Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1093626.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      The_Avengers_(Marvel_Movies)
  Relationship:
      Clint_Barton/Phil_Coulson
  Character:
      Maria_Hill, Nick_Fury
  Additional Tags:
      Non-Graphic_Rape/Non-Con, please_read_the_notes, Hurt/Comfort
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-12-22 Words: 5045
****** Christmas in Kiev and Other Annual Disasters ******
by SylvanWitch
Summary
     Every December 24th thereafter, a bottle of 100-proof, bottom-shelf
     vodka shows up on Phil’s desk.
Notes
     There is a brief scene of non-graphic rape involving an underage
     victim. There is implied non-consensual underage sex in Clint's past.
     There is no non-consensual sex of any kind described in detail. The
     graphic sex in this story is entirely and enthusiastically
     consensual.
     There is also one scene that is violent in nature, though I wouldn't
     describe it as "graphic," which is why it doesn't make the warnings
     up top.
     Finally, this story is AU for the MCU, and it is a stand-alone, not
     at all related to my Proving the Exception series. No Soul Bond here.
Clint Barton’s first Christmas with Phil Coulson is spent on a mission in Kiev.
They don’t talk about Kiev.  Ever.
But every December 24th thereafter, a bottle of 100-proof, bottom-shelf vodka
shows up on Phil’s desk with a note:  “Thought you’d like to strip the enamel
in your bathroom, sir.”
On Barton’s bunk at HQ, the ubiquitous brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide
appears mysteriously.  “For that little hygiene issue, Barton.”
That’s all.
*****
Christmas number three is in sunny Medellin.
Phil skips the peroxide, pours local hooch over the deep gash in Clint’s
shoulder, listens to him hiss and pant, and braces Clint with his free hand. 
The muscles of Clint’s good shoulder bunch and ease under his grip.  Clint’s
skin is slick with sweat, hair plastered to his head, face a bruised wreck, and
Phil has a sudden recognition that Clint’s still the most beautiful thing he’s
ever seen.
It’s not a discovery he’s comfortable revisiting in a shack on the edge of
perdition where an extraction team may or may not find them in time.
With hands that don’t betray a hint of the hesitation he feels, Phil  threads
thirty-pound fishing line through the edges of the wound with a fishhook he’d
honed to fine sharpness, filing away the barb with a patience he didn’t feel.
Biting insects swarm the sweating edges of his eyes, but he doesn’t blink, even
when one burrows in and takes hold, growing monstrous in his near sight as he
concentrates on tying off the last stitch.
He startles when Clint reaches up with his good hand, the one not sticky with
his own blood, and wipes the pest from his eye, thumb surprisingly gentle, his
own eyes glassy as the fever of infection sets in.
When Phil blinks at last, eyes stinging from being too-long open, he blames
that for the tear that purls down his cheek, leaving a single shimmering line
in the filth of his face.
Certainly, it’s not Clint’s breathy, “Merry Christmas, sir,” just before he
loses consciousness.
Definitely, it isn’t relief at discerning, moments later, the low thrum of a
rescue chopper coming in just above the trees that ring their little half acre
of hell.
*****
Christmas number five, Phil’s a third of the way through a fifth of scotch
because no vodka had magically appeared, though he’d had no reason to expect it
would.
Clint—Agent Barton’s gone, disappeared into the swelter of the Congo three
months ago.  Ghostly echoes of him come in from Lagos, Ombada, Riyadh,
Nasiriyah, and if Barton’s alive, he’s either gone rogue and is working in the
red again, or he’s got the world’s worst travel agent.
That last observation might be the scotch, though the voice in Phil’s head
sounds strangely like Natasha, who’s been notably silent on the subject of
Clint’s disappearance.
And there he goes calling him Clint again.
Phil remembers their Christmas in Colombia: the hot tackiness of Clint’s blood,
how he’d had to scrub it from his cuticles and the way it had followed his
heart-line along his palm to his wrist, as if seeking Phil’s pulse.
Remembers Clint’s trust as he’d sunk into darkness, emerging in thrashing,
nasty dreams on the long ride home from Medellin.
Remembers Clint murmuring, “Phil, Phil,” until the medical tech working to
break Clint’s fever had wordlessly handed over the IV bag and cold compresses
and moved to a bench on the other side of the open deck.
That was two years and a lifetime ago, before Natasha had entered their lives
and shaken up some of Phil’s expectations, expectations he wouldn’t allow
himself to even acknowledge until it was far too late.  Until Clint was out of
touch, maybe out of his life forever, well beyond the reach of Phil’s unwelcome
desires.
A courtesy tap at the door comes seconds before the security code override,
Natasha gliding inside, door closing silently behind her as she settles on the
edge of the couch in Phil’s office.
“He’s alive,” she says, but Phil thinks it might be in the kind of tone a
person uses when she can’t bear the possibility of loss.  Prior to Clint’s
disappearance, Phil would have asserted that Natasha was only the lethal, sharp
cold of one of her many blades.  
Now, he sees at the corner of her eyes a shadow, hesitancy born of long
inurement to pain eroded away by a steady, insidious anxiety.
She’s worried for Clint. 
Phil’s terrified.
“You have no idea what he’s doing?”
Phil’s asked the same question a hundred times, but despite that he’s earned an
impatient bark of a response, Natasha merely shrugs, that miniscule shifting of
shoulders peculiar to Eastern Europeans, and then shakes her head, a cascade of
red brushing her pale, narrow chin.
Recollecting his position, Phil settles Agent Coulson firmly around him and
asks, “Did you need something, Agent Romanov?”
Something like a smile flirts with her mouth and then slips away.  She knows
what he’s doing, pretending not to be afraid, and wants him to know that she
knows.
Just as she wants him to understand why she isn’t calling him on his bullshit.
In fact, he understands much more.  In a painful flash, like a knife through
the heart muscle, he feels the pinching certainty that Natasha trusts him. 
Given what may have happened to the last person she knew who’d trusted
Phil—disappeared, without a trace, except for bloody rumors of black work—he’s
moved by the power of it and the responsibility.
This time, a tentative smile takes hold, wavers defiantly while she murmurs,
“Merry Christmas,” and then rises and vanishes away, as fleetly and silently as
she’d arrived.
He thinks he might have just been given a gift as rare as Clint’s had been that
night in Kiev five years before.
Phil wonders, not for the first or even the hundredth time, what he did to make
Clint take that gift back.
Sighing, he squares his shoulders and confronts the mission reports and
personnel audits and myriad other tasks awaiting a single man who has dedicated
his life to a cause that doesn’t much care for his individual needs.  Somehow
comforted by the black and white symmetry of the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo dominating
the top of each document, he settles into the habit of a lonely lifetime and
ignores the creeping wrongness of the peaty dregs staining the bottom of his
glass where the lightning fire of vodka should be.
*****
Arizona.  Mid-July.  Sweat baking into a second skin of itchy salt before he’d
been out in the hide for more than ten minutes.  Flat stretches of super-heated
grit turned to a mirage of taunting water as he’d squinted and tried to pick
out the target.
Eons later, lips coated in Cooper’s blood, Phil had resisted licking them for
the scant, copper moisture of it and squinted again through his scope.  He’d
finished the mission, clusterfuck as it was.  He’d come back.
Concrete hard and unforgiving under his ruined boots, Phil nevertheless feels
un-grounded, surreal, like the bland walls and anonymous corridors of HQ will
prove illusory, the real world just a hell of unfinished red earth, broken only
by the accusing finger of a tower rock pointing upward to an unforgiving sky.
He wants a shower and a stretch of uninterrupted sleep, and he’s thinking about
how he’s only going to get one of those things when Hill intercepts him.
She starts to say, “Coulson, you need to—,” then, “Phil—,” more firmly, but the
look on his face makes even the inimitable Hill take a step back, and she fades
off through a doorway on his periphery as he heads for his on-site quarters to
strip off the filthy field suit and try to drown himself with the lackluster
water pressure of a lukewarm shower.
There’s a bottle of vodka on his bed when he comes through the door, and he
takes that in in the seconds before his brain registers that the room is
occupied, after which everything is amplified—a familiar scent almost
forgotten.  A beloved smirk believed lost.  The sound of a smart remark cut
short by what can only be Phil’s expression because he hasn’t mustered up any
words to confront the specter of Clint Barton lounging against his desk edge,
hands open against his thighs, as though to show that he has no weapon.
They both know that Clint can hurt Phil without ever laying a hand on him.
Phil takes in the purple swell of an imminent shiner under Clint’s left eye and
realizes Clint must have run into Natasha before he came here.
He still can’t find words that won’t scorch his throat and suck the air out of
the room between them, so he says nothing, suddenly unaccountably more
exhausted than he was after thirty-six hours without sleep, no company but
Cooper’s cooling corpse and the scorpions that scuttled around them on the
deceptive sands.
“Sorry it’s late, Boss,” Clint attempts, nodding at the bottle.
With a casual gesture, as if he’s just reaching to smooth the coverlet, Phil
grasps the bottle by the neck and hurls it toward the wall behind the desk.  It
shatters, showering Clint in shards of glass, beading his hair and eyelashes
with stinging liquor.
He doesn’t flinch, but he does nod.  “I deserved that.”
“Yes, you do,” Phil answers at last, correcting Clint’s verb tense as if that’s
the most important thing he can do right now.
Clint’s hands turn, palms out at his waist, as if inviting further violence,
surrendering to it, even.
Phil shakes his head wearily and gestures at the door.  “Get out,” he says,
turning toward the bathroom, dropping his tack vest as he goes.
He expects the sound of boot-falls, the click of the closing door.
Instead, Clint’s hand startles him, and he pivots, running on spent adrenaline
and sudden, annihilating anger.  He grabs Clint’s wrist, ducks under it, brings
Clint’s arm up behind him, increasing the pressure until he feels the ball at
the shoulder shuddering at the very edge of the socket.
Clint’s swallows a grunt.  Phil resists the urge to dislocate his shoulder; it
doesn’t have the same satisfaction when he knows Clint could have slipped the
hold at any time.  It’s a hollow victory and a bitter one.
“Don’t touch me,” Phil growls in soft, precise syllables, propelling Clint away
from him.  “Get out.”  His tone this time brooks no argument, suggests that
staying would be the very height of foolish hope.
“Phil,” Clint says, sounding young and old at the same time, frightened and
grieving and lost.  It should move something in Phil, and maybe it does—maybe
the clot in his throat that he swallows around, the tight fingers of dread
clutching his ribs are signals that the numbness isn’t real, but Phil’s too
tired, his anger having drained the very last of his energy.
He steps into the bathroom and closes the door behind him, leans against it
with his breath held until he hears Clint’s retreat.
Only then does he let a shudder rack him, relief at Clint’s survival weakening
his knees, making his hands shake as he struggles out of his filthy clothes,
turns the faucet handles, steps into the shower.
When he emerges a few minutes later, towel around his waist and another one
clutched in his hand to dry his hair, Clint is sitting on the edge of his bed
beside an improbable second bottle of vodka.
Phil starts to say something, something incisive and awful, something that
can’t be taken back or worked around.  Something forever.
But before he can let the acid burn away what’s left of them, Clint says,
“Kiev,” so quietly that Phil is sure he heard wrong.  His uncertainty must
register on his face because Clint says it again, clearing his throat and
making a visible effort to meet Phil’s gaze.
“Kiev.”
Phil fumbles for the desk chair, swivels it around until he can sit down,
heedless of the damp towel, the water still caught in the hair on his legs or
the way the material gaps in a vee that leaves very little to Clint’s
imagination.
Of course, Clint doesn’t have to imagine.
Phil had been showering then, too, eking cold comfort from the banging pipes of
the tenement where they were holed up, awaiting word on extraction from their
contact.
He’d heard Clint come in, listened for the outer door to close, and knew
something was wrong by Clint’s heavy-footed walk, by the sound of him stumbling
into the card table they’d scrounged from an abandon apartment across the hall.
He’d heard a bottle hit the ground and shatter, and he’d stepped out of the
shower, wiped his gun hand on a towel, grabbed his weapon, and put his back to
the bathroom door.
Phil hadn’t called out.  He’d held his breath and willed his heart to ease its
pounding, straining around the blood sound in his ears to discern the threat
level in the next room.
“Coulson,” Clint had growled, something off about his voice, and Phil had gone
into the room fast, diving to one side, rolling into the partial cover of the
one armchair in the room, aiming at Clint, who’d been standing, swaying in
place, hands so wet with blood that it dripped steadily onto the grimy linoleum
floor.
Tap.  Tap.  Tap.
It had splattered as it struck, flowers of gore spreading around his feet.
Setting his gun on the arm of the chair, Phil had risen from his crouch and
moved toward Clint with his hands out, palms open, in the universal gesture for
I’m unarmed.  I won’t hurt you.
Clint’s eyes hadn’t been focusing on Phil, didn’t seem to recognize him, and
that more than anything else had driven a cold spike of fear through Phil’s
chest.
“Agent Barton, are you hurt?” 
He’d tried his Agent Coulson voice first, hoping it would break Clint from his
fugue.
“Barton?” He’d tried a second time, easing closer, heedless of his nudity or
the freezing cold floor beneath his bare, damp feet.
“Clint?” That time, he’d accompanied the soft word with a softer touch, just a
ghost of a caress along Clint’s cheek, drawing his eyes to Phil’s face.
Clint had let go a sound that Phil had never forgotten, a terrible wounded
noise, like a cornered animal finally giving up the fight.  He’d sagged and
would have fallen had Phil not braced him at the shoulders, and then he’d sunk
against Phil, shivering.
Clint had smelled of copper, thick and sharp, and of snow—flakes had been
clinging to his hair, melting, darkening it as Phil bent his mouth to kiss the
crown of Clint’s head and murmur soothing nonsense.
That hadn’t been his way—still wasn’t.  Agent Coulson didn’t mutter useless
platitudes or pretend that there was comfort where there was none.
But Phil could no more have put Clint away from him at that moment or put
professionalism between them than he could have walked out of the apartment
naked and survived a frigid night in Ukraine. 
Clint had been shaking in his arms, fingers curled around Phil’s biceps,
digging in, clinging like Phil was the only firm thing in a swirling chaos.
(He’d wake the next day with eight bruises, almost identical in diameter, a
temporary mark that had made Phil’s face hot to see them in warped mirror of
the dingy tenement bathroom.)
Unbidden, Phil’s hand had come up to curve around the nape of Clint’s neck, and
his other arm had gone around Clint’s waist to bundle him closer, to tighten
and hold, promising safety and comfort and a host of things Phil had had no
business pretending he could offer.
They’d been thousands of miles from home, surrounded by enemy agents, out of
options and utterly alone.  The mission had gone bad even before Clint had
returned from what had supposed to have been a routine recon mission wearing
another man’s blood like a second skin and shivering like his own blood was
draining from him with every breathless hiccup he made against the still-damp
skin of Phil’s neck.
Everything had changed when Clint had opened his mouth and ghosted his tongue
tentatively along the thin skin stretched over Phil’s pulse.
Phil had had to bite back his own sound, a startling submission roaring through
him, weakening his resolve.
But he still hadn’t known what their status was, hadn’t been able to fathom
what could undo a man for whom Phil had formed an immutable respect in the
eight months he’d been Clint’s handler.
“Clint,” he’d murmured, “Are they coming for us?  Do we need to move?”
Clint’s answer had been to gently fasten his teeth around Phil’s collar bone,
savaging the skin and then soothing it with his hot, broad tongue.
Given his state of undress, Phil’s reaction had been impossible to hide, and a
huff of hot air along his shoulder had only just anticipated the shift in
Clint’s stance as he made enough room between them to wraps his cold, callused
hand around Phil’s cock.
Phil had gasped at both the cold and the grip, hips bucking helplessly once
before he’d gotten control of himself.
“Clint,” he’d warned, pulling himself away, loosening his grip around Clint’s
waist so that he could look into Clint’s face. 
Grief had shadowed Clint’s eyes and clung grimly to the corners of his mouth. 
He’d been pale, a faint green tinge suggesting incipient illness, but there had
been recognition in his eyes.  He had been aware of himself and of Phil; he’d
been awake to the implications of his gesture, their intimacy.
He’d reiterated that awareness by strengthening his grip and slowly,
deliberately stroking the length of Phil’s cock, palm caressing the head and
gathering a bead of moisture that clung there, easing his way back up Phil’s
length until the back of his hand brushed the wiry hair at Phil’s root.
“Clint,” he’d tried again, desperation joining insistence in his tone.  Even
the redoubtable Agent Coulson could be moved beyond reason by getting at last
what he’d never permitted himself to consider wanting.  “Are they coming?”
Clint’s head had been angled down so that he could watch his hand stripping
Phil of every ounce of his resistance, so the shake of his head brushed his wet
hair against Phil’s chest.
He’d sucked in a breath, want singing through every pore, and pulled Clint’s
face up for a punishing kiss that left them both panting and weak-kneed,
stumbling like drunks to the sprung mattress they’d both been sharing, shoved
into the least filthy corner of the cracked linoleum floor.
Phil had undressed Clint with a deliberate, precise haste that had left Clint
panting and muttering a string of swallowed expletives, had retrieved his damp
towel from the bathroom and used a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to clean the
worst of it from Clint’s hands, arms, and neck, and then had pushed him down to
sprawl on the bed, knees spread, hard cock curling up toward his belly, eyes
fixed trustingly on Phil’s serious face.
He’d knelt between Clint’s thighs, bent himself in half to take Clint into his
mouth, wringing a choked sound from him that had resolved itself into throaty
grunts as Phil sucked and bobbed and swallowed around the head, lodged deep
back in his throat, muscles milking Clint’s cock until he came in a juddering
wreck, hands reaching for Phil’s hair, his cheek, his shoulders, clinging until
he was utterly spent.
Only then, when Clint’s eyes had been at half-mast, watching with hungry
approval Phil’s every move, had Phil retrieved their only lubricant—gun oil—and
stripped his cock with a ruthless efficiency, striping Clint’s belly and pubic
hair and wet, flaccid cock with his spend.
Then he’d reached over for the towel, now much the worse for wear, found a
clean edge with which to wipe up the evidence of their passion, and laid down
beside Clint, pulling a sleeping bag over them both.
Clint had hesitated only a moment before burrowing into Phil’s side and falling
asleep while Phil kept watch, his gun in the hand not holding Clint against him
while he slept.
When Clint had inevitably dreamed, whimpered shouts trapped in his sleeping
mouth, Phil had soothed him awake with kisses and then listened while Clint had
told him all about it:  About the human trafficker they’d been hunting, whom
Clint had tracked to a restaurant on the ground floor of a three-story
building, apartments and offices on the floors above. 
Voice low and controlled, Clint talked about the boy he’d seen bundled in
through the alley door, his drugged state apparent from his slack mouth and
unfocused eyes.
About the men who’d followed shortly thereafter, big greasy men with huge hands
and ugly smirks, who’d passed money to the guard on the door and whose
impassive face met their filthy leers with indifference.
Clint had said he didn’t remember killing the guard at the door or the one
inside, didn’t remember climbing the stinking stairs to the second floor,
following the sounds of piteous cries.  Didn’t remember kicking the door open
or stepping inside, pinioning one man to the wall with an arrow through his
throat and pulling the other off the struggling boy.
He’d apparently taken his time with the boy’s rapist, but he didn’t remember
that, either.  It did explain the blood he’d been coated in, though.
Clint had remembered finding a robe and shoes for the boy and ushering him down
the stairs and out the side door, had remembered taking him to a nearby church
and leaving him with a wide-eyed pastor who had had the sense—or enough
experience—not to ask any questions.
The next thing he’d been able to recall clearly was the feel of Phil’s warm,
naked body against him, Phil’s strong and steady hand stroking the back of his
neck.
Phil hadn’t asked why this particular mission had worked its way so far under
Clint’s skin.  He’d read Clint’s medical reports, his psych evals when Clint
had been admitted to S.H.I.E.L.D.  He knew enough to know not to ask any
questions.  Instead, he’d pulled Clint on top of him and kissed him deeply and
considered their options for escape.
Ultimately, they’d ended up returning to the restaurant to shut down the
trafficking operation in a most permanent and fatal way, at which point Phil
had walked through the apartment above and retraced Clint’s actions from the
evidence, which the trafficker hadn’t yet had a chance to clear away.
Then he’d helped Clint drag the bodies to an old clawfoot tub, muscled them
inside, made the usual cocktail of cleaning solvents they’d found under a sink
in the restaurant’s kitchen, and dissolved the most immediate evidence of their
actions.
Acrid stench of melting flesh pungent on the cold air, they’d gone door to
door, knocking and then entering, finding only stripped fixtures and rat shit
for their troubles.  It had been apparent that their suspicions about the
building had been correct.  It had served only two purposes—as a front for the
trafficker’s activity and as an apartment to offer potential buyers a preview
of their purchase.
They had burned it to the ground, waiting until the fire trucks arrived before
shouldering their backpacks and leaving the area in a car Phil had boosted from
a long-term parking garage three blocks to the east.
Phil had lied by omission in his post-action reports, lied to Nick Fury’s face,
lied during the mandatory psych evaluation. 
Lied to Clint when Clint had asked, “Can things go back to the way they were
before?”
They never talked about it again, but here’s Clint now saying, “Kiev,” like
it’s the cipher that can break the code of almost six years of silence, and
Phil would be bitter about  how easy it is for Clint to get to him, that single
word bringing back every scent and sound, every taste of Clint’s skin, every
sensation of his hands and mouth and cock, everything, all of it, in details
that bely Phil’s assertion to himself since Kiev that it hadn’t mattered that
much, that it didn’t mean anything.
Would be bitter except for the sense that it’s all been inevitable, every
Christmas since.
“What do you want from me, Clint?” he asks, wishing he was wearing his suit,
not a towel and a blank expression meant to hide the treacherous hope making a
mockery of his control.
“I want to make love to you,” Clint answers, hastening on before Phil can
object in the fashion that Clint is clearly anticipating.  “I don’t have any
right to say that to you.  I gave up that right years ago.  I threw it
away—threw us away—like it didn’t matter.  But it did.  It does.  It matters,
Phil, and I’ve regretted it worse than anything I’ve ever done.  I know you
don’t owe me anything, and I won’t ask again if you say no this time, but I’ve
spent eight months wanting to put my mouth against your throat and feel your
pulse under my tongue, and I promised myself if I survived, I’d tell you that,
tell you what a fucking idiot I’ve been and how much I loved you—I’ve always
loved you—and beg you on my knees if that’s what it takes…”
Phil makes a sound that he’ll deny until his dying day and that brings Clint up
short.
“Don’t,” Phil says, though it doesn’t sound like him, voice weak and word
garbled.  He clears his throat and tries again, but it doesn’t sound any
better.
“Don’t what?” Clint asks, stepping closer, until he’s standing in the bracket
of Phil’s knees.  “Don’t tell you I love you?  Don’t ask forgiveness?”
“Don’t beg,” Phil says then, a whisper that carries, and Clint sinks to his
knees and tugs the towel apart at Phil’s waist and rests the weight of his palm
in the hair at the base of Phil’s quiescent cock.  The muscles of Phil’s
abdomen shiver under Clint’s touch, and he sucks in air so quickly that it
chokes him and he coughs until the tears come to the corners of his eyes and
spill over.
Clint brushes them away with the hand not pinning Phil in place.
“Can I?” he asks, and Phil is helpless to do anything but nod, words beyond him
now, heart too big for his chest, clogging up his throat and forcing him to
take shallow, short breaths.
When Clint wraps his hand around Phil’s cock and strokes slowly, eyes full of
love and promise and heat fixed to Phil’s, all Phil can do is let his head drop
back, baring his throat for Clint’s exploration.  Clint fulfills his desire,
sucking a love-mark into Phil’s neck, soothing it with his tongue as Phil’s
pulse speeds up.
Clint stops just as Phil feels the building pressure of climax drawing his
balls up, and he makes a wordless sound of protest as Clint steps away, only to
shed his clothes with remarkable efficiency and return, naked, to where Phil
sits, hard and ready and waiting. 
Clint straddles Phil’s lap, reaches over him to retrieve something from the
right-hand desk drawer.
Phil manages a breathy laugh, says, “You’re pretty sure of yourself, Barton,”
and knows there’s something he should be upset about and things he should be
asking about.  But Clint’s spreading his own legs, reaching between them to
prepare himself, eyelids fluttering as he fucks himself on his own fingers,
one, then two, then three, at last coating Phil’s cock before holding it steady
and sinking down by slow degrees, inch by inch, until his body has welcomed all
of Phil, impossibly tight and hot around him.
Clint shifts in Phil’s lap, rocks his hips, makes a startled sound of animal
pleasure, and then repeats the motion, head flung back as he rides Phil’s cock,
dragging it over the sweet spot inside of him.
“Fuck,” Phil breathes, looking up at Clint’s face, at the flush of red down his
neck and across his chest, at the way his abdominal muscles bunch and shift
when Clint fucks himself on Phil’s cock.
Then he can’t help but close his eyes as Clint speeds up, rocking harder and
faster, fingers slipping into Phil’s mouth so Phil can make them wet, tongue
swiping over the salty skin, Clint moaning at the sensation, motions growing
arrhythmic as he says, “Fuck, close—I’m close, Phil.”  Clint pulls his hand out
of Phil’s mouth to touch his own cock, and Phil puts a hand around Clint’s to
help him along.
With a cry, Clint comes, and at the first pulse of Clint’s hot seed against his
chest, Phil’s orgasm rips through him.
The air is sex-soaked when Phil takes in a deep, shuddering breath, cock
slipping from Clint’s body.  He seeks out Clint’s gaze and finds him looking
steadily back at him.
They remain like that for long minutes, and Phil sees on Clint’s face the toll
the past months have taken on him, sees the weight he’s lost and the ghosts
he’s gained. 
Sees an uncertainty lurking.  This, at least, Phil can ease.
“I love you,” he declares, not forgetting the complications of their
relationship or the cost of Clint’s eight-month odyssey that will have to be
paid by both of them for a long, long time to come.  Right now, though, Phil
can’t care about what’s been.  He has to know what is.
Clint’s smile breaks sudden and beautiful across his care-worn face. 
“I love you,” he answers, and there’s no hesitation, no regret, nothing but
love between them.  Then he laughs, a short, sharp bark of discovery.
“What?” Phil answers, mystified.
Clint nods at the floor around them.
They’re ringed in broken glass and spilled vodka, but somehow, impossibly,
neither of them have cut their naked feet.
“Merry Christmas,” someone says, Phil or Clint, or maybe both, and then they’re
kissing again, the slow, lingering, deep kiss of two people who suddenly and
unexpectedly have irrefutable proof that miracles can and do happen, even—or
maybe especially—to people like them.
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