Chapter Text
He doesn’t find out until after the shawarma.
Natasha pulls him aside and tells him what happened, stares at him.
He’s not sure what she’s looking for – cracks in the surface, maybe. He stares back at her for a long time while everything around him seems to fall apart. Clint opens his mouth to say something, anything, but nothing ever comes out.
The lump in his throat makes talking impossible.
Phil is gone.
Phil is gone, and Clint feels like he can’t breathe.
Natasha’s hand is firm on the back of his neck and she looks worried. He realizes she’s been talking to him and he hasn’t heard a single word.
His sinks down to the floor and wonders how the fuck he’s supposed to keep going when Phil’s not here to push him.
--
There’s a large part of him that hadn’t wanted to come at all. Maybe if he didn’t attend, it wouldn’t be real. He’s glad for the hand Natasha has hooked around his elbow because it gives him something other than the pain in his chest to focus on.
It’s clear by some of the looks he’s getting from the less senior agents that they think he shouldn’t be here.
They think it’s his fault.
He can’t really blame them. They’re right, after all.
Natasha whispers something to him that he doesn’t hear.
There isn’t a casket. The table at the front is covered with flowers and one large frame with a picture of Phil. He’s not smiling in it, and Clint can’t help but think that Phil would hate it a lot. He would hate to be remembered that way.
Junior agents liked to joke that Phil was a robot, but in actuality, he laughed all the time. At least around Clint and Natasha, he did.
The tight feeling in his chest starts to get worse after they sit down and it gets harder to breathe. He curls his fingers around Natasha’s when her hand finds his between them.
He thinks seriously about getting up and walking out after a few minutes, but they’re at the front of the room. He wouldn’t be able to slip out without everyone seeing him leave. Instead, he takes a deep breath until he can’t possibly expand his lungs any more and lets it out in a slow exhale. He stops listening to what Fury is saying and tries to find the place in his head where everything else falls away.
Natasha squeezes his hand some time later. “Clint. Come on, it’s over,” she says softly, and when he opens his eyes, everyone is standing to leave, some stopping at the front to pay last respects.
Clint sucks in a shaky breath and somehow manages to get his feet beneath him.
There’s a line of expensive black cars waiting on the curb. Natasha pushes him into the backseat of one and then slides in after him.
“Where are we going?” Clint asks as the car pulls away. He struggles to get out of his suit jacket, feeling claustrophobic.
“Stark rented out a restaurant,” Natasha tells him and reaches over to swat his hands away from his tie as he tries to get it undone. “You’re going to ruin it.”
“I don’t care,” he mutters.
She gets the tie off and shoves it in one of the pockets of his discarded jacket. She reaches over and takes one hand in both of hers, holding tightly.
Clint’s eyes are burning as he watches the city pass by them. His breath gets lodged somewhere in his throat when the car comes to a stop outside of a nice Italian restaurant.
It was Phil’s favorite.
“I can’t.”
Natasha squeezes harder. “You can,” she tells him, her voice soft but firm. “Come on. Just for a little while, and then we’ll go home.”
Phil was home, he thinks, and based on the expression on Natasha’s face, she knows what he’s thinking.
Within thirty seconds of walking in the door, Natasha puts an excessively large glass of whisky in his hand. Clint slides around the bar and sits in a booth in the far corner, his back to the wall so that no one will be able to sneak up on him.
Two glasses of whisky in, Clint watches Steve approach. Steve slides into the booth seat across from him, which Clint tries valiantly not to think of as Phil’s.
“Hi.”
“Cap.”
Steve watches him empty his glass and eyes the server as she places another one on the wooden surface in front of Clint. “Have you eaten yet?” he asks and when Clint shakes his head, he suggests, “Maybe you should order something.”
“I’m good.” He doesn’t think he would be able to get food down when swallowing the liquid is already a bit of a struggle.
“Okay.” Steve is still watching him, assessing. “I know the two of you were close.”
“Do you?”
Steve shrugs. “You don’t work together as long as you two did and not get close,” he says. “I didn’t know him well, but I think it says a lot about him that so many people showed up today.”
Clint forces down another swallow of amber liquid. “Yeah.”
“I’m not going to push, but if you ever want to talk to someone who’s not a shrink, I’ll listen. I know a thing or two about losing friends,” Steve tells him, and Clint feels an awful stab of guilt. Steve isn’t very far removed from losing everyone he ever knew.
“Okay,” Clint answers. “Thanks, Cap.”
“It’s nice,” Steve says haltingly after a minute, making a gesture around the restaurant. “What they’ve done for him.” He offers Clint a small, sad smile and slides out of the booth to disappear back into the crowd.
Clint stares down at his glass of whisky and wishes it could make him forget why they’re here, that it’s his fault.
--
The mandated therapy sessions certainly aren’t a surprise. If the mind control hadn’t landed him here, losing Phil definitely would have. With a combination of the two, Clint is pretty sure he’s never going to see the outside of this room again.
His therapist is nice enough. She’s familiar with him, and he with her, because she’s been his assigned therapist after ops for the last year. She asks a lot of leading questions, trying to draw him out, trying to get him to talk about things.
Clint doesn’t answer most of them. He shuts down quickly when she brings up Phil.
Dr. Adams always gives him this look afterward, but she hasn’t started really pushing against those walls. She prescribes him anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication to “help manage everything.”
Clint wisely doesn’t make the lobotomy joke that automatically springs to mind, because he knows what the end result of that is likely to be and he’s not interested.
When Tony Stark invites him to live in the Tower, he’s mostly relieved. Staying in his room at HQ is making his skin crawl, and he can’t bear the thought of staying in his and Phil’s apartment in Queens without Phil there.
Clint spends a lot of time alone unless Natasha breaks into his bedroom. He’s not the least bit surprised when she spoons up behind him and slides her arm over him. He covers her hand with his, twining their fingers together.
“You should have come downstairs,” Natasha tells him. “We watched Indiana Jones.”
He lets out a sigh. “I didn’t feel like it.”
“Are you ever going to feel like it?” she wants to know.
“I don’t know, Tasha.”
They lie there in silence for a while until she says softly, “I feel like I’m losing you, too.”
Clint releases her hand to turn over in bed to face her. When they settle down again, her head is pillowed on his bicep, close enough that their noses are almost touching. He curves his arm over her waist and holds her tightly. “You’re not losing me.”
“But you’re not here,” Natasha counters. “Where are you?”
He tangles his fingers in her red curls. “What do you want me to say?” Clint asks. “I’m sad. Most of the time, it’s all I can do just to get up in the morning.”
“It’s never going to go away,” Natasha says.
Clint almost smiles. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Of course not.” Her fingers are running a light trail up and down his spine. “But eventually you get used to it. You learn how to live with it.”
“I’m tired.”
“Grief does that.” Natasha slides her hand up to the back of his neck, her nails scratching along his hairline. “On the whole, sitting around in the dark by yourself is not going to make you feel better.”
“Are you sure?” Clint asks.
“Has it so far?” Natasha asks, the corner of her mouth twitching the tiniest bit.
“No,” he admits.
Natasha closes the small distance between them and kisses him lightly on the forehead. “Fake it until you make it, Barton.”
Clint sighs. “That’s horrible advice,” he tells her. “Stay with me?”
“Of course.”
--
Clint punches his code into the keypad outside the office door and waits for it to register his identity. When the locks click, he pushes the door open and takes a breath before stepping inside the office.
It’s dark and still and Clint feels its emptiness like a punch to the gut. Fury assured him it hasn’t been touched – won’t be touched until Clint has gone through it to pack up Phil’s personal belongings.
It’s not the office itself that really gets to him, but the half-empty cup of Starbucks coffee still sitting on the desk.
He clears a space on the desk for the box he brought with him and empties it of the packing supplies, setting those aside on the chair for when he needs them. The deep breath he takes to steady him-self doesn’t help much. It’s slow going because the emotions threaten to overwhelm him with every little thing of Phil’s that his fingers brush.
He finds the box when he’s going through the drawers. It’s tucked behind pens and paperclips and notepads and a heavy-duty stapler.
It’s a small black box and when he opens it, there’s a thin platinum band sitting on white satin. There are three dates engraved on the inside of the ring and he recognizes their significance immediately.
The earliest one is the day all those years ago when he and Phil met for the first time, when Phil had offered him a lifeline instead of a jail cell or a bullet to the head. Clint had grasped it tightly with both hands and promised himself he would die before disappointing this man, before letting him have even the slightest regret about the decision to bring him in from the cold.
The second is the date that Phil had officially been assigned as Clint’s handler. It was after he’d burned through all of the other available handlers and they’d quickly washed their hands of him, saying he was insubordinate, impossible to work with, and, on that last memorable occasion, better off on a cold table in a morgue.
He’s not sure what happened to that handler. He hasn’t asked, because Phil always looked a little too pleased when his name was brought up in conversation.
The third is their anniversary date, a week from today. Five years.
Clint’s chest feels tight and his lungs burn. He tries to focus on getting air in and out, the way his therapist has told him to when the anxiety starts to set in.
It reminds him that he hasn’t been to medical yet this morning. He knows from experience that they’ll come looking for him if he doesn’t turn up by lunchtime to take his medication.
After a few minutes, Clint touches the cool metal. He lifts it off its cushion and slides it onto his left hand. It fits perfectly, which doesn’t surprise him.
The one box he brought with him is more than enough for the personal items in Phil’s office. There aren’t too many, because Phil hadn’t wanted to invite questions with pictures and knickknacks.
The pictures that are in the office are mass-produced pieces of art, impersonal.
He finds the box for the set of four glass coasters in the bottom drawer of Phil’s desk. Clint collects them carefully, sliding a sheet of the flat foam between each of them so that they don’t get scratched.
He was with Phil when he bought them at an art fair: circular coasters hand-painted to look like Captain America’s shield. He remembers teasing Phil, and Phil just smiling at him, tucking his hand back into Clint’s with his purchase secure under his other arm.
It feels like a lot longer than only three years ago.
As he’s taping up the box, he hears the locks click and the door open.
There are only a handful of people who have access to this office. He’s already inside it, and one of them is dead. That shortens the list considerably.
“I wish you would have told me you were doing this today,” Natasha admonishes lightly. “I would have helped you.”
Clint shrugs his shoulders and rips the tape with his teeth, smoothing it down over the edge of the box. He stills when Natasha’s fingers brush the ring on his hand, but otherwise she doesn’t comment on it.
She reaches for the set of three paintings carefully bubble-wrapped together and lifts them up easily, tilting her head at him.
Clint tries to smile, he does. Based on her expression, it must look more like a grimace. He hefts up the box and follows Natasha to the door.
--
With Natasha’s help, it takes him three full days to pack up his and Phil’s place in Queens. The boxes are moved to the space Tony gave him in the Tower. He makes sure to do it overnight, when the others aren’t around to ask questions he doesn’t want to answer.
He’s not ready to talk about it, isn’t sure he’s ever going to be ready.
When he wakes up in the morning, he finds himself surrounded by a sea of boxes that are full of Phil’s things. The closet is full of Phil’s impeccable suits, his shiny shoes neatly lined up next to Clint’s battered sneakers and boots.
It feels like something is trying to claw its way out of his chest and it takes him a while to remember how to breathe.
Twenty minutes later, Clint is dressed and packed, the bag thrown over his shoulder as he walks out the door.