your tags about phil/kate/clint always give me joy (aka I'm smiling like an idiot right now)
"Would you stop cringing," Kate hissed. "You look fine. Slightly more fine than usual."
"I know," Phil replied simply, and Kate made a show of rolling her eyes at him before following his gaze as it flicked around the dance floor. After a moment, she cringed as well.
"I'm going to go get him," she said firmly.
"Don't you dare," Phil returned, and while his voice was calm, almost mellow, there was that thread of authority in it that had Kate settling back in her seat without even meaning to. "It's better to let him enjoy himself than to cause a scene."
Kate tried to pull her eyes away from Clint, and failed. He had solved the problem of dancing in his tight skirt by pulling it up so everything from the top of his ass down was on display. Including the pair of lacy underpants he had apparently borrowed from Kate. Not all of him seemed to fit in the panties at once. It was kind of hypnotic, watching everything shift around as Clint ground and wiggled and snaked in his own little world.
Finding out that her not-really-mentor and fellow Hawkeye wore dresses had been a bit of a non-event. Kate had been digging through Clint's wardrobe for a jacket, had seen the dresses still in bags from the dry cleaners hanging up, and asked who they belonged to. "Me," Clint had said simply, and had given Kate a kind of perplexed look that said 'who else would they belong to?'. So Kate had said "Cool," and found a sweater to wear, and just added it to the small pile of things that she knew about Clint Barton.
The pile was a lot bigger these days, and it was tangled in some places with the (admittedly smaller) pile of things she knew about Phil, and also with the general clutter of things that she thought she knew about herself. It was odd sometimes, realising which parts of her piles were common knowledge and which were secret. Everyone knew that Clint would wear a dress if the occasion allowed, but practically no one knew that the reason he skipped breakfast most mornings was because it took a while for his brain to wake up and deciding between toast and cereal was just too hard for him. If you gave him food he would eat it, but if you gave him a choice you could be waiting for hours for the cogs to clank into place.
And now, everyone in the room was having another item added to their Clint-pile. And for most of them it would be that Clint could jiggle one testicle back into the panties and pop the other one out with a sharp snap of his hips. It was hypnotic to watch, and judging by the smirk on Clint's face (when Katie finally managed to lift her gaze) he knew exactly how engrossing his dance moves were. Kate blushed, largely out of frustration and embarrassment and a little bit of anger. Because she didn't often get invited to these things and she'd never been invited to one this fancy and it was the first time that both of her dates had been there, and she hadn't expected to spend the whole evening flushing and having to hold her chin stiffly up as people smirk at the Hawkeyes. She felt fingers brushing against her leg under the thick layers of her gown, and jumped a little as Phil leaned close to her.
"You look like you just bit a lemon," he said quietly.
Kate snorted, and then made an effort to straighten her face out, and then felt some of the annoyance in her loosen. It was hard to be angry at someone for being carefree, and since it was a SHIELD social function she was technically on Clint and Phil's territory. Looking around the room again, she could see that while plenty of people were amused or bemused by Clint shaking his stuff, only a few people remained surprised or flustered by it. Clint, Kate was slowly realising, probably did this kind of thing all the time. Which also explained why every now and then a pair of her nice underpants would go missing.
"Come on," she said, and then grabbed Phil's arm and stood up without allowing any further questions. Phil allowed himself to be pulled to his feet, and while he hesitated when Kate set course to the dance floor she was able to tow him along and that meant he wasn't completely opposed. "I know you can dance," she told him, giving him a stern look. "We're not going to let Clint hog the spotlight."
Phil gave her a doubtful look, but didn't disengage from her grip. The DJ, a cool and remote Agent May who Kate had never spoken to, smoothly transitioned into a new track, serendipitously timing it so the new song started just as Phil's shiny shoes clicked onto the dance floor. Or, given the betrayed look Phil shot at the DJ booth, maybe it wasn't serendipitous at all. But Phil put a hand on Kate's waist, and held her fingers against his palm, and before Kate could even open her mouth to boss him around he had her swept up in the fast skips and circles of electroswing. Clint caught her eye from across the dance floor, and the grin he gave her was infectious.
