Chapter Text
"I don't know, Clint," Bruce said, kind of like Clint had thought he would, "Tony made fun of me isn't exactly red flag behaviour." Neither was 'Tony said something mean' which was the other phrasing he'd been thinking of going with. It all sounded so childish and sensitive.
Clint frowned and rested his chin on folded arms, slumped on Bruce's work table and didn't care that he looked like he was peevishly sulking. That was the problem. No one--and by no one, he meant Bruce--would listen to him. Tony being a bit of a shithead wasn't unusual, or weird, or anything Clint himself wouldn't tune out, most of the time, but Tony was mostly a shithead only in certain contexts.
Or really, to be more accurate, there were contexts in which Tony wasn't a shithead. Wouldn't be. It was a big part of why Clint was with him at all. He fiddled with a device on Bruce's table until Bruce took it away, then moved on to toy with an eyedropper, drawing up about a teaspoon of Bruce's coffee before squeezing the bulb and sending it splashing back into his mug.
"You don't even know what I've been using that for," Bruce said, "I might have been poisoned if I hadn't see you doing that."
Bruce would be fine. The Hulk would make sure of it. Clint didn't say so.
Bruce sighed. "Fine," he said and sat back from his work, folding his arms over his chest in a way that clearly said he was humoring Clint and thought Clint was wasting his time. "What did he say." There wasn't a question mark at the end of it. Clint could tell from his tone.
"I don't want to repeat it." Not because it had been bad, but because it hadn't been. It would make Clint look totally pathetic and fragile if Bruce knew exactly how much of a nothing it had been. "It wasn't a big deal," he added, in case Bruce thought that the reason he wouldn't tell was because it had been actually awful.
Because Tony was sometimes awful and none of them would really be surprised by him being snippy in the bedroom. Clint fidgeted. The whole thing was going not-to-plan. The whole thing was pretty much going sideways. Clint wasn't a planner and this sort of thing was why.
Bruce kept looking at him, a little worriedly, like he was no longer sure that Clint was wasting his time and like he maybe thought Tony didn't know how to treat subs properly.
"It's not like that," Clint snapped, straightening and throwing the eyedropper down. It bounced off the table and rolled, then fell off the edge. A serious miscalculation. Clint pretended not to notice the snaff-up, but Bruce looked down as it hit the floor then gave Clint another dose of that worried look, this time with extra bit of worry and a little less stop bothering me.
Clint felt insulted on Tony's behalf. "He's usually really nice to me," he said, sounding sulky again. God. What the hell was going on with him. Maybe Bruce was right. Maybe he was taking it way too personally. He knew subs who sounded the way he sounded right now, and as a general rule, he mocked them behind their backs.
It was like Tony had promised and failed to call him.
But then, Tony had promised and failed to call him. On multiple occasions and most of the time Clint hadn't even cared because he tended to do the same to Tony. Had forgotten, several times over, that anyone was supposed to call anyone. Tony wasn't always that good with schedules if no one was reminding him of them and nagging about it, and Clint was often just not paying that much attention, or busy. He didn't over react like this. It wasn't his thing.
But it wasn't Tony's thing to snip at him when they were alone. At least, not when Clint was listening. Not when things were far enough along that every third word out of Tony's mouth made his stomach flip in that good-bad scary-safe way. He couldn't always unravel it, and Tony knew that. Tony made sure that good-bad scary-safe would balance out on the good and safe side, in the end, and during, mostly.
Tony didn't pick on him or tease him, or pretend he couldn't see it when things were spinning out of Clint's control way too fast. It was so, so easy for Clint to fall back into bad and scared, and Tony knew it and made sure it didn't happen.
But Clint would be damned if he said so to Bruce. Bruce was already looking at him like he was being dramatic and maybe something of a princess and if someone had whined the same story to Clint that he'd just whined to Bruce, he'd probably think the same thing.
"Never mind," Clint said, and almost stole Bruce's coffee before he remembered the eyedropper and Bruce's comment about getting poisoned.
-----
"If you want a relationship counselor," Bruce said, the next time he came to the lab to talk about Tony being weird, "I'm not that kind of doctor."
"Bruce," Clint said, and stood there and fidgeted and knew his hair was standing up at all different angles and his clothes were kind of rumpled and disheveled.
"Jesus," Bruce said after he'd had time to process the visual, and gave Clint his coffee, but mostly Clint suspected, so he'd have something to do with hands other than fuck with Bruce's tools. "Do I even want to know what you're about to tell me?"
Clint considered if he really wanted to tell Bruce in the first place. Bruce wasn't taking him seriously, and fair enough. He wouldn't take himself seriously at this point, except he'd probably be more sympathetic to the fact that he'd obviously come straight here from Tony's and how that was a sign that he was at least honestly upset.
"Tony," Clint started, and tried to figure out how to word it this time.
"What?" Bruce gave him that cold look that Clint had long ago learned to ignore from doms and sure as fuck wasn't going to humor coming from Bruce. It didn't really have anything to do with Clint anyway. It was Bruce's you're-acting-strange-and-scaring-me-so-I'm-going-to-pretend-I-have-control look.
It was actually maybe a bit telling that Clint could identify it, but Bruce looked the same way sometimes when he thought he was about to Hulk out.
"It's nothing," Clint said, even though he was the one that was convinced it was something, and Bruce the one who had more or less told him he was an idiot. He should have straightened himself out more before coming to find Bruce. Now Bruce was over reacting and maybe coming up with all sorts of twisted scenarios in his head.
There was no getting to the middle ground that Clint wanted with him. The middle ground where someone would listen, but not freak out.
And there was only one person he could rely on for that, really.
----
Thor wasn't anything. Asgard didn't have definitions and roles in the same way that they did down on Earth, and from what Clint could gather, people in Asgard pretty much did what they wanted however they wanted and it didn't make them one thing or the other. They had subs, but it didn't make them subs, and they had doms, but it didn't make them doms, either. Just people with preferences, which sounded kind of fucking great, but also like it might be hard to put out a personal ad.
The whole thing made Thor a surprisingly reasonable and level-headed source of advice--a fact which Natasha had discovered and passed on to Clint, and they used him maybe a little shamelessly as a sort of relationship magic-8 ball, but where the result wasn't a three word answer, but a lengthy epic with a tidy moral at the end.
Clint had asked if they could cut straight to the moral, once, because that was the useful part, and been told that they couldn't. Clint suspected Thor was just buying think time, but it was worth it sometimes to just listen to Thor talk and talk and know he was actually considering the problem.
Clint found him in the living room and told him about what Tony had said--or rather, just that Tony was saying stuff, and more stuff, more frequently--still with his hair standing all over the place, and feeling oddly shaky. Just slightly. He didn't think he could repeat this totally inconsequential story too many more times.
But Thor listened, and didn't jump to bad dom alarm bells--thank god--because he didn't have those alarm bells. But he didn't recite an hour of poetry about a war between hinds and eagles either. All he said was, "Sometimes a person's day is not so good, Clinton. And then they say things they do not mean."
-----
On Friday, Clint's day is not so good, and then he says things he doesn't mean. Which consisted, mostly, of calling Tony a fuckhead and things in that vein. He wasn't proud of it, or of himself for doing it, but he'd fallen off a fire escape that afternoon--or rather, he'd fallen with a fire escape--and nearly been impaled when a support pole had missed him by inches, and when he'd slipped into Tony's room in the late evening, had suddenly realized, without Tony doing anything at all, that he couldn't deal right now if Tony opened his mouth and said something harsh.
So he'd said something harsh first, and then beat a hasty retreat.
"I think you're having this little drama all by yourself," Natasha told him, not unsympathetically. A little bit like she thought Clint couldn't help himself. He was sure she had them typecast in her head. She, as the sensible, put-together sub of the team, and Clint as the histrionic one. He glared.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked, because he'd laid into Tony for no reason that anyone but Clint could see, and there would probably be consequences. With Tony that probably meant moping. Maybe with some drinking on the side. A lot of drinking on the side.
Tony punished totally unfairly. There were about a hundred and twenty violent things Clint would rather have done to him than have to watch Tony disconsolately build himself robot friends all night and into the early hours of the morning.
"I'm going to fix it," Clint said, "obviously."