Work Text:
Clinton Francis Barton, twenty-four years old and a paramedic, was, for once, sitting in a hospital waiting room. He felt an odd sense of displacement as he stared at the muted yellow walls, studying the smooth coat of paint idly, eyes drifting from one little blemish to another as his mind registered nothing but numbness. He’d never been in this situation before. He’d always been the one working behind the scenes, and the fact that he wasn’t working at all was really grating on his nerves.
He wasn’t scared – not really. A little worried maybe, but not truly scared. It was just appendicitis, he kept repeating to himself, trying to banish the memory of the look of pain that twisted Natasha’s face as she gripped his arm hard enough to bruise and told him to drive her to the hospital. Even if her appendix had already ruptured, her likely hospital stay was only likely to increase to 5.2 days from the average 1.8.
It just sucked that he couldn’t do anything. Most of the time he was actually happy that he was a paramedic and not a surgeon, but right now Clint wished that it was him standing over Natasha on the operating table, knowing that it was his own steady hands operating on her prone form. Not that he wasn’t sure that Natasha’s current surgeon was more than qualified – it was just that, well, it was his best friend being operated on in there.
Clint let out a strangled sigh, rubbing his hands over his face and slumping back on the lumpy waiting room couch. He looked over at the coffee table in front of him, frowning for a moment before snatching up the one lonely magazine that lay there (Better Homes and Gardens? Really? This was New York city! His own apartment was the size of a postage stamp and he certainly didn’t have a garden, unless the cactus that Tony had given him as a gag gift counted.). He leafed through the glossy pages of the magazine, his eyes drifting idly over the high resolution pictures of brightly colored flowers and color coordinated bedrooms as he tried to distract himself.
The paramedic skipped over a few pages, looking for the pumpkin bread recipe advertized on the cover, but he paused in his search as a small square of paper fell into his lap. Confused, he turned it over and examined it.
Clint stared for a moment at the, admittedly cute, cartoon octopus. He couldn’t help the hint of a smile which tugged at his lips as he read the sweet message that went along with it. The paramedic tucked the little slip of paper back in between the magazine’s slightly crumpled pages, smoothing over one corner of the note that had been bent slightly. The drawing stowed away again, he continued to look for the pumpkin bread recipe, eventually finding it after the section on fall garden care.
He tried to memorize the recipe, thinking that maybe he could try baking some of the bread for Natasha as a “Get Well Soon” gift, but he kept zoning out while reading the ingredient list. Clint pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket, meaning to write down the recipe instead, but he realized after a few moments of digging around in his pockets that he’d left his sticky notes back at the apartment in his rush to get Natasha to the ER.
His fingers brushed over the glossy pages as an idea came to him and he pulled the little octopus note out of the magazine again, biting his lip as he wondered how much of an asshole it would make him if he stole the uplifting note that some kind soul had left for the unfortunate waiting room residents.
Clint wrote on it anyway.
---
Okay, so maybe he was a bit of an asshole, but he wasn’t that much of an asshole. Clint stopped by the waiting room for a moment the next morning before going to bring Natasha a mystery novel and a bouquet of flowers (mainly to annoy her, but also because he knew she secretly liked tiger lilies).
---
Clint tried to resist the urge to see if the mysterious octopus doodler had responded when he walked through the waiting room again a few hours later. He really did struggle valiantly – in fact, he was literally halfway out the door before he finally gave up and surrendered to the magnetic pull of the hidden post it note. The paramedic gently flipped through the pages, trying to appear nonchalant and not as if he had walked into a hospital waiting room just to read a Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
He tried not to feel disappointed as he continued on and on through the magazine without finding either his original post it note or a reply. However, on the final page of the magazine was tucked away the little yellow post it note that he’d placed in the magazine earlier. Clint almost didn’t read it, assuming that someone had just moved it so they could read the article it had been covering, but then his eyes noticed a slight discrepancy.
Clint was quite sure that the grin that involuntarily lit up his face was bright enough to blind Natasha through concrete, three stories up. He scribbled a quick “I’ll draw you a penguin next time” before closing the magazine again, skipping out through the sliding glass doors.
The paramedic tried not to dwell on what it meant for him that a random stranger drawing a top hat on his own doodle of a fat bird made his day.
---
Clint didn’t set foot in the waiting room until two days later. The major freeway bridge collapse had every emergency medical professional working on overtime and Clint found himself neck deep in the thick of it for over twenty four hours. He felt a little dizzy as he stepped back into the yellow painted room, slumping down onto one of the couches and just sitting there for a moment, thinking about how he probably should have gotten some sleep before trying to go help Natasha check out of the hospital. His original back up plan was to get Bucky to pick up Natasha if he was working, but considering the state of emergency and the fact that Bucky, as a fellow paramedic, had still been on duty when Clint was sent home, that clearly wasn’t going to work.
Clint stared blankly at the waiting room ceiling, his lips parted ever so slightly and his eyelids slipping down over his eyes. He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to wake himself up at least a little bit, slumping forward and pressing his forehead to his knees, breathing deeply and trying to clear his mind. The paramedic propped himself up with his elbows on his knees, looking out over the lobby and telling himself that he’d get up and go to Natasha’s room in just a moment.
The Better Homes and Gardens magazine lying innocently on the coffee table in front of him caught his eye. Clint just stared at it for a moment, debating whether it was worth the energy expended to actually lean over far enough to pick it up.
He picked it up.
Clint smiled a little at the octopus doodle, brushing his thumb over the dried black ink. He was still tried as fuck and about ready to just fall asleep on the uncomfortable waiting room couch (screw the consequences), but the drawing helped a little bit. Eventually he mustered the strength to dig his cheep, blue bic pen out of his pocket, taking a moment to scribble a reply and another little sketch.
The paramedic examined it for a moment, chewing on the end of the pen in contemplation as he debated whether or not to scratch out the post script. Sure, the mysterious other doodler had responded to two of his messages, but trying to make this sort of connection was… different. And not necessarily a good kind of different. Did he really have so few friends that he had to resort to conversing with anonymous people through slips of paper hidden in a Better Homes and Gardens magazine?
He left the post script anyway.
---
Clint grinned throughout the entire day when he finally received a reply. (Well, until Bucky told him that he probably should be grinning while stabbing a patient in the leg with an epi pen and intubating them. Then again, the patient was probably a little too occupied with the hives breaking out on their face and the fact that their blood pressure had dropped below 80/60.)
He may or may not have taped the little slip of paper to the wall above his bed.
(He would have stuck it to the refrigerator door if he didn’t want Natasha judging him.)
---
Two weeks later, Natasha found him out. He knew she would discover her eventually, but he’d honestly thought he was being subtle about it! It wasn’t like he was reading the messages aloud to himself day in and day out. (He only reread them at most five times, and that was always in his head!)
The confrontation started out something like this:
“What is this?”
“… a post it note?”
“I understand that it’s a post it note, but why does it have a picture of an octopus with sunglasses and a taser on it?”
She may or may not have been holding up the one where Clint asked Phil if he was actually a secret agent and that was why he had to go to the hospital so often, to treat his battle wounds. The octopus drawing had been his only answer.
“And who’s ‘Phil’?”
“Just a friend.”
“I know he’s not a new paramedic. He better not be someone you met on a shady online dating site.”
Natasha had severely restricted Clint’s internet usage after a certain incident involving a cute guy who was a little more into guns than his website profile had suggested. The night may or may not have ended with police shoving the cute guy, handcuffed, into the back of a police car as Clint focused on dressing their poor waiter’s bullet wound.
“Don’t worry. I mean, I haven’t actually seen him before, but I met him in a hospital waiting room, so…”
“Explain.”
Clint explained. And realized that Phil and his relationship had sounded a lot healthier in his head than out loud. Well then.
---
---
Reading a new note from Phil became the highlight of Clint’s day. Despite the fact that they were communicating with post its, their conversations covered every possible topic, from how he and Natasha had met (Nat was an athletic trainer for the Giants, and when Clint had been called in about a player going into cardiac arrest, he’d arrived on the scene to find Natasha completely in control, to the point where pretty much all Clint had to do was load the guy into the ambulance) to why Phil was at the hospital so often (his best friend – not boyfriend! – Steve was in a coma).
Most of the time their bantering was frivolous: best ice cream shops in the city, whether being forced to read Hemmingway in high school counted under cruel and unusual punishment, and so forth. At the same time, Clint realized that he probably, on average, talked to Phil more than he talked to friends he saw everyday (except for Natasha, of course). Clint tried to feel guilty about that fact, but failed whenever he got a new message from Phil.
Really, it was no different than having a casual friend relationship with someone online. It wasn’t like he was in love with Phil or anything.
---
“Hi. Natasha. I think I’m in love with Phil,” Clint blurted to Natasha as he collapsed face first onto her bed like a rag doll.
“You can’t possibly be in love with him,” Natasha said, deadpan, her expression not exactly disbelief, as that would imply a sort of possibility that there was any way one could believe this.
“Don’t mock my pain!” Clint whined, slightly muffled by the pillow he had pressed his face into.
“The only thing you know about him is that he doodles cute octopi,” Natasha reiterated, looking at Clint in a way that was a close to gaping as she could get.
“I know!” Clint moaned. “Also, the correct plural is octopuses, not octopi.”
“Where did you learn that?” Natasha asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Phil,” Clint mumbled almost inaudibly, sounding more than a little embarrassed. “Something to do with Latin conjugations. I didn’t really get it, but I looked it up online later and it’s true.”
“Wikipedia?” Nat questioned.
“Wikipedia,” Clint confirmed.
“Seriously, though,” Natasha continued. “I don’t want this to turn out like your last incident with meeting someone who you’d met through indirect, anonymous communication.”
“This is different!” Clint protested, pulling his head out of Natasha’s pillow so she could hear him clearly. “I can’t be blinded by his hotness if I don’t even know what he looks like.”
“Exactly,” Natasha replied, unimpressed. “You don’t even know what he looks like. In fact, you don’t even know if he’s a he.”
“We had a long conversation about how much it hurts to get kicked in the balls,” the paramedic replied, giving Natasha an unimpressed look of his own. “Trust me, he’s a guy.”
“Well, it still doesn’t change anything,” Natasha sighed, moving a little closer to Clint and running a hand through his spiky dirty blonde hair. “If he asks to meet you, just say no, okay?”
“I – yes, but – ” Clint stammered, shifting to press his cheek up against Natasha’s soft thigh.
“Promise me,” Natasha said unwaveringly, cutting him off.
The paramedic opened his mouth to protest, but the look on Natasha’s face, a mix of concern, sadness, and stubbornness stopped him.
“Promise,” she repeated.
“I promise,” Clint finally replied, sighing as he turned over onto his back.
As he stared at the light red paint covering Natasha’s ceiling, he tried not to feel like he was betraying Phil in some way. He failed quite miserably.
---
The exhausted paramedic stared blankly at the post it note he’d found attached to the page with the pumpkin bread recipe in the hospital waiting room’s crumpled copy of Better Homes and Gardens. He couldn’t bring himself to touch it, to run his fingers over the dried ink of the drawing like he normally did, imagining Phil’s confidant hands guiding a ballpoint pen over the surface of the yellow post it note.
He hated himself for his reply to the invitation. He wasn’t actually busy Friday. In fact, he had the day off. As he walked out through the sliding glass doors at the hospital’s entrance, the small piece of paper felt like it was burning a hole in his pocket. Clint crumpled Phil’s post it note and threw it in the trash.
---
The next day Clint spent his whole shift one edge, twitchy and over energetic, constantly distracted by the thought of what Phil’s reaction might be. Would he be mad? Would he give up on trying to meet Clint, or would he try to reschedule? Would their conversations just slowly dwindle down to nothing, less and less frequent until one of them finally just stopped writing?
“What the fuck is up with you, Clint?” Bucky demanded, breaking the paramedic out of his thoughts as he roughly pulled him to the side of the hallway on their way back from the ER.
“What? Nothing!” Clint protested, trying to shake off Bucky’s grip. “What’s up with you?”
“Clint, it took you three tries to insert that lady’s IV,” Bucky said, still clearly upset, but he let go of Clint’s arm. “I’ve never seen you take more than one try to hit the vein. You always get it perfectly on the first try. So tell me, what’s wrong?”
“I – ” Clint stammered, embarrassment coloring his face a bright, hot red. “I just – there’s this guy, okay?”
“Okay,” Bucky replied, crossing his arms over his chest, signaling for Clint to continue.
The younger paramedic slumped back against the white hospital hallway wall, ducking his head slightly so that his spiky hair flopped down over his forehead, hiding his facial expressions somewhat. He crossed his arms over his chest, too, although his stance was much more defensive, as opposed to Bucky’s combative one.
“And I really, really like him,” Clint went on, not meeting Bucky’s eyes, “but Nat doesn’t, and yesterday he asked me out for coffee, but I refused because I promised Nat I wouldn’t meet him.”
“You know, Kid, if Natasha doesn’t want you going out with someone, she probably has a good reason for it,” Bucky replied after a moment, his tone a mixture of apology and reason. “Has she told you what it is about this guy that has her on edge?”
“I haven’t actually ever seen him before,” Clint muttered, fiddling with one shirt sleeve.
“Jesus, Clint, this isn’t another online dating thing, is it?” Bucky asked, looking equally exasperated and disappointed.
“It’s not!” Clint protested, pushing himself up a little straighter. “Look, I just – I found this slip of paper hidden in a magazine in the hospital waiting room after I took Nat in for her appendix and I was feeling really shitty and then there’s just this little doodle of this weird octopus along with one of those generic ‘I hope this cheers you up!’ lines, and, the thing was, it did – cheer me up, that is, and so I wrote a note back, and then it just spiraled out of control – !”
“Hey, Clint, breathe, would you?” Bucky said, placing a strong hand on Clint’s shoulder to steady him. “So you’re saying that you’ve fallen in love with a guy via post it note conversations?”
Clint nodded sullenly.
“How do you manage to get yourself into these bizarre situations?” Bucky muttered rhetorically, half to Clint and half to himself. “Okay. Look, what do you actually know about this guy?”
“He’s thirty one years old and just recently became an American History professor at Columbia,” Clint started tentatively, because, honestly, how did he know what he was saying was actually true. “He comes to the hospital at least four times a week so visit his friend Steve who’s in a coma – ”
“Wait, what did you say this guy’s name was?” Bucky blurted out, looking at Clint with wide eyes.
“Uh, Phil. I don’t know his last name, but – ”
“Well, fuck me. Phil Coulson, you sly dog!” Bucky laughed, grinning and slapping Clint on the arm.
“You know him?” Clint asked, eyes wide.
“Of course I do!” Bucky replied, still grinning brightly. “Remember how I told you about how in middle school there I had to share my best friend with another kid and we always got in fights about who was actually his best friend? Well, the kid who I always fought with was Phil. Steve, who's in a coma, is the friend we fought over.”
“Oh,” Clint answered, unsure what else he should say to his surprising revelation. “Oh. So he’s a good guy, then?”
“The most loyal friend you could ever have,” Bucky said, his expression sobering for a moment. “Also a good seven years older than you. Not that that’s really an issue with me, but you might have to negotiate with Nat a bit.”
“I… can work with that,” Clint replied, a hint of a smile spreading across his face.
“Oh, and in case you’d like to actually talk to Phil face to face instead of through post it notes, Steve’s room is number 227,” Bucky continued, giving Clint another small smile.
“Thanks,” Clint answered.
“Anytime,” Bucky replied, clapping the younger paramedic on the shoulder again. “Now, let’s get back to work.”
---
Clint stood before the door to Coma-Steve’s hospital room and tried not to hyperventilate. Which was actually much more difficult than he thought it would be. He took one step forward and stopped, still not breaching the threshold. The normally brave paramedic was practically trembling, and for a moment, he contemplated just turning around and leaving. Banishing the thought, shaking his head, Clint closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing: deep and steady, in and out…
He opened his eyes again and entered the room.
The first thing the paramedic noticed was how bright the room was. The curtains had been drawn open as widely as they could possibly be and the bright sunlight bounced off the wall, amplifying so that the whole enclosure looked more like an actual home, as opposed to the distinctly sterile and artificial feel of most hospitals.
The next thing he noticed was a soft, distinctly male voice reading a book aloud. Clint had no clue what the book was, but the gentle inflections of the voice, the way that each individual word seemed infused with individual warmth, made Clint’s skin tingle. The reader still hadn’t noticed Clint’s presence in the room, so he took a moment to observe him, his Phil.
As soon as Clint’s eyes landed on Phil, he was quite sure that if he’d actually known what Phil looked like earlier, he would never have refused that coffee date, Natasha be damned. His cheeks heated slightly as noticed the perfect cut of the man’s suit and the way his shoulders fit into it perfectly. His brown hair looked feather soft and his thick rimmed glasses just made his entire image a little more perfect.
Clint’s phone then beeped loudly with a text message. The paramedic blushed brightly in embarrassment as Phil looked up at him, clearly startled and confused. Clint tried to ignore the gorgeous blue color of the other man’s eyes.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,” Phil said, breaking the silence and smiling a small, friendly smile at Clint. “Are you here to see Steve?”
“Um, hi,” Clint replied in what sounded to his ears like a squeak. “I’m Clint. Barton. Clint Barton. Um, you know – with the post it notes.”
“… oh,” Phil answered after a moment, eyes wide. “Well, ah, I’m Phil. Phil Coulson. Nice to finally meet you.”
“You too,” Clint replied, smiling slightly. “And, um, I’m not a stalker or anything, I swear. I’m friends with Bucky Barnes and he said he knew you…?”
“You being a stalker hadn’t even crossed my mind,” Phil replied, his smile growing from something polite into something genuinely happy. “I think I was a little too distracted by how gorgeous you are.”
“Oh, um, I… Thank you,” Clint stuttered, blushing even brighter than before. “Well, I was wondering if that offer for coffee was still open.”
“For you, always,” Phil replied, closing his book and setting it on the table next to the bed, standing up. “Is now a good time?”
“Sure,” Clint blurted, smiling as Phil walked over to him.
“Great,” Phil answered, shoulder brushing lightly against Clint’s as they started walking. “How does a place called ‘The Cephalopod’ sound?”
“Perfect,” Clint replied, grinning.