Bartons Down

there was no way to truly keep from forming attachments, no way to be assured that when a colleague went down beneath a hail of bullets the pain would be any less because you never acted on the attraction. Phil had realized that when he’d had to make that call to Natasha and tell her, in his calmest voice, that Clint had been compromised by that bastard Loki, and when he woke up in that hospital bed, unsure whether Clint had survived or was even Clint anymore.

So the call, when it came, surprised them all