hoosierbitch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hoosierbitch) wrote2013-06-13 12:59 pm
hoosierbitch) wrote2013-06-13 12:59 pm
Entry tags:
fic: past tense [dyslexia!verse, pg-13, clint/coulson, 1/2]
Title: Moving Into Past Tense
Fandom: Avengers
Series: Dyslexia!Verse (found via LJ tag here, or on AO3 here).
Rating: PG-13
Content Advisory: Depression, loss of a loved one, and a character with a learning disability.
Thanks: When![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ivorysilk takes over the world, I am first in line to be her minion. She beta'd, cheerleaded (whatever, that's a word now), and bullied, which is the only reason this got done. Thanks, bb.
Notes: THIS STORY WILL HAVE A HAPPY ENDING! #coulsonlives, y'all. Just not until the next chapter. (I never write unhappy endings. Just complicated ones sometimes.)
Summary: Loki’s gone and New York is as safe as it ever was. The city’s damaged, but it’s still here. They all are. The Avengers, capital letters so big that even Clint can hear them. The Avengers, and Phil The Avenged, who’s dead.
*
There is a war.
Clint finds himself a soldier again, killing faster than he can count, losing arrows in a dizzy storm of weak spots and patterns and hope.
Against all odds, they win. (Clint knows this only because other people tell him so. From his vantage point, it doesn’t look that way.)
Natasha says it is a hollow victory, which is a new phrase for Clint’s growing vocabulary. Clint likes it, likes those words together. He thinks he almost understands it because he feels hollow but Captain America comes up to him after the dust has settled, claps him on the shoulder, and says Good job.
Phil’s gonna be so jealous.
*
Natasha pulls him aside after Shwarma, when he’s examining the hairline fractures in his bow that match the line of bone-deep bruises and cracked ribs running along his back where he landed on it, and says, “The new red in my ledger is Phil.”
Clint reads better in colors than in black. It’s something about the font, the shapes and colors, something about his eyes and habits. Clint likes Times New Roman, Calibri, and Helvetica. Phil had forbidden Comic Sans with a ferocity that Clint doesn’t quite understand; Clint types his reports in Wingdings whenever he’s feeling perverse. Phil did something to Clint’s kindle so that the letters would show up in medium blues, dark greens, purple. Bruise colors.
Natasha’s still looking at him.
His cracked ribs hurt. He hasn’t slept or eaten in days.
Phil is red now.
Loki’s gone and New York is as safe as it ever was. The city’s damaged, but it’s still here. They all are. The Avengers, capital letters so big that even Clint can hear them. The Avengers and Phil, The Avenged, who’s dead.
*
Clint finds himself at a loss for words in the days that follow Loki’s fall. The people around him talk about recouping their losses, about moving forward and making repairs. Clint doesn’t understand how they can talk about anything other than the hole in the world where Phil used to be.
*
There is a memorial ceremony that Clint attends from a block away. He watches it through a scope, listening device tucked behind his ear and a small receiver targeted at the podium. Phil understands that Clint sees best from far away—or, no. Breathe. Erase. Rewrite. Understood, past tense: Phil had understood.
Clint’s a block away because he sees best from there and also, also because he’s a coward, and Phil had understood (past tense) that too.
*
Natasha takes care of him, which Clint allows, because Natasha feels strong when she can take care of the people around her. Clint needs taking care of. He knows this. He needs someone to be with him as he waits through the remnants of his concussion, to watch for signs of Loki’s control returning. He needs someone to tell him to eat and wake up and take his painkillers. (He’s just not used to that someone not being Phil.)
He does tell Natasha—when they reach the bottom of another bottle of vodka at the end of one more in a string of bad days—that if she needs him to help her, he will. He might not be able to do much, but she’s as familiar with his limitations as he is. Maybe more so. She knows what he has to offer. (It's been a while since he'd offered himself to anyone other than Phil.)
She leaves and takes the bottle of vodka with her. He wishes she had stayed. It is very quiet now. The halls of the Hellicarrier are emptier these days. They echo). He thinks it was worth it to make sure—to make sure, because there shouldn’t be ambiguity about things like caring for your friends—that she knows that he is here.
Clint’s still here.
He eats and drinks and sleeps and time moves forward.
*
“We should go to New Mexico,” he says to Natasha. They’re sitting on the rubble of what had once been the US Bank headquarters. Between the Hulk-sized dents and the places where the Chitauri ships had crashed, the walls look pockmarked. Reconstruction hasn’t started on this particular building yet, which is why they picked it as their place to watch today’s sunrise. Scaffolding clings to the buildings on the opposite side of the street like cobwebs.
“Why New Mexico?” she asks.
“All my shit’s there.” He’d been stationed in New Mexico for months, watching Selvig flirt with a sentient singularity. Clint had been bored out of his mind, but he hadn’t complained. Phil had been there too. They used to eat lunch together on Clint’s favorite catwalk. One time Phil had shot spitballs at Selvig and blamed it on Clint.
Clint’s getting better at past tense.
“It burned,” Natasha says. “Swallowed into the ground. Nothing’s left.”
His fingers dig into shards and twisted metal; all of a sudden it feels like the earth is shaking apart again. “Right. I forgot.” He had been lost in blue the first time he helped Loki destroy his world but vaguely he remembers Loki wrapping around his heart, shooting Fury, watching the earth dissolve and feeling—
“We can get you new stuff,” she says.
In New Mexico, Clint lost one suitcase worth of clothing; his second-favorite pair of boots; one crossbow, one recurve, two sniper rifles, four pistols, and a set of throwing knives; a photo of him and Phil that Natasha had framed for them; Trick Shot’s book and all the things that its pages had protected.
Clint had been thinking of going to New Mexico to get his book and bows, but when Natasha touches him on the shoulder (gently, like Phil had done when Clint was still learning that Phil wasn’t going to hurt him), he realizes that he would have been going back for Phil. Phil and his briefcase and his laptop and his set of cooking knives and his bonsai and his seven favorite suits and too many ties to count. Phil Coulson, whose name Clint no longer needs to spell.
*
Sometimes he sleeps with Natasha, the two of them curled together like bent spoons in a drawer full of empty vodka bottles.
Sometimes he sleeps alone and tries to remember what he’s supposed to do with his elbows now that Phil’s not here to cradle them.
*
Four weeks after the invasion (which is what they’re calling it, even though Clint thinks they should call it a war), Fury summons Clint and Natasha into his office.
Fury’s stubble has grey in it now. For the sake of his own sanity, Clint wants to ask him to dye it. Too many things have changed.
“I’m sending you out,” Fury says. He doesn’t ask them if they’re ready, doesn’t ask them how they’ve been doing, doesn’t say anything at all about Phil. (He’d spoken at Phil’s memorial service and said everything he needed to then.) Natasha looks over at Clint, who nods.
She tells Fury they’ll take the job.
Hill meets them in weapon’s storage. “I’m your handler for this one,” she says, looking at the floor.
“Good,” says Natasha simply. Hill looks surprised. Clint doesn’t know why. Phil’s dead and they have to move on.
“We trust you,” he says, when Hill doesn’t respond.
She says, “Thanks,” and goes to get a new set of throwing knives for him. Natasha slides over next to him and rests her forehead on his shoulder. He can feel her body against his; it’s strange how unfamiliar intimacy already feels. She takes one shaky breath and lets it out.
He wants to tell her, again, “Phil’s dead,” because sometimes it feels like she’s the only one who understands that it’s not just a fact, it’s a cognitive impossibility. There’s a hole in the world, a part of Clint that lives in both past and present tense.
*
Natasha gets shot in the leg in Bangladesh and they both get fucked up on her painkillers. Hill sighs and locks them in their hotel room, promising to keep guard in the hallway. Clint knows he should feel worried about the fact that someone other than Natasha or Phil is watching his back, but he feels strangely untouchable these days.
The painkillers help.
He kisses Natasha and she kisses back. It doesn’t feel like they hoped it would—desperate or familiar or comforting—so instead they take turns throwing her knives and his arrows at an ugly painting hanging on the wall. When Natasha suggests that they shoot it with something else, he puts her gun on his side of the bed and wraps himself around her until she falls asleep. Natasha’s not a soldier. Assassin, killer, warrior: yes. But going up against hordes of enemies that she didn’t know, killing them indiscriminately, had taken a toll on her. War was one thing the Red Room hadn’t trained her for.
They won, he reminds himself. War, invasion, battle, whatever the newspapers call it. They won.
*
No one says Phil's name anymore.
*
Feedback is appreciated!
Fandom: Avengers
Series: Dyslexia!Verse (found via LJ tag here, or on AO3 here).
Rating: PG-13
Content Advisory: Depression, loss of a loved one, and a character with a learning disability.
Thanks: When
ivorysilk takes over the world, I am first in line to be her minion. She beta'd, cheerleaded (whatever, that's a word now), and bullied, which is the only reason this got done. Thanks, bb.Notes: THIS STORY WILL HAVE A HAPPY ENDING! #coulsonlives, y'all. Just not until the next chapter. (I never write unhappy endings. Just complicated ones sometimes.)
Summary: Loki’s gone and New York is as safe as it ever was. The city’s damaged, but it’s still here. They all are. The Avengers, capital letters so big that even Clint can hear them. The Avengers, and Phil The Avenged, who’s dead.
There is a war.
Clint finds himself a soldier again, killing faster than he can count, losing arrows in a dizzy storm of weak spots and patterns and hope.
Against all odds, they win. (Clint knows this only because other people tell him so. From his vantage point, it doesn’t look that way.)
Natasha says it is a hollow victory, which is a new phrase for Clint’s growing vocabulary. Clint likes it, likes those words together. He thinks he almost understands it because he feels hollow but Captain America comes up to him after the dust has settled, claps him on the shoulder, and says Good job.
Phil’s gonna be so jealous.
Natasha pulls him aside after Shwarma, when he’s examining the hairline fractures in his bow that match the line of bone-deep bruises and cracked ribs running along his back where he landed on it, and says, “The new red in my ledger is Phil.”
Clint reads better in colors than in black. It’s something about the font, the shapes and colors, something about his eyes and habits. Clint likes Times New Roman, Calibri, and Helvetica. Phil had forbidden Comic Sans with a ferocity that Clint doesn’t quite understand; Clint types his reports in Wingdings whenever he’s feeling perverse. Phil did something to Clint’s kindle so that the letters would show up in medium blues, dark greens, purple. Bruise colors.
Natasha’s still looking at him.
His cracked ribs hurt. He hasn’t slept or eaten in days.
Phil is red now.
Loki’s gone and New York is as safe as it ever was. The city’s damaged, but it’s still here. They all are. The Avengers, capital letters so big that even Clint can hear them. The Avengers and Phil, The Avenged, who’s dead.
Clint finds himself at a loss for words in the days that follow Loki’s fall. The people around him talk about recouping their losses, about moving forward and making repairs. Clint doesn’t understand how they can talk about anything other than the hole in the world where Phil used to be.
There is a memorial ceremony that Clint attends from a block away. He watches it through a scope, listening device tucked behind his ear and a small receiver targeted at the podium. Phil understands that Clint sees best from far away—or, no. Breathe. Erase. Rewrite. Understood, past tense: Phil had understood.
Clint’s a block away because he sees best from there and also, also because he’s a coward, and Phil had understood (past tense) that too.
Natasha takes care of him, which Clint allows, because Natasha feels strong when she can take care of the people around her. Clint needs taking care of. He knows this. He needs someone to be with him as he waits through the remnants of his concussion, to watch for signs of Loki’s control returning. He needs someone to tell him to eat and wake up and take his painkillers. (He’s just not used to that someone not being Phil.)
He does tell Natasha—when they reach the bottom of another bottle of vodka at the end of one more in a string of bad days—that if she needs him to help her, he will. He might not be able to do much, but she’s as familiar with his limitations as he is. Maybe more so. She knows what he has to offer. (It's been a while since he'd offered himself to anyone other than Phil.)
She leaves and takes the bottle of vodka with her. He wishes she had stayed. It is very quiet now. The halls of the Hellicarrier are emptier these days. They echo). He thinks it was worth it to make sure—to make sure, because there shouldn’t be ambiguity about things like caring for your friends—that she knows that he is here.
Clint’s still here.
He eats and drinks and sleeps and time moves forward.
“We should go to New Mexico,” he says to Natasha. They’re sitting on the rubble of what had once been the US Bank headquarters. Between the Hulk-sized dents and the places where the Chitauri ships had crashed, the walls look pockmarked. Reconstruction hasn’t started on this particular building yet, which is why they picked it as their place to watch today’s sunrise. Scaffolding clings to the buildings on the opposite side of the street like cobwebs.
“Why New Mexico?” she asks.
“All my shit’s there.” He’d been stationed in New Mexico for months, watching Selvig flirt with a sentient singularity. Clint had been bored out of his mind, but he hadn’t complained. Phil had been there too. They used to eat lunch together on Clint’s favorite catwalk. One time Phil had shot spitballs at Selvig and blamed it on Clint.
Clint’s getting better at past tense.
“It burned,” Natasha says. “Swallowed into the ground. Nothing’s left.”
His fingers dig into shards and twisted metal; all of a sudden it feels like the earth is shaking apart again. “Right. I forgot.” He had been lost in blue the first time he helped Loki destroy his world but vaguely he remembers Loki wrapping around his heart, shooting Fury, watching the earth dissolve and feeling—
“We can get you new stuff,” she says.
In New Mexico, Clint lost one suitcase worth of clothing; his second-favorite pair of boots; one crossbow, one recurve, two sniper rifles, four pistols, and a set of throwing knives; a photo of him and Phil that Natasha had framed for them; Trick Shot’s book and all the things that its pages had protected.
Clint had been thinking of going to New Mexico to get his book and bows, but when Natasha touches him on the shoulder (gently, like Phil had done when Clint was still learning that Phil wasn’t going to hurt him), he realizes that he would have been going back for Phil. Phil and his briefcase and his laptop and his set of cooking knives and his bonsai and his seven favorite suits and too many ties to count. Phil Coulson, whose name Clint no longer needs to spell.
Sometimes he sleeps with Natasha, the two of them curled together like bent spoons in a drawer full of empty vodka bottles.
Sometimes he sleeps alone and tries to remember what he’s supposed to do with his elbows now that Phil’s not here to cradle them.
Four weeks after the invasion (which is what they’re calling it, even though Clint thinks they should call it a war), Fury summons Clint and Natasha into his office.
Fury’s stubble has grey in it now. For the sake of his own sanity, Clint wants to ask him to dye it. Too many things have changed.
“I’m sending you out,” Fury says. He doesn’t ask them if they’re ready, doesn’t ask them how they’ve been doing, doesn’t say anything at all about Phil. (He’d spoken at Phil’s memorial service and said everything he needed to then.) Natasha looks over at Clint, who nods.
She tells Fury they’ll take the job.
Hill meets them in weapon’s storage. “I’m your handler for this one,” she says, looking at the floor.
“Good,” says Natasha simply. Hill looks surprised. Clint doesn’t know why. Phil’s dead and they have to move on.
“We trust you,” he says, when Hill doesn’t respond.
She says, “Thanks,” and goes to get a new set of throwing knives for him. Natasha slides over next to him and rests her forehead on his shoulder. He can feel her body against his; it’s strange how unfamiliar intimacy already feels. She takes one shaky breath and lets it out.
He wants to tell her, again, “Phil’s dead,” because sometimes it feels like she’s the only one who understands that it’s not just a fact, it’s a cognitive impossibility. There’s a hole in the world, a part of Clint that lives in both past and present tense.
Natasha gets shot in the leg in Bangladesh and they both get fucked up on her painkillers. Hill sighs and locks them in their hotel room, promising to keep guard in the hallway. Clint knows he should feel worried about the fact that someone other than Natasha or Phil is watching his back, but he feels strangely untouchable these days.
The painkillers help.
He kisses Natasha and she kisses back. It doesn’t feel like they hoped it would—desperate or familiar or comforting—so instead they take turns throwing her knives and his arrows at an ugly painting hanging on the wall. When Natasha suggests that they shoot it with something else, he puts her gun on his side of the bed and wraps himself around her until she falls asleep. Natasha’s not a soldier. Assassin, killer, warrior: yes. But going up against hordes of enemies that she didn’t know, killing them indiscriminately, had taken a toll on her. War was one thing the Red Room hadn’t trained her for.
They won, he reminds himself. War, invasion, battle, whatever the newspapers call it. They won.
No one says Phil's name anymore.
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