“No,” Bucky whispered, horror struck. He stepped back automatically and Steve’s hands came up to hold his shoulders, the support grounding and settling and allowing him to catch his breath.
“Buck?”
Bucky whirled around on his heel, staring up at Steve, who looked worried at the stress that was no doubt clear on his face.
“I am not going in there,” he insisted, keeping his voice steady, trimmed fingernails biting into the palm of his hand. “I am not going in there and you can’t make me.”
“Okay,” Steve said seriously, taking hold of Bucky’s elbows and backing up, “that’s okay, Bucky, we can -” he was looking over Bucky’s shoulder, bemused, like there was absolutely nothing wrong with the scene taking place in the kitchen. Like it was perfectly normal to walk in for breakfast and see the object of his unrequited feelings in heart-covered boxers with tiny golden wings strapped onto his back.
“His abs, Steven,” Bucky groaned, almost all the way under his breath, and the stress faded from Steve’s eyes to be replaced by wicked amusement. But his grip didn’t falter, he kept towing Bucky gently away, and no matter what else happened Steve was always gonna be his best guy.
“Morning, Clint,” Steve said over Bucky, laughter clear in the tone of his voice. “Nice wings.”
“Lost a bet,” Clint said easily. “Happy Valentines Cap, Bucky.”
“Shit,” Bucky hissed. “He saw me?”
Steve choked on a laugh.
“Pretty sure he just blew a kiss to your ass,” he said.
Tag winterhawk fic
160.
Clint grunts softly over comms, barely audible, and Bucky takes off running.
“Bucky?” Steve yells; his shield flies back to him and he lets the momentum spin him, staring after Bucky like a lost kid. Bucky ignores him. Natasha’s nearby, Tony’s on high, no one’s gonna die without him.
No. Someone. Someone might die without him.
Clint requested anaesthetic, once, when Bruce was using a needle to get at a splinter. Clint whined for hours one time about stubbing his little toe. Clint decided he couldn’t do anything except sprawl across Bucky and watch cartoons that time he had a bruise the size of a dime on the inside of his thigh.
Once things’re safe, once he’s satisfied he doesn’t have to go save anyone’s ass, Clint will bitch and moan and exaggerate a limp – and the second one of the team is in danger he will fight his way off a damn hospital bed to get them safe.
“Buck?” Clint says, and his voice is a little strained but not so you’d notice. “Fight’s that-a-way.”
Bucky doesn’t have the breath to reply, crashing through the door of the building and running for the stairs, pushing every muscle until he’s burning all over.
“Good shot,” Tony says dryly.
Steve’s crisp voice, “Hawkeye, are you -” is cut off by Natasha, sharp, scared.
“Clint?”
Bucky shoves through the roof access and pounds across the rooftop, and Clint’s giving it his best fucking shot – because every shot’s his best fucking shot, that’s Clint, that’s who he is – but he can barely stay upright any more, his grip on his bow failing and his side slick with blood.
“Hey,” he says, when Bucky reaches him, and he crashes down onto his knees, placing his bow carefully on the floor with shaking hands. “Sorry.”
“Fuck you,” Bucky says, and presses the quickest possible off-center kiss to his wryly upturned lips, heaves him upright and over his shoulder and across the rooftop and down the stairs almost without breathing. (Clint’s still breathing. Clint’s biting back groans with every step, and Bucky hates every tiny almost-hidden noise.)
Bruce is in the ‘jet and does what he can with the supplies they have. Clint’s terrifyingly pale and still, and Bucky should return to the fight but it sounds like it’s wrapping up and he can’t move.
“I’m, um,” Bruce says, pushing his glasses up and leaving a bloody fingerprint on the lens, “he’ll be fine, I’m fairly sure. The response time was excellent, so he’ll -”
He’s interrupted by the team pouring in from outside, and in the chaos Clint’s eyes open, fuzzy for a moment or two but then visibly flickering round in an efficient visual check of their status. Then he catches Bucky’s eye and his mouth tip-tilts up into the tiniest of grins.
“Fuckin’ ow,” he says.
437.
Bucky came home to find Clint about a foot from where he’d been when he left that morning, and the apartment in almost exactly the same state, too. He took a couple deep breaths, felt his teeth grinding together, tried to keep his voice accusation-free.
“Not what I was hoping for, I admit,” he said, and Clint’s shoulders hunched in just a little.
“Hey,” he said, and he sounded kinda heavy. Tired.
“Should we just – not?” Bucky asked, and he honestly didn’t mean to sound so pissed, but out of all the many and varied emotions pissed was the easiest to deal with right now.
At least Clint’s reaction was something. His head shot up, eyes wide, and he scrambled onto his knees. Supplication, that was the word for it, right?
“Buck, no, please, I swear I want to do this, I just -”
“You just got attached to this place, and I’m askin’ you to make these huge changes for me, and I get that -”
“Buck.”
“- it’s too soon, or too much of a commitment, or -”
“Bucky.”
“- maybe you’re just not that into the whole living together -”
“Buck, please.”
Clint looked – genuinely distressed. Stupidly miserable. Beaten down by it, and that was enough to deflate all the pissed that Bucky could muster.
“Aw, fuck, it’s okay, sweetheart,” he said, and sank down to the floor next to Clint, pulled him into an awkward halfway hug. “It’s okay if you wanna wait, I don’t -”
“I couldn’t find the lid for the fuckin’ tupperware,” Clint said, which cut Bucky off at the knees.
“…what?”
Clint eased back from him, sat back on his heels, rubbed his forearm across his eyes like a little kid.
“I found the box but I couldn’t find the goddamn lid,” he said, “and it just seemed – important, like that was the thing I needed to do most, and then -” he flailed, vaguely, in the direction of the kitchen island, “and then when I was looking for that I figured we needed some kinda bubblewrap for the mugs, right? So I went to the bodega on the corner, but they didn’t have packing tape, and then I knocked over the box with the silverware and – you’d cleaned them, I didn’t wanna start out with filthy fuckin’ forks so – and then they had to dry -”
Bucky grabbed for Clint’s hands, which were telling a distressed story all their own.
“And then it was fuckin’ four, somehow,” Clint said, hopeless, “and I knew you were coming back and -”
“It’s okay.”
“- and I just started thinking about – this is what you’re signing up for. Fuck.”
“Hey,” Bucky said. He reached out to cradle the back of Clint’s head, threaded his fingers through the hair there and let his thumb soothe back and forth. “Hey, baby -”
“I’m sorry,” Clint mumbled, once Bucky had tugged him all the way in, forehead resting in the crook of Bucky’s neck where it fit just exactly right. “I’m a mess.”
“I love you,” Bucky said, easy as breathing. “I love you, and this is nothing, and we’ll get in professional fuckin’ movers, okay? I don’t give a shit, I just wanna be with you.”
39. Who leaves little notes in the other one’s lunch? (Bonus: What does it say?)
468.
Clint was unwrapping a sandwich, poking through the wrappings like there was a bomb inside ready to go off. (Sam was hoping there wasn’t a bomb ready to go off, literally or metaphorically, ‘cos Banner was up from the labs today and the guy had a temper.
Eventually he extracted a slip of paper and placed it carefully on the desk as he munched on his sandwich – tuna mayonnaise, cucumber, red onion, that was an effort sandwich, and Clint didn’t look like the effort type.
“Your honey make you lunch?” Sam asked, and Clint choked on a piece of cucumber.
“Um,” he said, “I guess you could call him that?”
“So what’s with the note?” Sam continued, curious beyond belief at the way Clint side-eyed it, wary as all hell.
“He thinks he’s funny,” Clint said. “Read it.”
Sam picked up the note, which was written on the corner of a pizza menu, looked like, in almost-dried-out Sharpie.
“’And I said hey,’” he read out, and Clint joined in dolefully, “‘what’s going on.’“
“The hell?” Sam asked, and Clint made a face.
“Every goddamn day he earworms me.” He grabbed his phone out of his pocket, and carefully picked out a text on the screen that was spiderwebbed with cracks. Upside down, it looked like it said ‘u sick son of a bitch’. “And then he laughs his ass off at me when I come home whistling.”
“Aaw, c’mon,” Sam said, “how the hell hard can it be to resist?”
By end of day every poor bastard in the precinct was singing.
600.
(For @lissadiane)
Clint sneaking out of medical had become enough of a habit that the medical staff tended to just send any prescriptions to his rooms, FAO Mr J. Barnes, as soon as he was mobile.
So the nurse just about jumped out of her skin when he cleared his throat and asked politely for some painkillers, please, while they both tried to ignore the shining tracks down his cheeks.
“But we -” she said, helpless, “we left the door open?” She gaped at him for a moment more, then bustled into action, taking his empty water jug to refill and going to fetch a doctor to issue more pills.
Clint scrubbed the hand that was currently working across his face, wishing the breath he took in wasn’t so goddamn shaky, and then tried to fish out the remote that’d make his bed lay him down again.
The bed started moving before he’d done more than brace himself to reach for the remote, settling into just the perfect angle, and he covered his face again ‘cos everything, everything goddamn hurt.
“Hey,” he croaked, and did his best to pat at the fingers that trailed gently over his cast-wrapped hand.
“Oh sweetheart,” Bucky said, and Clint choked on an idiot sob, curled as best as he could into the arms that Bucky wrapped around him as best as he could. Clint hid his face in Bucky’s hair and hitched in dumb breaths that hurt like hell and smelt like home, and Bucky whispered everything that he needed to hear.
“I’m sorry,” Clint said, “I’m sorry, I just – can we press pause for a bit? I swear, I swear we’re gonna talk about it, and I’ve probably got an apology to – but can I come home?”
Bucky reared back, startled, appalled, and cupped Clint’s face with a hand that was about as unsteady as Clint’s dumb voice.
“You’re a goddamn idiot,” he said, and pressed kisses to his forehead, the side of his face that wasn’t swollen, the stubbled skin just under his chin. “I don’t give a shit what we’re fightin’ about, Clint, I will never in my life not want you there.”
45 pls!
242.
“How much of that did you hear?”
There was a slight movement by his foot, but no other acknowledgement. Clint slid down the wall to sit, reaching over with one hand to pet gently, like that was gonna make this any better.
“Look, you gotta know, me and your dad – we love each other, okay? No matter how much we shout, that’s always gonna be…” He sighed, and his hand fell still. “No matter how much I screw up.”
Clint let out a long breath and leaned his head back against the wall.
“‘cos I screwed up, and I can acknowledge that. I do get that. I’m just not -” his chin was rough when he scratched at it: a night on the couch, cleaning up in the guest bathroom. “I’m not so good when people are yelling. Brings out the stubborn, and once that happens I can’t pull it back until we’re done. And I can’t -”
He let the silence tick by for a time.
“Done’s never gonna come from me. Not with your dad. I’ll die before I’m done with him.”
There was a mutter of low swearing from the kitchen, and Clint bit his lip.
“How much of that did you hear?” he said.
“Quit talking to the Roomba, you asshole,” Bucky said, “and come here and kiss me.”
601.
“Uugh.”
Rain was pattering gently against the window, the gentle whistle of wind easing in around the window frame that he meant to get around to replacing any time, now.
The bed was some kinda iron-framed rickety monstrosity that he’d found out in the barn, ‘cos Clint had burned his parents’ bed just as soon as he’d been able to hold an axe again. The patchwork quilt, though, had been one Gammy Francis had made, and he’d choked the washing machine to death on it.
Clint stretched, the springs of the bed clanking out a song that was almost familiar, dragged a little off-key by the additional weight on the poorly-stuffed mattress.
“So what are your thoughts on taking the day?” Clint asked, awkwardly casual but still uncertain enough to ask the ceiling instead of turning to look at his face. “We could ignore the whole responsibilities bullshit, stay in bed, maybe order some crappy pizza from the only place that’ll deliver here…”
There was silence. Silence but for the gentle pitched whistle, the soft patter, the creak of springs as Clint nervously shifted his weight.
“Or not,” he said, forcing his voice into a grin that his face didn’t have to bother with, since apparently no one was interested in looking. “Or we could just pretend that none of this ha- erk!”
A cool metal arm had snaked around his waist and yanked him back from where he’d been edging closer to the edge of the bed, tugging him back under the heavy, faded quilt and rolling him onto his back. Bucky braced himself over him, hair forming a curtain between them and the peeling wallpaper, and the lines between his brows were only formed of barely-awake confusion. They were undermined entirely by the tiny smile on his face.
“Counter-offer,” he said, his voice hoarse and warm in a way that Clint wanted to get familiar with. “We go downstairs, I cook you some eggs, and we curl up on the couch under this blanket while we wait for the functioning goddamn bed you’re gonna order. I keep sleeping on this fuckin’ thing, even my back’s gonna give out.”
“You’re staying, then?” Clint asked, hesitant, and Bucky rolled his eyes and collapsed onto him, burying his face in Clint’s neck and crushing him into the goddamn uncomfortable springs.
586
(For @lissadiane who wanted a sequel to the one where Clint misses his own wedding…)
“What’re their demands?”
Lainey span her seat around, pissed off beyond all measure that yet another asshole was trying to take over her job.
“Look,” she said, keeping a tight rein on her temper, ‘Cos when you were a woman in this profession you could only screw that up once. “If you’d just -“
She stopped, confused. Murder glare, sure; she hadn’t been expecting boutonnières.
“I’m sorry, miss,” an earnest-looking blond said, the ridiculous angle of his jaw somehow familiar. “Bucky’s -“
“Holy shit,” she said helplessly, “you’re Captain America!”
The brunet – who by process of elimination had to be the Winter Soldier, and boy was she glad she hadn’t ripped him a new one – tipped his head back and let out a long slow breath, visibly struggling to stay calm.
“Have you got communication with anyone in the bank?” He asked, his voice low and even.
“Yeah,” she said, “they’ve got an Avenger in there,” she winced, “which obviously you guys know. He was all John McClane for a while there.”
They both blinked at her blankly.
“Er. Hiding? In the vents. They caught him when he broke into some guy’s office and tried to look up the phone number for City Hall.” She smiled a little, friendly. “I mean, most people would’ve gone with the police, but -“
There was a crackling from the radio that stood on Lainey’s desk, and before she could grab it it was wrapped in metal fingers and yanked us to the Soldier’s mouth.
“Hey Lainey?”
“Try again,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“Aaw, Buck?” There was indistinct murmuring in the background, then, “yeah, okay, I’ll tell ‘em, just let me – Bucky, you mad?”
“The only reason I ain’t gonna kill you,” the Soldier said, “is ‘Cos I was anticipating a little longer ‘til ‘death do us part’.”
Hurray!!!! 😀😀 I’ll just have to keep requesting sequels to it, it’s my favourite.
theproblemwithstardust 