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I first discovered Captain America when I was fourteen. By that time most of my peers had moved on from comic books to breasts, but I didn't have any particular interest in women and I'd never been allowed comics as a child.
I found Captain America through a class project. Miss Green, a shy and ineffective kind of history teacher, put us in groups and gave each group a hero of the Second World War to research. I kind of rolled my eyes at the assignment and resigned myself to doing all the work for Gina Town who was already scribbling her name in little love hearts in her notebook and Gregory Smith who was pulling faces at his friends across the room.
I'd gone in to the project with reluctance; I came out a changed boy. Where breasts had failed to do anything for me and I'd rather do maths homework then kiss Lizzy under the bleachers like my friend James loved to do, I'd happily spend hours lost in the world of Captain America. The library became my second home as they had a complete collection of the comics, including the vintage volumes written back when Cap had been alive. I devoured them all in hours when mother thought I was working on my homework.
Eventually I started buying my own comics, smuggling them in to the house in my school bag and hiding them in a box in the bottom of my wardrobe. Through the official comics I found the official fan club which I joined immediately, though it meant I had to be sure I was first to the post every day when something was due. Through the fan club I heard about the conventions.
My mother discovered the obsession in the middle of my last year in high school. She's cried in to a handkerchief and said she'd almost have been happier if it were girls. At least girls made sense. It didn't make sense for her son who was nearly a grown up to read children's comics. She threatened to burn them, though there was no real power in the threat.
In the end they were kept in the living room, locked in my father's desk, and I was allowed access to them three nights a week but only if I proved I'd finished all my homework. I was also banned from buying any more of them with the allowance my parents gave me so I found a part time job.
The job proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to me. For the first time I found my ability to memorize, organize and work to instruction was paying off. People appreciated me for it and what had been a few hours on a Saturday helping out turned in to every moment I could spare. This meant two things for me in real terms. The first was that it gave me hope for a future other than the one my mother had mapped out for me where high school lead to college and corporate law or medicine. The second was it left me, come the summer, with a nice sum of money in my bank.
Summer brought two things to me. The first was my first real rebellion against my parents when I announced I’d decided to study business. The second was my first convention. My parents objected to the convention too but they had bigger battles to fight so I took my suitcase, boarded a greyhound and went.
I came back feeling, for the first time, like I wasn’t alone. I had a captain American shirt which my mother sniffed at and a copy of one of my favorite old issues. I also had something else, tucked in my clothes and secreted to my room before they saw it. I had my first fan-zine. I’d spent the night at the hotel curled up reading it under the covers and learning. I re-read it so many times over that summer leading up to college I nearly destroyed it. For the first time, I considered that Captain America might be someone like me. That, maybe, being someone like me wasn’t such a bad thing.
It was the summer of 1983 and I had just discovered slash fanfiction.
When I got to college, my life really changed. Not in the way that most people’s lives changed, but in that I had access to my own post box for the first time in my life. I sent away to the makers of the zine I’d found asking for a subscription and not only did they add me to the list but their editor sent me a list of zines and instructions about how to get on to a UseNet group.
Now, up to this point, I’d never really used a computer. Once or twice in a class, yes, but not as an independent project. I took the time to go down to the computer lab, though, once I’d mailed of for all the other zines. The zines were awesome and opened up a world for me that I barely understood yet, a world of forbidden love and stolen kisses and men who could be heroes and love other men. I wanted more, though. I was greedy. Wanted conversation.
Usenet was where I made the best friends of my life. It’s what made me, in a very sad and very specific way. I remember the first time I logged on to a computer with intent, the abject fear of rejection. I didn’t get rejected, though. I got friends. People who understood not only my obsession with Cap but everything else that was going on with my life. They were there for my when classes were stressful and I doubted. There for me when I needed someone to just tell me I wasn’t alone. We talked about everything, anything. They were my family.
I met some of them in real life, at the convention that summer. I’d had to starve myself for weeks to afford it but I didn’t mind. It was strange, meeting people who I’d come to think of as family face to face for the first time. Strange but good. For the first time it felt real. I wasn’t just slinging my feelings out into space; I was flinging them at these people. That made it all more bearable.
It wasn’t until my second year of college that I wrote my first piece of fanfiction. I’d had the idea for a while but doubted my skill. Rosa, a girl who I’d met through the UseNet group and then the convention, cheered me on. She talked through my ideas with me, encouraged me, then beta read for me. She was my best friend. I’m not saying that thing was a work of art, though I still have a copy of it on my hard drive. What it did do was open me up to the idea of participating in fandom, instead of just talking about it.
I went to the convention every summer until I left college. Back then we called it Cap-con. It was the only place I really felt myself. I met my friends there, had my first kiss. That was a strange one. There was a guy called Darren who’d been in the UseNet group a little. He didn’t post much but we somehow connected, exchanged a few e-mails. He turned up at the convention and somehow, well. I won’t bore you with the details; we’ll just say I owe a lot to those conventions.
When college came to an end I made a difficult decision. Business was alright, I could do it, but I felt like I was never going to be completely happy like that. I’d discovered a taste for adventure in myself. Taken up running and boxing and I didn’t want to sit behind a desk for the rest of my life. I’d be lying if I said Cap didn’t have something to do with my going in to the army. He had a lot of do with it. You can’t admire a guy like that without absorbing some of the things he stood for and, well, it beat going home to my mother and her endless tissues to cry in to.
Of course, the army changed everything. I could hardly request time off for conventions so my attendance was a little patchy. The internet was just never going to happen on a regular basis so that fell away, though I was surprised by the number of people who still kept in touch. Rosa in particular used to send me care packages which my parents refused to do as they didn’t approve of my being in the army. The other guys used to presume Rosa was my girlfriend and I let them think that. It was easier than explaining she was the girl who read the stories I wrote about the biggest American hero there was making love to his male best friend.
It was while I was in the army that I met Nick Fury. He’s the kind of guy who demands respect, deeply good at what he does, and we became friends after a fashion. We spent time together and intimidated the others, anyway. It was a good match.
Leaving the army was a hard decision. It was 1994 and I was 28. What really made the decision for me was my father dying. Nobody should lose their father that young. I mean, I know I was an adult but I still felt like a child. Like I was in some in-between phase, cast off in the world and needing my father for guidance though I hadn’t been to him in years. I know it wasn’t rational but that’s how I felt. I reevaluated my life. Thought about what I really wanted. The helping people was important, though I’d come to doubt how much of that I was doing relative to how much I could do in my current position. The thing was I’d gone back to hiding me. It was as though those years in college were a heady dream to be revisited occasionally when I could make a convention, which hadn’t happened in four years. I was living a lie, not living to my potential. I knew I had to leave. It was still the hardest decision I’ve ever made.
From the army I was recruited by the F.B.I. They trained me up and assessed me, discovered the people management skills and the ability to get things done on time and effectively and I rose through the ranks pretty quickly. I was doing necessary work, helping people on a large scale, and I was stable enough that I could be the other side of me again.
A lot had changed. I bought my own PC for the first time. I bought a Packard Bell Pentium 90 MHz which I still remember because of the hours spent painstakingly researching it. I went the full distance and got dial up internet. It was an extravagance but I understood living simply so I could afford to spend a good deal of money on one big thing and live simply otherwise.
The internet had changed a lot since those first days on UseNet. We’d expanded. Rosa was still there which frankly I find amazing. We swapped e-mail addresses again and suddenly it was like we never parted. She introduced me to a new mailing list, a new generation of people who’d come in to fandom in an entirely different way. I found that a good number of the zines I’d loved had been discontinued and new ones didn’t seem to be replacing them, the internet was being used to circulate fanfiction instead. It was strange and a little bit exciting to be able to access all of that, though I still went to the convention. Nothing could replace that.
For a long time, my life was stable. The mailing list gave way to yahoo groups and fanfiction.net and geocities then live journal. The names changed, I met so many people. The conventions were a constant, though they re-branded as Captain America Comic Convention (we still called it Cap!con, but Paul who ran it thought it made it sounded more official). Somehow I found myself in a group, I suppose we were the big name fans. We knew all the people involved in running the convention, it wasn’t possible to go so many times and not know them. I gophered for a lot of them, was head gopher for a few years and you might think it odd that I spent my vacation working for the convention but when you love something it isn’t really work to be involved in it.
For a few years, Rosa, myself and a woman called Kaitlyn ran a small Captain/Bucky convention but then Kaitlyn tried to use her fandom fame to get a new laptop (this was back when they were really expensive) and then got mixed up in another boat load of drama and accused us of being against her for not involving ourselves and the entire thing fell apart.
I was best man at Rosa’s wedding. I dated a man called Roy who did Captain America re-enactment for a few years. He was wonderful. We’d been thinking about living together, or I had, when I found out he was taking his role a little too seriously and he discovered that my love of slash fanfiction didn’t excuse him for screwing the man who played Bucky to his Steve.
A few months after that I was looking to move on. I felt, by now, the F.B.I. had given me everything it could. I liked the stability but they’d stopped training me. They’d got a job for me, I did it. That was it as far as they were concerned but I wanted more. It was then that Nick Fury came into my life again and brought S.H.I.E.L.D.
I transferred immediately.
I lost some of the stability of hours, but what I gained more than made up for it. Every day was something new and stretching and Nick, oddly, knew about my fandom and kept it to himself. He’d always been suspicious as I used to have a photo of cap on my bunk but lots of guys did, man was an icon. However, first time he ended up at my flat discussing staffing rotas or something in the evening I’d forgotten I’d left some old zines out. He just looked at them, raised an eyebrow, and carried on as usual.
My obsession with Cap became kind of a thing, then. I think the junior agents liked it because it made me human. I could do the paperwork in a second flat but I was a weird fanboy crush on a dead soldier. I used it as an excuse to hang a poster on my office wall and got on with my job.
It was in 2004 that we brought in Hawkeye. I’d been on the job for a year and I can tell you the exact date, September 24th, as it was five days after the christening of Rosa’s daughter, to who I am the godfather.
It took me a while to realize that Hawkeye is a superhero. You can forgive me my blindness, I was used to working with the best of the best so he blended in, strangely. Didn’t do anything to draw attention to his abilities, the scope of them. In fact, he was pretty much an asshole. Swore at people, refused to respect authority, did what he liked and then laughed when faced with the consequences. Fury did, of course, assign him to me.
I am a sneaky kind of guy, or so Clint would say. He spent the first two years of our association trying to get me to crack, trying to find a way in. I spent them trying to stop him getting in. It was a ridiculous thing really, he found out by meeting Rosa.
Rosa didn’t know much about my job. She knew I worked for the government, that I liked my boss, enjoyed the job and had trouble with someone I was supervising. She wasn’t to know when she should and shouldn’t talk to me, so when she saw me on one of the rare missions we ran in New York she came right up and hugged me.
I thought Hawkeye was going to drop dead at the display of affection. It was the kind of thing I avoided at work but Rosa has been my friend for forever. I couldn’t say no to her. I hugged her back, asked after Daisy. She told me Daisy was fine, her husband was fine, and about this awesome fic she read the night before that she’d link me too when she got home. Clint didn’t say anything but he grinned and I knew there was going to be trouble.
I had a choice to make, then. By this point I trusted Hawkeye with my life. I had to decide if I wanted to trust him with my soul. If I left it he’d pick at it like a scab. Probably share what he knew. It wasn’t as though fandom was hidden, he might track me down and out me to the entire place. How could I command junior agents about when they all knew I wrote homoerotic porn about Captain America? The other option was to tell Hawkeye everything now, get it over with. At least like this he might be persuaded to keep the confidence.
I took him home with me after the mission. I sat him down and told him what I was doing and why and then laid the entire thing out for him. I showed him some zines, told him what Captain America had done for me both in accepting myself and making me a better person. He joked at first but got quiet as I went on. I told him about my mother and corporate law and how Cap had inspired me to help people. I showed him the pictures from the conventions, told him about my family there.
I’ve never felt more exposed than that, more adrift. I’d never wanted Clint to know but it was oddly cathartic telling him, and when I was done I felt like I’d just tipped out my most secret soul for him to see. Nobody had ever known all the parts of me in the same way he did then. Nick knew me for my efficiency, my ruthlessness, my work. Rosa knew about the shipping and the conventions and the excitement. I’d never given anyone else all of it before.
Clint left. He was gone for two hours and when he came back he didn’t say anything, just kissed me. We had sex on the couch, quick and messy, then on my bed.
My relationship with Clint wasn’t like anything I’d ever encountered before. Before, people had been divided into two groups. On one side I had the normal people who I worked with and who had no idea about the fandom. I could hold conversations with them about state security or the food in the mess and, yes, they knew I was a fan but didn’t have any idea that sometimes when they interrupted me in the office I wouldn’t be writing reports, I’d be writing fanfiction.
Then I had the other side of my life, completely removed. People like Rosa who knew me only through fandom. Didn’t have any idea about my job or my real life but I could talk to them about the love I had for these fictional characters. Talk to them about the fic I found last night or the fanart I saw or the plot bunny I had.
Clint was the first person who straddled the line. It took a while for him to do that. At first he was a work person, obviously. The sex didn’t change that. It just made it so that some night work followed me home. My fandom people were used to be disappearing for days at a time with no explanation so they didn’t worry and I got a relationship. All the relationships I’d ever had before were with fandom people, it was strange to approach it from the other side.
The truth is, I was a little afraid to discuss it with Clint. He knew, I’d told him, but there’s a difference between being told something in theory and being confronted with the evidence of it. He’d asked me if I wrote and I’d told him yes, but he hadn’t read anything I wrote. He knew I read it, but he didn’t pry. I thought that was how our relationship was going to be – the fandom thing would just be a thing we didn’t talk about again.
We’d been doing our thing for just over a month when Clint showed up at my flat unexpected. That wasn’t a problem, but he walked in and handed me his phone. I thought it was for a mission, opened it and found he’d been reading. Didn’t take me long to recognize my own words.
“Where did you find this?” I asked, not really thinking properly. He looked at me and I flushed.
“It wasn’t hard, Phil. I’m surprised nobody’s found you out before. Anyway, that’s not the point. That thing there, it was kind of super hot but is that even possible?”
“Of course it’s possible,” I said, frowning. “He’s a super-soldier, he’d be more flexible.”
“I don’t think anyone’s that flexible,” Clint said raising an eyebrow. “But, look, I’m probably as flexible as Cap would be, right? I train a lot. Maybe we should, you know, test it.”
It took me a few seconds to process what he’d said. To really take it in. It turns out he was right, it wasn’t possible but we quickly found something that was possible. That’s probably the night that I really started to fall in love.
I opened up to Clint after that. He spent more time in my flat. He wasn’t really in to the fandom but he got it. He didn’t laugh at me for it and he’d let me talk about it. Accepted it as a part of my life that he could dip his toes in to but didn’t need to commit to fully. He started to beta read for me, which was kind of surreal. It was also awesome because our beta reading had a certain physical aspect and if there was something new I wanted to try out in the bedroom not only did I get the joy of writing about it, I got to live it too. He’d read fic when I reced them to him. Sometimes I know he loaded them onto his phone for long missions, said it made him feel closer to me in a weird way, like we were there reading them together.
The day I really fell in love with him was the day I realized he was a superhero. Not just a highly trained agent with a gun but a superhero. It was the day we brought in Natasha. We’d been given a kill order and I hate executing them but it’s a necessary evil. Clint made his call. I was so angry at the time, scared really. We’d placed him at a distance, obviously, but he’d disregarded that and gone up to her. Then he saved her life.
I didn’t realize until later what Clint had seen in her, though he did always see best from a distance. I know now that he didn’t see a murderer, he saw a version of himself. He saw a person so tired of running and hiding that they were willing to stand at an open window and look at their assassin.
I’ve never had Clint’s prowess from a distance but when I went down to the holding cell where my lover was sat with her, talking to her in a low voice about one of my ridiculous reality shows, I knew he’d done the right thing. He’d saved her life, he was a superhero, and he was mine.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t scream at him. I could have killed him with how angry I was. But once he was safe and I could evaluate I knew I loved him. Knew it because for just a second I knew what it would be to lose him and also because he was what I’d wanted my entire life, a superhero. Someone who would do the right thing, someone I could be proud of.
I told him when we were next alone just how proud of him I was. Clint has never accepted complements particularly gracefully.
Life was good for a couple of months, then things for complicated. First there was Iron Man and adding ‘dealing with Tony Stark’ to my responsibilities list pained me, though Pepper was wonderful. I’d have marked her down as a superhero before Stark any day. Then there was the week from hell and New Mexico and Stark and Banner and, I just don’t want to go in to that too much. It went down a week before the big con but I still managed to make it. Clint laughed at me for ducking out on my paperwork to go play geek. He said he’d never thought he’d find the thing I loved more than paperwork but if it was going to be anything, this made sense.
That year’s con was particularly exciting. Superheroes were real again and while I’d known that for a while the public was only just waking up to it. There were people in Iron Man merchandise all around and a lot of stuff circulating around the fandom about Howard Stark again and what would happen if Steve had met Tony. There was a huge resurgence in Howard/Steve fic but I’d never been a big fan and nothing about knowing Stark had done anything to endear me to his father.
I came back from the convention exhausted and with a camera full of photos. Clint was waiting for me. He asked after Rosa and sat patiently with me as I went through the entire camera full with him then he kissed me and told me he loved me for the first time.
It was the best convention ever.
After that I made more of a attempt to involve Clint in my fandom life. I started taking him to Rosa’s with me. I tried to get round to seeing her at least once a fortnight and she seemed absolutely delighted that I was bringing my boyfriend with me. Clint, in return, seemed to love her. They had a strange kind of friendship based of their love for me and he thought he kid was the best thing ever.
It was the happiest I’d ever been, I think. Then we found Captain America.
It’s weird that in a way Steve brought up together and also drove us apart. When we found him in the ice I was ecstatic. It was like all my Christmases come at once. Clint saw me off with a wave and a smile and I didn’t realize that it was going to change things.
We thawed him out, I observed. When he woke up I was called away on other urgent business which kept me in Prague of all places for a month. I got back in time for Clint to be weirdly distant to me for a few days before the world went to hell.
I missed the summer convention that year on account of being dead.
Not in a melodramatic sense. I was dead. I owe my life to starktech – they’d been developing nano-bot technology with a medical application and that’s what saved me. It annoys me a lot that I owe my life to Tony Stark. Anyone else I could have coped with but Tony Stark?
The months after the incident were a whirl. The Avengers disbanded but I should have known Stark wouldn’t leave it at that. He decided we’re better together and after nearly getting killed again set about transforming Stark Tower in to the Avengers Tower. Clint was on a mission for most of this and I was missing him. I moved us in to the tower in advance and got to spend some time with the team.
They tell you to never meet you heroes. I met my hero and Steve Rodgers was everything I’d ever hoped he would be. He was good and patient and kind. If he’d found a lost puppy he’d have probably brought it back to the building and kept it. He seemed a little bemused by my being a fan of his, though of course I didn’t tell him the extent to which I was a fan. It made for an awkward few weeks while I got my head around the fact that he’d spent a good chunk of my life writing pornography about the man who now lived two floors above me.
What helped, in the end, was focusing on the ways the real Steve was different to the Steve I knew from fanfiction. Once I did that it got easier and I got less guilty about indulging. Still, it was strange to know Steve. Strange to think that Captain America knew me as a friend. Strange to think that the fandom was blowing up over this when I was living it.
It went to great lengths to stay behind the cameras. I certainly didn’t want my online life linked to my real life and I knew if I let myself be photographed then I’d end up in a mess.
The news coverage focused mostly on Stark and Steve which was good because I had no idea how the others would react. There was a little focus on Thor but nobody could really identify who or what he was so he escaped the worst of it.
Clint came back from his mission and we fit in one night of mad passionate sex before I was gone on a mission in Peru. If Clint was a little desperate that night I didn’t question it too closely. It was, after all, the first time we’d had a chance to properly be together since the Loki thing. It was only when I finally got back to the tower full time that I realized something was wrong.
Clint had always been a passionate lover, he became a desperate lover. He started to cling to me and while I’m not against clinging in principle, it became clear something was wrong. It also didn’t take long for me to realize what it was.
Clint would almost growl when I was around Steve. He had a habit of coming and physically standing between us and, honestly, it was a little endearing. I mean, you can’t blame me for thinking my boyfriend being a little overprotective was cute. The sex was still fantastic, he just didn’t like me being around Steve but I trusted him to keep that in check. He trusted me, after all. Surely.
In the tower, at this point, we had weekly movie nights. It was, oddly, an idea I’d picked up from fanfiction and slipped in. I didn’t tell them the origin of the idea, of course, but Steve thought it was ‘swell’ and somehow it became a thing. Clint was away that week and when we sat down to watch I sat next to Steve. It was an ordinary night. Steve had turned around to speak to someone, I think. He had an arm thrown along the couch behind me and was turned towards me when Clint walked in.
Clint sees better from a distance, turns out he was too close just then to see clearly. He turned around and walked back out and I didn’t realize until later just how close Steve had been to me and what it must have looked like. Steve raised an eyebrow, I shrugged and we got on with the movie.
When I went down to our rooms that night all Clint’s stuff was gone.
All of Clint’s stuff doesn’t amount to much. He’d never really stopped being a wandered in his mind. Never really gotten used to the idea that he has a place and he’s allowed to stay in it. He lives the kind of life you can pick up and move at the drop of a hat and apparently that’s what he did.
Turns out Stark tower is a horrible place to hide. That AI can find anyone. It found Clint for me in the ceiling a few floors up and I seriously considered just letting him stew for the night. I couldn’t though, in the end. Something had clearly upset him to make him remove himself from my bedroom and, if I’m being entirely truthful, I was just a little selfish too. I wanted Clint home and in my arms too much to leave him in the ceiling over night.
Let me tell you, climbing through ducts is NOT easy. Not by a long stretch. It’s a tight fit, though I suspect Stark made the ducts in his tower slightly larger since he knew they’d be utilized this way. Actually, he should have made them smaller. If he’d just stopped Clint getting in to the system in the first place I’d never had had to crawl through them.
Clint must have heard me coming from a mile away but he didn’t run. That surprised me. I half expected to spend the night running around bits of the tower trying to pin him down but he was waiting for me just where Jarvis said he would be, his worldly possessions wrapped around him and wearing one of my t-shirts.
“What are you doing?” I asked, letting myself in to the space. It was about three feet high, some machinery was housed in it but it was pretty quiet for that. It was also oddly snug, it looked almost as though Clint had built himself a nest.
“It’s alright,” Clint said, gripping his bag tighter. “I’ll find a better place in the morning, don’t worry. You won’t even have to see me.”
“What on earth makes you think I don’t want to see you?” I asked, edging closer. “I was rather planning on seeing a lot of you tonight.”
“No, it’s alright,” Clint said, and he sounded so damn sad and that not like Clint. Clint gets angry, and then hurt and sarcastic. If he’d gone right through angry, hurt and sarcastic to sad I clearly hadn’t been paying attention. “I mean it’s not personal, I know. How could anyone compete? You’ve been in love with him since you were fifteen.”
“You think there’s something between me and Steve,” I summarize quickly. “You’re wrong.”
“I don’t...I was angry about it but what’s the point, Phil? I love you and I know you love him, always knew you loved him, but I didn’t think it would ever matter. Now he’s here and he’s everything you thought he would be. Don’t lie, I know he it. Why do you want me?”
“I want you because I’m in love with you,” I say, shifting closer. “I’m not going to lie to you, I’ve loved an idea of Captain America for most of my life but it was just that, an idea. The thing about the Cap I write about, Clint, is he isn’t real. I can turn him into anything I want to be. I can be him or love him and he can be me. The Captain America I love isn’t the one out there, and I know that’s kind of ridiculous but they’re different people to me. I don’t love Steve Rodgers and I’m certainly not in love with him. I find that in real life I prefer my heroes sarcastic and hidden in ceilings.”
“You don’t.”
“I love you,” I said, finally sitting down beside Clint. I reached over to take the bag from his arms then pulled him into my side. He went easily, gripping my shirt.
“Look,” I said, stroking his hair. “If you need me to stop the fandom stuff then I will. It’s important to me, but it’s not as important as you and if it’s going to upset you like this I can do other things. It’s not worth losing you.”
“Don’t want that,” Clint mumbled. “I love you dorky side and that I’m kind of the only one who gets to know the Phil who can kill a roomful of men armed only with office supplies and the Phil who’s passionate about the fictional life of a man he’s never met to the point where he waves his arms around and grins. I just...I’m just not sure why you’d want me when you’ve been offered everything you could ever want.”
“Steve isn’t everything I ever want,” I say softly into Clint’s hair. “I can’t say that you’ll be everything I ever want, I’m too practical for that, but I’m happier with you then I ever have been before. I need you to trust me, Clint. You are who I want. You are my superhero and I love you. I will not leave you for Steve.”
Clint was quiet for a few minutes then he pulled back, leaning in to kiss me like he thought he’d never be allowed this again which was ridiculous because if anyone should be worried about losing the person who was clearly too good for them it should be me.
We spent that night in the ceiling, clinging to each other. In the morning I helped Clint unpack and he went outside to restore the karma of the universe by hiding in the air ducts and throwing things into Tony’s workshop to disrupt what he was working on.
I’m not going to lie and say things were magically fixed after that. They weren’t. It took a long time for Clint to accept that I wasn’t going to run away with Captain America. I think he helped that I found a new corner of fandom to play in. The Hawkeye fandom was small but I enjoyed it quite a lot. They were very open to my OC SHIELD agent, though the fan favorite pairing was still Clint/Natasha which made the man himself laugh.
I’d expected Clint to be a little freaked out by the attention turned on him but, on the contrary, he seemed to think it was an awesome idea. He even wrote some fic for it himself, though encouraging him to troll the fandom wasn’t entirely what I had in mind when I went looking for it.
He came with me to the big summer con that year. They’d re-branded again as Avengers!Con. We shared a car down with Rosa and her family. Rosa still hadn’t made the connection but other than listing Hawkeye as an active Avengers member, there were only a few blurry photos of him in existence so he got away with it most of the time.
He spent the weekend stalking the Hawkeye cosplayers, more or less. He reported back to me on the inaccuracies in their costumes. He also got into drinking games with Thor cosplayers to pass the time and trolled some of the younger fangirls by telling them he had inside info and feeling them lies. I still loved him.
I proposed on the main stage. I’ve never seen Clint blush so red but he said yes.
Three days later we had to save the world again. That’s part of my life now. Part of our lives. I live with Captain America and I still write fanfiction about him sleeping with his best friend. I also write a popular series about Hawkeye and his S.H.I.E.L.D. agent boyfriend that has hundreds of Kudos on AO3, good for such a small pairing. People have written derivative work from my fic, Clint loves that.
My life isn’t perfect. One day I’m going to be caught on camera, or Clint will be caught on camera, and my two worlds are going to come crashing into each other. I’m going to marry my asshole of a boyfriend and I wouldn’t change that for anything. I kind of hope my world do collide before the wedding; otherwise Rosa’s going to be really surprised when Captain America is my best man to her maid of honor.
End