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Title: Tell Me What I Want
Fandom: Avengers
Pairings/characters: Clint-centric, Natasha, Coulson, Clint/OCs, Clint/Coulson
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 5396
Summary: 4200 words of Clint figuring out his kinks, followed by 1100 words of it all getting fucked up by Loki
Author notes: Explaining and content-noting this story is making my head hurt, because it's about kink but not really in a sexual way, and although stuff happens, it's not really explicit and the story's about how it feels, not how it is. Plus, the pairings aren't romantic in-love pairings, they're affection and connection.
With that in mind, this contains: various forms of impact play, knife play, a number of attempts at impact play that don't work, and a brief description of a dissociative episode around being spanked, including reference to childhood spanking that Clint sees as normal discipline, not child abuse.
Tell Me What I Want
"I want you to hit me," Clint says, and it feels like the most dangerous thing he's ever said. He's been with SHIELD for over a year, he's probably the safest he's been in his life, and he's still not sure he's safe enough for this.
The man, Ben – fifteen years older than Clint, tall and dark and calm in a way that reminds Clint of Director Fury – smiles down at Clint and nudges his hard dick against Clint's thigh. "Hit you how?"
Clint shifted as much as he could, held down by Ben's weight on the small hotel bed. He makes himself hold Ben's eyes. "With your hand. To, um, spank me."
He's not worried that Ben isn't into it – SHIELD taught Clint how to read people – but maybe a little that Ben won't be into it with him. He's got no idea what makes someone into the kind of person someone else wants to spank. He just knows that he wants to try it.
Ben asks, "You got a safeword?" and Clint says, "Am I going to need one?" like it doesn't matter at all one way or the other. It does.
Ben looks at him for a long moment, then shrugs. "Stop when you say stop." He waits a beat. "Turn over."
Clint does, folding his arms under his head and closing his eyes. His erection's mostly gone – even that little talking is enough to wreck the mood for him – and his skin feels bright and crisp, like if he opened his eyes he'd see it giving off some kind of glow in the dim room. He feels Ben move, the bed dipping as he settles, followed by a hand on his ass, feeling him up, or feeling him out. "Okay," Ben says.
Ben's hand on Clint is a sharp flash of pain that makes him groan. It's what he wanted, what he was hoping it would feel like, and the next hit is better. He's going to have a mark, the shape of Ben's hand on his skin.
The next strike lands a little lower, where his ass turns into his thigh, and it feels different, off in a way that makes Clint's breath catch and stutter and –
And the world cracks, tilts, goes sideways. He's five years old, his father's hand on his arm, holding him still as he spanks Clint for – for something, for talking back or not eating his dinner, he doesn't know, but it hurts and Clint sobs, reaching for his mom.
"Stop," he says. "Stop, please." He's standing in the kitchen of his childhood home and he's on the bed in a hotel room and the hand on his skin is Ben's, he knows because his dad never hit bare skin, but he's a child too, afraid and in pain and he doesn't know where up is any more.
Careful hands touch him, urge him onto his side. Clint keeps his eyes closed, draws his knees up and makes himself small and protected. The hand on his arm feels good, feels better when it shifts to the back of his neck and strokes down his spine. He curls into himself and shivers, caught between where he is and where he was until the world slowly rights itself.
"You still there?" Ben asks, his voice soft.
Clint nods, still not ready to open his eyes. "Yeah." His voice is rough, and his eyes are sore in a way that probably means he was crying. Fuck, he hates crying.
"You, um –" Ben sounds a little uncertain, but not so much that Clint thinks this is going to be painful or any more difficult than he already made it. "I'm not going to ask where you went, unless you want to tell me."
Clint shakes his head. Plenty of the kids he grew up with got slapped when they misbehaved, it's not a big deal. He has no idea why he went back there, or why he freaked out so badly.
"I am going to take a guess that this was the first time someone did that to you."
"Yeah." Clint should really be an adult and open his eyes. He's not actually sure he can. Not without bolting for the door, which would be a problem, since he's naked and in his own hotel room.
"And you didn't expect for that to happen." Clint nods again. "Why did you want to try it?"
"I thought it would feel good." It's hardly an answer at all, but Clint doesn't want to talk about this, not to anyone and especially not to a near-stranger who just saw him have some kind of dissociative episode. He doesn't even know if he can put words to how he expected being hit to be so much more than the way he'd felt when people he was sleeping with bit him, hard enough to leave marks, or scratched deep enough to draw blood, like everything in his head shut down and there was nothing else left. Like it was okay to just stop for a while.
Ben sighs. "Then can I make a suggestion that, next time, you at least warn your partner that you're still experimenting."
Clint risks opening his eyes, though he looks at Ben's throat instead of his face. "Sorry."
Ben cups his cheek, drops a kiss to his forehead. Clint would say that it makes him feel five years old, except he just did that, and this isn't the same. It's kind of nice. "Call me if you're in town again, once you've figured out what you like."
Clint doesn't say anything as Ben dresses and leaves, but he does take Ben's card with him when he packs the next morning.
*
If being spanked messed with his head – and maybe it won't happen like that again, but Clint's not willing to risk it. He tries hard not to think about his family, and he's not going to change that – then he figures someone using a belt on him will probably be the same.
He tries it, once, in his tiny New York apartment, wrapping an old leather belt around his hand and swinging it against his leg. It stings, hurts, but it's not right. He sighs, tosses the belt to the floor and falls back to stare at the ceiling, not sure if he's disappointed or relieved.
*
In Chicago, they wrap up the mission two days early, which is annoying, because they have to wait for some CIA guy to get into town for the debrief, and he won't make it until the scheduled end date.
"Enjoy the down time," Senior Agent Hill says, looking almost pleased. Clint doesn't roll his eyes – everyone knows she'll be making Deputy Director in the next five years, and Clint mouths off to her about as much as he does to Fury, which is to say not at all because he values his life. "I don't want to be stuck here any more than you do."
Clint doubts that very much. She's only along because of the CIA angle, and she doesn't get out of the office enough to be this jaded about it. "Yes, ma'am," he says anyway, and waits until the light under her door goes out before slipping through the dark hotel corridors and onto the street.
The club's easy enough to find, and SHIELD training comes in oddly useful for blending into a BDSM club when you've never been in one before.
Clint only means to watch – he figures Ben maybe had a point about working out what he wants before messing around with another person – but a woman finds him while he's sipping a glass of soda water. She's tall and so pale her skin almost glows. She's got blonde hair piled carefully in the back of her neck, she's wearing a black corset and a long black skirt, and her body's soft and full and curved.
Clint kind of wants to – he doesn't even know, curl up at her feet and purr or promise to do her bidding, something like that – especially when she smiles and leans in close and asks, "Are you here alone?"
"Yeah," he says, swallowing the ma'am that feels like it should naturally follow.
"And are you here to watch, or to take part?" She sounds like Natasha, when Natasha's over-playing at being seductive to make the agents they're with laugh, except she probably means it.
Clint shrugs, and she hmm's, low in her throat.
"I'm here to use this," she says, and shows him a thin cane, made of dark wood so it was easy to miss against her dark skirt in the dark club. "I've not yet found the right person to use it on."
It's a clear invitation, and maybe Clint's stupid, but he says yes anyway.
*
She says that her name is Eve, which Clint doubts a lot though he couldn't say why, and that she likes an audience, which Clint doesn't doubt at all. He's a little less certain about doing this in front of strangers, a whisper in the back of his head pointing out how much worse it will be if the same thing happened as with Ben, but he's experimenting, and this is not more frightening than following Natasha into SHIELD.
If the strike of Ben's hand against Clint's skin was good, then the bite of Eve's cane, even through his pants, is perfect, white hot and sharp in a way that makes him cry out as she burns lines of fire into the backs of his thighs and the muscles of his back. Every hit is like a nudge deeper into the place he balances on the edge of when someone scratches him, bites hard enough to bruise, and when he closes his eyes he can almost see it, just waiting for him to fall in.
It's like a tightrope, up high and teetering, sure that he's going to drop. Except – except that the anticipation, waiting for the next strike, waiting to know where it will land, unable to hear the whistle of the cane through air amongst the ambient club noise, is a hand on his arm, a safety rope holding him in place, a grip that he can't break, no matter how he tries, one that won't let him fall.
It still feels breathlessly good, and when he finally steps away, he's damp with sweat, his legs barely holding him up.
She kisses him on the mouth and runs a gentle hand through his hair. "That was lovely," she says, and it sounds like goodbye. Like whatever she was looking for, she didn't quite find it with him.
Clint knows how she feels.
*
The CIA liaison is called Agent Coulson, and he and Hill are apparently old friends from somewhere they don't tell Clint about. Coulson is deadpan and serious, and he looks at Clint just a little too long and knowing when Clint shifts, the seam of his shirt rubbing at a particularly raw patch of skin.
Clint really hopes Coulson won't be sticking around.
He's completely unsurprised when Coulson turns up wearing a SHIELD ID badge three weeks later. At least, being mainly sent out on international missions, Clint doesn't have to see much of him.
*
Between Ben and Eve, Clint's determined to figure out what the hell's going to work for him. He tries paddles (he can't help it, he starts laughing when the guy he's with brings out something that looks like it could double as sports equipment. He knows it's rude, apologizes with his mouth on the guy's dick until his knees and jaw awake).
He tries being slapped (too close to his day job to be a turn on, which is fucking frustrating, since the woman slapping him has long nails that catch against his skin when she hits him and feel amazing).
He tries whips, which are too close to the unfocused anticipation of canes, and spanking again, because maybe the first time was a fluke (it wasn't), and being tied down because what the hell, maybe that'll be it (it's not, and he can't even manage to be disappointed).
It's all so close, but none of it's right and it makes Clint want to scream. It should not be too much to ask of his brain and body that they figure out how to be hurt during sex and feel good with it.
*
It happens one night when he's lying in his apartment, staring at the ceiling and wishing he could sleep, trying to shut his mind off from an op that went all to hell, even if he did still achieve the objective.
Maybe that's what makes him reach for the knife he keeps in the nightstand, or maybe it's the video he watched a few nights ago, giving him ideas.
He turns the blade so the faint street light glances off it. This is probably a bad idea.
When he drags the knife from the inside of his knee cap to high up his thigh, he decides he doesn't care. He doesn't press hard enough to draw blood – it's not about that – just hard enough to feel it, hard enough to leave a mark that will fade in a few days.
He moans, loud enough to be glad he's alone, and when he draws a second line, parallel to the first, the moan turns into a sigh. Even on his own, even unable to totally turn his brain off when he's the one doing it, the pain feels so good.
He curls in on himself after, feeling washed out and shivery, and turns the night's revelation over in his mind. Apparently, he spent years following the wrong angle off what he knew worked, too focused on the pain to realize it was the closeness just as much that works for him. The pain as well, but not from being hit, the way he'd figured; sharp, from something up close, even more so than being spanked, and now he knows, he feels a little dumb for not figuring it out sooner. Biting and scratching made a kind of sense as a lead in to hitting, but not so much that he shouldn't have figured out his own brain.
Not that he's ever been much good at seeing things in himself - too close in to see everything he needs.
Which means that, if doing it to himself felt good, having someone else do it, being able to switch off and not think about the how and where and when, will be even better.
*
In the end, he calls Ben, who has no idea who Clint is until Clint brings up what was arguably his most humiliating moment in bed with anyone.
"You fix that?" Ben asks, voice laughing.
Clint shrugs, even though Ben can't see him, hundreds of miles away from Clint's apartment, and also on the other end of the personal cell that SHIELD doesn't monitor. "Kind of. I mean, I figured out what I want. Um."
There's a long pause, and then Ben says, "Are you going to tell me? I assume that's why you called."
"I, um..." Clint may have neglected to figure out this part of the conversation. "I tried it on myself – I used a knife. Not enough to draw blood."
"Huh," Ben says. "Not what I was expecting."
"Me either."
"That's not something I'm into," Ben says, before Clint can work up to asking. He sounds mostly apologetic, and not like he thinks Clint's a freak for liking it or anything. "Assuming that's where this conversation was very slowly going."
"Kind of." Clint taps his fingers against the seam of his jeans, all out of things to say, and not at all sure what he was thinking when he made this call.
"Can I give you some advice?" Ben asks. Clint makes an assenting noise and braces himself for whatever's coming. "You seem like you're still figuring out this side of yourself. It might help to spend some time with other kinky people – have someone to talk to, be part of a community, all that stuff."
Clint tries to imagine the conversation that would follow him getting involved with New York's kinky community beyond occasionally picking someone up in a bar. It's not that he thinks SHIELD would object, exactly – for a top-secret quasi-military intelligence agency, they're pretty open-minded – but there's no question that they'd find out, and Clint really isn't ready to discuss his sexual preferences with anyone in his chain of command.
"Thanks," he says anyway. "I'll think about it."
*
He thinks about it, and doesn't come up with a good solution. This isn't something he wants to do at a club, in front of people, and he spends enough time at his day job to know that bringing home a near-stranger and handing them a knife is a bad idea.
"You could try a non-stranger," Natasha suggests, when Clint caves under the weight of his own not-even-entirely-sexual frustration and tells her.
"I don't date," Clint says flatly. He spins his coffee mug between his palms and avoids meeting Natasha's eye across his kitchen table.
"Then you're screwed," Natasha says. Clint looks up just enough to glare at her, and finds her grinning sweetly back at him. "Or not, as the case may be."
Clint drops his head into his hands and groans. Just his luck that he finally figures himself out and, instead of getting what he wants, he's going to be stuck trying to make it work on his own for the rest of his life.
*
And then he gets caught.
It's partly his own fault, for pushing further than he should have and leaving a too visible mark high on his shoulder, and partly Agent Jackson's fault, for getting food poisoning right before a mission with Coulson so that Clint gets tagged in his place.
Mainly, though, it's the fault of the militia leader that Clint's there to shoot, for having a guard where none should have been, and the fault of the guard, for shooting Clint twice before Clint, who hadn't heard him coming (fucking ambient jungle noise making it hard for him to pick out sounds that shouldn't be there), can shoot him back and pass out from blood loss.
After all that, he's not particularly surprised to wake up in medical. He's a little more surprised that, after the medical staff are done with him, Coulson shows up. In the past, his mission leaders have given it twelve hours before hassling him for a debrief, but maybe Coulson's different.
"You have three parallel cuts on your shoulder," Coulson says, once he's done with the pleasantries.
Okay, apparently Coulson's more than different.
"Also a bullet wound in my thigh and a second one to my shooting arm," Clint says, and doesn't point out that he still managed to shoot both the bodyguard and the militia leader with said bullet wound. Yes, he really is that good.
"These cuts didn't come from the fight." Coulson steps a little closer, making sure the curtain surrounding Clint's bed is properly closed. Clint fights the urge to sigh. He's really not up for the lecture on whatever part of this Coulson's going to fixate on. Clint doesn't know him well, but he knows that Coulson likes rules.
"And they're not the first unexplained knife wounds you've shown up with."
"Not really sure where you're going with this, sir," Clint says in his best mild and confused tone. It hasn't worked on his field commanders in years, but Coulson's never heard it before.
"Those are deliberately inflicted, and your psych evals don't suggest that you'd be doing this as a form of self-harm." Coulson steps closer, close enough that Clint could touch. He doesn't, but he doesn't look away either. There's no way that Coulson – ex-CIA, always wears a suit and tie Coulson – is going where it sounds like he is. "So my question, Agent Barton, is: wouldn't it be a lot easier to get what you need if someone else was giving it to you?"
Clint stares, can't help himself. Coulson's propositioning him, in the middle of SHIELD medical. Clint's honestly not sure if it's funny or hot. He gets a brief flash of the one time he saw Coulson with a knife in his hand, how natural he looked.
"How do you know someone isn't already?" he asks.
"Angle of the cuts. Self-inflicted. And personnel hasn't reported any new people in your life lately."
"For the record, the amount of checking into me you've done makes this a little creepy. Just in case you weren't aware."
Coulson cracks a small smile. "But hopefully less strange than asking if you were self-harming."
It is, but Clint's not entirely sure that helps. On the other hand, he works in an agency full of the sneakiest people he's ever known, people who don't really believe in the concept of private information and think that locks are just there to provide a challenge. Hell, he's one of them.
"You want to do this with me," Clint says, not making it a question. "You're not – I mean, I'd trust you to use a blade on me, but I don't want to date or something. No offence."
"None taken." Coulson doesn't roll his eyes, but it looks like a near thing. "Think about it. We can talk more when you're out of medical." He nods, turns on his heel and leaves.
Clint stares up at the ceiling for a while, trying to figure out what happens next. The best he can manage is a slightly stunned, "Huh."
*
In the end, he figures he might as well give it a go. Coulson's not exactly a troll, and while Clint's never really looked at him as a potential... fuck buddy, or whatever they're going to be; Clint's not even entirely sure they'll actually have sex... now that he's thinking about it, it doesn't seem as out there as it would have before Coulson offered.
It's not like he knew any of the other people he let hit him any better than he knows Coulson, and both being SHIELD confers a level of trust he can't have with anyone outside. Worst case scenario, they don't click at all, and go back to being near strangers.
They don't even get close to the worst case scenario.
There's more pre-planning than Clint's entirely on board with, and he says, "Not like that, more like –" a lot for the first few minutes, but then. Then it's like he imagined, only more and better and Coulson was right, having someone else do it is so much better than doing it to himself.
Much later, when Clint's mostly back in his own head again, Coulson offers him another glass of water (seriously, the man has some sort of obsession) and says, "I think we can call that a success."
Clint feels a little giddy every time he touches the pink lines on his thighs and chest. "Yeah," he says, the word coming out slightly breathless. "That's one word for it."
*
They're not dating, and half the time they don't even sleep together, but they get to be friends, get to know each other beyond Phil pressing a knife to Clint's skin, and even with the way the insanity at SHIELD is ramping up, it's good.
For the better part of a year, Clint has what he wanted, a way to make his brain switch off, a way for his body to feel like something more than a soldier and an archer and a SHIELD agent.
And then Loki happens.
*
Clint holds it together through the battle, and food after. Through medical and psych assessments, through damage assessments on the Helicarrier, through who's dead and who's alive and who's injured out of SHIELD (and who's alive who isn't supposed to be).
He keeps it together through agents' funerals, through hours long debriefs, through what-do-we-do-with-Loki and what-do-we-do-with-that-army-you-recruited-Agent-Barton. Through news broadcasts and which bits of New York are still standing and the Avengers and a couple of missions for SHIELD.
He works his way through the insurance claim, and boxing up his meagre belongings because his apartment (tiny but his, his safe space where no-one came that he didn't want there) is still standing amongst a maze of scaffolding, but scheduled for demolition and no longer safe for habitation.
He survives all of it, because what choice does he have but to keep putting one foot in front of the other, waiting for whatever happens next, waiting for the moment when something happens to make it feel better, make it so he doesn't sleep every second he can and still feel exhausted, or lie awake, so alert he can feel individual air molecules over his skin.
What he gets is Phil tracking him down on the range at SHIELD HQ a little after midnight, medical clearance papers in hand, no evidence that he was stabbed by a god and nearly died.
What he gets is Phil asking, "Want to come back to my place?" and a wash of relief that maybe this is the thing that will make it start to feel better, so strong that the world goes a little fuzzy at the edges and his, "Yeah," comes out breathy.
*
Clint lies in the middle of Phil's bed, naked but for his boxers, and closes his eyes, breathing in the familiar scent of cotton sheets and furniture polish. He feels the bed dip and Phil's hand, warm and high on his shoulder, a warning before the tip of the knife presses there, cold and sharp.
Clint gasps – it's been so long, too long, he's started to forget how this feels, how good it is – and forces his muscles still when Phil drags the length of the blade round his shoulder blade, down the curve of his back, twisting just a little as it passes over his hipbone.
He breathes deep and steady, the way he does when he's lining up a tough shot, and when the knife presses against his skin again, he sighs, a ball of tension at the top of his spine rolling away. He loses time in the strokes of the knife, the flares of pain and the neat lines he'll twist to see in the mirror the next day. He knows what's coming next, drops his head a little more to feel ease and peace wash over him, the world drifting away, exactly how he's wanted since he looked up and saw Natasha looming over him, enemy, fight, passing too slowly from his brain.
He drops down, just a little into what should be a warm, fuzzy place. Instead, it's ice cold, washed blue and red and the complete security of being led by somehow who was perfect and would never let it hurt.
Clint's whole body jerks rigid, the too-sharp pain in his left hip meaningless as he gasps, "Stop, stop, please don't," and there's a word, there's a word he's supposed to use for this but he can't remember it. He can't remember, but Phil has a knife, sharp like the sceptre and Clint has to get, "Away, let me go, let me –"
He flings himself back and sideways, hits the floor too hard and drags himself, instinct more than anything, into the corner of the room, tucked up where he's hard to get at, where he can't be – where Phil won't, Loki won't...
Hurt him.
"Clint," Phil says softly.
Clint sees him, sitting against the wall, close enough to touch, hands folded in his lap, like he's not shirtless in his bedroom with a freaked out guy mostly naked in the corner. Clint drops his head onto his folded arms, too tired to do anything else.
"Do you know where you are?"
Clint nods, shaking. Even with his eyes closed, the world is edged in blue.
"Are you – do you want to talk?"
Clint shakes his head. He doesn't want to say anything, afraid that the sob caught in his throat will come out if he does. He wishes Phil would go away, leave him alone with his misery and exhaustion. Except Phil touches his bare shoulder, right over the first knife mark, soft and careful, and Clint says, "He ruined it," without meaning to, unable to stop the way his voice shakes. He can't look up.
"Loki?"
"He ruined everything," Clint says. "He broke all of it." He pulls further into himself, trying not to think about SHIELD, full of residual damage and empty spaces where dead agents should be, or his wrecked apartment. Even his friendship with Natasha, the first solid thing he ever had, is tainted by Loki's threats, what he would have made Clint do to her, and the fuzzy memory of fighting with her on the Helicarrier. This, with Phil, should have been the one thing left that was still right. He has no idea what he'll do now it's proven as broken as the rest of his life.
"Clint." Phil sounds helpless, but he draws Clint closer when Clint leans into him.
"I'm sorry," Clint says, because he doesn't know what else to say. He's shaking, and when he tries to breathe, he sounds too close to crying.
All he can think is that he should have fought, should have shot Loki when he had the chance, and then none of this would have happened, he'd never have shot at Fury and Hill, tried to blow up the Helicarrier and fired on his friends.
He'd give everything to go back and make it different.
*
Clint expects Phil to throw him out, or at least call Natasha to come get him. He's not sure how he ends up in Phil's bed instead, Phil's arm around his waist.
He knows Phil isn't sleeping, for all that the lights are out and Phil's quiet.
"What?" he asks eventually, hating the way his voice has gone rough.
Phil rubs his thumb against Clint's stomach for long enough that Clint thinks he's going to play at being asleep. Slowly, though, Phil says, "I want to ask you to think about something." Clint waits, quiet. "I want you to think about seeing someone. Medical or psych."
"Because I'm crazy?" Clint asks, with none of the sarcasm he wants to put into the words.
"No," Phil says firmly. "Because you've been through a trauma, and it's still affecting you."
"Psych cleared me," Clint says.
"Can you tell me when you last felt rested?" Phil asks quietly. "Or when you didn't feel tired?"
Clint doesn't say anything, and eventually Phil says, "If I asked you to think about what would make you happy, right now, could you even tell me?"
Clint figures Phil doesn't mean the thing about going back in time and making it different. Slowly, he says, "You don't want me to think about seeing someone. You want me to do it."
"Yes," Phil says readily. "I think it would help, but not unless you expect it to be helpful as well."
"I don't want to," Clint says, so quiet he can only just hear himself. He suspects Phil's right – it's not like psych never helped him before – but then he thinks about starting again, about rebuilding everything all over again. It's not going to be anywhere close to as much fun as figuring out his kinks, and that frequently wasn't a barrel of laughs. "I want to just – wave a magic wand."
"I know," Phil says. He doesn't. He pretty much did get fixed by someone waving the technological equivalent of a magic wand, and dying doesn't seem to have messed with his head at all. "It'll be worth it, in the end."
Clint shakes his head. "Can I just sleep?"
"Of course you can. It'll look a bit better in the morning."
Clint doubts that, really a lot, but it's something to hold onto. Right now, it might be all he has to hold onto. He closes his eyes, and tries to pull up the memory of how he felt before Loki, when everything was stable and working. He can't.
He tells himself that Phil's right – Phil usually is. Small steps.
Better in the morning.
Fandom: Avengers
Pairings/characters: Clint-centric, Natasha, Coulson, Clint/OCs, Clint/Coulson
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 5396
Summary: 4200 words of Clint figuring out his kinks, followed by 1100 words of it all getting fucked up by Loki
Author notes: Explaining and content-noting this story is making my head hurt, because it's about kink but not really in a sexual way, and although stuff happens, it's not really explicit and the story's about how it feels, not how it is. Plus, the pairings aren't romantic in-love pairings, they're affection and connection.
With that in mind, this contains: various forms of impact play, knife play, a number of attempts at impact play that don't work, and a brief description of a dissociative episode around being spanked, including reference to childhood spanking that Clint sees as normal discipline, not child abuse.
Tell Me What I Want
"I want you to hit me," Clint says, and it feels like the most dangerous thing he's ever said. He's been with SHIELD for over a year, he's probably the safest he's been in his life, and he's still not sure he's safe enough for this.
The man, Ben – fifteen years older than Clint, tall and dark and calm in a way that reminds Clint of Director Fury – smiles down at Clint and nudges his hard dick against Clint's thigh. "Hit you how?"
Clint shifted as much as he could, held down by Ben's weight on the small hotel bed. He makes himself hold Ben's eyes. "With your hand. To, um, spank me."
He's not worried that Ben isn't into it – SHIELD taught Clint how to read people – but maybe a little that Ben won't be into it with him. He's got no idea what makes someone into the kind of person someone else wants to spank. He just knows that he wants to try it.
Ben asks, "You got a safeword?" and Clint says, "Am I going to need one?" like it doesn't matter at all one way or the other. It does.
Ben looks at him for a long moment, then shrugs. "Stop when you say stop." He waits a beat. "Turn over."
Clint does, folding his arms under his head and closing his eyes. His erection's mostly gone – even that little talking is enough to wreck the mood for him – and his skin feels bright and crisp, like if he opened his eyes he'd see it giving off some kind of glow in the dim room. He feels Ben move, the bed dipping as he settles, followed by a hand on his ass, feeling him up, or feeling him out. "Okay," Ben says.
Ben's hand on Clint is a sharp flash of pain that makes him groan. It's what he wanted, what he was hoping it would feel like, and the next hit is better. He's going to have a mark, the shape of Ben's hand on his skin.
The next strike lands a little lower, where his ass turns into his thigh, and it feels different, off in a way that makes Clint's breath catch and stutter and –
And the world cracks, tilts, goes sideways. He's five years old, his father's hand on his arm, holding him still as he spanks Clint for – for something, for talking back or not eating his dinner, he doesn't know, but it hurts and Clint sobs, reaching for his mom.
"Stop," he says. "Stop, please." He's standing in the kitchen of his childhood home and he's on the bed in a hotel room and the hand on his skin is Ben's, he knows because his dad never hit bare skin, but he's a child too, afraid and in pain and he doesn't know where up is any more.
Careful hands touch him, urge him onto his side. Clint keeps his eyes closed, draws his knees up and makes himself small and protected. The hand on his arm feels good, feels better when it shifts to the back of his neck and strokes down his spine. He curls into himself and shivers, caught between where he is and where he was until the world slowly rights itself.
"You still there?" Ben asks, his voice soft.
Clint nods, still not ready to open his eyes. "Yeah." His voice is rough, and his eyes are sore in a way that probably means he was crying. Fuck, he hates crying.
"You, um –" Ben sounds a little uncertain, but not so much that Clint thinks this is going to be painful or any more difficult than he already made it. "I'm not going to ask where you went, unless you want to tell me."
Clint shakes his head. Plenty of the kids he grew up with got slapped when they misbehaved, it's not a big deal. He has no idea why he went back there, or why he freaked out so badly.
"I am going to take a guess that this was the first time someone did that to you."
"Yeah." Clint should really be an adult and open his eyes. He's not actually sure he can. Not without bolting for the door, which would be a problem, since he's naked and in his own hotel room.
"And you didn't expect for that to happen." Clint nods again. "Why did you want to try it?"
"I thought it would feel good." It's hardly an answer at all, but Clint doesn't want to talk about this, not to anyone and especially not to a near-stranger who just saw him have some kind of dissociative episode. He doesn't even know if he can put words to how he expected being hit to be so much more than the way he'd felt when people he was sleeping with bit him, hard enough to leave marks, or scratched deep enough to draw blood, like everything in his head shut down and there was nothing else left. Like it was okay to just stop for a while.
Ben sighs. "Then can I make a suggestion that, next time, you at least warn your partner that you're still experimenting."
Clint risks opening his eyes, though he looks at Ben's throat instead of his face. "Sorry."
Ben cups his cheek, drops a kiss to his forehead. Clint would say that it makes him feel five years old, except he just did that, and this isn't the same. It's kind of nice. "Call me if you're in town again, once you've figured out what you like."
Clint doesn't say anything as Ben dresses and leaves, but he does take Ben's card with him when he packs the next morning.
*
If being spanked messed with his head – and maybe it won't happen like that again, but Clint's not willing to risk it. He tries hard not to think about his family, and he's not going to change that – then he figures someone using a belt on him will probably be the same.
He tries it, once, in his tiny New York apartment, wrapping an old leather belt around his hand and swinging it against his leg. It stings, hurts, but it's not right. He sighs, tosses the belt to the floor and falls back to stare at the ceiling, not sure if he's disappointed or relieved.
*
In Chicago, they wrap up the mission two days early, which is annoying, because they have to wait for some CIA guy to get into town for the debrief, and he won't make it until the scheduled end date.
"Enjoy the down time," Senior Agent Hill says, looking almost pleased. Clint doesn't roll his eyes – everyone knows she'll be making Deputy Director in the next five years, and Clint mouths off to her about as much as he does to Fury, which is to say not at all because he values his life. "I don't want to be stuck here any more than you do."
Clint doubts that very much. She's only along because of the CIA angle, and she doesn't get out of the office enough to be this jaded about it. "Yes, ma'am," he says anyway, and waits until the light under her door goes out before slipping through the dark hotel corridors and onto the street.
The club's easy enough to find, and SHIELD training comes in oddly useful for blending into a BDSM club when you've never been in one before.
Clint only means to watch – he figures Ben maybe had a point about working out what he wants before messing around with another person – but a woman finds him while he's sipping a glass of soda water. She's tall and so pale her skin almost glows. She's got blonde hair piled carefully in the back of her neck, she's wearing a black corset and a long black skirt, and her body's soft and full and curved.
Clint kind of wants to – he doesn't even know, curl up at her feet and purr or promise to do her bidding, something like that – especially when she smiles and leans in close and asks, "Are you here alone?"
"Yeah," he says, swallowing the ma'am that feels like it should naturally follow.
"And are you here to watch, or to take part?" She sounds like Natasha, when Natasha's over-playing at being seductive to make the agents they're with laugh, except she probably means it.
Clint shrugs, and she hmm's, low in her throat.
"I'm here to use this," she says, and shows him a thin cane, made of dark wood so it was easy to miss against her dark skirt in the dark club. "I've not yet found the right person to use it on."
It's a clear invitation, and maybe Clint's stupid, but he says yes anyway.
*
She says that her name is Eve, which Clint doubts a lot though he couldn't say why, and that she likes an audience, which Clint doesn't doubt at all. He's a little less certain about doing this in front of strangers, a whisper in the back of his head pointing out how much worse it will be if the same thing happened as with Ben, but he's experimenting, and this is not more frightening than following Natasha into SHIELD.
If the strike of Ben's hand against Clint's skin was good, then the bite of Eve's cane, even through his pants, is perfect, white hot and sharp in a way that makes him cry out as she burns lines of fire into the backs of his thighs and the muscles of his back. Every hit is like a nudge deeper into the place he balances on the edge of when someone scratches him, bites hard enough to bruise, and when he closes his eyes he can almost see it, just waiting for him to fall in.
It's like a tightrope, up high and teetering, sure that he's going to drop. Except – except that the anticipation, waiting for the next strike, waiting to know where it will land, unable to hear the whistle of the cane through air amongst the ambient club noise, is a hand on his arm, a safety rope holding him in place, a grip that he can't break, no matter how he tries, one that won't let him fall.
It still feels breathlessly good, and when he finally steps away, he's damp with sweat, his legs barely holding him up.
She kisses him on the mouth and runs a gentle hand through his hair. "That was lovely," she says, and it sounds like goodbye. Like whatever she was looking for, she didn't quite find it with him.
Clint knows how she feels.
*
The CIA liaison is called Agent Coulson, and he and Hill are apparently old friends from somewhere they don't tell Clint about. Coulson is deadpan and serious, and he looks at Clint just a little too long and knowing when Clint shifts, the seam of his shirt rubbing at a particularly raw patch of skin.
Clint really hopes Coulson won't be sticking around.
He's completely unsurprised when Coulson turns up wearing a SHIELD ID badge three weeks later. At least, being mainly sent out on international missions, Clint doesn't have to see much of him.
*
Between Ben and Eve, Clint's determined to figure out what the hell's going to work for him. He tries paddles (he can't help it, he starts laughing when the guy he's with brings out something that looks like it could double as sports equipment. He knows it's rude, apologizes with his mouth on the guy's dick until his knees and jaw awake).
He tries being slapped (too close to his day job to be a turn on, which is fucking frustrating, since the woman slapping him has long nails that catch against his skin when she hits him and feel amazing).
He tries whips, which are too close to the unfocused anticipation of canes, and spanking again, because maybe the first time was a fluke (it wasn't), and being tied down because what the hell, maybe that'll be it (it's not, and he can't even manage to be disappointed).
It's all so close, but none of it's right and it makes Clint want to scream. It should not be too much to ask of his brain and body that they figure out how to be hurt during sex and feel good with it.
*
It happens one night when he's lying in his apartment, staring at the ceiling and wishing he could sleep, trying to shut his mind off from an op that went all to hell, even if he did still achieve the objective.
Maybe that's what makes him reach for the knife he keeps in the nightstand, or maybe it's the video he watched a few nights ago, giving him ideas.
He turns the blade so the faint street light glances off it. This is probably a bad idea.
When he drags the knife from the inside of his knee cap to high up his thigh, he decides he doesn't care. He doesn't press hard enough to draw blood – it's not about that – just hard enough to feel it, hard enough to leave a mark that will fade in a few days.
He moans, loud enough to be glad he's alone, and when he draws a second line, parallel to the first, the moan turns into a sigh. Even on his own, even unable to totally turn his brain off when he's the one doing it, the pain feels so good.
He curls in on himself after, feeling washed out and shivery, and turns the night's revelation over in his mind. Apparently, he spent years following the wrong angle off what he knew worked, too focused on the pain to realize it was the closeness just as much that works for him. The pain as well, but not from being hit, the way he'd figured; sharp, from something up close, even more so than being spanked, and now he knows, he feels a little dumb for not figuring it out sooner. Biting and scratching made a kind of sense as a lead in to hitting, but not so much that he shouldn't have figured out his own brain.
Not that he's ever been much good at seeing things in himself - too close in to see everything he needs.
Which means that, if doing it to himself felt good, having someone else do it, being able to switch off and not think about the how and where and when, will be even better.
*
In the end, he calls Ben, who has no idea who Clint is until Clint brings up what was arguably his most humiliating moment in bed with anyone.
"You fix that?" Ben asks, voice laughing.
Clint shrugs, even though Ben can't see him, hundreds of miles away from Clint's apartment, and also on the other end of the personal cell that SHIELD doesn't monitor. "Kind of. I mean, I figured out what I want. Um."
There's a long pause, and then Ben says, "Are you going to tell me? I assume that's why you called."
"I, um..." Clint may have neglected to figure out this part of the conversation. "I tried it on myself – I used a knife. Not enough to draw blood."
"Huh," Ben says. "Not what I was expecting."
"Me either."
"That's not something I'm into," Ben says, before Clint can work up to asking. He sounds mostly apologetic, and not like he thinks Clint's a freak for liking it or anything. "Assuming that's where this conversation was very slowly going."
"Kind of." Clint taps his fingers against the seam of his jeans, all out of things to say, and not at all sure what he was thinking when he made this call.
"Can I give you some advice?" Ben asks. Clint makes an assenting noise and braces himself for whatever's coming. "You seem like you're still figuring out this side of yourself. It might help to spend some time with other kinky people – have someone to talk to, be part of a community, all that stuff."
Clint tries to imagine the conversation that would follow him getting involved with New York's kinky community beyond occasionally picking someone up in a bar. It's not that he thinks SHIELD would object, exactly – for a top-secret quasi-military intelligence agency, they're pretty open-minded – but there's no question that they'd find out, and Clint really isn't ready to discuss his sexual preferences with anyone in his chain of command.
"Thanks," he says anyway. "I'll think about it."
*
He thinks about it, and doesn't come up with a good solution. This isn't something he wants to do at a club, in front of people, and he spends enough time at his day job to know that bringing home a near-stranger and handing them a knife is a bad idea.
"You could try a non-stranger," Natasha suggests, when Clint caves under the weight of his own not-even-entirely-sexual frustration and tells her.
"I don't date," Clint says flatly. He spins his coffee mug between his palms and avoids meeting Natasha's eye across his kitchen table.
"Then you're screwed," Natasha says. Clint looks up just enough to glare at her, and finds her grinning sweetly back at him. "Or not, as the case may be."
Clint drops his head into his hands and groans. Just his luck that he finally figures himself out and, instead of getting what he wants, he's going to be stuck trying to make it work on his own for the rest of his life.
*
And then he gets caught.
It's partly his own fault, for pushing further than he should have and leaving a too visible mark high on his shoulder, and partly Agent Jackson's fault, for getting food poisoning right before a mission with Coulson so that Clint gets tagged in his place.
Mainly, though, it's the fault of the militia leader that Clint's there to shoot, for having a guard where none should have been, and the fault of the guard, for shooting Clint twice before Clint, who hadn't heard him coming (fucking ambient jungle noise making it hard for him to pick out sounds that shouldn't be there), can shoot him back and pass out from blood loss.
After all that, he's not particularly surprised to wake up in medical. He's a little more surprised that, after the medical staff are done with him, Coulson shows up. In the past, his mission leaders have given it twelve hours before hassling him for a debrief, but maybe Coulson's different.
"You have three parallel cuts on your shoulder," Coulson says, once he's done with the pleasantries.
Okay, apparently Coulson's more than different.
"Also a bullet wound in my thigh and a second one to my shooting arm," Clint says, and doesn't point out that he still managed to shoot both the bodyguard and the militia leader with said bullet wound. Yes, he really is that good.
"These cuts didn't come from the fight." Coulson steps a little closer, making sure the curtain surrounding Clint's bed is properly closed. Clint fights the urge to sigh. He's really not up for the lecture on whatever part of this Coulson's going to fixate on. Clint doesn't know him well, but he knows that Coulson likes rules.
"And they're not the first unexplained knife wounds you've shown up with."
"Not really sure where you're going with this, sir," Clint says in his best mild and confused tone. It hasn't worked on his field commanders in years, but Coulson's never heard it before.
"Those are deliberately inflicted, and your psych evals don't suggest that you'd be doing this as a form of self-harm." Coulson steps closer, close enough that Clint could touch. He doesn't, but he doesn't look away either. There's no way that Coulson – ex-CIA, always wears a suit and tie Coulson – is going where it sounds like he is. "So my question, Agent Barton, is: wouldn't it be a lot easier to get what you need if someone else was giving it to you?"
Clint stares, can't help himself. Coulson's propositioning him, in the middle of SHIELD medical. Clint's honestly not sure if it's funny or hot. He gets a brief flash of the one time he saw Coulson with a knife in his hand, how natural he looked.
"How do you know someone isn't already?" he asks.
"Angle of the cuts. Self-inflicted. And personnel hasn't reported any new people in your life lately."
"For the record, the amount of checking into me you've done makes this a little creepy. Just in case you weren't aware."
Coulson cracks a small smile. "But hopefully less strange than asking if you were self-harming."
It is, but Clint's not entirely sure that helps. On the other hand, he works in an agency full of the sneakiest people he's ever known, people who don't really believe in the concept of private information and think that locks are just there to provide a challenge. Hell, he's one of them.
"You want to do this with me," Clint says, not making it a question. "You're not – I mean, I'd trust you to use a blade on me, but I don't want to date or something. No offence."
"None taken." Coulson doesn't roll his eyes, but it looks like a near thing. "Think about it. We can talk more when you're out of medical." He nods, turns on his heel and leaves.
Clint stares up at the ceiling for a while, trying to figure out what happens next. The best he can manage is a slightly stunned, "Huh."
*
In the end, he figures he might as well give it a go. Coulson's not exactly a troll, and while Clint's never really looked at him as a potential... fuck buddy, or whatever they're going to be; Clint's not even entirely sure they'll actually have sex... now that he's thinking about it, it doesn't seem as out there as it would have before Coulson offered.
It's not like he knew any of the other people he let hit him any better than he knows Coulson, and both being SHIELD confers a level of trust he can't have with anyone outside. Worst case scenario, they don't click at all, and go back to being near strangers.
They don't even get close to the worst case scenario.
There's more pre-planning than Clint's entirely on board with, and he says, "Not like that, more like –" a lot for the first few minutes, but then. Then it's like he imagined, only more and better and Coulson was right, having someone else do it is so much better than doing it to himself.
Much later, when Clint's mostly back in his own head again, Coulson offers him another glass of water (seriously, the man has some sort of obsession) and says, "I think we can call that a success."
Clint feels a little giddy every time he touches the pink lines on his thighs and chest. "Yeah," he says, the word coming out slightly breathless. "That's one word for it."
*
They're not dating, and half the time they don't even sleep together, but they get to be friends, get to know each other beyond Phil pressing a knife to Clint's skin, and even with the way the insanity at SHIELD is ramping up, it's good.
For the better part of a year, Clint has what he wanted, a way to make his brain switch off, a way for his body to feel like something more than a soldier and an archer and a SHIELD agent.
And then Loki happens.
*
Clint holds it together through the battle, and food after. Through medical and psych assessments, through damage assessments on the Helicarrier, through who's dead and who's alive and who's injured out of SHIELD (and who's alive who isn't supposed to be).
He keeps it together through agents' funerals, through hours long debriefs, through what-do-we-do-with-Loki and what-do-we-do-with-that-army-you-recruited-Agent-Barton. Through news broadcasts and which bits of New York are still standing and the Avengers and a couple of missions for SHIELD.
He works his way through the insurance claim, and boxing up his meagre belongings because his apartment (tiny but his, his safe space where no-one came that he didn't want there) is still standing amongst a maze of scaffolding, but scheduled for demolition and no longer safe for habitation.
He survives all of it, because what choice does he have but to keep putting one foot in front of the other, waiting for whatever happens next, waiting for the moment when something happens to make it feel better, make it so he doesn't sleep every second he can and still feel exhausted, or lie awake, so alert he can feel individual air molecules over his skin.
What he gets is Phil tracking him down on the range at SHIELD HQ a little after midnight, medical clearance papers in hand, no evidence that he was stabbed by a god and nearly died.
What he gets is Phil asking, "Want to come back to my place?" and a wash of relief that maybe this is the thing that will make it start to feel better, so strong that the world goes a little fuzzy at the edges and his, "Yeah," comes out breathy.
*
Clint lies in the middle of Phil's bed, naked but for his boxers, and closes his eyes, breathing in the familiar scent of cotton sheets and furniture polish. He feels the bed dip and Phil's hand, warm and high on his shoulder, a warning before the tip of the knife presses there, cold and sharp.
Clint gasps – it's been so long, too long, he's started to forget how this feels, how good it is – and forces his muscles still when Phil drags the length of the blade round his shoulder blade, down the curve of his back, twisting just a little as it passes over his hipbone.
He breathes deep and steady, the way he does when he's lining up a tough shot, and when the knife presses against his skin again, he sighs, a ball of tension at the top of his spine rolling away. He loses time in the strokes of the knife, the flares of pain and the neat lines he'll twist to see in the mirror the next day. He knows what's coming next, drops his head a little more to feel ease and peace wash over him, the world drifting away, exactly how he's wanted since he looked up and saw Natasha looming over him, enemy, fight, passing too slowly from his brain.
He drops down, just a little into what should be a warm, fuzzy place. Instead, it's ice cold, washed blue and red and the complete security of being led by somehow who was perfect and would never let it hurt.
Clint's whole body jerks rigid, the too-sharp pain in his left hip meaningless as he gasps, "Stop, stop, please don't," and there's a word, there's a word he's supposed to use for this but he can't remember it. He can't remember, but Phil has a knife, sharp like the sceptre and Clint has to get, "Away, let me go, let me –"
He flings himself back and sideways, hits the floor too hard and drags himself, instinct more than anything, into the corner of the room, tucked up where he's hard to get at, where he can't be – where Phil won't, Loki won't...
Hurt him.
"Clint," Phil says softly.
Clint sees him, sitting against the wall, close enough to touch, hands folded in his lap, like he's not shirtless in his bedroom with a freaked out guy mostly naked in the corner. Clint drops his head onto his folded arms, too tired to do anything else.
"Do you know where you are?"
Clint nods, shaking. Even with his eyes closed, the world is edged in blue.
"Are you – do you want to talk?"
Clint shakes his head. He doesn't want to say anything, afraid that the sob caught in his throat will come out if he does. He wishes Phil would go away, leave him alone with his misery and exhaustion. Except Phil touches his bare shoulder, right over the first knife mark, soft and careful, and Clint says, "He ruined it," without meaning to, unable to stop the way his voice shakes. He can't look up.
"Loki?"
"He ruined everything," Clint says. "He broke all of it." He pulls further into himself, trying not to think about SHIELD, full of residual damage and empty spaces where dead agents should be, or his wrecked apartment. Even his friendship with Natasha, the first solid thing he ever had, is tainted by Loki's threats, what he would have made Clint do to her, and the fuzzy memory of fighting with her on the Helicarrier. This, with Phil, should have been the one thing left that was still right. He has no idea what he'll do now it's proven as broken as the rest of his life.
"Clint." Phil sounds helpless, but he draws Clint closer when Clint leans into him.
"I'm sorry," Clint says, because he doesn't know what else to say. He's shaking, and when he tries to breathe, he sounds too close to crying.
All he can think is that he should have fought, should have shot Loki when he had the chance, and then none of this would have happened, he'd never have shot at Fury and Hill, tried to blow up the Helicarrier and fired on his friends.
He'd give everything to go back and make it different.
*
Clint expects Phil to throw him out, or at least call Natasha to come get him. He's not sure how he ends up in Phil's bed instead, Phil's arm around his waist.
He knows Phil isn't sleeping, for all that the lights are out and Phil's quiet.
"What?" he asks eventually, hating the way his voice has gone rough.
Phil rubs his thumb against Clint's stomach for long enough that Clint thinks he's going to play at being asleep. Slowly, though, Phil says, "I want to ask you to think about something." Clint waits, quiet. "I want you to think about seeing someone. Medical or psych."
"Because I'm crazy?" Clint asks, with none of the sarcasm he wants to put into the words.
"No," Phil says firmly. "Because you've been through a trauma, and it's still affecting you."
"Psych cleared me," Clint says.
"Can you tell me when you last felt rested?" Phil asks quietly. "Or when you didn't feel tired?"
Clint doesn't say anything, and eventually Phil says, "If I asked you to think about what would make you happy, right now, could you even tell me?"
Clint figures Phil doesn't mean the thing about going back in time and making it different. Slowly, he says, "You don't want me to think about seeing someone. You want me to do it."
"Yes," Phil says readily. "I think it would help, but not unless you expect it to be helpful as well."
"I don't want to," Clint says, so quiet he can only just hear himself. He suspects Phil's right – it's not like psych never helped him before – but then he thinks about starting again, about rebuilding everything all over again. It's not going to be anywhere close to as much fun as figuring out his kinks, and that frequently wasn't a barrel of laughs. "I want to just – wave a magic wand."
"I know," Phil says. He doesn't. He pretty much did get fixed by someone waving the technological equivalent of a magic wand, and dying doesn't seem to have messed with his head at all. "It'll be worth it, in the end."
Clint shakes his head. "Can I just sleep?"
"Of course you can. It'll look a bit better in the morning."
Clint doubts that, really a lot, but it's something to hold onto. Right now, it might be all he has to hold onto. He closes his eyes, and tries to pull up the memory of how he felt before Loki, when everything was stable and working. He can't.
He tells himself that Phil's right – Phil usually is. Small steps.
Better in the morning.
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Poor Clint.
Wonderful journey. And Coulson becoming this for him was great.
And then the fallout. Urgh.