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The first thing Phil thinks, when he wakes up, is Clint.
And then, the pain hits him, and he loses consciousness again, aided by the medication running through his bloodstream.
He doesn’t know how long he’s out. Considering he never expected to wake up in the first place, that the plan was not to wake up, not if his death meant Loki got stopped and Clint would go free, would be fine…
His thoughts always trail off at that point.
He’s made a tactical error.
~~
Nick visits him. He is the only one, which makes Phil worry a little.
“They had to regrow your lungs and your heart,” Nick tells him, as soon as he is able to stay awake for longer than five minutes. “I stopped them before they could replace anything else. I know how fond you are of your ulcer.”
“That thing took a lot of work,” Phil croaks around a grimace, and because Nick is here now, he asks the thing that’s the most important question of the whole wide world, as far as he is concerned.
“Barton?”
Nick glances down. “I gave him your cat. He’s coping,” he says.
Phil doubts that. Clint is not like the kind of person who copes so easily with everything that went down. He’s more the kind of person who is good at pretending for the sake of everybody around him.
“Where is he now?” he manages to rasp out.
“With the Avengers,” Nick replies, and then, he says, “They think you’re dead.”
Phil stares at him. “You didn’t tell him?” he asks, and then, “Wait, how long have I been out?”
At this point, a machine above his head starts to beep insistently. Phil’s throat and chest suddenly ache horribly.
“Four months,” Nick tells him. “You had two of your major organs regrown, you think that happens in a couple days?”
He leaves with that, under the pretense of letting Phil rest, but Phil feels too agitated to go back to sleep.
Four months.
Clint will never forgive him for this stunt.
It looks like he made two critical tactical errors.
~~
It takes Phil two more months to rebuild his strength and get back in shape. It’s a slow, lonely process because nobody knows he’s still here in the first place. They didn’t bury him, but that doesn’t make a difference to Phil.
He doesn’t get access to a phone or the internet for a long time, and this, he thinks morosely when the ache gets too much, is probably how Tony Stark must’ve felt in that cave in Afghanistan.
He pushes the thought away quickly; after all, all he has to do is get his strength back, not build a missile.
Nick tells him the Avengers are doing fine and that he doesn’t need to try and contact Clint.
Clint understands, he says.
Phil believes him.
~~
And then, the Avengers get called out on a mission that goes FUBAR before any of them has the chance to react, and a good SHIELD-agent is dead and Tony Stark is in the hospital with a broken wrist, and Nick tells Phil that he can go undercover in a school or become the Avengers’ new handler, his choice, and Phil doesn’t have to think about it for long.
The second he steps out of the elevator in Stark Tower, Pepper-the-cat is there, and Phil is so happy, so relieved to see her. He missed her so much, his body folds down to kneel on the ground and reaches for her without his conscious decision. It’s so good to see her, and she’s looking well-fed and healthy, and just perfect.
And then, he looks up, at the Avengers, at Clint, and he realizes that Clint is not fine.
He’s made another tactical error.
He lets Clint go and doesn’t chase after him, even if there’s nothing he wants to do more. Clint apparently needs some space, and Phil wants to do the right thing.
He gives Clint space.
~~
They don’t talk unless it’s part of an Avengers mission. It’s hard, and Phil wants to reach out to Clint, but Clint keeps a careful distance between them and treats him with nothing but cold professionalism.
It’s obvious that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Phil anymore.
Phil doesn’t like it, but he has to accept it.
He bites his lip and curls his hands into tight fists to keep them by his sides instead of reaching out casually and brushing his fingers against Clint’s skin.
He lost that right when he grabbed that gun and went after Loki.
He sees Pepper curled up in Clint’s lap, late one night, the two of them huddled together and watching TV, Clint obviously unable to sleep and petting her to keep the demons at bay, but Phil doesn’t dare to intrude on the scene, certain that Clint doesn’t want him there.
~~
He gets his belongings back, all the things that made up his apartment, his home, carefully packed and put into storage by SHIELD. Among those belongings are the ring he bought on a whim in Tokyo and had wanted to give to Clint, and there is the red-white-and-blue cat collar with the Captain America-tag Maria found for him and gave him, the day before he flew out to New Mexico.
He puts the collar on Pepper, where it was supposed to go half a year ago, hides the old faded circus poster advertising The Amazing Hawkeye archer prodigy that Clint doesn’t know he has, and he puts Clint’s t-shirts in the drawers alongside his own.
He should return them to Clint. Phil is sure he wants them back. Plus, it would give him an opportunity to talk to Clint, see if he can at least explain himself.
He doesn’t.
Clint doesn’t want to talk to him, and Phil is afraid of talking to him; afraid of Clint accusing him of abandoning him and Pepper and not wanting to have anything to do with them anymore.
He’s such a coward. He should just get over himself.
It’s easier said than done.
~~
Mornings are hardest. His chest aches, he feels old and lonely, unwanted and pathetic. He knows he should get a grip, maybe talk to someone from SHIELD’s psych department about how he feels, but he just can’t muster up the energy.
He lies in bed, curled on his side, arms wrapped protectively around his ribs, and focuses on breathing, on the feel of his own heartbeat in his chest. He imagines that it is different from before, not quite in rhythm with what it should be, and the thought makes him feel unsettled and queasy.
Mornings are when Pepper traipses into his bedroom and curls up with him, her body pressed to his, her whiskers tickling his cheek and her feet kneading his pajamas. He focuses on her purring instead of his heartbeat, on the feeling of her soft fur under his hands instead of the raised flesh of his scars, and after a while, he always manages to calm down enough to get up, get going, get through another lonely day.
~~
The Avengers are on Clint’s side, as they should be, and they let him feel that they feel deeply about his betrayal. They treat him with courtesy, but they never linger longer than they have to when they hand in their reports.
Natasha usually brings Clint’s, and she doesn’t talk to him at all.
He doesn’t try to bring any of them over to his side. He feels like he doesn’t have the right.
~~
There are more missions, more heroic adventures for the Avengers, more mission reports, and then, they find themselves in Harlem. Hulk is uneasy, which is not unexpected, and Iron man spends more time stopping him from taking off than focusing on the threat at hand, and he’s completely unprepared when the bombs go off and the buildings around them collapse, like a series of dominoes or a badly constructed card house.
Phil is far enough away, but even he feels the vibrations of the explosions through the soles of his shoes, and then, there’s Cap’s distressed voice in his ear, calling out “man down, Hawkeye’s down!” and Phil’s heart stops in his chest.
He’s on his feet, radio in his hand, snapping orders and racing toward Clint’s last known position without hesitation, without regard for his own safety. The danger is not contained, but that is Cap’s problem, not his.
He has his gun and a spare clip. That has to be enough.
Rubble shifts under his dress shoes. They are covered in dust after just a few steps, and he slips, falls, ruins his suit and rips his knees and palms and elbows open on broken bricks and sharp steel and shards of glass.
He doesn’t really notice.
Seconds stretch into eternity, punctuated by his off-kilter heartbeat, as he searches, growing more and more desperate, the voices coming through his radio half ignored, half unimportant.
Finally, he catches sight of a hand, a familiar shooting glove, a bare arm covered in dust and blood.
He crashes to his knees, drops his radio, pulls pieces of rubble from Clint’s still form, horror scenarios racing through his brain and chasing each other. Blood trickles from Clint’s nose, his mouth, the gash in his temple. His leg is caught under a piece of concrete Phil can’t move, no matter how many bloody handprints he leaves on it.
~~
When Clint stirs and groans, Phil wants to cry. He reaches out, presses his hand carefully against Clint’s shoulder and asks, his voice wobbling, “Clint?”
He sounds rough and choked up, not like unflappable Agent Coulson but like little Phillip who still is scared of the dark, at least sometimes.
“Phil?” Clint slowly blinks and rolls his head in his direction, and Phil yanks off his suit jacket and carefully folds it under Clint’s head.
“I’m here,” he promises. His fingers tangle with Clint’s, and he has to swallow twice before he can ask, “Status?”
Clint coughs weakly. More blood runs down his chin. “Hurts,” he manages, and Phil can handle this like a professional agent, can be cool and in control, or he can freak right the fuck out.
“You’re trapped,” he starts, and then, he swallows thickly, tasting blood and dust and desperation. “Stay with me, Clint. I’m gonna get you out of this, I promise, I’m not gonna leave you, not again, please don’t do this to me, stay awake.”
He doesn’t know what he’s saying while showing uselessly at the block of concrete, begging Clint to stay awake, to be okay.
It takes Captain America himself to pull Phil away from Clint, Steve’s arm strong and careful around his shoulders and chest as he drags Phil away, to let Hulk and Thor gently lift the concrete block off of Clint, let the paramedics take his place to stabilize Clint and splint his broken leg.
~~
Phil is so tired he’s swaying on his feet. He’s dazed, everything he hears dull and from far away. Maria and Jasper take over for him, effortlessly and effective, and Phil sits in the hospital wing of the Helicarrier like a puppet with his strings cut.
His heart and chest ache, and for once, it has nothing to do with his physical organs.
~~
Nick Fury himself drags him away for a debriefing and to make sure he gets the medical attention he needs, half concerned friend and half strict boss, fussing angrily and finally giving Phil a choice.
Phil doesn’t have to think for long before making his decision, and when he walks away, for once he doesn’t feel like he made a tactical mistake.
It’s a good feeling, and it almost help ignoring the off-kilter beat of his heart in his throat.
~~
The Avengers are assembled around Clint’s bed, sitting and lounging on every available surface. They left the chair by his bedside for Phil.
Clint is awake and lucid, and Phil steps up to his bed and asks, gently, “How are you feeling?”
“Great,” Clint replies, his words slightly slurred and with an unmistakable edge of pain underneath. “Tony promised to build me a new leg if this one doesn’t get fixed properly.”
“Nice,” Phil says, and he really means it. He needs to find a way to let Tony know later how much the offer means.
Clint slides his hand over, to bump against Phil’s, and clumsily grabs it, and Phil takes a deep breath, sits down and curls both of his hands around Clint’s, careful of the i.v. needle taped to the back of it, and says, “Effective immediately, Agent Sitwell is the new SHIELD-liaison for the Avengers.”
He doesn’t answer any of the questions the Avengers throw at him after that, stays where he is until SHIELD’s medical personnel kicks out the Avengers because of the noise they’re making. He knows they’re going to take it to Fury, complaining – Stark loud, Steve determined, Thor curious and Banner careful, Natasha being the only one who understands, probably – but the decision has been made, and it was Phil’s.
He waits until they are alone before he bows his head and presses a kiss to Clint’s knuckles, careful and gentle because of the abrasions and scrapes. Clint tightens his grip on his hand, and Phil takes a deep breath.
Time to face the music.
“We need to talk,” he says.