Having Everything yet Nothing, 3/8ish
Having Everything yet Nothing
iii
Tony eyed the six foot metal tube on the floor where Nat had dropped it, unimpressed. “And what exactly is this supposed to do?” he asked with a raised eyebrow. He could feel her amusement clearly.
Nat rolled her eyes and replied, “It’s called a slosh tube. It’s filled halfway with water and when the water moves around it makes it difficult to balance. It’s good strength and core training. Are you seriously going to wimp out on me already?”
Tony glared, “No chance in hell.”
Her smirk was positively evil. “Good.”
[Read More]
Nat flipped backwards off of where she had previously pinned Tony to the mat. She was favoring her right arm; most likely still largely numb from when Tony pinched nerves under her shoulder. “Okay,” she said, “this is beyond guesswork. You were trained in pressure points.”
Tony rolled off of his back into a crouch, “Richardson thought it would be a good thing for me to learn, to make it easier to escape quickly without permanently injuring or killing someone on accident.”
She nodded slowly. “Have you ever heard of Kadochnikov Systema? It’s a Russian fighting style based on biomechanics and the body’s weak points. I think you’d like it.”
“I’ve never heard of it, but I have a feeling I’m about to become rather familiar with it.”
“Careful, you almost sounded tired there.”
“You suck.”
Tony was just finishing up his warm-up stretches when Nat walked into the gym, carrying what looked like a black briefcase. “Whatcha got there?” Tony queried.
She gave him a smile that was somehow dangerous and happy at the same time (satisfaction-pride-anticipation ran through her, bright and strong) and flicked open the latch on the case. Inside, resting on velvet, were twelve daggers, all of them less than a centimeter wide and deadly sharp, but varying in length from two to four inches. Tony picked one out of the case and let out a low whistle. The knife was perfectly balanced, just enough weight behind it to throw without it being needlessly heavy. “These are really nice, Nat. For me? You shouldn’t have.” The first part was honest, the latter nothing but sarcasm. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Tony took comfort in the warm feelings Nat gave off, too many for him to bother naming. She just gave him a little smile, and started to teach him how to properly use the knives.
Bruce paused as he passed by the gym on his way to get a drink from the mockup vending machine Tony had installed on the floor.
“Come on, Tony, you can go harder than that.”
“I’ll show you hard, Nat!”
He really, really didn’t want to know.
They were just joking about the fact that Tony’s smaller knives didn’t always stick in the target.
Natasha was happy. Comfortable. When she was with Tony.
The realization blindsided her. It had happened sometime in the two months since they had been captured, and she hadn’t even realized it. Natasha wasn’t used to feeling completely safe or at ease around anyone that wasn’t Clint or Coulson. It wasn’t that Natasha didn’t trust the team; she just didn’t trust them completely. She hadn’t emotionally dissected any of her other teammates or worked with them for over a decade, so that probably had something to do with it. Things were what they were, and Natasha couldn’t bring herself to regret it. Clearly Tony needed someone who supported him, given his nervous breakdown in the lab and his more positive reactions to her support afterwards.
When they were alone, he was softer; his sarcasm had no intention to hurt behind it and he didn’t block her out like he did everyone else on the planet. It was gratifying, that he trusted her enough to leave himself so open around her. Natasha was also fiercely glad that Tony was an empath in this situation; there was no way he didn’t know what she felt about this unless his was pigheadedly denying it, which didn’t seem to be the case.
It was…nice.
“Hey Nat, you coming? Dinner should be happening already,” Tony called, leaning against the wall by the elevator. He was still slightly out of breath from the hours spent training, sweaty, a faint flush covering his face.
“Of course,” she answered with a small smile. The elevator doors opened with a quiet ping, and they stepped in, enjoying the companionable silence while it lasted.
They were Avengers after all; quiet wasn’t something that happened very often, and therefore it was something to be savored.
Tony was right; when they reached the communal floor that Tony had installed a state-of-the-art kitchen in, the rest of the team was already digging in to their dinner. It looked like ham, green beans, and potatoes, but there was an unnamed sauce accompanying it that meant Thor had made dinner. He liked - and was good at - mixing Asgardian and Midgardian cuisines.
Steve was the first to notice their presence and sent a small frown their way. He believed that meals should be eaten together, as a family unit. Natasha knew she wasn’t the only one who found it a bit strange, but all the same it was…nice.
“Gatorade, Nat?” Tony asked from the kitchen as he forked some food on to two plates for the both of them.
“Lemon-lime,” she nodded as she took her plate from him.
Tony grinned and chucked the bottle at her just as she sat down across from Clint. She reached up and caught it, sending him an unimpressed eyebrow.
“Love ya too Nat!” he joked with a small, true smile as he plopped down in the open chair next to her.
Inwardly, Natasha melted a bit. Tony was like an overgrown, overeager puppy at times. It was adorable in the same way that he must have been as a child, thin, gangly, tripping over his own legs and wearing thick-rimmed glasses. He actually had worn glasses as a child for a bit, until he got contacts.
“What were you two doing that made you so late for dinner?” Bruce asked suddenly, smirking slightly at Tony.
Natasha blinked for a moment. Was he really implying..?
“I must admit, I am curious as well, Shield Siblings!” Thor said with his normal enthusiasm.
“Just training,” Natasha said coolly. “What exactly did you think we were doing, Bruce?”
Steve frowned at Bruce, probably not sure what he was implying. Bruce just shrugged. “Well. I mean, it is Tony. And you two have been spending a lot of time together.”
She took one glance at Tony and could tell he was nervous; he was eating slowly and watching everyone else warily, especially Clint. He swallowed and said to Bruce, “Are you serious? Nat would kill me if I even tried that. I’m not looking for another relationship right now. We’re just working on my hand-to-hand skills so I’m not totally useless outside of the suit.”
If he was admitting to a weakness in front of the others, he was definitely nervous.
“Damn straight she’d kill you,” Clint snapped suddenly. “Tasha’s your fucking teammate, Stark, show some goddamn class. Not that you have any, you did fuck your PA for a while, didn’t you?”
Natasha glared at Clint for that. With his walls down, Tony was much more sensitive in the emotions department then before; he could feel every bit of anger and whatever else it was that was driving Clint to act this way.
“She wasn’t just my PA, she was my PA and my girlfriend, and then she was my CEO and my girlfriend. Why, if I didn’t know better, Katniss, I’d say you were jealous,” retorted Tony.
“Yeah, and look how well that turned out, eh? You’d think that’d teach you how you are with relationships. I don’t even know why Tasha bothers, you’re just a rich civilian with some brains outside of the suit. And you know what? You’re just a selfish asshole whose money built him a superior suit. And that fortune and those brains? They’re not yours, they’re just inherited. They all came from Howard, and from what I’ve heard from Cap he’s ten times the man you could even hope to be. You’re the only one who had a problem with Howard, Tony, and I bet he just saw down to the core of who you really are - a horrible, miserable human being. You’re just the fucking shadow of what your father was, and without that you’d be nothing.”
At this point, Natasha didn’t give a fuck that it was Clint who was saying these things. She was pissed and Tony had that wide, slightly glazed look that he’d had when Steve had said much the same, and that was not allowed.
It was the Black Widow that stood up out of her chair and snarled at Clint, not Natasha Romanov. “You’d better listen to what I’m about to say, Clint. Tony is a smarter, stronger, better man then Howard could even dream of being. I don’t know who the man Cap knew was, but the man Tony knew was a fucking monster. Don’t you ever call Tony selfish again, you dick, because he’s the one who is funding the Avengers, gave us our home, and building our weapons. All of you treat him like shit just because you can’t deal with the fact that he’s sarcastic and socially retarded, and yeah, he can be a bit of an asshole sometimes, but in case you haven’t noticed, ever single piece of his ego is earned.”
Natasha’s voice was low and deadly. Everyone looked utterly terrified of her, except for Tony. His utterly shocked expression just fueled her on.
“I don’t care if you’re Captain America, the prince of another dimension, have a green alter-ego, or if you’ve worked with me for over a decade, if you hurt Tony without provocation, I will end you.”
Steve and Bruce just looked shocked, and maybe even a little scared. This would serve as a warning to them. Clint bowed his head nervously, looking at least slightly ashamed of himself. Good.
Thor looked her straight in the eyes, understanding in a way that none of the others did. “I agree with you, Lady Natasha. I do not believe we have been treating the Man of Iron with the respect he deserves, and I am ashamed it has taken so long for me to see it.”
Natasha nodded, sat back down, and returned to eating. She didn’t have to look to know that Tony was fidgeting underneath the table.
“I’m just…gonna go,” Tony muttered, standing up from the table. “I’ll be in my lab if anyone needs me.”
With that, he walked away as fast as he could manage without making it look too awkward. Tony’s shoulders were hunched in, head slightly bowed, as if he wanted to disappear. Tony had barely even touched his food.
Natasha had to restrain herself from punching Clint for making him feel like that. Yes, she had a long history with Clint, liked, got along with, and shared her secrets with him. But if he kept pulling dick moves like that on Tony, that might not last for very long.
“Just for the record,” Natasha added as she stood up to put her dishes in the dishwasher, “we’re not fucking.”
With that, she stalked out of the room, head held high enough for both her and Tony.
By the time Natasha keyed in the codes to the lab, Tony was already working with one of his hologram interfaces, apparently putting the finishing touch on what looked like a pair of gloves with wires running through it.
“What are those?” she asked, sliding into the extra chair Tony had kept as a permanent fixture since the first time she had entered the lab.
“Originally, they were going to be advanced movement sensors to make holograms more available for the general public,” Tony answered, fiddling with some wiring in the hologram.
“In terms suitable for the average consumer?” Natasha prodded dryly.
Tony let out a quite chuckle before he explained, “They work somewhat like a Wii remote, sensing movements in the hands and fingers and transmitting it back to the main device. Certain preset movements will correlate to commands in the program. It’s expensive, but it’s much cheaper than the advanced, custom-programmed body recognition system programmed into JARVIS.”
“You said originally. What are you planning on adding?”
“Well. The movement sensor part was easy, so I moved on to a GPS tracker, vitals monitor, and a two-way Morse code system. Not something the general populace needs, but useful for people like us. And it gives me a nice excuse to wear them all the time.”
Ah. So that was what this was really about. She should’ve known. “Still nervous about your empathy?”
“I guess.”
There was a blanketing silence for a moment, before Natasha noticed a horizontal glass tube attached to what looked suspiciously like a heart monitor and a control panel of some sort and belonged more in a hospital then a lab. “Tony, why do you have a heart monitor here?”
Tony turned slightly to look where she was and said flippantly, “Oh, that’s just a hypobaric chamber. It helps my body create more red blood cells, absorb oxygen faster and all that.”
Natasha frowned suspiciously. “Why do you need that?”
Tony raised an eyebrow and said in a flat tone, “Nat, I have a hunk of metal embedded five inches into my chest. My ribs were cut open, my heart was moved, and muscles were cut out. My lungs only work at three-quarters of their original capacity.”
She stared at him, trying to reconcile the image he had just given her with the strong man in front of her. “I didn’t think it was that bad,” she muttered. “You’ve never seemed anything but healthy as a horse, except for the palladium poisoning.”
Tony smiled at her, a little sadly. “Well, it’s not that bad once you get used to it. I’m Tony fucking Stark, I’m bigger and badder then the goddamn Batman and I was never gonna let something like this keep me down.”
Natasha quirked an eyebrow at that. “Figures. Doesn’t it hurt, though?”
Tony shifted a bit, “There’s always a low level of pain from it. But I’ve gotten used to it, mostly.”
She almost winced in sympathy. Natasha was learning more and more that being Tony Stark sucked. Most people would laugh in her face if she told him that.
A peaceful quiet fell over them again, until Tony broke it five minutes later with a quiet sigh as he closed down the hologram he had been working with. She turned to face him straight on out of reflex.
“When Clint said that Howard saw what I really was, he meant that I deserved everything he ever- “ Tony started.
Natasha interrupted him immediately with, “Clint is a moron. Nothing of what he said is true, do you hear me? Nothi-“
“Howard threatened to kill me once,” Tony confessed quietly.
Natasha stopped talking. She had believed Howard was bad but this…this was worse than she had imagined.
“It was after an espionage mission over summer break when I was sixteen. I failed, fucked it up pretty badly, got myself exposed and almost killed. He told me if I ever screwed up that badly again, he’d either leave me to die or kill me himself to save them the trouble. We were in his lab. He had just finished a new model of hand gun.”
Tony sucked in a breath and finished, “I thought he was going to kill me, Nat, with a bullet between the eyes as an asset that had lost its usefulness.”
Natasha let out a quiet string of words in Russian, cursing Howard and everything he had ever cared about. At least she had been an orphan; it was strangers that had tried to break her and ultimately failed. But for Tony, it was his own father, and Natasha wasn’t sure if Howard hadn’t succeeded.
Well fuck Howard and everyone else who had hurt Tony in the past. Natasha would step over their dead bodies to keep Tony safe.
“Sir -“
Tony rolled over in his sleep, burying his head deeper into his pillows. He was actually sleeping, that was practically a cause for celebration in and of itself, so whoever was interrupting him had better have a good fucking reason.
“Sir, I must insist you get up!”
As soon as he registered the panic in JARVIS’s electronic voice, he was out of bed and pulling on a pair of pants and a t-shirt thick enough to block out the light of the arc reactor. His gloves were already on. Nat would freak if she found out he wore them to sleep. “What’s up, JARVIS?”
“There are intruders in Doctor Banner’s floor; they entered through the windows. I have already notified the other Avengers, all of which are en route.”
“Who’s the enemy, Jarvis?” Tony barked while he strapped on his utility belt, knives sheathed and a repulsor handgun holstered.
“It appears to be four mutants with varying abilities: the female seems to have gravity control and the Hispanic man has electrokinesis. The abilities of the other two are currently unknown.”
“Thanks, JARVIS,” Tony called as he ran down the stars as fast as he could while still staying reasonably silent. “Contact the police and SHIELD.”
“Of course, Sir.”
Tony slowed down once he reached Bruce’s floor and heard voices coming from the open door that lead to Bruce’s library.
“-n’t move, or else your Captain pays the price,” somebody said, ridiculously smug.
There were indeed four intruders, most of them calm and confident, even on the Avengers’ home turf. These guys, whoever they were (Richardson’s goons, most likely) knew what they were doing, or at least thought they did. Probably trained, judging by the calm collected blanket that covered their emotions. Going by the smug triumph coming from one of the intruders and Cap’s uncharacteristic nervousness and worry, they had Cap at a gunpoint or something similar, which was just not allowed.
Tony edged silently towards the door and eyed the scene with wary calculation. The four foreigners had their backs partially turned to the door, and by extension, to Tony. He recognized one of the intruders as Michael immediately. Standing behind him and slightly to the left was a willowy female with ash blonde hair wearing civilian clothes.
Bruce was crumpled unconscious on the floor in his human form in front of the two. Tony viciously bit back the urge to go batshit on the two of them just for that.
The remaining two invaders (The Avengers Tower was their goddamn territory, deal with it) were men dressed completely in black, masks covering their faces. One of them was heavily armed with guns and knives while the one holding a gun to Cap’s head was unarmed except for that weapon.
The other Avengers were scattered around the room, all of them focused entirely on the gun pointed at Cap’s head, even Barton, whose right arm was clearly broken. Fair enough. If Tony had been in the same position, he probably would have done the same.
The man that had Cap at a gunpoint nodded sharply to Michael, who hauled Bruce over his shoulder with one arm and started towards the shattered window.
Oh fuck no.
Nobody endangered Tony Stark’s team and got away with it. And these fuckers were threatening two of them.
In half a second, he made a series of calculations; anatomy, force, velocity and trajectories running in the back of his mind. Then, he moved.
Tony threw one of his smaller knives at the wrist aiming the gun at Cap’s head, slicing clean through the muscles and tendons there. His mark let out a loud swear and tried to pull the trigger. Before he could Tony was standing behind him, shoving Cap out of the way, wrenched the bastard’s wrist so he was forced to drop the gun and pulling out a larger knife to bury in the man’s throat. He twisted, cutting all the veins there and ripping the man’s neck open. Tony yanked his knives out of the man’s body and let his body drop to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Cap preformed a quick pivot on his heel and punched the heavily armed man, who didn’t even twitch at the attack. The man’s mutation was most likely super-strength or something of the like, based on that. Tony lunged forward and angled a knife at the man’s spine, but it glanced off as if he had been trying to dig it into adamantium instead of skin and cloth. Tony modified his earlier assessment: hard skin, probably equal or greater to the strength and durability of stainless steel.
The man pulled out two guns and casually shot Cap in the stomach before pointing one gun at Tony. Cap struggled valiantly to get up, but it would take a while judging by his worry and fear, even with his healing factor. Tony was going to have to get out of this one himself.
He twisted to the side in a low crouch and lashed out at the man’s knee with a strong kick. His skin might have been hard as steel, but the rest of his body might not be. The man faltered backwards and began to fall, but he managed to flip himself so he came down on top of Tony, pinning him to the ground. He had let go of his left gun at some point and wrapped the free hand around Tony’s windpipe, squeezing harshly. Tony scrabbled fruitlessly at the steely skin. Even though logically he knew it would do nothing, instinct didn’t bow to it.
Spots began to dot his vision just as a shock of red appeared seemingly from nowhere behind Tony’s assailant. Nat did something with the bracelets on her wrists that caused the intruder to spasm before collapsing, unconscious, on top of Tony. It was uncomfortable, but it was better than being strangled to death. Tony took in a couple of wheezing breaths to get his light-headedness at least somewhat under control. He rolled the heavy body off of him and reassessed his surroundings.
The library was thoroughly trashed; bookshelves were broken and collapsing and a pile of books was burning in the corner. The mark Tony had killed was lying face-down on the carpet in a puddle of blood. He was going to have to get a new one. Thor was standing over Michael’s slumped, twitching form, amused. Tony could tell he was just barely restraining himself from laughing. Tony stared for a moment.
Well. He supposed that was what you got when you tried to fight the Norse god of lightning as a mutant with electrokinetic abilities.
That left one other intruder. Where had the woman gone? Tony’s empathy let him know that she was still nearby, so Tony turned towards the shattered window and saw the woman leaning towards the ledge, Bruce slung over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Apparently Nat saw too, because she immediately lunged towards the blonde woman. But before she could get there, the woman jumped out the window and soared away under her own power.
“Fuck,” Tony whispered, “Bruce!"