Chapter 6
The next day passes in a blur and Clint has a smile on his face that simply won’t be suppressed, and Phil quirks the corner of his mouth upwards every time he thinks of Clint, which happens a lot.
Clint is busy on the SHIELD range, there's no mission so he's just practicing- but really he's waiting for Phil do come pick him up.
Phil, for once, can't wait to finish his paperwork.
In an unspoken agreement, they leave headquarters without showing any public display of affection.
Heading straight to his apartment, Clint feels vaguely guilty for ignoring his team again.
As Clint closes the door behind them, Phil turns back around to him. They immediately meet in kiss, and all thoughts about the other Avengers are forgotten, because this is SO much more important.
They fall into a routine, once again switching between staying at Phil's apartment and in bedstuy, but this time they're almost always sharing a room.
Almost only because Phil still sometimes needs to work inumanly long hours when he's planning or supervising a mission from on base, and because Clint sometimes can't sleep at all, and they both don't want to disturb each other.
After a while, and some more talking about feelings and such, Clint sometimes does stay in bed with Phil when he can't sleep but doesn't feel like working out, and Phil sneaks into bed with Clint in the middle of the night whenever he's not so tired that he just crashes at HQ. It mostly wakes Clint, but he wouldn't have it any other way.
They're still not working together, of course, Clint an Avenger and Phil and Agent of SHIELD.
And when they're called out on missions without each other, especially the longer missions out of the country with no connection back to base to check whether the other's okay, they're worried sick about the one in the field while the other one isn't quite concentrating at a hundred percent...
"Aw, arrow, no!" Clint groans when he took an exploding instead of a poisoned arrow in the heat of the battle. His team members don't see how it's a big deal, yeah it might have drawn a bit unnecessary attention and usually that's Thor or the Hulk's or Cap's thing, but it did its job?
"You don't get it" Clint snarls. "If I can't be in control of what I'm doing at one hundred percent, who says I won't make an actual mistake?"
And Phil, stoic secret agent man, gets a tiny paper thin cut on his cheek as he dodges a knife a millisecond too late thinking how his attacker's eyes are the exact same colour as the ones of the one person he wishes he fought with side by side.
It haunts him for weeks.
So, some people might say that it's necessary to keep work and private life apart.
But that's not how it is for them, never has been, never well be.
They're a team.
And one day, they decide that it's really the only way this can work.
Fury, of course, is pissed when they issue their demands.
But he really doesn’t want to lose either one of them- he can’t take Clint away from the Avengers, and he really doesn't want to lose Coulson's loyalty to SHIELD completely by letting him go, and he's certain Stark would be just too happy to snatch him away.
So he makes the man a liaison between the Avengers and SHIELD.
But really, Clint figures, Phil is his handler again for all that it's worth.
He's the voice in his ear or the fighter by his side whenever there's a mission, and he has an office in the tower as well as HQ... It really, really couldn't be any better.