Morgue Files

Contrary to popular legend at SHIELD, Phil Coulson had nothing to do with Clint's recruitment. Even 15 years ago, Clint was a snot-nosed so and so and Phil was already blandly, terrifyingly necessarily for operations and administrative errata at security levels beyond Clint's wildest imagining. When he'd been hauled into SHIELD headquarters as an L2 specialist, it had been by Carnaghan, who swore fluidly and profusely with probably the densest Boston accent Clint's ever heard. He'd been put through his training paces with Robinson and Soleymani, and Skolimowski and Maternofsky had been his most frequently two handlers on ops for the first three years of his SHIELD tenure. The day he'd been elevated to L3, Soleymani bought him a cupcake with a sparkler on top, kissed Clint on the cheek and said, "I'm really glad you didn't burn out and go dark side, buddy," and Clint had said, "Thanks, asshole," because all the rough edges hadn't finished coming off, yet.

The first time Clint saw Phil Coulson was in a makeshift mess tent that had been set up for a 300-person operation in a nowhere places in between several ramshackle Mexican villages. They were in abandoned territory, where the police and the feds had given up and the murder rate was so high it was pointless to keep track, and Clint had just come back from 14 hours parked in the blistering heat, drenched in sweat and woozy from dehydration and so generally fucking unhappy about everything he was ready to run away to the God damn circus some more. Again.

Except he'd stomped into the mess to get some water and stopped short at the way there was a woman in a nondescript gray suit sitting by herself in the middle of the lunch rush — everybody in the cafeteria giving her a three-table berth. She was eating the biggest plate of reconstituted mashed potatoes Clint had ever seen — just shoveling angry spoonfuls in her mouth — and crying, not making a sound. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were red and he kind of stood there in frozen awe, spellbound, watching her fucking murder this dish of potatoes over the four of 15 minutes, pause long enough to scrub the heels of her hands — blunt, short fingernails, no polish, a no-nonsense watch — over her cheeks, and then bus her tray without a word.

Everybody held their breath until she left, and once the the last clicks of her shoes melted away, some guy hissed, "Mother of Christ."

"Who the fuck was that?" Clint asked, to some passing, white-faced SHIELD guy, in BDUs wearing an ID code on his shoulder that indicated he was L5.

"That? Coulson, man," White-Faced SHIELD Guy says, and pulls off his cap, runs a hand over the back of his neck. "Fuck. I fuckin' hate it when she does that."

Later, when he's supposed to be maintaining radio silence, Clint asks, "But what does it mean?"

"Have you never heard the phrase 'eating your feelings' before, Barton?" Sitwell replies, because Sitwell is a solid bro like that.

Clint adjusts his scope 2 millimeters to the left. He's been watching their mark fuck an underaged prostitute for the last like 20 minutes, and Clint's almost as bored as the kid is. The SHIELD-issued scope is good enough that Clint can see the boy rolling his eyes as he mouths rapturous sex noises and the goon on top of him furiously jerks it.

"That was not eating feelings," Clint argues, because seriously their drug lord probably needs to see a doctor. He has testicles the size of a coconut, a rapidly purpling shrimp dick, and he's been promising to spatter jizz all over this kid's ass for a small eternity. "ODed on Cialis, you think?"

"Definitely ODed on Cialis," Sitwell agrees. "No, I mean, we lost five guys in a skirmish today. That's just Coulson's MO. She eats, she cries, she goes out and and shoots a bunch of people in the knees."

"Huh, no shit, sir," Clint says, meditative, and everybody on the op breaks radio silence together in relief when this asshole finally comes, a chorus of "fucking finally Jesus" ringing out across the radio. "Call it, Sitwell."

There's a click on the line, and a woman's voice carries across it:

"I'd wait until he rolls off of the bed mate at least, Barton."

Clint blinks. It's a new voice, but it goes on to add, "Sitwell, the compound is secured. Nigel will move on your call."

"Who the fuck is Nigel?" Clint blurts out.

"He's a very young looking specialist," the woman replies, apparently unflustered. "And Barton — aim for debilitating but nonfatal. Mr. Rodriguez and I have an appointment."

"Copy that," Clint says, reflexive, over top of Sitwell's, "Copied, Coulson." Clint manages to restrain himself until there's the tell-tale click of someone breaking off their line before he gasps, "That was her? The potato lady?"

"I will pay you $1 billion to call her that to her face," Sitwell informs him, and there's the sudden burst of static that comes from another radio held close by as he says, "Nigel — your efforts, as ever, are godlike heroism. We're ready to go once you're clear."

Through the scope, Clint watches the kid on the bad do some ripply stretch that's fucking criminal, and then say some stuff that gets their drug lord looking loopy and permissive, nodding his head and scratching of his hands through the mat of dark hair on his chest. Nimbly, the kid rolls off of the bed, and if Clint wasn't such a fucking professional, he would have been tracking the kid — Nigel's ass as he swayed it toward the bathroom.

"Barton, stop staring you fucking pervert and take the shot," Sitwell tells him.

"You're the fucking worst, Sitwell," Clint tells him, and shoots Rodriguez twice neatly: once in his jerking hand and once in the left knee.

It's two weeks later, once they're all back stateside, that he hears, "Barton, right?" in the hallway outside of the sparring rooms.

When Clint looks up, it's to Coulson staring at him, waiting for an answer.

"Yes," he manages. "Yeah, that's me."

She smiles at him. Or at least Clint thinks it's a smile. The corners of her mouth move and it's not downward, anyway. She gives him a once-over with clinical detachment and makes eye contact again before saying, "Good job. On the Rodriguez gig."

"Thank you, sir," he says, before correcting himself. "Uh — ma'am. I guess."

"Sir's fine," she tells him, and what's when fucking Nigel comes out of the sparring room, glistening with a fine sheen of sweat in a soaked-through wife beater and fucking basketball shorts. Clint's seen the guy maybe five, six times around the office since the op and he can't fucking make eye contact with him.

"Theroux, with me," Coulson says, and Nigel jogs up to her all bashfully beaming, and the two of them saunter off down the hall.

It leaves Clint clutching at his chest and staring at the dishwater chignon of hair Coulson has at the nape of her neck and he thinks, oh, fuck, and realizes he is fucking crazy into that.

***

Getting Coulson's attention primarily involves getting onto her rotation. This is basically impossible because only half of her job involves field operations, and when she is playing handler, it's with the L7s and the most high risk intakes. The next time Clint works with Coulson in any capacity, it's because he and Maternofsky cross paths with Widow in Budapest, and any sighting of her is an immediate stand down and regroup with HQ. HQ sends Coulson.

"How'd she look?" Coulson asks, when she rocks up.

She's gotten a drop off via unmarked helicopter, wearing a white linen shirt tucked into loose taupe pants that cuff beautifully over a pair of glossy, pointed kitten heels. She's wearing no jewelry, her hair is loose, she has on eyeliner. It is the most devastating thing Clint has ever seen, so he doesn't blame himself for saying:

"Uh — murder-y?"

Coulson turns to Maternofsky instead, who is still staring at Clint with barely concealed disgust. "She looked tired, sir," he tells Coulson, who makes a considering noise.

She gives Clint the kill order, which he has every intention of following through on — he's seen Window's file — except he finds himself tangling with her in the rafters of an old warehouse just outside of the city limits, she doesn't look tired like Maternofsky said, she looks done. She looks ready to come inside, and Clint has a fleeting moment of familiarity that feels like a fucking gut punch.

Clint's primary coping method with occasionally having feelings is declaring them in flat statements, so he's not surprised that he tells Widow:

"I don't want to kill you. You should join us."

Or that she kicks him in the throat for saying it and gets away.

Clint's knocked back down to L1 after that and spends months serving penance in the form of milk runs. He gets his ass chewed out by no fewer than five senior agents, but he doesn't see Coulson at all. Sitwell, with his typical kid glove approach, explains that Coulson don't waste time getting furious with useless shitheads beneath her notice, so she'd delegated all the screaming to someone else and went off to Monaco. Clint thinks about the way she's probably getting all sunkissed and freckly there and feels deeply, horribly punished for his sins.

"Monaco?" Clint croaks.

Sitwell smirks, all mean and all teeth. "Nigel texted to say she's wearing a skirt."

Clint's throat releases a creaking, croaking noise.

It's hard graft and an awful six months to get off the probationary list and be allowed on international gigs again, and as soon as he crosses U.S. borders, there she is again, the Widow, just hovering in the corners of the mission. She doesn't engage, and neither does Clint; he just reports her presence dutifully in Albania, in Pakistan, for the entirety of that two-month run in Afghanistan where they'd set up post too near a U.S. base and ended up with imbedded reporters wandering over to their side to ask questions.

"You realize the longer you stall out on telling me who you are, the more curious I get," she says to Clint. Lorna Shipman is 36 years-old, her hair gone frazzled and bleached from the sun, and while she is technically imbedded with the recon marines on the other side of camp, Clint thinks she must spend about half her life on the fringes of the SHIELD camp, bugging him.

He scowls at her. "You know I have a gun right?" he asks.

She peers over his shoulder. Hilariously, she's 5'1" on a tall day, so all she's seeing is shoulder and bicep. "There're a lot of women in there," Lorna plows on. "Are you guys an experimental convoy?"

Clint tries to imagine what would happen if someone told Hill or Soleymani their tits precluded them from front-line combat and has to choke back a laugh.

"Okay, sure, experimental convoy," he agrees.

Lorna looks unconvinced, narrow-eyed, and then her expression changes.

Over Clint's shoulder, Coulson says, "There's a reason we hire professionals for this sort of thing, Barton," and when he turns around to look at her, she smirks at him, jerks her chin toward the rendezvous tent and says, "Go — I'll be in in 5 minutes."

"Sir," he says, nodding, and Lorna does the appreciative whistle Clint can't do himself, saying, "That's a nice suit, Suit — what it is, Jil Sander?" as Clint beats feet.

He hears Coulson saying, "Yes. Resort collection, two years ago. The fabric breathes amazingly well," and "I'm going to need you to leave now, though."

As promised, 5 minutes later, Coulson's ducking into the tent, where Clint has been frozen in parade rest in a defensible corner trying not to stare at Fury's eye patch or melt under Maria Hill's poisonous gaze for the 4 minutes and 59 seconds previous.

"Barton, I hear you made a fucking friend," Fury spits out, the minute Coulson lets the tent flap close.

Reflexively, Clint says, "I don't have any friends, sir."

Hill sighs, and Coulson hides her mouth behind a manila folder.

"Then why is the fucking Black Widow following your pasty white ass across the globe," Fury goes on, but it's pretty clear he doesn't really want an answer from Clint, so the obvious comment about doing a lot of kettlebell squats gets repressed in favor of continued respiration. No matter what Maternofsky says, Clint's not that stupid. Mostly.

"Our profilers suggest Barton's initial assessment may be correct," Coulson jumps in to say, handing Fury the folder and stopping holy shit like 2 feet away from Clint. That's 24 inches, plus or minus 2, and that means Clint's immediately compelled to stare stupidly at the pink flush over her cheekbones, the — be still his heart — bracelet that has appeared on her wrist. She's wearing a pale gray silk shirt with a keyhole opening that closes with a pearl button at the nape of her neck, and it's ruining his life.

"We think Widow's ready to come in," Hill explains, while Fury keeps scowling down at the folder.

"And she's ready to come in for this guy?" Fury asks, deeply unconvinced and glaring up at Clint even though Clint has literally done nothing but follow orders to a T for six straight months.

Coulson smiles, this time, Clint's definitely sure it's a smile. She says, "I don't know. Barton's not that bad."

"Thank you, sir," he says, and Coulson's eyes crinkle a little, like that little grin is making its way upward, but before it can turn into a full blown moment, Fury says:

"Fine. Fuck it. It's your call, Coulson."

Hill interrupts to say, "She's obviously batshit."

"Good," Coulson says, and motions at Clint to follow. "I like batshit."

***

Obviously, Coulson likes batshit because she is also batshit. Like calls to like.

She puts Clint to work on a fucking minefield of high-stress, crazy dangerous ops. She doesn't mention the Widow at all until Clint asks about it, two weeks later, at which point Coulson says, "She found you before, all those other times; I may as well get some mileage out of you until she decides to show up again." Clint makes a feeble noise of agreement and then goes to sit angrily in his perch for 12 hours, unmoving, ignoring the semi in his pants.

In his minimal off hours — read as: times he's not actively providing sniper back up on assorted missions — Coulson makes him sit in cafes and restaurants, wander around open air markets.

"Are you trying to get me killed, sir?" Clint asks. In retaliation, he's started to buy the ugliest souvenirs he can find and interofficing them to her in New York.

"Just making it easier in case Widow wants to make her approach," she says, unperturbed.

And absolutely everybody on Coulson's team is a dick. Just lousy with jerks. There's Sitwell and Heller and Lin and Kim and Smith 1 and Smith 2 and they're all straight up assholes. Coulson's comms are the loudest, most unrelenting stream of filth and one-upmanship Clint's ever heard until she cuts in with, "Guys," and then it all goes to pindrop silence, not even breathing on the line. If anybody seems stressed out about working with the legendary Philomena Coulson, nobody says anything about it, and Clint spends the first two months feeling like he's failing a test he's not sure he's taking.

***

After a while, Clint's hind brain crush on Coulson matures into a resigned irritation with his own reflexive desire to please Coulson. Eventually, he's even comfortable enough to start engaging in his normal behavior when this sort of situation comes up: act like a dick. He back talks. He shows up just a little late. His uniform's always kind of a mess. Either she doesn't care, doesn't notice, or operates with the knowledge that she'll always have the upper hand, that she can make Clint walk into walls and pop a teenaged boner with the way she turns the pages in a file, orchestrates ops. That she can make something inside his chest fill up, spill over, just by pressing a hand to Clint's shoulder and saying, "Good job, Barton."

***

Six months into his tenure with Coulson's traveling roadshow of insanity they get called into Budapest. Clint fucking hates Budapest.

Bar future experiences with Loki and the tesseract, it will be the worst mission of Clint's life. Smith 1 and 2 are killed within minutes of each other, and he and Heller end up hiding in the guts of the sewer for three days, nursing open wounds and anticipating gangrene and Coulson's inevitable, crushingly bland disapproval. The only reason Clint doesn't end up in the bodycount, too, is that Widow shows up, wild-eyed and sharp-edged. After all of it, after the literal dust settles and the last warehouse fire burns out in the cold winter rain, Widow surrenders herself into SHIELD custody — let's Sitwell usher her off into an unmarked white van, battered enough that nobody will look twice.

He'll get attacked by field medics wielding tetanus boosters and antibiotics as soon as they're back in safe territory, but Coulson — who has a broken wrist swollen to twice its normal thickness — gets hauled right past medical into a closed-door meeting with Fury. It lasts four hours, and not even the best of SHIELD's sound-killing technology dampens all of the screaming. It's unidirectional. So far as Clint can tell, Coulson never raises her voice. It's not her style. He can't imagine what he'd do if she yelled.

Clint will also have the fucking misfortune — three days later — of watching Coulson eat an entire tray of french fries while crying those same awful, silent tears; she'll be in black at the time, the funeral suit she wore to say, "I'm so sorry for your loss," to Smith 2's wife, to Smith 1's brother.

***

It takes months for Widow to become Natasha.

First there's the layers upon layers of vetting and evaluations miles and miles above Clint's paygrade, and even after she's released into the general population it's usually with a senior SHIELD handler fucking glued to her side. When Clint's around — when he's not out shooting additional drug lords in the testicles or whatever — he watches her carefully to see if she's about to bug out and kill everybody in the canteen. He'd probably let her get to Russell, but sometimes Coulson is in there; this deteriorates into thought experiments he shares with Sitwell during radio silence time.

"I'd sacrifice Hill, no questions," Clint says, about 20 minutes into a conversation about who they would throw at Natasha if she went batshit and started murdering people.

"Wise," Sitwell says meditatively. "On the one hand, she is probably one of the worst humans on the planet. On the other, she might actually survive a Black Widow attack."

"Coulson could survive Widow," Clint says, more out of loyalty than conviction.

"Barton, I want you to know that this fucking crush of yours is embarrassing, and I'm embarrassed for you, and to know you," Sitwell says, with his typical thoroughness.

The 45 page friendly fire report Clint has to write for shooting the coffee out of Sitwell's hand where he's sitting a million miles away from the action with a literal sack of cake donuts is completely, totally worth it.

Coulson, when Clint hands it in, asks, "Do I want to know?"

"I can say with perfect certainty you don't," Clint says.

"Fair enough," Coulson allows, and she pauses long enough to worry at her watch for a second, running a thumb along its face before asking, "What do you think of Romanoff?"

Clint sees Widow sometimes in the halls at SHIELD, but she's probably one of the most dangerous and high maintenance assets the organization's ever acquired, and Clint recently celebrated returning to L2 status by dint of not dying in Budapest. Soleymani refuses to get him another cupcake for quote, failing upwards, which Clint thinks is fair, if mean. Sitwell tells him Coulson made a ferocious bid to have Clint brought back to L3 based on his pivotal role in recruiting Widow, but Fury wasn't having any of it. Clint's neither surprised by Fury's assholeishness nor by the reflexive, humiliating lurch of something he gets at the thought of Coulson standing up for him.

Clint frowns. "You think she's a security liability?" he guesses.

Coulson smiles at him, worn and genuine and stunning. "Of course she's a liability, Barton — I meant more, do you think we'll be able to integrate her, one day?"

"I — wouldn't be the expert on that, sir," Clint says, evasive.

"I can think of no better expert," Coulson rejoins. "You were hostile, hurt, and more likely to burn the place down than toe the line when you joined SHIELD."

"I wasn't that bad," Clint mutters, lying.

"And now you're one of our most vital and effective assets," Coulson presses on, and that worn smile on her face has changed into something small and secret. It's a new expression, one Clint hasn't seen before, and he's greedy for it, commits it to memory. He wonders if this is the smile she has over fancy dinner dates with atmospheric lighting: pleased, provocative. "You have insight — more than most of us ever could — as to whether or not Romanoff could ever feel safe enough here to work for us."

Clint hesitates. He hates hesitating. But this isn't like pulling a trigger or taking a shot, and so he rocks back on his heels and asks, sounding shy and ten years younger, "Can I think about that and get back to you?"

"Of course," she tells him, tipping her head to the side. Coulson spreads her hand out across her desk, bracing. She says, "You know my door is always open to you."

He did not know that at all, previously, but he nods anyway, because there's nothing he can say to that. It's almost a week later — a week of watching Natasha carefully and caucusing with Sitwell, who's been handling her national security debriefings, and sitting for long hours in the canteen to pick up the ambient gossip — that he knows the unavoidable truth of the thing, the embarrassing reality of it.

"Hey," he says, sticking his head into Coulson's office one Tuesday afternoon and talking as quickly as possible. He's staring at her floor because he doesn't think he can look at Coulson's face, and he babbles at double speed, "I think Widow's going to be scared for a really long time, but people like us are used to it. But she's strong or she wouldn't have made it this far, and if you guys are careful — I think it could work."

His throat closes up for a long time. He doesn't say how shitty and tired and fucked up he'd been when SHIELD had come after him, three years into an illustriously bloody career as a merc. He doesn't say how he spent years waking up in a cold sweat in his SHIELD quarters ready to run, or that not every SHIELD agent had the soft but implacable touch of Coulson's inner circle. But he doesn't want Natasha to die, to immolate, and there're maybe a half dozen organizations in the world where someone with her background can land. Clint knows her entire life story in a SHIELD file but he knows fuck all about her — that doesn't change how much he hurts for her.

"That's heartening," Coulson tells him, patience threaded through her voice. "I'll take it under advisement as I'm compiling — "

"I think you should handle her training," he interrupts, sudden; his voice is shaking.

"Me," Coulson repeats, flatly.

Clint squeezes his eyes shut. "I think it would help," he mumbles. "You get people. You're good at this kind of thing."

When Coulson finally answers, it's so soft it's barely above a whisper. She says, "Thank you, Clint — I appreciate your input on this matter," and he more or less runs out the door, out of SHIELD, into the New York nightscape where the air has the bright sharpness of early winter and the traffic can drown out the panicked voice in his head yelling, you fucking idiot — you total fucking moron, now she knows, there's no way she doesn't know now.

***

SHIELD is weird, even for a shadowy pseudogovernmental organization, so the day that Coulson walks into the canteen and says to Clint, "Barton, with me," he doesn't even think twice about it. He punches Sitwell in the shoulder before he can say whatever he's going to say, ignores Natasha's all-too-knowing look, and trails after Coulson as she winds out of the bowels of the building, past the administrative offices and toward the lobby. Clint's abstractly been aware SHIELD had a lobby, but he's used it maybe once, maybe twice in the six years he's worked here.

"Where're we going, sir?" he asks, when they're already on the street and Coulson's hailing a cab.

She glances over her shoulder at him, wisps of her hair flying in the brisk February wind. "Intel gathering," she tells him, no-nonsense.

In the backseat of the cab, she tells the driver to head for the Met, and says, "Here," and sticks her purse in Clint's lap. She swaps out her flats for a pair of perilous nude pumps, and puts on a flat, cherry red lipstick. They're stuck in the endless traffic along Park when Coulson puts on earrings, and they're crawling past 60th Street when she shakes her hair out of its chignon. It falls along the back of her coat in glossy curls, and it smells like flowers, and Clint can feel his dick rub up friendly like along the bottom of Coulson's fucking handbag and feels like a monster.

The driver, who is almost as bad a pervert as Clint, keeps looking in the rearview mirror despite Clint's continuous, unabated glower. He asks, "Midday date, huh?"

Clint almost swallows his tongue.

Coulson just smiles, the wide, sweet one that isn't her at all. "Don't tell my boss."

She tips him outrageously, and when then step out onto the sidewalk on Museum Mile, she loops her arm into Clint's, presses them close together, so she can rest her chin on his shoulder. Clint's wearing a beat up leather jacket over a ratty green henley, busted jeans and combat boots, and he knows exactly what they must look like together.

"I'm hurt, boss," Clint says, after he buys them egregiously overpriced entry tickets and laces their fingers together, leads her toward the Temple of Dendur. "Did you seriously just zero in on me in the mess as the most effective piece of rough trade?"

"No self-respecting cougar would prey on Sitwell," she says lightly, and dips her head in close. From a distance, it must look like she's telling him a secret, that beneath the veil of her hair she must be blushing, shy, flirtatious. Up close, Clint can feel the warmth of her skin and he can't fucking stop smelling her hair, not even as she says, "Just look besotted — I'll handle the rest."

So that's easy. Just, like the easiest ask Clint's ever gotten for SHIELD, and he steers Coulson around the museum and can't help but square his shoulders, touch her cheek sometimes, to get her attention. He leans into her too much, whispers into the crown of her hair too often, and from the looks they're getting, it's convincing. What's even better is the looks she's getting.

Clint knows Coulson is only kind of pretty; he can be objective about this so long as nobody else is saying this shit to his face. He's tangled with Natasha for years and Hill off and on, SHIELD assets as gorgeous as they're deadly. But when you stop and look at her, Coulson is striking, and when she smiles — even this fake smile she's been wearing all afternoon — makes Clint feel like he's underwater, like he's breathless.

They linger for what feels like a yawning eternity in European Sculpture and Decorative Art, in that room with the awful baroque chairs with the gilded flowers all over, that look impossible to sit on. Coulson's loosened up now, her shoulders losing the tension of her in medias op focus, and Clint suspects whatever intel she wanted has already been collected from the pair of sleekly suited businessmen that had been exchanging half-sentences in the medieval gallery, near the massive wall of the choir screen.

"That can't possibly be comfortable," he says, into her temple, because Clint's a good agent and would never break cover without permission from his handler.

Coulson huffs, her decorative laughter gone away now. When Phil Coulson talks, it's in short sentences and suppressed grins and the texture of her voice in Clint's ear has buoyed him through missions during monsoons, frigid endless nights, the gory flesh wound in his thigh, the arcing terror of a forest fire making the jump from the treeline to a house — one Clint had been perched on.

"Clothing of the period would have made it impossible to lean back, anyway," she answers him, but she doesn't slide their fingers apart. "Corsets, stays, that kind of thing."

Clint cocks an eyebrow at her. She has a swirl of hair, almost a cowlick, right at the top of her head, and he feels a degree of passion toward it he hadn't felt about the last three people he was fucking; this is so embarrassing.

"And how would you know that?" he asks, and barely swallows back the 'sir.'

She sneaks him one of those looks, from under the eyelashes. They must teach all girls how to do that in middle school. "I know my way around a corset."

Clint is aware the noise he makes is neither stealth nor ninja. "Sir," he pleads.

She doesn't say anything else, but she does buy him an overpriced coffee at the cafe near the sculpture hall, and Clint watches the late afternoon light thread through her hair and feels all of his old wounds ache.