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Laura Barton’s swear jar is the bane of every Avenger.
At first, it’s an empty, clean mayonnaise jar, set up on the farmhouse refrigerator where Clint would pitch quarters with uncanny accuracy whenever Laura caught him cursing. For awhile, in Wakanda, there is no swear jar, even though there is a lot of cursing, because Laura can’t bring herself to chastise him for it. Once they hit the States again, though, the swear jar goes back on the fridge, and Clint’s potty mouth is once again a taxable commodity.
“This isn’t fair,” he complains, ricocheting two quarters off opposite cupboards. They clatter and clink into the jar as he eyes his wife. “Do you have any idea how much cursing Sam can do? Or Nat? Or Scott? Shit, honey, if Tony were here, he’d—”
“All I’m hearing,” Laura says serenely, rattling the half-full jar of coins and one-dollar bills at him, and he groans and flicks another quarter into it, “is that I need to put this in the common room.”
It isn’t long until every Avenger comes to know the hunted feeling their teammate Hawkeye feels every time he lets an epithet slip: the feeling of knowing, somewhere, Laura Barton knew.
The clean mayonnaise jar is soon replaced with an empty gallon pickle jar. The scent of dill pickles, faint and lingering, is now reason for most of them to feel tiny pangs of unease and guilt, without quite knowing why. It might have died in its infancy, the Avengers-wide swear jar, had Maggie Lang not thought it was a brilliant idea and started making Scott and Hope pay into it whenever they slipped around Cassie. Then Pepper gets wind of it, and suddenly, a new clause is written into the Avengers charter dictating behavioral standards as set by the head of the house who, in her opinion, is Laura.
No one’s quite forgiven Clint for it yet.
oOoOoOo
Everyone contributes to the swear jar, some more than others. Natasha inparticular has an inventive repertoire. Laura debates at first whether or not she should badger Natasha to pay up for every infraction, because Natasha’s changed. She’s angrier, sharper, a little more bitter. A little quicker with a biting comment than she was before the Accords and subsequent fallout. But Laura decides, in the end, that it’s not fair to let Natasha have special treatment, so she tells FRIDAY to keep a running tally and tells Natasha, matter-of-fact, that she’s paying into the jar.
It’s the first time she’s seen Natasha smile in almost a year.
Rhodey always owes at least five dollars after his physiotherapy appointments, and pays up when he leaves the gym. On one more notable occasion, he drops thirteen dollars into the jar and fishes out a quarter in change, glaring around the room and daring anyone to say anything.
No one does, because Rhodey can be pretty intimidating when he wants to be.
Hope swears the least, but always gets the most ribbing from the Avengers. Scott doesn’t slip up often; he’s used to watching what he says and where he’s saying it. Wanda doesn’t curse at all, but she also doesn’t say much of anything anyway, just stays quiet unless she has something to contribute. Vision, likewise, doesn’t swear either. Sam contributes about as much as Clint does, all in all, and Bruce averages about the same. Peter tosses in a few quarters now and then, an impressive amount when Laura stops to consider that he’s not here all week, day in and day out, and she has a lengthy conversation over the phone with May about it.
The news that Peter’s got a swear jar at home now earns him a lot of mocking.
Thor escapes the swear jar for a long, long time, at least until Laura cottons onto the fact that he’s cursing in Asgardian. It takes almost as long for Laura, with FRIDAY’s help, to piece together the list of his infractions, and they are jaw-droppingly numerous. She presents the list to Thor, along with a final tally that is somewhere in low hundreds range, and is rewarded with an embarrassed flush from the blond demigod.Thor settles his account in Asgardian gold, which requires a special trip to the bank with Thor in tow, just to get them to accept it as foreign currency.
It takes Clint three weeks to stop laughing at the sight of Thor, Crown Prince of Asgard, scuffing his feet like a three-year-old in front of the much tinier Laura, cowed by the Disappointed Eyes.
Even Steve falls prey to the urge to swear, though he mostly restrains himself to solo sessions in the training room, or in his own private suite. But he still finds Laura rattling the jar at him on Thursday nights. The one time he attempts to protest that none of the kids are around to hear him, Laura just raises an eyebrow and points past him, back into the training room, where Nathan is on his tiptoes, reaching for the Wakandan hard-light shield generator Steve left on the table.
The word Steve says at that sight requires the deposit of another quarter.
When Tony comes back, the swear jar fills up more often because not only is he freer with his language than many of the others, he disappears into the workshop for days at a time. Scott’s contributions suddenly take a sharp upturn, influenced by the atmosphere of the workshop when he’s in there with Tony, but Rhodey’s astonishingly decrease, even after his physio appointments.
Steve’s also take a very sharp swing upwards, but Laura thinks that’s because Tony refuses to talk to him outside of Avengers business. Privately, she’s glad for that, because she has a feeling that, when Tony is ready to talk to Steve again, she’s going to need a couple of extra jars on hand, just in case.
oOoOoOo
“Boss, it’s 8:30am.”
Tony barely glances up from his soldering, just enough to see the clock floating on the holo displays above him. He bends his focus to the delicate circuitry, once again curses Hank Fucking Pym for being so tight-assed about his tech, because Scott’s suit is the most obstinate piece of shit he’s ever worked on. “So it is, FRIDAY. Why is that important?”
“Because, boss,” FRIDAY says, “It’s Friday morning, and Laura’s leaving for the bank in approximately fifteen minutes. She’s just gone to fetch her money box out of the Vault, and should be back in your residence shortly.”
“Shit. I meant to settle up last night.” He shuts off his blowtorch, tosses his welding equipment onto his bench and briskly scrubs both hands over his face. “What’s my damage for the week?”
“With your most recent invective, boss? Nineteen dollars and twenty five cents.”
“Tallied like a good little self-aware abacus,” Tony says, but with no real accusation, just fondness. “Thanks, FRI. Can you handle shutting down the workstation for me? I think I’m done for the day.”
“Of course, boss. Saving your work to your external drive, your internal drive, and the cloud now. Would you like me to alert you when Jiminy shows up for his shift?”
Tony tilts his head and considers. “Nah,” he says after a moment. “Scott’s a big kid. He can supervise himself today. I’ve got Cooper’s science fair project to take care of. Make a note that I have to go into the city later. After I take a nap or something. I’m getting old.”
“Yes boss,” FRIDAY says. “I’ve made the appropriate notes. Anything else?”
Tony replies in the negative and exits the engineering bay, wandering in the direction of home. It’s times like this he really misses JARVIS, who would have had a dry, snarky comment to add. There’s Vision, he guesses, fishing his wallet out of his back pocket and thumbing through the bills. But Vision isn’t the same as JARVIS, even though he sounds like JARVIS and, at times, behaves like JARVIS.
But his days of programming extensively intelligent AI are over. As much as he misses JARVIS, he isn’t going to try and bring him back.
He yawns as he opens the door and pads into the living area of the suite he shares with the Bartons, nose twitching in appreciation of coffee. Clint’s already at the pot, pouring a cup for himself. He glances over his shoulder as Tony comes in, then reaches up to the cupboard above the percolator to get another mug. “Morning, Tony. You want the usual?”
“That’d be great, thanks.” Yawning again and scratching his chest, Tony drops a twenty into the jar and swishes his hand around, looking for change. It’s the end of the week, though, and hunting coins in the moderately dense jar of bills is usually an exercise in futility. The only coins he can find are Asgardian, and Tony sighs in frustration, stares at the jar, and considers dumping it out to see if there are any quarters left. He growls and takes the twenty back out, goes back to thumbing through his wallet for smaller bills, rummaging in his jeans for change.
Clint smirks at him as he hands him a steaming cup of coffee. “Rough night, honey?” he asks, mock-sympathetically.
Tony eyes him balefully as he takes the cup and sips. The fact that Clint always manages to make him the perfect cup no matter the time of day isn’t enough to prevent Tony from snarking back. “Sometimes, you’re a real fucking asshole, Hawkass,” he says, and then releases the twenty as Clint laughs. Tony shrugs, hides his own grin with the coffee cup. “What? If I can’t get change back, I may as well get my full money’s worth.”
A hand makes contact with the back of his head, a soft paf that pulls an involuntary and unnecessary ow from him. Laura comes into view with her biometric money box in hand. “That’s not what the swear jar is for, Tony,” she says. “It’s supposed to be a deterrent, not a pay-to-swear.”
Tony smiles good-naturedly and gulps more coffee. “That's one school of thought. I subscribe to a different philosophy.”
Laura eyes him as she thumbs the biometric lock and inputs her passcode, which even Tony doesn't know for security purposes.
“Yeah,” Clint says, and drains his cup, hauling down the creamer and sugar to pour himself another. “That doesn’t work with her. Believe me. I’ve tried.”
Laura shakes her head as she turns the jar upside down, reaching in to drag out the bills caught on the curve of the rim. “I despair of the two of you,” she mutters, and starts sorting out the bills. “And I’m starting to despair of the Avengers as a whole. I see a lot of twenties in here.”
“It’s a good stress reliever,” Tony says. “The Avengers’ job description involves a lot of stress. It’s hardly surprising. What’s surprising is that you aren’t deducting it straight from our paychecks.”
“Yep,” Clint says, stirring his new cup of coffee. “Tried that one too. I’m telling you, Tony, you’re out of luck. You’re not going to come up with any valid excuse Laura will accept.” He turns and leans back against the counter as he sips his coffee. “You planning on attending Cap’s briefing later?”
Tony blinks, taps the face of his watch to bring up his schedule, and feels acid churn in his stomach. “Shit,” he says. “I guess I have to. Goddammit, I have better shit to do today than sit and watch Captain Sparklepants make those pathetic fucking eyes at me.”
Laura’s hand is abruptly thrust into his field of view, palm up, and Clint just starts laughing. Tony blinks again, stares at it, and follows the arm up to find Laura waiting with an amused expression. “That’s another dollar, Tony,” she says.
He grumbles and gets his wallet out again, hands her a twenty and accepts his nineteen dollars of change back. “I thought it wasn’t a pay-to-swear service.”
Laura smiles and shrugs, turns back to her counting. “That’s one school of thought,” she says. “I subscribe to a different philosophy.”
oOoOoOo
The line at the bank is longer than usual, and Laura sighs faintly as she joins the end of the queue, behind a pregnant lady texting on her phone. There are five people ahead of her, and three at the wickets. Laura sighs, rubs her forehead. Hopefully, she’ll be done soon enough to get the breakfast special from that diner she keeps meaning to go back to on the way home.
Maybe she should have brought Clint and Tony. At the very least, they’d keep her entertained while she waits for a teller, and then they could have a nice, quiet family meal. And maybe she’d finally be able to talk to him about his place in the family.
Because Tony has trouble figuring those things out for himself. For a guy with the brainpower of a world class genius, he has an awful hard time seeing things right in front of his nose. Laura knows some part of Tony is waiting for the ball to drop, waiting for her and Clint to kick him out.
If she hadn’t seen the warning signs for herself, Rhodes had sat them both down not long after Tony’s moving-in became an official thing and had what, in her younger, TV-watching years, Laura would have called the shovel talk. Oh, Rhodes hadn’t been at all hostile or less than polite, but Laura’d gotten the impression that anyone trying to harm Tony these days would find a supremely unimpressed War Machine knocking on their door.
In between the not-threats and the bland reminders of how much firepower he packs, Rhodes had quietly asserted that Tony took time to come around to the notion he was wanted anywhere, and at some point before that happened, he’d try to protect himself by leaving first. Just a thing he does.
Laura shifts up the line as two customers leave the wickets and are replaced by two more. She lifts a hand in greeting to Roy, a retired cop with whom she’s chatted before, at the Small Business wicket, but her thoughts are all turned inward.
In the last three months, she’s seen Tony go through a lot of mood changes and shifts of introspection, but she doesn’t think he’s ever been close to leaving. Then again, she doesn’t think he’s actually aware of how intertwined his life’s become with theirs, because half the time, he’s exhausted from Avengers business or exhausted from engineering binges, and the other half of the time, he’s either trading one-liners and witticisms with Clint or coloring with Lila or building things with Cooper or letting Nathan crawl all over him.
She knows Clint’s aware of it. She’s definitely aware of it. Every day Tony stays with them, finds the openings they leave him to wind his way into their family, it gets harder to remember how it worked without him.
If she's being honest, she worries that Tony will decide one day not that they don't want him, but that he doesn't want them.
Laura moves up again, and then again, and in shorter order than she thought, she’s standing at the counter. She smiles at the girl behind the counter, but her heart sinks a little, because for as long as she's been banking at this branch, she's never seen this teller before.
With Asgardian gold to deposit, she doesn't really want to deal with a new teller. To date, every time she has, it's taken three times as long to conclude her business because they all have to call Robert, the manager, over to train them on the Avengers-specific banking policies.
“Good morning!” the teller chirps with a friendly smile. “How can I help you today?”
Everyone has to learn sometime, Laura, she reminds herself, and passes over her bankbook and drops her eyes to the girl's name tag long enough to read it. “Good morning, Marisol,” she says with her own friendly smile. “I'm Laura Barton, one of the financial managers for the Avengers. I have a couple of deposits I'd like to make into one of the Initiative accounts, and I think you might want to see if Robert is available for one of them. It’s a little… complicated.”
Marisol frowns, but dutifully types something into the computer anyway. “Robert’s been busy this morning,” she says in apology. “It might take some time for him to be free, but…” Her eyes flick over Laura’s shoulder, assessing the line behind her. “You said you had a couple of deposits. Are they all complicated?”
“Not at all. Just the one. The rest are pretty straightforward, actually.”
Marisol’s smile is a touch relieved. “Then let’s get those out of the way, and hopefully, Robert will be free by the time we’re done.”
Laura pops the lock on the first layer of the box, static-locked to a band on her wrist, and pulls out the cash. It takes her and Marisol five minutes to count it out properly, but soon enough, eight hundred and fifty six dollars and twenty five cents is bagged and dropped and Marisol records the transaction into the account.
Her eyebrow does go up though, when she first brings up the account information. “The Sin Fund?” she asks.
“I have a swear jar,” Laura says, and unlocks the bottom layer, where fourteen Asgardian coins glitter under the fluorescent lighting. “Everyone pays in. Even Thor.”
Marisol actually leans forward, looking impressed. “Is that why you need Robert?” she asks, frowns a little in doubt. “Because I don’t think we can actually take gold coins.”
“Thor’s been in,” Laura replies, and schools her face into controlled warmth as unease, premonition, prickles along her shoulders. “He had a talk with Robert about it. Everything’s already in place for the currency exchange. I guess that’s just something they forgot to mention.”
She's not sure what warns her. A split-second flicker in Marisol's eyes as she glances in fright over Laura's shoulder. The dead silence of the rest of the bank. The smell of gun oil and sweat tickling her nose. But Laura’s survived this long because she listens to her instincts. She swings the lid of the box compartment fast and quick, and it snaps shut just as something cold, hard and round nudges her temple.
Laura goes very, very still.
“Give me the box, bitch,” a gruff voice growls, “and no one needs to get hurt.”
Laura meets Marisol’s eyes, and Marisol looks terrified. Slowly, subtly, Laura shifts her left hand towards her right, closes her fingers around the face of her watch, and triggers the panic button Pepper had insisted all Avengers civilians wear. The vibration against her skin is very, very subtle, just enough to be detectable to her without drawing attention from the guy holding a gun to her head.
“You!” The gun barrel doesn’t move, stays rock solid against her temple, and Laura freezes again. The teller flinches back, eyes going wider, and Laura figures he was talking to her. “Get your fuckin’ hands where I can see them.”
Slowly, Marisol lifts her hands from the counter. “All the tills are locked,” she says, voice shaking nearly too much to be understandable. “And we can’t access the vault.”
“Don’t care about money,” the robber says, and the gun digs hard into Laura’s temple, until she has to let it shove her head or bruise her skin. “I want the gold.”
“You can’t have it.” Laura barely recognizes her own voice, because it is calm, even, and firm. "It's worth nothing without Thor's authorization anyway."
“Is if you know who to sell it to,” Gruff Voice snarls, and the gun jabs her again. “Hand it over.”
If it had been the bills, or any of the other coins, her car, her wallet, anything else, she’d have handed it over without concern. But someone who doesn’t care about the money, who wants Asgardian gold to sell it to someone specific has tripped all of her red alerts and blaring alarms. Handing it over, she is one hundred percent positive, is going to be a Very Bad Idea. "No."
Gruff Voice grabs her roughly by the wrist and whips her around. Instinctively, she jerks her arm out of his grasp, and her watch goes flying as the band lets go under the pressure of his hand. She has to force herself to not watch it crack onto the floor, has to force herself to not feel the sudden spurt of grief when another of the robbers steps on it in his rush to get to a window.
Clint gave her that watch when they were young, poor and newly married. It’s just a stupid watch, she tells herself, but it punches her in the gut anyway like she’d just lost her wedding ring, or the rent check.
“Boss,” the watch-breaker says warningly, peering out the window from the side. “Boss, we got cops.”
“Shit!” Gruff Voice is decidedly not so gruff anymore, still male, still low in register, but without the obvious growl he’s using to disguise his voice. “Alright, everybody get on the fucking ground now!”
As Laura sinks to her knees under the eye and gun of Gruff Voice, her eyes flick to the watch. Underneath the pang of loss, she just hopes the signal broadcast long enough for FRIDAY to pick up.
oOoOoOo
Tony wants to be anywhere but here, listening to Vision drone on and on about team tactics and training schedules. If he never hears the word “synchronicity” again, it will be too soon. He stops paying attention partway through the lecture and explanation of tactics, and pulls a notebook and a pen from the pile on the table towards him.
Because he’s not allowed to access the holo screens in here, he does things the old fashioned way. Sketching by hand isn’t exactly a skill he’s lost, but it’s not as clean as he’s used to either. Makes it a bit more challenging to get it right.
The sketch is quick and messy, a series of inked images delineating his improved line of static locks, then a pair of boots, then a guinea pig standing on top of an armored stick figure, carrying a bow and arrow. And then the armored figure spinning, and the guinea pig flying off, followed by a question mark. And just because it’s possibly the most juvenile thing he can add, he scrawls do you like testing new, untried tech? ___ Yes ___ No.
With a smirk, he slides the sketchpad across the table to Clint. The scrape of the spiral wire breaks the conversation, pulls all eyes to him. He arches an eyebrow back at them. “Can I help you?”
Natasha catches his eye, smirks faintly, and goes back to doodling on her own notepad. Steve opens his mouth to say something, and Tony’s shoulders go tight and tense in preparation for whatever it is, but FRIDAY cuts in before he can do much more than pull in the air to speak.
“I’m sorry for the interruption, boss,” FRIDAY cuts in suddenly, oddly subdued, “but I received a brief transmission from Laura Barton’s panic button. It cut off abruptly, but I verified it as legitimate. Also, the police scanners are picking up increased chatter. I think the bank’s being robbed, boss.”
The table erupts in chatter and noise, but Tony goes cold and still. For the life of him, he’ll never know why, but when he looks up at Clint, he finds Clint staring right back at him. Clint’s gone pale, but his eyes are hard, searching Tony’s face for … something. Whatever he’s looking for, he seems to find, because he just nods, gets up and leaves.
“...asha, Wanda,” Steve is saying when Tony turns his focus to the rest of the Avengers. “Scott. Get your gear and get to a quinjet. You’re going to be first —”
Tony stands so abruptly his chair screeches across the floor and slaps his hands on the table. Silence drops immediately, pale, angry, worried faces turning towards him. But his eyes are only for Steve.
“The Avengers show up to a bank robbery,” he says, low and lethal, “and we have a media circus in seconds . There’ll be choppers and reporters and every fucking two-bit villain shows up to challenge us if we go out in force.” He’s nothing but ice inside right now, and his face feels frozen. “Clint and I will handle it.”
Steve frowns uncertainly. “Tony…”
“Clint and I will handle it.”
Steve flinches, actually flinches back, eyes going round and wide. Deep below the ice, Tony’s darkly satisfied with it, vicious and delighted he took Steve aback. “Keep talking team tactics. Synchronicity. Whatever. FRIDAY will give me the Cliff Notes when I get back.”
He spins from the table before any of them can say anything else, strides towards the door, tapping on the face of his watch to wake up his Bleeding Edge armor from its repair bay.
“Stark.”
He doesn’t turn around, but he pauses, looks back over his shoulder. Everyone’s watching him, expressions ranging from carefully blank to faintly approving, to absolutely disapproving. Out of all those faces, he focuses on Natasha. “What?”
She eyes him for a moment, cold and calculating, then smiles a smile that’s like the dawn breaking after a night of cold, grey, dark rain. “Nothing, Tony,” she says. “Go get ‘em, tiger.” And then she goes back to doodling on her pad.
“Anyone else? No? Good.” He doesn’t actually wait for a response, just hits the door at a run. “FRIDAY, eyes on Clint?”
“Clint is approaching the quinjet hangar, boss. He’s retrieved his bow and tactical equipment already.”
“Good. Send the armor to intercept me, FRI. I’ll pick up Clint on the way out the door.”
----
The flashing lights of the cop cars are visible miles away from the air. Tony can feel the tension ratchet up in Clint’s shoulders through layers of reinforced Kevlar and titanium-vibranium-gold alloy and it’s impossible, but he swears Clint’s got his hand wrapped tight enough around Tony’s gauntlet to dent the metal. “Ease up, Barton, or it’s gonna hurt when I drop you.”
“I’ll ease up when I see Laura with my own two goddamn eyes,” Clint snaps, and then his head tilts back against the wind. “Wait, what do you mean, when you drop me? Don’t you dare fucking drop me, Stark.”
No one seems to have noticed him yet, which is the optimal situation. At least, if they have noticed him, they’re not pointing upward or taking pictures or making a point of drawing attention to him. And that’s good. It means that no one’s noticed he’s carrying a passenger. “Gonna have to if this plan’s going to work.”
“You actually have a plan?”
“I always have a plan.” Granted, it isn’t much of a plan, but these are low-brow scumbags here, so maybe the simpler plans are just what they need. He burns his jets a little hotter, streaks over the crowd too fast for him to really register yet, and circles behind the bank building. “Hold on, Ygritte. Landing might be a little rough.”
“Don’t tell me what landings are like,” Clint says. “I’ve seen your landings. You know nothiiiiiiiii—”
Tony has only seconds to calculate the right angle and speed to release his hold on Clint as he comes up and over the lip of the roof, but figures he got it right when all Clint does is yelp and grunt and thud onto the building.
“Break anything?” he inquires, sweet as sin, as he drops into his usual, flashy landing to a crowd finally starting to react to the fact that he’s there, with pointed cell phones and pointing fingers.
Clint makes a pained groan. “I really,” he says, enunciating clearly over the faint scrape of rooftop gravel and scuffing feet, “really fucking hate you, Tony.”
He straightens from his crouch, can’t help grinning wide and broad. “Aww. And here I thought we were besties. Also, swear jar. And find the vents while you’re up there, honeybunch. FRIDAY, find me the blueprints to that building.”
“Yes, boss,” FRIDAY says promptly.
A corner of his HUD starts flashing, but Tony doesn’t have time to watch the progress bar shift, because the cop he assumes is the chief of police from the big, shiny hat with the gold braidwork is walking towards him, looking like he just smelled something foul. “Hang tight. Looks like I have to talk to the fuzz.”
“I’m not sure what’s more disturbing,” Clint says conversationally, as Tony lets the helmet fold away, plates sliding over one another until he’s blinking in the bright sunlight. “The fact that you called me honeybunch, or the fact that you think we’re in a shitty buddy cop movie from the 70s.”
“I call everyone honeybunch,” Tony lies through his teeth, then pastes on his brightest, about-to-go-on-Fox-News smile and makes eye contact with the chief. “Morning, officer. Can I help you?”
The chief is most definitely not happy to see him, greets him with a sour frown and a downturned mouth. “Mr. Stark,” he says, and eyes Tony warily. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing here?”
“I understand there’s a bank robbery in progress,” he says, glances over his shoulder at the bank, his first proper look at it. The shades have all been drawn down, and he thinks he can see shadows crossing back and forth, but it’s hard to tell from the glare of the sun on the glass panes.
“There is,” the chief says evenly. “But I didn’t call for the Avengers, and I’d appreciate it if you’d head on back to your compound, sir. We’re not in need of your services.”
“Asshole,” Clint snorts, and something clangs on the other end of the comm. “Why do I have the sudden suspicion that your plan involves me getting up close and personal with cobwebs and dust bunnies? Jesus. Do they never clean out their ventilation system?”
“Can’t do that, chief.” Tony never gets tired of watching the faces of law enforcement contort with the realization that they can order a man in power armor to leave all they want, but they can’t really make him listen. He enjoys it just a moment longer. “But I’m not here to get in your way.”
“His face must be priceless.” Clint’s voice has an odd echo to it, and Tony figures he’s inside the ductwork.
“You’re not here to get in our way.” The chief’s expression is doubtful, one eyebrow raised.
“That is correct,” Tony answers them both. As Clint snickers quietly in his ear, Tony turns around to face the bank, folds his arms over his chest and stares at the sun-opaqued windows. “I’m just here to make sure the family I have inside comes out okay.”
Unexpectedly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the chief’s face softens just a fraction. “Stay out of the way, Mr. Stark,” he says gruffly, “and you can stay.”
“Thank you, chief,” he murmurs and, when the man turns away, lets the faceplate snap back over his face. “He’s gone. You inside?”
There’s no answer for a moment, and Tony frowns. “FRIDAY, have you got eyes on Katniss?”
“Yes, boss,” FRIDAY replies, and a blinking light appears on his HUD.
Tony watches it for a minute, but it doesn’t shift at all, just stays in one spot. He chews on the inside of his cheek, resists the urge to fidget. “Clint? You okay in there?”
“Yeah.” Clint’s a little breathless, a little strained. “It’s a tight fit.”
“Well,” Tony murmurs, trying to keep one eye on Clint’s tracker and one eye on the cops and one eye on FRIDAY’s search for the building plans, “a little less donut and a little more cardio, Katniss, and you’d still squeeze through those shafts like a greased eel.”
“Says the man who thinks green ooze is a food group. Anyway, I’m supposed to be retired,” Clint grumbles, and Tony can track the locator chip on his bow in the AR overlay over the building, see that Clint's moving, but he’s gotta admit. Clint’s good. He can’t hear even a faint brush of cloth on metal, let anyone any of the banging and clanging anyone else on the team, barring Natasha, would be causing trying to get through the pipes and ducts. “I’m not supposed to be… Jesus… squeezing through anything except an inner tube anymore.”
“That ship has sailed,” Tony replies, attention distracted by the sudden spread of blue lines drawing themselves in over the building in his HUD. Blueprints, complete with plumbing and electrical notes in the margins. FRIDAY must have finished her hack-and-grab of the local municipal archives. “You wanted to stay retired, you should have gone water skiing with your kids instead of playing Robin Hood. Consequences, sweetheart. I understand they’re a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing, but sooner or later, something’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.”
The other end of the comm channel goes quiet for a moment, long enough that Tony brings back the tracker following Clint’s progress through the building. The tracker has stopped moving again, and Tony’s tension ratchets up again. He starts to take a step forward, but restrains himself reminding himself that he can’t do anything that might touch off the robbers while Laura’s still inside with an unknown number of hostiles. “Clint?”
“Yeah,” Clint replies quietly. “I’m here. Just thinking.”
“Give the damn hamster a break already. Stop thinking. Start moving.”
“Swear jar,” Clint mutters snidely, but his blinking purple dot resumes momentum through the now-overlaid blueprints. “Hey, Tony. About stuff biting you in the ass…”
“Hey, I’m game, but you’d have to ask Laura first.” Tony clicks his teeth together, resists the urge to facepalm, as Clint abruptly chokes on the other end of the channel. That’s what he gets for stretching himself too thin. Mouth ran away and was miles ahead before he noticed and could catch up. “Shit. Forget I said that. Just slipped out. What were you going to say?”
To his credit, whatever kind of reaction Clint’s coughing fit had meant, it’s not evident in his tone at all. “I was going to say that none of it was your fault.”
Tony blinks. “None of what?”
“The airport. Siberia. Hell, the Accords? I don’t know, Tony. I just know it wasn’t your fault. Or, well, not completely your fault.”
The lightbulb goes abruptly on. “Ahh, Laura and her never ending campaign to reform me of my wicked self-deprecating ways. She ask you to have a word with me?”
“No. Shit. Hang on a second.” Clint’s voice sounds strained, and Tony can hear the faintest of clanging on the channel. “Getting closer to the ground floor now. Gotta be a bit more careful moving around.”
“Swear jar,” Tony says, but his heart isn’t really in it anymore. There’s a faint churn of unease beginning to swirl around in his gut. So far, he’s managed to avoid having any awkward conversations about the Accords and the airport and the fallout that came from all of it with anyone. Including Rhodey, though Rhodey tried his damnedest just after Tony came back.
He’s a champion avoider of unpleasant topics, has sophisticated techniques to duck, dodge and dive from conversations he doesn’t want to have. He’s great at dissembling, distracting, using sleight of hand and brash, ballsy statements to steer away from things he doesn’t want to talk about.
Somehow, he doesn’t think it’s going to be quite so easy this time.
oOoOoOo
“Shit! Fucking Iron Man is here!”
Without drawing too much attention to herself, Laura gradually shifts, millimeter by millimeter, until she can see the two masked men at the front of the bank. The one who spoke is leaning against the wall beside the blinds-covered window, carefully separating the blades of the blinds to peer outside. She still can’t see much of his face, in profile and under the balaclava, but his eyes have gone wide, skin around them pale.
And Laura smiles faintly, because there was never a doubt in her mind Tony would come. And there isn’t a doubt in her mind that Tony’s come with Clint.
Beside her, Roy twitches, a movement she catches in the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t turn her head towards him. Even the three supposed to be covering the hostages are distracted and disarrayed by the news their teammate blurted. They drift closer to the window as a hushed, furious argument starts between the two already there, and Laura subtly glances at Roy.
“Iron Man?” Roy murmurs, so faint it’s barely audible. “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s here for me,” Laura murmurs back, equally soft. “He’s family.”
“He gonna make this worse?”
Laura’s back teeth grind, and she knows her shoulders have gone tense and angry. “No,” she says, clipped and short, sees Roy twitch again, this time in surprise. She wishes she had time to be more thorough in her response, but the quiet hissing argument is already over. Gruff Voice is striding back towards her, with his mouth twisted in an ugly line. “Be ready to move. Get these people to a back room and lock the door.”
“Yes, ma’am.” It’s all Roy has time to say out of the side of his mouth before the leader’s grabbing at her still-sore wrist to drag her up.
Laura comes up swinging, and the biometric box, titanium-gold, just like the suit, clips the bottom of the Gruff Voice's jaw, snapping his teeth together and rocking his head back. She spins into his body, snapping her head back into his rebounding head and her foot stomps down across his instep. She shoots a quick look at Roy, who’s looking up at her, agape. “Go!” she snaps. “Go!”
Roy, to his credit, closes his mouth and moves, grabbing up the pregnant woman in a bridal carry and hustling towards the back. A second later, Robert the manager is likewise on his feet, exhorting the others to be quick and come with him.
Laura heaves her shoulders and throws Gruff Voice’s dead weight off her back, grunting with the effort. She grits her teeth against the sudden burn of a pulled muscle in her side. I’m rusty, she thinks, resisting the urge to curl into the sharp ache, and slides her foot back into a ready-for-anything stance that already has her legs protesting. Too many Disney movies, not enough flexibility maintenance. She doesn’t regret retiring for her children, but right now, she wishes she’d kept up the training regimen she’d had as an active-duty agent.
The four remaining are slow responding. It's only been a few seconds at most, but Laura watches time stretch like taffy. Logically, she knows it's because the adrenaline has kicked in, heightening her focus and readying her for a fight or to flee, but for a moment, it's wild and out of control.
Long-dormant training sluggishly responds as the first of the four reaches her and telegraphs a grab. She knocks it aside, sloppily, and someone that sounds an awful lot like Nat in the back of her mind clucks in disappointment. Too slow. Too out of practice.
Still, slow and rusty as she is, she's a better hand-to-hand fighter than the robber. She steps into his reach while he's still gathering himself for his next swing, driving her knee up into his crotch. His eyes go comically wide, what skin she can see turns the color of curdled milk, he goes down for the count with a high-pitched noise. It strains a muscle in her thigh, but she kicks him in the temple and hopes she’s judged her strength right as his eyes roll back and flutter shut.
She turns, hair flying into her eyes and breath coming fast and heavy, for the next attacker, and pulls up abruptly at the press of a gun barrel against her forehead, the click of the hammer pulled back. She freezes, slowly brings her hands up, and smiles at the supremely unamused look on the robber’s half-covered face.
“I do Tae Bo,” she says unprompted.
The robber’s eyes dart left to right, but the hand holding the gun to her head is rock steady. “Open the fucking case,” he snarls, low and soft.
“No,” Laura replies, and then she’s sprawled on the floor with her ears ringing and her face throbbing before she even realizes he hit her.
He follows her down, and the gun presses hard into her forehead again as he crouches over her. “Open the fucking case, or I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
“Then you’re definitely not getting the case open,” she says, blinking the water out of her eyes. Movement above the robber’s head, slight but noticeable, shifts her attention, and only disciplined effort keeps her from reacting at the sight of Clint directly above her in a ceiling vent.
She returns her gaze to the robber, slowly folds her thumb and pinkie down to show three fingers on her right hand. “The case is keyed to my biometrics, and only me. Not even Tony Stark can open this thing without my authorization, and good luck trying to convince him to help if you kill me.” She flips her hand palm up, lowers another finger to show “two”, then points in their direction and hopes against hope none of them are close enough to see her gestures. She doesn’t have to hope Clint got the message. He saw it, he got it.
“Attention, criminals inside the bank! I have always wanted to say this, but this is astonishingly the first opportunity I’ve had: we have you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!”
Tony’s voice booms loud and clear, and the robber all but sitting on Laura’s chest jerks instinctively, head swiveling to the front of the bank. Laura jumps too, because whatever she was expecting, it certainly wasn’t that, but she has enough presence of mind to close her hand when something small and hard hits her palm.
The robber turns back with a snarl. “Don’t fuckin’ move,” he warns, and gets to his feet.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Laura replies tiredly and glances up again to see Clint staring back down at her and tapping his ear. And it’s a very good thing that all three of the robbers left standing are now on the other side of the bank foyer, because her smile is wide and fond. Clever boys, she thinks and, with a wary eye on the gunmen, she slips the earpiece into her ear and taps it on.
“--nough of a distraction, Katniss? If not, I’ve got more shitty one-liners I can yell before the cops haul me away.”
“Swear jar,” she whispers, and has to close her eyes and bite her lip to keep from laughing aloud in delight at Tony's relieved Laura, thank fucking Christ . Because it’s all over now but the shooting.
Clint and Tony are very, very good at that.
As they cheerfully demonstrate seconds later.
----
Within ten minutes, Laura’s sitting on the back of an open ambulance with a blanket around her shoulder's, Clint hugging her also by the shoulders, and Tony carefully handing her a cup of steaming coffee. Laura gratefully takes the cup as gratefully as she leans into Clint’s side, tolerating the paramedic carefully prodding at the spectacular black eye she’s developing.
Tony is pale, slightly green, and keeps staring at her like she’s going to vanish or worse, and flinches when she hisses in discomfort after the paramedic touches a particularly tender spot. “I’m fine, Tony,” she says. She smiles reassuringly at him, but all he does is go paler, swallow harder, look a little greener.
“You almost weren’t,” he replies, and combs frazzled fingers through his hair. “This is normally the place where I’d tell you my plan to make sure this never happens again, but I historically do not have the best luck with those. I don’t know what to do.”
Laura’s smile slips, fades a little. Tony had been doing nothing but relaxing and improving since he’d moved into their spare room, but the defeatism in his voice now breaks her heart. She glances at Clint with an eyebrow raised.
Clint rolls his eyes, kisses Laura’s temple, and slides off the back of the ambulance. “I’m going to go talk to the cops,” he says, and claps Tony on the shoulder as he passes. “Take my spot, Tony. You look like you need to sit down.”
Laura watches Clint stride away towards the knot of cops hanging around the squad cars and the other ambulance, each containing the would-be robbers and hostage-takers, then shifts her attention to Tony. He's wavering on his feet, halfway between sitting and, she thinks, running away. “How are you doing, Tony?”
Tony twitches, and his eyes with their distance abruptly focus on her. For a moment, she wonders what he’s seeing because it doesn’t seem like he’s seeing her at all. But then he shakes his head, like he’s coming out of a bad dream, sighs heavily and scrubs his face. “I should be asking you that question. What do you need, Laura? What can I do for you?”
And she smiles, because she told him weeks ago what she needed, and it was just as true then as it is now. She frees a hand from the blanket and pats the still-warm spot Clint just vacated. “Come sit and keep me company. I could use the company.”
He hesitates for another moment longer, then sighs and sinks onto the edge of the ambulance like a man a thousand years old, head in his hands. She leans against him as much as she dares, a bare hint of hip on hip, shoulder against his side. A tremble runs through his shoulders, and then like a tree toppling over in slow-motion, he leans towards her until his temple is resting against the crown of her head.
They don’t say anything, but that’s fine. Laura doesn’t need to talk. She doesn’t need to do anything but sit, and sip her coffee, and let the post-adrenaline jitters run their course. After a few moments, Tony’s arm creeps hesitantly around her shoulders, and she leans into that too.
oOoOoOo
“Here.”
Tony looks up as a brown glass bottle is thrust towards his face, and he takes it instinctively, eyeing Clint as he settles on the porch swing beside him with a sighing grunt. “Rough day,” he says conversationally, swigs from his own bottle as he stretches into a comfortable sprawl.
Tony is about to thank Clint for the thought but no thanks on the booze when he catches sight of the label. Dad’s Root Beer. He smirks and cracks the top, takes a swallow and enjoys the cold fizz as zings down his throat. “Must have been rougher than most if you’re breaking out the hard stuff.”
Clint smirks, tips the bottle again for a long swallow. “Coop’s almost thirteen. I don’t keep real beer in the house. I’m not making it easy for him. He’s going to have to work for his underage drinking, same as I did when I was his age.”
“A-plus parenting there, Barton.” Tony takes another long swallow. Sweet is not usually his go-to, but it’s cold enough to satisfy a craving he didn’t even know he had. “This stuff is good.”
“Only the best grocery-store soda for the billionaire buddy,” Clint says modestly, then grimaces and scrubs the back of his head. “Listen. We need to talk.”
Tony’s stomach immediately starts churning, the root beer fizz turning unpleasant and sour, and his mind starts screaming through all the possible reasons those words might have come out of Clint’s mouth. But he’s old hat at these conversations, knows how to cover the anxiety and the fear with false smiles and humor. “Breaking up with me, Katniss?” he says lightly.
Clint smirks and throws a bottle cap at him. It bounces off Tony’s forehead. “Don’t be an ass, Stark. I’m serious.”
“Should I be looking for four scary guys riding horses?” Clint’s smirk turns to a faint scowl, and Tony holds up his hands, mentally preparing himself for anything from we’re tired of you living here to … he doesn’t even know. “Alright, Christ. What’s on your mind?”
Clint doesn’t answer for a second, just drops his gaze to the bottle he’s turning around and around in his hands. Then he sighs, looks back up and says, “When all that shit went down between you and Cap last year, why didn’t you call me?”
Tony blinks, because as prepared as he’d been for almost anything, that hadn’t been even a consideration on his list, and it takes him a minute to get his shit together enough to answer. “You were retired.”
“So? Cap called. Why didn’t you?”
Tony blinks again. “Someone asks me for space, Clint, I give them space. You retired. I respected that. You were out. I didn’t want to haul you back in.”
Clint smiles, dark and a little bitter, and Tony tilts his head because he can’t think of a single reason that would be the case. “You didn’t think I’d come, did you?”
“I…” What the hell is he supposed to say to that? Fuck it, he’s going to try honesty, because he’s suddenly tired of smoke-screening and putting on a good show. “No. I didn’t.”
“You’re a fucking idiot then.” He sighs, leans his head back against the rail. “I wasn’t exactly handling being a full-time dad all that well. Off with the Avengers or on SHIELD missions most of my life, visits home on downtime only a couple of weeks at the most. Suddenly, it’s all day every day. I would have jumped at the chance to get out of the house if the fucking Ringmaster called and asked me to come back to the circus.” He tilts his head, considers. “Well. Maybe not. But you get what I’m saying, right?”
No. He’s really not. “Where are you going with this? I’m sorry I didn’t call to give you an excuse to get out of the house?” He sounds more defensive than he really is. Mostly, he’s just not following the threads, and it’s making him edgy.
There’s a strange look on Clint’s face, confused and incredulous. “I waited to see if you would, you know.”
“Why?”
“I agree with you, in principle. Not about the Accords themselves as they were written, but that something should be in place. Like what we have now with the UN liaison we’re supposed to get in a couple of weeks. It’s the right thing to do.”
He frowns because now he’s just goddamn confused. “That’s an odd position for you to have, given you were on Rogers’ side of the airport.”
Clint shrugs, drains his bottle and sets it on the porch beside the swing. “He called,” he says simply. “But just think for a second, Tony. Do you know what I’ve spent the majority of my adult life doing on missions for SHIELD?”
“You’re a sniper. I imagine you did a lot of sniping stuff.”
Clint nods, and his eyes don’t leave Tony’s. “You know what I need as a sniper to do my job perfectly?” He doesn’t wait for Tony’s response, just carries on. “Voice of God. Oversight calling the shots. I can line up a shot and loose the arrow because someone I trust is making the calls, and I don’t have to dick around worrying about the morality of it. Somebody else has already weighed the choices.”
Tony frowns. “That’s not really a great principle to apply to a group of people with the kind of power we have, Clint.”
Clint just smirks and shrugs. “It’s not a perfect analogy, but the basics are the same. Yeah, it’s not a perfect system, but nothing ever is. Rogers thinks he’s so clear-headed and impartial he can make the calls and be in the middle of the shit at the same time. But it doesn’t work that way in practice. Emotions and stress fuck up all that logic and tactical thinking that’s necessary for the shit we do.”
Tony makes a note to mark his calendar because he has absolutely nothing to answer that with. Instead, he goes with a nice, safe change of topic. “You shot me. Repeatedly.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I might have been a little hurt you didn’t want me backing you up. I always liked you better than Cap.” While Tony’s frozen in dumbfounded shock, Clint smiles, stands and picks up his bottle. He clasps Tony gently on the shoulder, pausing long enough to squeeze for a moment, then drops a folded piece of paper in Tony’s lap and heads back towards the door. “Don’t stay up too long, Tin Man. We’re taking the kids hiking tomorrow. Lila wants to go fossil-hunting. Attendance is mandatory.”
Tony picks up the paper and unfolds it with hands that tremble ever so slightly. His sketch from earlier, before FRIDAY alerted them to Laura’s distress broadcast. The grade-school question. Do you like testing new, untried tech? ___ Yes ___ No.
Neither option is checked. Instead, in Clint’s messy scrawl is ___ only if Tony builds it with a large check mark in the blank space.
He sits alone on the swing for a long time after Clint goes back in and most of the lights are off, holding his warm root beer and staring at the paper and trying to process the conversation. Eventually, across the quad, he catches sight of Steve’s unmistakeable broad-shouldered form, and his thoughts go still and quiet.
Steve turns towards him, pauses for a moment, then lifts a hand in a tentative wave. Tony watches him for a long moment, then gets off the swing and returns the wave as he heads towards the door.
More than time he went to bed anyway. He’s tired of thinking.
On his way through the darkened house, he stops long enough to pick up the evidence bag holding all the broken pieces of Laura’s watch from where he left them in his suit jacket. He hadn’t been lying when he told Laura and Clint that he didn’t know what to do to make sure situations like today never happened again, but that was before he had an actual plan.
It’s not much of a plan, but it’s what he’s got.
He swallows hard, staring at the gears and pieces of metal embellishments in the baggie, because today might have turned out so much worse. It might not have been Laura’s watch in a police-stamped bag. It might have been Laura. It might have been Clint. It might have been Lila or Coop or Nathan, if Laura had taken them with her.
It’s a thought that makes his stomach clench, forces bile into his throat, makes him want to throw up. Because if nothing else, today made him understand, with thoroughly humorous hopelessness, how deeply attached he’s let himself become to them. How absolutely, frighteningly much he’s come to love them all, and how it’s going to forever break something in him when they decide they’ve had enough of him.
“Oh fuck me,” he whispers, choking and thick, and covers his eyes until he’s sure he’s got the burn of emotion stinging at them under control. He sighs, shakes his head and pockets the broken watch. He needs to sleep, he knows, but he’s not going to be able to, and he knows that too. Instead, he turns and goes back to the door, because he has a broken watch that’s treasured by a person he cares for, and he’s always been shit at expressing it with anything other than material things.
“Fuck me,” he says again, hopeless and lost. And just before he opens the door, he turns. With accuracy Clint would find impressive, he pitches two quarters across the room and into the empty swear jar on top of the fridge, and then he’s out the door and heading towards his workshop.
oOoOoOo
When she doesn’t see Tony for two days, Laura starts to worry. While it’s not unusual for him to disappear for a couple of days into the workshop, an off-handed inquiry to FRIDAY reveals he’s not at the compound at all, and hasn’t been since yesterday afternoon. That’s cause for concern, and she’s chewing on her lip as she pulls the roast from the oven and moves it to the table in the dining room to set down so Clint can start carving.
She watches him handle the knives for a bit, smoothly transferring slices of steaming meat from the roast to the serving plate. “Did something happen with Tony yesterday?”
He glances at her briefly, surprised. “No. Not that I know of anyway. I assume Cap didn’t track him down because the compound is still standing. Why?”
She shakes her head. “FRIDAY says he left yesterday afternoon and hasn’t been back. She won’t tell me where he is either. And he’s not answering his phone.”
“Okay,” Clint says slowly, and sets the carving knife and fork down. “You have my full attention. What do you want to do?”
She shakes her head, frustration and worry making the movements sharp and quick. “I don’t know. What can we do?”
“Have you checked with Rhodes? Or Pepper?” She shakes her head and he nods, rubbing her biceps soothingly. “We’ll start with them. And if they don’t know, we’ll figure it out from there. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says, sighing faintly. “I’ll go call Pepper. You finish getting dinner ready? The kids will riot if we don’t feed them soon.”
“You got it, honey.” He leans over the table and kisses her cheek, then picks up the carving utensils again.
She pauses at the door, hand on the jamb, and looks back over her shoulder. “Clint, what if…”
“Laura,” he says without looking up from the meat, “I stood in a flying city and fought off an army of killer robots with a bow and arrows. There’s no such thing as what if. There’s only what do we do now. ” He glances up at her and smiles. “Go call Pepper. We’ll find him.”
----
Laura’s call to Pepper only partially reassures her, because while Pepper can confirm she saw Tony in person at the engineering labs at Stark Industries this morning, it’s now nearing seven, and he’s still not picking up his phone.
She leaves the bedroom, chewing on the chain of her necklace (a bad habit she thought she’d long since overcome), with every intention of getting her jacket and going across the compound to track down James Rhodes, but she’s brought short in her tracks by the sound of the front door opening, and Nathan’s excited squealing laugh, followed by Lila yelling for “Papa Tony!”
“Oh thank God,” she breathes, and hurries towards the stairs. By the time she’s reached the bottom, Tony’s been dog-piled by her children, Nathan reaching determinedly for him out of the playpen, Lila hugging him around the waist and Cooper chattering at him about the Mars rovers, for some reason.
And it hurts her heart, just a little, in a good way, to see the easy smile, the pleased laugh, as he hugs Lila and pulls Nathan out and up onto his hip, and answers Cooper back with a string of arcane math Laura can’t follow.
He glances up at her, then looks again and the smile slowly fades into a concerned frown. “What’s wrong, Laura?”
For a long moment, she has no idea what to say. Half a dozen responses are on the tip of her tongue. Half a dozen actions ready to perform. She takes a soft, steadying breath and shakes her head. “Nothing’s wrong, Tony. We were just starting to worry about you.”
He blinks. “About me? Why?”
“Didn’t know where you were,” Clint’s voice comes from the doorway, drying his hands as he appears. “FRIDAY said you left yesterday and you weren’t picking up your phone.”
His frown deepens, and he glances down at his watch, taps it a couple of times, then swears under his breath. “I didn’t realize,” he says. “I told FRIDAY I wanted some privacy while I was at SI, and I guess she interpreted that as total lockdown.” He offers a tentative, apologetic smile. “I keep forgetting she’s not as intuitive as JARVIS was. I’m, uh…” He scratches the back of his head, awkward and uncertain. “Sorry I worried you?”
“It’s fine, Tony,” Laura says with a calmness she’s somewhat amazed she can summon. “Just let us know in the future, is all. We're your family. We’ll always worry if we don’t know.”
“I can do that,” Tony agrees, but the slightly bewildered expression tells Laura that he has no idea why they care, and that breaks her heart just a little.
“Come on, kids,” Clint says, coming out to take Nathan from Tony. “Let’s go get dinner.”
----
After dinner, Tony makes himself scarce again, but at least Laura knows where he is this time. Apparently, one of his very important errands into the city involved picking up a box of scrap metal from SI for Cooper’s science fair project which he finally decided on and is, to her grand surprise, a working scale model of the Mars Rover Curiosity.
“And what would you have done,” Clint asks with a smirk as he cleans Nathan up from the remains of his dinner, “without Tony’s help?”
Cooper rolls his eyes. “A not-working scale model,” he says, exasperated. “Jeez, dad.” Arms full of the box of parts Tony’d gone to fetch, he mutters his way out of the room and stomps up the stairs.
Tony lingers behind long enough to eye them both. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He’s doing the work himself. I’m just supervising and helping. I’m not building it for him.”
“Never crossed my mind,” Clint says, unbuckling Nathan from his high chair and lifting him out. “We trust you.”
Tony fidgets for a moment. “You really don’t mind he asked me and not you?”
Laura has to bite back a snort at the flat look Clint gives Tony as he gets Nathan settled on his hip. “Do I look like a fucking engineer to you? Yeah yeah, swear jar,” he says, as Tony opens his mouth, then reaches into his pocket, pulls out a quarter and flips it over his shoulder with his thumb to ring and clatter into the jar. “Seriously. Coop’s about a thousand times smarter than me. You can actually understand what he’s talking about, and then I don’t have to sit there and pretend like the last engineering project I put together wasn’t Lila’s bike last Christmas. The one with the idiot-proof instructions.”
“As long as you’re sure you’re okay with it.” Tony’s head swivels, following Clint as he leaves the kitchen with Nathan, and then he turns back to Laura, once again awkward and uncomfortable. “I… uh… have something for you,” he says, and fumbles in the pocket of his jacket and pulling out a small velvet bag. He stares at it for a moment, before thrusting it in her direction, so fast she almost has to take it before it falls out of his fingers. “I got it from that cop friend of yours who was in the bank with you the other day. I thought you’d like it back.”
She arches an eyebrow at him as she unties the drawstrings, and then she catches her breath, eyes swimming with sudden tears, as her watch spills out of the bag into the palm of her hand. “Tony,” she whispers, covering her mouth. She turns the watch in her hand, remembering the shattered, crushed mess it had been on the bank’s marble floor. She runs her thumb over the inscription on the back plate — I love you, Laura. Clint. — and does her best not to cry.
“I salvaged as much as I could,” he says, all in a rush. “I replaced the battery with one of the new nano reactors, so you won’t have to change the power supply for about a hundred years. Repaired what was repairable, and I fabricated the rest. I tried to get it as close to the original as I could. I know it's special for you. I hope I got it right.”
“Tony, I just…” Overwhelmed and overcome, the only thing Laura can do is slide the watch onto her arm, and then throw her arms around Tony, hugging him tightly. “Thank you,” she says, smiling and hitching, and kisses his cheek. “This means the world to me.”
His eyes are strange, wild, uncertain, afraid, and his hand touches his cheek before he jerks it back down. “Anytime,” he says, then clears his throat and points at the stairs. “I’m gonna just… go help Cooper. Um... Dinner was lovely, thank you, Laura.”
Tony high-tails it to the stairs, and Laura sinks into a dining room chair, smiling softly and wiping her eyes and running her fingers over her watch, tracing the more delicate lines of the vines on the face. She doesn’t know how much work went into its restoration, but for Tony to have even thought of it… for him to have noticed without being told how sentimental she was about it…
God, she’s got it bad.
She’s still at the table, smiling at her watch, when Clint comes back from putting Nathan to bed. She looks up when he stops in the door and smiles affectionately at her. “You’re in a good mood,” he says, crossing the floor and kissing the top of her head. “What’d he do now?”
In response, she holds out her wrist so he can see the watch back in its customary place. “He fixed my watch,” she says softly. “It’s like it was never damaged. Good as new.”
His snort is soft, and he kisses the top of her head again. “You’re adorable. That’s not your watch.”
She frowns, pulls her head back so she can look him in the eye. “Yes it is,” she says. “It’s even got the inscription on the back.”
Clint’s looking pleased as he sits in the chair beside her. “I don’t doubt he made it out of your watch,” he says, and reaches towards her wrist. “But the thing is… may I?” At her upswept hand, he fiddles with the buttons on either side of the face, eyes creased in concentration. “The thing is, I’m Hawkeye, love. I see things other people miss. And I know this isn’t your watch because...Ah!”
Clint’s grin is unbearably smug as the face of the watch abruptly unfolds, and shining red and gold flows across her hand, up across her fingers, and snap-clicks across her palm. He leans his chin in both hands and just smirks. “I didn’t buy you one with a convertible repulsor glove option. That’s how I know it’s not your watch.”
She eyes him, eyes the glove, eyes him, eyes the glove, is having trouble processing exactly what’s happened. She wiggles her fingers, watches the metal move with the motions, turns her hand over and back. “I can’t believe he did this,” she says, soft and wondering.
“And you were worried he didn’t like you,” Clint says, fondly and mockingly.
Her eyes snap back to him. “I’m armed,” she warns.
“I know,” he says, with his best shit-eating grin in place. “It’s really really fucking hot too.”
“How do I…?” Mimicking what Clint did, she finds the combination that makes the glove fold back into the watch again. She stares at it for another few minutes, trying to find the seams that allow it to change, but they’re too cleverly hidden for her eyes to find. She doesn’t have her husband’s vision, after all. She shakes her head, runs both hands into her hair and blows out a breath. She turns her head to eye Clint. “What are we going to do about this?”
He shrugs, drops his hands to the table and slouches back in his chair. “Dunno, honey. I mean, I know what I’d like to do about it, but you already know where I stand.”
“You and men in suits, I swear to god.” She twists the watch on her wrist again, then shakes it back into place. “He’s not going to go for it. He panicked when I kissed his cheek.”
Clint shrugs, stands, reaches out to snag her free wrist and pulls her up. “He will or he won’t,” he says, circling her waist with his arms. “Either way, if he tries to run, we’ll throw the kids at him. They’re great as tiny anchors.”
“Clint. That’s awful of you.” But she’s laughing softly, circles his neck with her arms.
“What?” His eyes are dancing with a light sort of humor she hasn’t seen in years. Not since Loki. “I didn’t say you’d be throwing them. I’ll take care of that. I never miss.”
“Okay,” she says, and her smile is broad and warm. “So we have a plan.”
“We do,” he says, then releases her and steps back. “In the meantime, get your ass upstairs. I want to see the glove again.”
“I’m not feeding your armor fetish,” she says, then shrieks a laugh as he swats at her backside. “Okay, okay. I’m going.”
“Best wife ever,” he says happily behind her as she takes the stairs in twos.
oOoOoOo
“... and they all lived not happily ever after, because happily ever after is boring. Instead, they all lived ever after, and had lots more adventures I’ll tell you about another night. The end.”
With a flick of his hand, Tony cancels the holograms acting out the story he’d spun out of the ether for Lila, about a princess who lived at the top of a tower of goblins who all worked for her, and had to fight off a fire-breathing dragon while learning how to breathe fire on her own.
He hopes Pepper never hears about it, because she’ll probably love it, and he does not have the time or the inclination to program children’s novels or games.
“Papa Tony, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course, little Barton. Ask away.”
Lila just looks up at him, eyes wide and curious, a look he’s well aware she’s well aware turns his heart into gooey marshmallow. “How come you don’t sleep with Daddy and Mom?”
Tony chokes and coughs, is sure he’s turning an alarming shade of blue for moment before he finds his breath and sucks in a lungful of air. “Because,” he says, strangled. “I just don’t.”
Lila’s forehead creases. “Why? You’re like my dad. You should sleep in the parents’ room.”
Tony glances into what he can see of the hall, but can see neither hide nor hair of anyone to come save him from this hellaciously awkward conversation. “I… uh..” Brilliance hits him and he seizes it desperately. “Because not all parents sleep in the same bed. Cassie has two dads and two moms. But they don't all sleep in the same bed, little Barton."
Lila blinks, long and slow. "Sometimes they do," she says.
There are things, Tony decides as another coughing fit abruptly takes him, that he just doesn’t need to know. And the Ant Family’s particular sleeping arrangements are definitely near the top of the list. Oh Christ, he’s got lab time with Scott in the morning. How the hell is he going to be able to look at any of them ever again without thinking about it?
“So if Cassie’s parents do it, how come you don’t?”
With supreme effort, he reins himself back to something approaching calm. "But I'm not your dad, Lila," he says as gently as possible.
She rolls her eyes and scoffs, a Clint in miniature. "I know that, Tony. I said you were like a dad. You help me with my homework and you read stories to me and you sing to Nathan when he wakes up at night and you help Cooper with his science fair stuff. That’s all dad stuff, you know. That’s why we call you Papa Tony."
He has no idea what to say to that, nor what to do with it either. He flails for an appropriate response but can't find one to save his life. “Well… uh… I just… that is…”
Lila makes a noise in the back of her throat and rolls her eyes, and that expression is neither Clint nor Laura. That look is pure Natasha. She slides off his lap and holds out her hand. “I want to say goodnight to Mom and Daddy,” she says, in a tone that indicates she expects him to escort her.
It dawns on him, slow and nagging, that he might be in serious trouble here.
---
“So,” Tony says five minutes later, after Lila has demanded that her parents stop being dumb and make sure Papa Tony knows where he belongs and then left to tuck herself in like a big girl. The door closing behind her had sounded like the bell of doom to him. He clears his throat and scrubs his hands through his hair. “This is really awkward.”
Clint and Laura eye him silently, until anxiety and a desperate, deep desire to run the fuck away is all but choking him.
“I’ll just wait until she’s asleep to leave,” he offers. “Then it can stop being weird for all of us.”
In surreal synchronicity (that fucking word), Clint and Laura look away from him and at each other. Something silent passes between them, then Clint snorts, turns away, and starts removing pillows from the perfectly made-up bed. “So much for slow,” he says, amused. “Your daughter.”
“Meddlesome and obnoxious child,” Laura shoots back, goes back to brushing her hair up into a ponytail. “Your daughter.”
Tony has the feeling he’s missing something significant here, knows he should be concentrating on figuring out what that is, but he’s abruptly derailed from rational thought by Laura untying her robe to hang it up, and Clint pulling his shirt off over his head to toss into the corner. Shoulders have always been a fond weakness of his.
Clint glances at him as he pulls the covers back. “You plan on sleeping in your jeans, Tony?”
“That’s not going to be comfortable for anyone if you do,” Laura adds.
He has something witty to say. He has something snarky and biting. He’s ready to call them on their prank. Haha, very funny guys. Stop fucking with me. But all that comes out is a croaking, “... what?”
They do that strange talking-without-speaking thing, full of head tilts and shoulder shrugs and significantly raised eyebrows, and then Laura smiles, turns to him and holds out her hand. “Come to bed, Tony.”
There’s no punchline. There’s no haha, got you good.
“Oh come on, Tony,” Clint says with an eyeroll, after he hasn’t moved or said anything for awhile. “It’s a serious offer. I mean, clearly, if you don’t want to take it, then your plan of leaving in a few minutes is definitely for the best. But don’t do it out of some overblown sense that you’re misreading things here. You’re not. And we’re not. And there's not much people can hide from me, you know. Hawkeye. It's in the name. So. Get in the damn bed already.”
It takes a little more coaxing for his brain to abruptly reboot, and by then, Laura’s unbuttoning his shirt for him and Clint is undoing his tie, and he isn't just letting them, he's helping them do it. “You sure?” It’s his voice, but it doesn’t sound like it. He’s quiet, subdued, meek and unsure and wavering. Laura smiles fondly, and Clint sighs in exasperation, and the ultimate answer to his question is for him to end up in the middle of the bed, with Clint and Laura leaning over his bare chest to kiss each other goodnight.
And he blinks because how the fuck is this surreal shit actually happening?
“Goodnight, Tony,” Laura says, and he has a bare second to register her face looming over his before she leans in and brushes a kiss across his lips.
“Night, Tin Man,” Clint says from the other side, and his mouth also slants over Tony’s for a kiss.
And then they both settle down, tucking their noses against his neck, behind his ears, their hands clasped over his chest, breathing slowly evening out.
He lays there, wide-eyed and unblinking, staring up through the dark at the ceiling with a Barton snuggling into him on either side. He’s not sure how his his day started with fixing Laura’s watch and digging through scrap metal to find pieces for Cooper’s rover project, and ends with him in bed with Clint and Laura. Who have both kissed him. And are cuddling him. And are not weirded out by this situation at all.
After a while, he’s not sure how long, he whimpers, short and soft, because his brain cannot process this. “What,” he whispers, blinking furiously, “the fuck just happened?”
And from either side, in sleepy, husky tones, the Bartons reply in mumbled stereo with, "Swear jar."