “He walked into the building and asked to be arrested, sir.”

            “Thank you, agent,” says Phil calmly, and closes the door on her to hiss curses into his empty office for a moment before picking up his briefcase, smacking his face a few times to wake himself up, and opening the door to head down to the holding cells.

            Greggory Urlovich has been quietly terrorizing SHIELD agents abroad into embezzling money into his private accounts for years. He’s in possession of several million dollars in lost SHIELD funds and is responsible for the brutal murders of four agents.

            He tells Phil this in his containment cell, speaking too fast like he’s desperate to get it all out. Unlike the last man, he’s not crying, but his face is so pale is gleams in the overhead lights. When he’s done with his confession, he calms considerably, facing Phil with a certain acceptance in the stiff line of his jaw.

            “Who made you come here?” asks Phil.

            “My conscience,” says Urlovich. He gives no other answer, no matter how he is pressed.

            Phil leaves with his poker face twitching slightly.

            Maria’s waiting for him in the break room. “Heard you had another visitor this morning,” she says.

            Phil grunts into his coffee cup.

            “Sleep well?”

            “Wonderfully.”

            “You have the Dell logo imprinted on your cheek.”

            Some days you win; some days you are Phil Coulson.

            On Wednesday, Phil gets two hours of sleep and meets Julia Lugossi, who refuses to speak to anyone but him and then confesses to killing and then subsequently impersonating a SHIELD officer in their Japanese outpost; on Thursday, he’s down to one when a man who answers only to the name Doom and has had each fingerprint filed off of his hands tells Phil that he’s been responsible for the bombings of two SHIELD offices with a smile on his face.

            Phil goes into the bathroom once Doom has been processed and tries to pretend he isn’t having a nervous breakdown.

            Sitwell comes in as Phil is gripping the sink, contemplating his sweaty face in the mirror, and grimaces. “You know, Phil, I’m a little worried about you.”

            “Why’s that?” Phil grinds out through clenches teeth.

            “I mean,” says Sitwell. “For one, that forehead vein.”

            It really is pulsing a little. “I’m fine, Jasper.”

            “I, for one, think the whole thing’s kind of cool,” says Sitwell. “I wish high-powered criminals came in here asking for me. I don’t have that kind of brand recognition yet.”

            “I will puke on you,” says Phil to his reflection.

            “Jeez,” says Sitwell, “someone’s touchy.” And then he goes and pisses happily at a urinal across the room while Phil stares into his eyes until they start to cross.

            Phil is staring down the break room whiteboard, where someone has scrawled a cheerful TGIF! in Expo marker, when Maria Hill walks in and studies him judgmentally.

            “Leave me alone,” says Phil, not looking up.

            “You look like hell, Phil.”

            “I didn’t ask.”

            “You know there’s a betting pool going on how long it’s going to take you to snap and run out of the building screaming?”

            “I’m assuming you’ve got a sizable take,” says Phil.

            “Oh, I’m going to win,” says Maria, “but that’s not the point. The point is you should take that as a sign that you’re doing something wrong.”

            Phil looks down at his hands. “Did you know my mother’s called me five times in the past week?”

            Maria blinks. “Okay?”

            “She never calls,” says Phil. “But I’m afraid to answer because I think if I do I’ll start sobbing.”

            “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” says Maria, “because it’s way too brutally honest to be something you’d ever tell me if you weren’t utterly sleep-deprived.”

            Phil nods his head in thanks just as a SHIELD tech pushes open the door and sticks her head inside the room. “Agent Coulson?”

            “That’s me,” says Phil, slopping a little coffee on himself as he gestures. Maria side-eyes him but politely stifles her snigger.

            “We have the medical report ready from the fugitive brought in this morning,” says the tech, and passes over a file.

            “When you say ‘brought in’, you make it sound like Coulson actually had something to do with it,” Maria tells the tech, and then pauses to look over at Phil incredulously. “Coulson, why the hell are you laughing?”

            Phil presses his hand to his mouth, shoulders shaking, and feels his eyes tear up a little with glee. “Oh, fuck.”

            Maria’s actually starting to look a little concerned. “Phil, I didn’t actually want to win the pot-“

            “Maria,” says Phil, “guess what they dug out of this guy’s stomach.”

            Maria stares at him.

            “An arrowhead,” says Phil. He jumps up, slapping the file back into the tech’s hands, and says “thank you- thank you sincerely-“ before leaving at a run. An arrowhead.

            The months in captivity have not been kind to Natalia. Fluorescents are not a good look on her.

            She watches him as he steps into the cell, eyes bright and lips pressed tightly together. Natalia has said exactly two words since she first stepped into the cell one month ago, and they have both been “No”.

            Her hair is loose- they won’t let her have an elastic- and she’s in the seamless, one-piece jumpsuit designed for prisoners who can kill people with buttons and zippers. Natalia, who has killed with both on different occasions, looks sallow in it, the faded gray making her pale skin look thin and jaundiced.

            “Hello, Natalia,” says Phil.

            The Widow doesn’t say anything, but then, he wasn’t expecting her to. She hasn’t reacted to any of SHIELD’s interrogation methods in the entire month she’s been here, and Phil’s perfectly aware that they’ve strayed over any sort of line carved out by basic morality, so if she can withstand sleep deprivation and solitary and whatever other methods the beady-eyed SHIELD specialists have come up with she’s probably not going to react to Phil casually using what he knows perfectly well is just an alias.

            “I came here to talk to you about Clint,” says Phil.

            The Widow looks at the opposite wall, her gaze blank.

            “He cares about you, right?” asks Phil.

            The Widow’s eyes glaze over slightly. She looks like she’s going somewhere far away, and Phil’s hands twitch a little, guilt acidic at the base of his tongue. He knows full well what the face of someone who’s dissociating looks like; she’s trying to remove herself. She’s treating this conversation like it’s a method of torture.

            “So I was wondering,” says Phil, watching her face closely, “why he would be helping your captors, if that were the case.”

            Natalia watches the wall like she’s seeing something far beyond it.

            “Alright, Natalia,” says Phil, softly, “let me know if you ever want to talk.” He rises from his half-crouch, reflexively tugging at his sleeves as he stands. If he were a better man, he wouldn’t have been grinning on his way out.

            Phil is, for the first time in a week, in a good mood when he enters Fury’s office.

            “I’m putting a kill order out on Hawkeye,” says Fury.

            Well, that sure as hell didn’t last long. “Sir,” says Phil, “respectfully, what the fuck.”

            “You can’t respectfully ask me ‘what the fuck’, Agent Coulson, it’s not possible. And you know exactly what the fuck I’m saying. Hawkeye’s been toying with us for too long. He’s targeting one of my best agents and driving him insane; he’s terrorizing people into giving us confessions we have no way to determine aren’t coerced; he’s making a mockery of our system of justice, and I’m going to assume you haven’t seen this because you’ve been sleeping for approximately ten minutes a night. Because of him.”

            Phil skims down the file placed in front of him. “Fifteen SHIELD agents dead in California?”

            “And how’d they die, Phil?”

            Phil takes a deep breath and pushes the file back. “Sir, that could have been anyone.”

            “Either you’re trying to cover a criminal’s ass or you’ve actually lost it. Coulson, the only person who’d be killing an entire squad of agents with arrows to the eyeballs is Clint Barton, and I am putting a kill order out on him because I want him gone. Would you like to protest that?”

            “Yes.”

            “Phil,” says Fury, voice gone suddenly gentler, “I know you slept with him. Don’t-“

            “Don’t what? Humanize him?”

            “Forget who he really is.” Fury closes the file with a definitive snap. “If any of our agents come into contact with him, they’re taking the kill shot. I’m done with this kid toying with us. Would you still like to protest that? Don’t answer, I don’t actually care. Get the hell out of my office.”

            “This is the wrong decision, sir.”

            “Coulson, get out.”

            “He’s the best marksman in the world,” says Phil, trying to push down the desperation in his voice, “think of what an asset he could be if-“

            “This wasn’t a discussion, Phil,” says Fury, “this was an order, and you will accept it as such. Leave.”

            TGIF indeed.

            It’s two in the morning when Phil’s SHIELD cell rings with a call from an unknown number.

            Phil’s on the floor of his office, where he’d collapsed into a kind of blank doze a couple of hours ago; he curls upwards with a groan to get to the phone on his desk. Technically, there are only twelve people in the organization with the clearance to know this number, so Phil answers the call with trepidation that he forces into sounding something like steely resolve. “What.”

            “Phil,” says Clint Barton, and Phil very nearly fumbles the phone in shock.

            “Hawkeye,” says Phil, sharp. He uses his left hand to snatch desperately across the desk, pulling his laptop back into his lap, getting onto his account one-handed. He needs this call traced and he needs it traced now.

            Hawkeye coughs a little. The connection is crackling, but even through the static he sounds exhausted, voice rough and raw. “The Holly Sharpton Memorial Graveyard in New Jersey,” he says.

            Phil’s hand stills on his keyboard. “What?”

            “That’s where I am,” says Hawkeye.

            Phil closes his eyes briefly, resumes his typing. “You think I’m going to walk into a trap?”

            “You can bring all the backup you want,” says Hawkeye, “but I just ask that you come with them.” He pauses. “Please.”

            Hawkeye ends the call before Phil can say anything or manage to trace it. He tosses the phone aside with a curse.

            It’s so obviously a trap that Phil can’t believe he’s doing it, but a Google map search tells Phil that the graveyard Barton mentioned is a thirty-minute drive away. He crawls across the floor to go fetch the phone from where he’d pitched it and calls in for backup.

            It’s raining slightly when Phil steps out of the van, a damp drizzle just heavy enough to bead on his forehead and make everything gray and miserable. Holly Sharpton is a nice place, lined by gray brick walls that wind around rows and rows of headstones glistening in the rain, flowers wilting underneath the weight of the droplets; in the moonlight, the scene is vaguely romantic in a macabre kind of way. The black SHIELD van parked behind the rear wall somewhat spoils the effect.

            His agents follow him out, their boots hitting the wet earth with soft sucking sounds.

            “I want a perimeter established around the entire area,” says Phil. There are no high points around for a sniper to situate themselves in, but there are plenty of copses and headstones behind which a gunman on his stomach could be easily hidden. “Once it’s tight, close in. Keep radio contact and keep alert. We’re looking at a possible trap here.”

            The agents disperse silently, black uniforms stark and out of place against the soft gray of the soggy trees and the slick headstones. Phil climbs back into the van to wait.

            Nick calls as Phil is staring blankly out into the distance, listening to all-clear calls filtering in through his headset and wishing vaguely for coffee.

            “Coulson,” he says. “It’s four-thirty in the morning and you just took twenty-five agents out for a joyride to Jersey.”

            “We got a lead on Hawkeye, sir,” says Phil.

            “Source?”

            Phil pauses. “Hawkeye,” he admits.

            “So what you’re telling me,” says Fury flatly, “is that you just sent twenty-five agents into a trap.”

            “I think that maybe-“ Phil begins, just as the headset buzzes again and one of the agents says, “Sir, we have eyes on him,” and Phil unceremoniously hangs up on Fury to turn his full attention back to the graveyard.

            “Report,” says Phil.

            A pause. Another agent says, “I have secondary eyes.”

            “He’s surrounded, sir,” says the first. “He’s not responding to our questions.”

            “What do you mean, he’s not responding?”

            Another pause. “It’s unclear if he’s alive or not. Sir.”

            Phil slides open the van door and starts running.

            Hawkeye is propped up against a headstone with his head lolling against the marble and his feet splayed out in front of him. He’s been out in the rain for a while, and the droplets have collected on his forehead and lower lip, quivering in his eyebrows and eyelashes like glittering beads. He’s sickly pale against the gray stone; his lips are blue, his fingers curled stiffly in his lap. It’s Phil’s first time seeing him in three months. There’s a rifle being pressed into his temple.

            “He’s been patted down, sir, he’s not carrying a weapon,” says an agent standing behind Phil, a couple headstones away. “He’s still conscious. He’s not bleeding, but he’s not breathing right, either.”

            “He asked for you,” another one tells him, and suddenly it feels like grotesque overkill to have called twenty-six of SHIELD’s best and brightest here armed to the teeth to apprehend a weaponless man who’s listing sideways against a gravestone, rasping out shallow breaths like there’s something obstructive around in his lungs.

            “I need ten of you to fan out,” says Phil to the agent beside him. “We can’t discount the possibility that this is a trap and there’s backup coming.” Then to the man looming over Hawkeye: “Stand down, Agent. I’ll take it from here.”

            “Sir,” the agent acknowledges, and removes the gun from Barton’s head before stepping back a pace. Phil threads his way inside the ring of agents and moves to crouch down next to Hawkeye.

            Barton’s eyes slit open as Phil settles to his haunches; a blue-tinged smile twitches across his slack face. “Phil,” he says. “You came.”

            “Barton,” says Phil. The rain is coming down harder now, splashing down against the headstones, pooling in the uneven dirt, matting Barton’s hair to his forehead. “You know that there’s a kill order out for you.”

            “Yes,” says Barton, and then giggles a little. "You look awful."

            Phil will elect to ignore that. Pot, kettle, et cetera. “Why have you been sending me criminals?”

            “To get your attention,” says Barton, and then in an apparent non-sequitur, “I’m dying.”

            “This is a trick,” says Phil.

            “I wish,” says Barton, and then slowly, slowly, fumbles one hand over his body to push up his left sleeve. When Phil leans closer to see, rain dripping off his forehead and onto Barton’s wrist, he sees a telltale red mark beginning to swell just below the crease of his elbow.

            “Injection site,” says Phil, almost to himself.

            “Ding ding ding,” Barton tells him. He sounds so, so tired.

            “Who did this to you?”

            Barton’s eyes slide further shut. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Phil. I didn’t call you out to turn on them. I called you because-“ he lets out a shaky breath. “I didn’t want to die alone.”

            “I don’t believe you,” says Phil. “There’s no way I’m the person you’d call.”

            Barton forces his eyes open again with what seems to be incredible effort. There’s something dark bubbling on his lips. “I think about you all the time, Phil. You’re the only person. You took Nat from me. I have no one left. I have you, and you’re about to kill me, but I respect you, and I think you respect me, and I wanted you here.”

            “Barton,” says Phil, soft.

            Barton laughs. It sounds like it hurts. “Consider it an apology gift, Phil. A gold star on your record as recompense for screwing with you.” Recompense takes him a few tries to get out; his teeth have started to chatter, the muscles in his jaw starting to spasm. Phil can’t help but catalogue the symptoms; lockjaw, lack of circulation to the extremities, yellowing sclera, black froth on the lips.

            It’s possible that this is not a trick.

            “Clint,” says Phil, and slowly lifts his gun.

            Clint looks at him. “Ooh, first names,” he says, with a shadow of a smirk. “This must be serious.” There’s something in his eyes, beyond the thin veil of easy detachment, that makes Phil’s gut tug uncomfortably. Hawkeye, the great, the invincible, is dying, and he is afraid.

            “Clint,” says Phil, “you killed fifteen SHIELD agents.”

            “I know,” says Clint. He tips his face up to the gray sky for a moment, parts his lips slightly. Rainwater mixes with thick black froth on his tongue. “I know what you have to do. Will you do one more thing for me first, though, Phil?” And slowly, slowly, he lifts up his left hand and offers it to Phil, palm up, fingers splayed wide.

            Phil looks from the hand to his face and back again. Clint says, “Please,” and for a moment Phil could almost forget they’re being watched by fifteen people and listened to by ten more. For a moment, it’s just Clint and his shaking blue hand.

            And so Phil takes it, carefully, lets their fingers thread together, and Clint lets out a shuddery sigh.

            “Thank you,” he says, and finally lets his eyes slide shut. “You can do it now. I’m ready.”

            There are moments in a SHIELD agent’s career that define what kind of person you are. How you handle your first interrogation; how you handle your first time being interrogated. If you puke after your first time killing a man, if you jump on the grenade, if you pitch it at someone else.

            If you use one hand to hold onto someone else’s and the other to shoot them in the skull.

            “You’re dripping mud on my floor,” says Natalia Romanova.

            Phil startles so badly that he almost trips over the doorframe. “Oh.”

            “Yes,” says Natalia, tracking his careful path into the cell with empty dark eyes. “Thankfully, you thoughtfully installed drains, so it’ll all be very easy to hose away.”

            SHIELD torture is effective; it’s never claimed to be subtle as well. “Natalia,” says Phil, deciding for now to ignore the fact that the Widow is actually speaking out loud for the first time in the entirety of her captivity, “I’m here to talk to you about Hawkeye.”

            “Congratulations,” says Natalia.

            Phil’s poker face is clearly not up to the challenge of a vocal Black Widow, and she answers the confusion in his gaze with, “I’m glad you two finally made it official. If you’re here to ask for my blessing, this will get awkward.”

            Phil’s throat hurts. “Natalia,” he says, “Clint’s dead.”

            Natalia’s face doesn’t twitch, but something goes blank in her eyes.

            Phil rubs at his face. “I’m sorry,” he says, useless.

            “Do you think this is going to manipulate me into anything, Phil Coulson?” says Natalia. There’s something dangerous in her gaze. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

            “I’ve never lied to you, Natalia,” says Phil, “and I’m not lying now. I- he called me and- he’d been poisoned, and.” Phil Coulson does not stumble over his words. Phil Coulson has slept a total of ten hours in the past six days. Phil Coulson is losing it. “He stopped breathing, before I could-“

            He stops, and they stand there for a moment. It is silent in the Black Widow’s cell.

            Natalia says, “Poisoned.”

            Phil is so tired. He nods.

            She asks, “What are you doing with his body?”

            Phil blinks. “What?”

            “Cremation or burial?”

            Ridiculously, Phil’s gaze blurs. “I don’t know, Natalia.”

            “Alright,” the Widow says, and sits down against the wall she’s had her back against. “The story of your love is tragic, really. It’s all very Romeo and Juliet.”

            The insincerity is caustic. Phil stiffly adjusts his tie and turns to go.

            “Phil?”

            Phil stops. “Yes.”

            “My condolences,” says the Widow, and Phil has to fight not to slam the cell door shut behind him.

            In the observation room outside the two-way mirror, two agents are watching him with wide eyes. Phil pointedly and unnecessarily adjusts his tie again before leaving the room.

            The hallway outside is big and blank and empty, and Phil leans against the door for a moment, shaking a little. The mud caked onto his face is starting to itch. He can still feel the ghost of the clammy warmth of Hawkeye’s palm on his trembling hand.

            He knows it’s an act, knows it’s designed to bother him, but the Widow’s insouciance eats at him, tugs him the wrong way right in his gut-

            It’s all very Romeo and Juliet.

            Phil freezes. “Oh, fuck,” he says to the empty hallway.

            It really is all very Romeo and Juliet, isn’t it?

            Phil tugs his carefully adjusted tie loose from his neck and takes off at a full-out sprint. The SHIELD morgue is a good ten minutes away from his location. He’s going to go ahead and cut that down to four.

Chapter Text

            “Coulson to Fury,” Phil pants.

            Nothing but static.

            “God fucking-“ Phil takes a breath and keeps running. He’s only a stairway and a door or two away from the morgue. He’s not going to stop now, dammit. “Fury, I need reinforcements in the cells now. Hawkeye might be here to break out Widow. Do you copy?”

            Static.

            Phil swipes his card across the morgue door. “I think I might be walking into a trap,” he says into his gently buzzing earpiece. “Triple the Widow’s guard.”

            No response. Phil flings open the door and goes inside muzzle first.

            Hawkeye's body bag is lying on its intake tray, sitting in the back room in front of rows of waiting silver drawers. When Phil fits his gun between his teeth and spreads unsteady hands across the black fabric, it pulls taut at the head of the bag over what is very clearly a nose and mouth.

            Maybe this was all just a wild guess, thinks Phil, as he fumbles to unzip the bag, one hand splayed on the shoulder of the body. Maybe he just embarrassed himself over SHIELD-wide comms, maybe he’s just being paranoid. One reference to Shakespeare and suddenly he’s seeing bluffs and double bluffs everywhere he looks-

            He's staring down at the still face of a SHIELD guard.

            Phil whips his gun out from his mouth and gets his back to the wall. Even in the cold of the morgue, he's broken out into a sweat.

            How did he not notice the morgue was unguarded? He’s desperately off his game. In a job like his, slip-ups like these end in death.

            He has no one to blame but himself for letting Hawkeye get to him like this.

            The morgue is still, empty, and cold. Phil has to concentrate to make his steps silent on the tile floor, to keep his breathing from puffing out white clouds into the air.

            He gets around the corner into the next room. Rows and rows of silver drawers flank him as he swivels around, the muzzle of his gun bobbing. "Hawkeye," he says into the empty room, his voice thin.

            "Phil," says an answering voice.

            Phil turns into a faceful of metal drawer.

            It cracks against his skull so hard that he's out before he even hits the ground.

            Phil wakes up choking on vomit.

            Through the agonizing rattling of his headache, Phil hears, "Ah, no, ah, Christ," and is vaguely aware of strong hands on his shoulder rolling him over before he vomits again. The bile splatters against the surface beneath him, which is metal. It's metal and it's vibrating beneath his clumsy palms. Truck. He's in the back of a truck, and Hawkeye is crouching over him, hands on his shoulders. Phil closes his eyes, takes one second to try and breath through his headache, and then kicks both heels up to get Hawkeye behind his knees and goes to flip himself over at the same time.

            Hawkeye stumbles, curses, and Phil scrambles upwards, slipping in his own vomit. His head hurts so badly that his vision is blurring. Hawkeye is standing up, looking at him in exasperation.

            "You aren't supposed to be awake yet," complains Hawkeye. "And we don’t have any goddamn tranquilizers."

            Phil goes for his gun; it isn't there. He's about to stretch into a roundhouse kick when he sees Clint hefting the silver drawer from the morgue.

            "I swear to god," slurs Phil, "if you hit me with that thing-"

            It hurts even worse the second time.

            When Phil wakes for a second time, it's to find himself on a beach. This is confusing to him.

            The Widow says, “You’re looking a little pink,” and Phil very nearly dislocates his shoulder twisting around to face her. She’s lounging back in a beach chair, a tasteful black bikini wrapped around her lithe body, sipping at what appears to be a mojito, and Phil is handcuffed to a plastic chair next to her, dressed in a pair of swim trunks and nothing else.

            Phil flicks his eyes around, quickly assessing his surroundings. His head hurts in a distant way that speaks of some painkillers currently bubbling through his veins; his dick is chafing a little in the damp trunks, and there’s a pair of plastic sunglasses balanced crookedly on his nose. A few yards away, the surf laps contentedly at the white sand. The beach is empty as far as Phil can see except for the two of them and the empty chair beside him, backed by lush green trees until it dips away into the horizon. To their far right, there’s a white building in the distance.

            The Widow waits for him to take this all in as she quietly stirs her drink. “If you try to escape,” she says, “I will end that headache of yours by crushing your skull.”

            Fair enough. Phil settles back in against the chair, shoulders tense, and stares out at the pale blue ocean.

            “Hawaii?” he asks, casual.

            The Widow doesn’t answer. Her fingers are delicate against the stem of the glass. He has no doubt that she could incapacitate him without spilling a drop.

            “Are we waiting for Hawkeye?”

            The Widow says nothing.

            “Are you going to answer any of my questions? Can I ask you how long I was out?”

            “Would you like some sunscreen?” the Widow asks.

            Phil grits his teeth. “That is not-“ and then he squirms involuntarily as the Widow squirts a thick line of cold sunblock onto his belly. “Jesus.”

            “Sun safety is important,” the Black Widow tells him. 

            Phil tests his wrists against the cuffs and glares at her.

            The Widow smiles, slips shades down over her eyes, and settles back in her chair. “Just wait,” she tells Phil.

            Phil seethes instead.

            He’s fairly sure he knows what it is they’re waiting for, but even so the “Ah, Nat, you’re gonna give him uneven tan lines, what the hell,” makes him jump a little, rattling the cuffs where they’re chained to the legs of the beach chair. When Hawkeye comes around to Phil’s field of vision, he’s grinning hugely, teeth glinting underneath the shine of the bright sunlight. With his tousled hair and baggy palm-patterned swim trunks, he could easily join the Widow in making a perfectly inconspicuous pair of shockingly good-looking tourists, hanging out on a private beach for a relaxing vacation day. No one would be able to tell just by looking at him that he's killed at least a few dozen people to date, and possibly more if you also count the alleged charges, which Phil most certainly does.

            There’s no way Hawkeye could have possibly gotten the drop on Phil if he had made his way from the house along the beach- it’s a straight shot along the shore to where he and the Widow are lounging, which means- “Did you seriously hike through that forest just to get a drop on me?”

            Hawkeye peels off his shirt and drops a smarmy wink Phil’s way. “A magician never reveals his secrets, Phil.”

            “You’re not a magician, you’re a terrorist and a kidnapper,” says Phil. The sunglasses are inching down his nose, and the lotion is melting slowly into his swim trunks. “Are you ever going to uncuff me?”

            “Oh, hell no,” says Hawkeye, smiling widely. “I will be happy to rub that sunblock in for you, though. You know. To help with the tan lines.”

            “Take one more step towards me and I will knee you in the balls,” says Phil.

            “Can’t you guys keep your flirting down a little?” asks the Widow, idly smoothing sunblock down her arms. “I’m trying to relax here.”

            “Hawkeye,” says Phil, “you’re making a mistake.”

            Hawkeye makes a face and steals the sunblock from the Widow. “No, you are, man, it’s Clint.”

            “SHIELD isn’t going to forget about me,” says Phil. “They’re not going to stop until they find me, and when they do, they’re not going to bring you in alive.”

            “Do you know what relax means?” asks the Widow.

            Phil twists his neck around to stare at her. “You think this is a joke.”

            Clint waves a hand. “No, no, SHIELD is all-encompassing and very terrifying and scary and all that. Look at me. I’m quaking in my boots.”

            He’s wearing flip-flops. “Why did you bring me from the morgue?” asks Phil. “I assume we’re on some remote island with no extradition-“

            “Ooh, look, Nat, he watches White Collar too-“

            “-next to a house I’m guessing was your getaway spot. You could’ve disappeared. Why’d you bring me?”

            “Maybe we’re going to kill you,” says the Widow conversationally.

            “That makes no logistical sense,” says Phil. “If you were going to kill me, you could’ve shot me in the morgue before you left.”

            “Phil,” says Clint, “you’re thinking too hard. Shh.” And when Phil opens his mouth again, obstinate, Clint presses a quieting finger to his lips. Phil tips his head to get his teeth around it, but Clint just lets him gnaw at it as he turns to the Widow and says, “I’m gonna hit the surf. Be back in a bit.” Then he pulls away from Phil, pats him on the cheek, and jogs away to the water, where he wades in until the tip of his head is dipping beneath the clear waves.

            That water would feel heavenly on Phil’s slowly crisping skin. “Are you just going to keep me tied to this chair until I die of sun poisoning?” he asks the Widow.

            She doesn’t answer. He’s sensing a pattern here.

            He has to wait until Hawkeye resurfaces from the waves to resume any sort of conversation, and by that point Phil is feeling the sun so acutely he’s having trouble focusing on anything else. It’s possible that this is their version of an interrogation method. “I’m not going to tell you anything,” he informs Hawkeye, as Hawkeye drips onto the sand in front of him, toweling off his hair with his t-shirt.

            Hawkeye looks at him and shrugs. “Okay.”

            “Okay,” Phil repeats. He would love to, just once, understand what the hell Hawkeye is thinking.

            “Okay,” says Hawkeye again. “Want to go in the water?”

            Phil squints at him. The skin on his face feels tight and burnt. “What’s the catch?”

            “Uh,” says Hawkeye. “You’ll probably be at gunpoint.”

            Phil shrugs. He’ll take it.

            Hawkeye catches the pistol Widow chucks his way before leaning over Phil to fiddle with the cuffs beneath the chair. Phil can feel his breath moist and warm on the side of Phil’s neck, and his shirt hangs down to drag clammily along Phil’s bare front. And then he’s retreating, moving back, and Phil is stiffly shifting his arms to his sides and sitting up, his spine popping painfully.

            Hawkeye smiles at him and cocks the gun. “Race you to the water.”

            Phil is stiff and in pain; Hawkeye beats him by a good three seconds. “Damnit,” he grunts, splashing into the waves. The cool water feels heavenly on his burnt calves. “Why the hell is my back so sore?”

            “You, uh. May or may not have traveled here via cargo hold,” says Hawkeye, and then ducks underwater at Phil’s glare, the gun still wavering high above his head. He resurfaces a moment later, shaking wet hair out of his face. “You were unconscious, it wasn’t like you cared!”

            Phil walks deeper into the water, gets up to his shoulders submerged and floats for a moment, blissful. “So, Hawkeye,” he says, “your big plan was a success, right? You made your way past SHIELD security so that you could get the Widow out.”

            “Uh, yeah,” says Hawkeye. “I did.”

            “How’d you fake it?”

            “Drank some toxins. Temporary paralyzing agent.”

            “That was smart.”

            “Yeah, it was genius as balls.”

            That is most likely not how Fury will put it. “So you want to answer one question?”

            Hawkeye looks at him. The water is splashing up around his waist. He looks impossibly fit, the muscles in his shoulders bulging obscenely as he grips the gun.

            “Why did you take me with you?”

            “Uh,” says Hawkeye.

            “Is it because we slept together when I didn’t know who you were?”

            “Uh,” says Hawkeye, more emphatically.

            “Because, believe me,” says Phil, bobbing with a gentle wave, “had I known who you really were, it would never have happened.”

            “Right,” says Clint, “except you definitely knew who I was that next time, Agent Coulson, and I didn’t hear any protests then.”

            Phil flushes underneath his sunburn. “Nothing happened that time.”

            “Yeah, because we were interrupted before it could,” says Clint, “so get off your high horse, Agent. Anyway. I brought you here to offer you a job.”

            Phil blinks at him. “What.”

            Clint beams at him from behind the gun, loose hand tracing idly through the water. “You know how I’ve been working with you for the past few months?”

            And here Phil thought he’d spent the past few months actively working against Hawkeye. “No.”

            “Dude,” says Clint. “I sent, like, fifteen criminals right into your hands. Ones you wanted, too!” He pauses, like he’s waiting for a smile or a fucking high five or something, and then, “You’re welcome, Jesus.”

            “That was not working with me,” hisses Phil, the water lapping at his chin. “That was taunting me.”

            “That was showing you how well we worked together,” says Clint. “So I’m here to offer you a job.”

            “No.”

            “You haven’t even heard the job yet.”

            “I offer people jobs. I do not take them.”

            “That’s not what your mom said,” says Clint.

            Phil blinks. “That’s the worst your mom joke I’ve ever heard.”

            “What? I- no. Like, that’s actually not what your mom said.”

            Phil stares at him.

            “She says you might be willing to try something new,” says Clint.

            “What the actual fuck,” says Phil, “did you talk to my mom?”

            Clint waves a hand. “We chat, sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”

            “I beg to fucking differ.”

            “That really wasn’t the point. The point is we should work together.”

            Phil looks at him, across the stretch of water separating him. He’s beautiful in the surf, skin wet and smooth beneath the waves, muscles shifting easily as he moves. His eyes are very blue in the sunlight.

            “You, me, Nat,” says Clint. “Bounty hunters.”

            “You are absolutely insane,” says Phil.

            “I know what you’re thinking,” says Clint. “Bringing you in will totally ruin the whole Bonnie and Clyde vibe me and Nat’ve got going on.”

            “There are few things farther from what I was thinking.”

            “But don’t worry! I think you could be a valuable addition to our team. Think about it. We’d be unstoppable.”

            “I have a concussion,” says Phil to the water.

            “Phil. Look at me.”

            The water is almost as blue as Clint’s eyes.

            “No offense, but I’m the best marksman in the world,” says Clint. “Like, seriously. Well, definitely the best human marksman- Nat knows this guy with an arm- whatever, that’s not important, I don’t think he’s been around for the past couple of years anyway.”

            Phil is not even going to ask. “I don’t see what that has to do with you being insane.”

            “Well,” says Clint, “Nat’s kind of the best secret agent ever, and she’s also really hot, which actually is surprisingly helpful in a lot of situations. And then here you are. You’re kind of a tactical genius.”

            Phil looks blankly at him.

            “Put the three of us together, and ta-da!” Clint throws his arms wide, very nearly pitching the gun into the waves. “We’re like, Bonnie and Clyde but, like. Plus the Terminator.”

            “That’s the best group metaphor you could come up with,” says Phil flatly. The horizon swoops sickeningly as dizziness seizes his brain in an unsteady grip.

            “What do you want to be, the Three fucking Stooges?” asks Clint, and then says, “you, uh. Don’t look so hot.”

            “I have a concussion,” says Phil.

            It turns out that Phil does, indeed, have a concussion.

            “Quelle surprise,” he says.

            “Shut up,” says Clint, wringing his hands nervously.

            The three of them are inside the beachhouse, Phil sitting on a table set against a floor-to-ceiling window that looks out on the water. It’s light and airy inside; it smells like sunblock and fresh grass. There’s something comfortingly homey about the worn floorboards soft beneath the soles of his feet.

            “You shut up,” says Natalia, calmly wrapping the bandage back around his head. “You’re the one who clobbered him with a drawer.”

            “Twice,” Phil adds. He closes his eyes beneath the gentle pressure of the bandage. He’s beginning to realize that he can play this situation to his advantage. Not physically- he’s unarmed and outnumbered- but if he plays the game well enough, he has the chance to end up winning, and Phil Coulson always wins.

            Clint wasn’t joking earlier. He’s the best marksman in the entire world. The work he’s been turning in to Phil for the past month proves that beyond a doubt. He and Natalia, as deadly and understated as she is, would be invaluable to SHIELD. The three of them can spend the next few months building up a resume of bounties caught, one long and impressive enough to make SHIELD’s collective head spin. Then, once Clint and Natalia trust him implicitly- when Clint kisses him sweetly over morning coffee and Natalia lets him unzip her dresses after long days when she doesn’t feel like reaching around- he’ll call up Nick Fury and tell him that Phil Coulson is alive and ready to come back into the right side of the field on the condition Hawkeye and the Widow are granted amnesty in exchange for becoming agents. Clint and Natalia will have no choice then but to decide between prison and working with him, and as Phil knows, that's not much of a choice.

            Two birds, one stone. He’ll betray Clint and make SHIELD twice the organization it’s ever been in one beautiful move.

            Phil Coulson, tactical genius.

            “Phil,” says Clint, “you’re spacing out.”

            Phil blinks himself back through a film of dizziness to focus on Clint standing there, chewing delicately on his lower lip. “Yes, well,” he says, and gestures at the bandage. “Head, drawer. Et cetera.”

            Clint scowls. “Only because Nat used up all the tranq darts,” he says, crossing his arms obstinately. “We really need to restock on weapons, you know," he adds, looking her way. "That last stunt kinda left us running on empty.”

            Phil smooths down the bandage and laboriously stands up. “Okay. Where are we buying them?”

            Clint and Natalia trade a glance. “What?” says Clint blankly.

            “Money can be exchanged for goods and services,” Phil tells him gently.

            “Fuck you, I- you’re in?”

            Phil shrugs. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

            Natalia and Clint look at each other again. “Too easy,” says Natalia.

            “Of course it is,” says Phil, “and you should probably keep that gun ready, because I think even you’d be disappointed if I didn’t try to escape at this point. But if I’m stuck here, we might as well get started, right? Where are we buying the weapons?”

            “Well,” Clint hedges, “buying is such a strong word.”

            Phil smiles slowly. “So what are we waiting for?”