Title: Flammable Material
Fandom: Hawkeye (current Fraction/Aja series)
Rating: PG
Length: 650 words
Content notes: Clint Barton/Kate Bishop.
Author notes: Also fills the prompt "by candlelight" at dailyprompt.
Summary: A fuse blows during pizza & classic movie night at Clint's. Shenanigans ensue.


OK, so yeah, I started pizza and classic movie night after Clint got out of hospital, to check up on him, but now he makes like it’s some kind of Hawkeye tradition. As if I hadn’t half moved into his apartment anyway. He doesn’t seem to have noticed. Go figure.

We’re eating a large pizza out of the box and are watching Bullitt (Clint watches for Steve McQueen, I watch for the cars), when a fuse blows. The lights flicker and die, and the car chase stops halfway through a stunt.

“Dammit,” Clint says and gets up from his spot on the couch next to me. Given that he’s, a) much better at breaking shit than fixing it, b) spectacularly good at being unprepared, and c) not good with technology that was made after the 1960s, I’m not holding my breath for so much as a spare fuse, or even a flashlight. A lighter maybe. Or matches. Everyone has matches, right?

“You need help back there, Hawkeye?” I say into the darkness.

“Nah, I’m good,” Clint’s voice comes back. I angle for the slice of pizza I’d half finished when the lights went out and stroke Lucky while we listen to Clint rummaging around. By the sounds of it, he’s gone through twice as many drawers and cabinets than he actually has.

“Be right with you, Katie.”

Seriously. “Clint, if you wanna get rid of me ‘cause you don’t want me to see you struggle with the fuse box, just say the word.”

He comes back, finally. I can see him crouching at the coffee table across from me. He strikes a match (I told you, everyone has those) and lights one, two, three tealights that he puts on the table.

“That’s flammable material, Hawkeye,” I say, pick the pizza box up and set it down on my lap.
He lights two more tealights, and comes around to sit beside me again.

“Just trying to get a little romance going.” He smirks at me.

“Don’t even try. I know you only want me for my peperoni and double cheese.” I demonstratively pick up a slice of pizza.

“Damn straight,” he says, and then he dips his head and bites off a piece.

I raise an eyebrow at him before biting into it myself. “You’re weird.”

“Well, this is one of the weirdest candlelight dinners of my life,” he says through his mouthful of pizza.

I roll my eyes. “Yeah. Like that time you were camped out in Eastern Europe or somewhere with Natasha doesn’t take the cake on that one. You could just keep a spare fuse around. That way, there would be no danger of your apartment fabricating sexual tension against your will.”

He swallows. Here it comes, I think, and I’m not wrong.

“Kate.”

“Clint.”

“You know it’s not like that.”

“Like what?” Two can play this game.

“You know… Look, I told you… I told you I didn’t wanna…”

“Sleep with me. Yeah.” I turn my head to look at him. He’s avoiding my gaze, studying his fingernails. “Thing is, I come here for something other than the great coffee and stellar cuisine, you know. Maybe you wanna think about that.”

His eyes flick up to mine and I lick my lips before leaning forward to kiss him. Pretty soon, the pizza box gets in the way so I come up for air and put it down on the floor.

“You do that, you’re not gonna see any of that pizza again,” he says.

I take my hair band out and put it on the table. “That’s okay. Was just about to put the lights out anyway. Or are you a lights-on kind of guy?”

He grins, that boyish grin that he gets sometimes when he’s embarrassed.

“Anything you say, Katie.”

I make sure he sees my eyeroll before I blow the tealights out and make him shut up.