Avengers fic: Tapdancing on Tightropes (PG, Gen)
Title: Tapdancing on Tightropes
Fandom: Avengers
Character(s): Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff, Thor, Phil Coulson
Rating: PG
Genre: Team building, character study
Pairing: Gen
Spoilers: Plot/character-centric spoilers for The Avengers.
Disclaimer: The Avengers doesn't belong to me, this is solely for fun. No copyright infringement is intended.
Word Count: ~5100
Warnings: References to canon character deaths.
Summary: Either way, Steve's secured the upcoming long weekend for a team barbeque. He hadn't phrased it quite that way, but Tony knows better. Barton's still trying to redeem himself, Natasha goes for her holster when Bruce's voice rises, Bruce apologizes to every building he passes, Steve's had exactly one conversation with SHIELD since the battle, and Thor's dicked off to Asgard.
A solid cheeseburger makes lots of things better. (It did for him, at least.)
-
Tapdancing on Tightropes
-
There's a little pizza place not far from the tower he orders from on nights like this, obstinately because they deliver in twenty whether it's Wednesday morning or Friday evening, really because they remember his order but never call him by name. It's a homegrown Mom & Pop; four years (three weeks, and two days; he is absolutely counting, there may come a time when he does not need to know how long it's been since Afghanistan, but today is not that day) ago, he wouldn't have known that. Now, he cares a little more about which businesses he supports. Somewhere, Christine Everheart is smug. Well, considering he launched her career as an international reporter with a four word response, she probably spends a lot of time being smug vis a vis Tony Stark, but the point stands.
The kitchen in the mansion still smells faintly of drywall from the remodelling he's been doing, knocking out walls in the basement to put a proper lab in, reinforcing the foundation in case of world endangerment and/or Hulk (where the two events may or may not be related), and outfitting each room with the peripherals necessary to install Jarvis properly. The workshop, still in progress (it had been finished, but well - driving nukes into space uses up a vibranium core faster than one would think, and synthesizing that has this nasty habit of destabilizing structures), has been well and truly christened while the kitchen remains largely untouched. The holographic screen on the far wall was installed yesterday, but the wires for the stove are still sitting on the counter, waiting to be hooked up. He does have priorities, after all.
It's been two days since the good Captain called to check in and see how everyone's holding up after the big battle. Fuck if Tony knows how the soldier got in contact with Natasha - carrier pigeon? Do pigeons fly in climates that cold? Does PETA know about this? Tony had given them each blank StarkTech phones with disabled-except-in-case-of-emergency GPS chips, his number programmed in under the ambiguous contact name '55.8.' Molar mass of iron. Bruce had laughed. Bruce is Tony's new favourite. He doubts Steve used the phone, though; carrier pigeon's much more likely.
Either way, Steve's secured the upcoming long weekend for a team barbeque. He hadn't phrased it quite that way, but Tony knows better. Barton's still trying to redeem himself for actions performed under Loki's mind control, Natasha's hand goes for her holster when Bruce's voice deviates from baseline mellow, Bruce apologizes to every building he passes, Steve's had exactly one conversation with SHIELD since the battle, and Thor's dicked off to Asgard. Wounds are still raw, tempers are running hot, and Tony knows from experience that the evening will go a lot smoother if there is food involved.
A solid cheeseburger makes lots of things better. (It did for him, at least.)
-
The clock ticks over to midnight, and Saturday morning finds Tony still in the basement, absentmindedly tooling around with a holographic wireframe of Barton's quiver he copied off SHIELD's servers when he'd hacked them back on the helicarrier. It's held his interests where a number of other projects have failed over the last few months, and that unsettles Tony.
In the years before Afghanistan, he remembers primarily being bored. Lacking challenge. Military funding prioritizes scale above elegance, the size of the explosion over the design of the bomb. He doesn't want to revert to those ways, values his work improving lives rather than risking them, but he can't afford to get attached to the Avengers. Relationships are easy to fuck up - people's reactions aren't consistent, their feelings aren't predictable, and their wounds aren't correctible. He needs something fulfilling to last him for when this phase ends, too.
"Captain Rogers will be here in nine hours, sir. A night's rest and a shower are recommended before that time," Jarvis says quietly.
"Are you saying I smell?"
"I have no olfactory receptors, sir. There is insufficient evidence for me to reach a conclusion."
"You're saying I smell."
"That assumption would be in line with previous observations Ms. Potts has made, yes."
Tony considers the matter, one arm deep inside the shaft of the quiver. Lines of light from the wireframe cut across his hand where it blocks the light source in the ceiling as he adjusts the positioning of the release mechanism at the bottom, increasing the size of the gear with a swipe of his fingers as the computer recalculates angle and arc length. How long has it been since he slept?
"Jarvis, auto save draft, put it on the personal server. You can give access to Barton if he asks, but I don't want Fury to think I'll design anything for SHIELD after the stunt he pulled." When he steps back from the table, Dummy obligingly sends one of the lab stools careening towards him with the usual abysmal aim. He catches it with one hand, sits on it.
"Eh, you're probably right. Night, Jarvis."
"Good night, sir. Don't let the bed bugs bite."
Tony smiles, and tells himself it's not entirely hollow.
-
Steve turns up bright and early, wearing a beat up Yankees cap and carrying a cooler full of wings.
Tony just stares at him. "Be more All-American. Seriously."
"Should I have brought a six-pack?" Steve asks politely. Tony sighs, stepping aside to let him in the door.
"Come on, we're setting up out back."
"You're hobbling, Tony."
"Well, we can't all be as spry as you in our old age, Cap."
Bruce knocks politely on the door, and comes bearing a fruit platter. Clint drops out of a tree about an hour in, chocolate cake in hand, and Natasha just appears in front of the grill at one point. A mixing bowl of pasta salad shows up on the table at about the same time.
A lightning flash in otherwise clear skies announces Thor's arrival moments before he lands on the ground in a kneel, hammer in hand, leaving behind intricate Asgardian patterns on the lawn. It would be rather more dramatic if he didn't follow the arrival up with making a beeline for Natasha just as she's yelling, "Order's up!" A keg of mead beams down with him, though, so Tony revises his opinion. Thor is his new favourite.
The camaraderie lasts through the first round of burgers, at which point Clint promptly puts his foot in his mouth by mentioning Director Fury.
"-Fury is a lying, manipulative, war-mongering--."
"-rich, coming from you, Stark --."
"-assassins who live in glass houses--."
"-like a bunch of children, one person at a time--."
"-shove it, Cap."
By this point, both Clint and Tony are on their feet and yelling, right up in each other's faces with little respect for personal space. Steve slips right up in between them, extending a hand on either side to force them apart.
Bruce takes off his glasses, rubbing a weary hand across his eyes. "All of you, shut up," he says quietly. Tony and Clint carry right on bickering as Steve's attempts to control the situation grow increasingly righteous. To Bruce, it feels just like that first day on the helicarrier. They're all heroes in their own right, too used to being the one with the plan, incapable of relinquishing control. What makes them strong as individual operatives will be their downfall as a team. They may have saved New York, but they've still got a long way to go.
"QUIET," he roars. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Natasha freeze, one hand on the gun he has no doubt is hidden at the small of her back. She may never come around to trusting him, not after the other guy chased her through the decks of a plummeting helicarrier. To her, he will always be an asset to be placated until needed, not a teammate.
"Tony, you need to realize that Clint was a SHIELD agent before all of this happened, and he has a lot of respect for Director Fury. Clint, you need to realize that Phase 2 rather unsettles most of us. We're not entirely comfortable with any of the defense organizations possessing unrivalled weaponry, as the nuke Tony drove into space can attest to. The powers that be were willing to level Manhattan, and it wouldn't have done a damn thing to close the portal."
Clint and Tony eye each other warily, but return to their seats. Steve retreats to the grill to see about glazing the wings with sauce. He looks torn, and they leave him to his thoughts. As a group, they have words to reconcile with actions, notions of Phase 2 to compare against the ground-to-air missile Fury launched in defense of a team he couldn't count on winning.
This is, of course, the moment the mechanical octopus crash lands in the pool. A jet of fire fifteen feet long beams out of the one tentacle sticking out of the water, setting two nearby lounge chairs on fire.
"Assemble!" Steve yells, declaration made less dramatic by the paper plate of pasta salad he is holding. "What?"
-
There are five mechoctopi on the ground and another dozen incoming before they have a plan more extensive than 'avoid getting burned', but Steve is a stickler for things like strategy. He holds court by the table they've flipped for cover, shield at the ready in one hand to deflect stray flames while everyone gears up. For Natasha, it involves switching jackets. Clint ducks up a tree and comes back with bow in hand. Earpieces are handed out in short order and everyone has orders in hand, ready to fight, except --.
-- except the Mark VII doesn't initialize properly, there's a fault in the wiring leftover from the Battle of New York, and the electromagnet-linked capacitor intended to provide emergency backup for the arc reactor just in case (he doesn't feel the shrapnel move when it is disconnected, he doesn't) shorts out the drones. The resulting sparks fry one of the repulsors - complicated things fail in complicated ways, fuck fuck fuck - something he doesn't realize until he throws his momentum into a last second bank right and ends up in the laundry room instead, an Iron Man shaped hole through two rooms worth of drywall and soundproofing. At least he hadn't gotten around to painting this section of the mansion yet.
He's dazed when he sits up in a heap, the padding in the suit breaking his fall but doing very little about the bruises he's sure to have in the morning. Jarvis murmurs apologies in his ear for missing the malfunction in scans as schematics for the arm pop up on the HUD, the problematic wiring highlighted as Jarvis runs background simulations for potential fixes in the field. "Missiles have not yet been refilled in the Mark VI, but it is flight capable," he offers, displaying the quickest path to its current location in the workshop. Tony makes an educated guess that this is how AIs display guilt.
"That the best you can do for me?"
"The wiring is irreparable at this juncture, and manoeuvring will be very difficult with a repulsor down."
"Difficult but not impossible. We've worked with worse."
"Sir, you have never tested--."
"-also don't have the luxury of changing clothes right now, gotta work with what we got." He gets to his feet, bracing himself on a broken shelf when the world washes out in shades of grey, balance gone heady with the thrum of a blood rush. His vision's sort of blurred - going head-first into a washing machine tends to shake the brain around the skull a little - but he doesn't need to grab tentacles very delicately by the hand when aiming centre-of-mass does the trick as well.
"Iron Man's down," he hears Cap say, and Tony realizes Jarvis must have cut communications with the team while he got himself back in order.
"Good man," he says, picking his way out of the wreckage that was once the pantry as Jarvis acquiesces to his creator's demands, running diagnostics on the rest of the suit's systems to check they're still up and running. "Iron Man's up," Tony corrects, dropping in on the open line. He stops just short of the fray in the backyard as Hulk's green foot lumbers past, a mechoctopus slung over either shoulder and a grin on his face. The big guy's in his element, with smashing not only forbidden by actively encouraged twice in as many weeks.
He looks up in time to see Natasha drop off Thor's back mid-air, landing on the head of an octopus doing battle with Steve, severing the electrical connection between brain and tentacle with one calculated sweep of the knife. Clint is actively riding one through its attempts to shake him off - fucking circus balance, that guy isn't fazed by the loop-de-loops one bit, whooping as they fly through the air - picking off the rest of the pack with arrows from his quiver. That settles it, Clint's his new favourite.
"Huh," Tony says. Steve and Natasha join him in surveying the technological wasteland of severed tentacles and exposed wires, having dealt with the octopus trying to wrap its tentacles around Steve's throat. Clint neutralizes his ride and drops down to join them, Thor landing soon after. Hulk chucks the last of the mechoctopi into a tree that it doesn't move from, and then, seeing nothing else he has been told to smash, jumps in the pool.
"Guess you didn't need me after all," Tony comments. Then he passes out.
-
Tony makes it as far as the workshop level before he realizes he has not actually escaped the tender loving care of his teammates, nursemaid Steve at the helm. When Jarvis won't let him in, he comes to the conclusion they have simply beaten a tactical retreat.
"What? This is ridiculous. Jarvis, override stark-omega-four-two-delta-niner. Open sesame."
The keypad flashes red at him. "Override not accepted. I'm sorry sir, your authentication codes have been temporarily disabled."
"By who? You have no protocols for mutiny, and last I checked, I'm still the Captain of this goddamned ship. My authentication codes trump everyone else."
"Ah, but sir, you added a failsafe last year after the… incident in Iowa. If I receive three of Ms. Potts, Colonel Rhodes, Agent Coulson, and Captain Rogers' override codes, I am authorized to lock you out of the workshop for a duration of twenty-four hours, to be extended to forty-eight if you cannot solve a differential equation chosen at random at the end of your exile. "
"Rhodey's in the Middle East, Pepper's in England, how the hell did you manage that?"
"I did not obtain Colonel Rhodes' code."
Tony goes still. Fury's schemes have schemes, but Tony has made a severe error in judgement - more than operating the suit drunk, more than strawberries, more than Iowa if the Director has slipped that one past them. He expects to be manipulated, to be kept in the dark on projects that might determine whether or not he will continue to support SHIELD, but lying about Phil's death, lying to the team? "Who gave you Coulson's?"
"Sir-" Jarvis begins. It is approximately the same time as Clint starts yelling, shortly followed by the klaxon on this level going off, meaning that somebody has triggered an alert. In the darkened workshop, the emergency light washes out the empty workbenches in hues of red. The alert is keyed to the main entrance and Bruce's biosignature, and Tony has just the most awful feeling he knows what's caused it.
He takes the stairs two at a time, finds his team at the top. He shoulders past Clint, who's braced on one knee behind the cover of the kitchen counter with an arrow already nocked, and Steve, wielding the door to the stove as a weapon in lieu of his shield. Thor comes hurtling down the stairs, hammer in hand. Fabric rustles at Tony's back as Natasha shifts past, stopping just a few feet before the scene with gun at the ready as she takes in the same sight as Tony.
In the foyer stands Bruce, shoulders a tight line of tension, one hand on the open door. Just over the threshold stands their intruder, clad in sweatpants and a t-shirt, one Agent Phil Coulson.
"You look great for a guy that's supposedly dead," Tony says.
Phil smiles blandly. "May I come in?"
-
They end up in the living room, which is intact but for two Iron Man shaped holes in opposing walls. Clint stays through Natasha's careful confirmation of Phil's identity before excusing himself under the guise of giving SHIELD an update on the mechoctopi. (His actual update consists of a fifteen second call to Maria Hill, where he patiently listens to the initial questions of the debrief, replies with "target neutralized", and hangs up.)
"Look, it's great that you're still alive," Tony says, never one to hold his tongue when the conversation calls for putting his foot in his mouth, "but mind telling us how that happened?"
It's easy enough to be grateful, except -
-- except Tony remembers a room draped in black, the only five words Clint said on that day a whispered apology, the careful way Natasha held herself at the edge of the proceedings between the Avengers and a sea of mourning agents, of standing with Pepper at Phil's graveside. He remembers putting a laser right through Loki in Phil's honour, something twisting deep in his chest even then.
It was real at the time, Phil says. Fury mourned you too, Tony thinks, and for the first time since they saved New York, Tony's feelings towards the man soften. He has seen many an emotion faked - to spare feelings, to fool, to manipulate - but grief is not one of them, and whatever else Fury has done, he had grieved Coulson's death, too.
Steve's focus does not vary from the agent before them, but when he speaks, his words are not his own. "Why?" he asks, sincere in the way he keeps an open mind. A figure flickers in the hallway. Phil's gaze wavers for a fleeting moment before he tells them of Loki's scepter stealing both body and mind, of being turned before being killed, of fighting for his soul before fighting for his life. It had taken three surgeries to fix his body, he says. He doesn't say what it took to fix his mind.
When the room falls quiet, Phil asks both Natasha and Thor to stick their fingers in their ears. When they have done so, he addresses Hawkeye directly in Czech. The figure in the hallway shifts for a minute and then disappears into the rest of the house.
Tony does not wonder if Coulson will be forgiven. People don't tend to hold grudges over secretly being alive, not when continuing to be dead hurts more.
-
When Tony has retreated to find ice and Steve has rescued the charred remains of their barbeque and Thor has been installed in the kitchen with a laptop, Jarvis to walk him through the basic mechanics of Skype, and Dr. Foster on the line, Phil excuses himself to one of the spare rooms.
It leaves just Bruce, faint lines of tension in his forehead revealing his general discomfort, and Natasha, legs folded underneath her as she watches him closely. The stance poses a disadvantage to her reaction time in case of an attack; though it's one he may not recognize, she means it as a sign of respect. They are unique, she and Bruce. Possessing trust issues a mile wide is par for the course with this team, but theirs is a two-way street. When Clint went off the reservation, it was common knowledge that he was not in control of his actions. Were it her, were it Bruce, she wonders if they would be given the same benefit of the doubt.
No, she doesn't trust him, but that's not something he should take personally. It took Clint two years, a through-and-through to his thigh, and one long night in Bolivia with a bottle of vodka. Bruce is a man who understands the nature of atonement in a way that the others do not, Tony's actions indirect and Clint's undertaken of a mind his own. For as long as the good doctor puts himself in the line of fire, she will join him in battle.
She says none of this to him. Experience has taught her to tread the lines of sentiment carefully lest they be turned against her. She has seen betrayal from both ends of the spectrum, the people she has both betrayed and been betrayed by shaping her formative years. Something tells her that this job is different - this team is different, and not in the obvious ways. There's Thor, who respects her enough not to protect her; Clint, and his absolute disregard for her past reputation; Steve, who calls because he wants her presence and not her abilities; and Tony, who thinks he's being subtle about the home he is designing to suit them all, one holographic interface at a time. She doesn't want to screw this up.
"You make a mean pasta salad," Bruce says. She looks up to find he's been watching her as she him, smiling in the self-deprecating way he has, genuine but restrained, quiet and understated always.
The woman who taught her to make it is six years gone. Natasha's visited her grave once since the funeral, a quiet glen by the river in Sochi. What catches Natasha off-guard is not that she remembers, but that she speaks of it. "It's a recipe I learned from my friend, Eva. She was trying to show me how to make kholodets, but we lacked gelatine."
Enough time has passed that the memory is fond rather than somber, the sound of Eva's lilting voice as she gestured with the utensils she stirred with filling the spaces between the silences. If Eva ever suspected she was the Black Widow, she never spoke of it, always referred to her as Natalia, and sometimes, milaya. Natasha counts Eva as her first real friend.
Bruce nods quietly, holds his silence as she remembers. "Eva," he says, meeting her eyes.
She smiles softly, thinking of the last good afternoon they had before everything went to hell. "Good night, Dr. Banner," she says, surprised by the warmth in her voice.
"Good night, Agent Romanoff."
-
Clint stumbles across Tony in the kitchen while he's busy thoroughly inspecting the ductwork of the house. There are grates screwed into inopportune locations as part of the workshop's filtration system; he'll have to see about relocating those if he is to spend any extended period of time here. Otherwise, things look comfortable. The vents are wider than standard, custom as the rest of the house is, breakers in the floor and microphones in the ceiling.
"Stark, please don't tell me you're using a canister of liquid nitrogen as an icepack."
"It's freon," Tony says, metal cylinder pressed to his forehead with one hand. He's sitting at the kitchen table, both eyes closed, and he doesn't look up when Clint drops from the vent to the kitchen counter.
"Frozen vegetables work in a pinch," Clint says, hopping onto the tile floor and taking the two steps to the freezer. "Or…not," he mutters, sweeping a less-than-impressed eye over the empty shelves. The fridge is slightly better, but not by much. Excluding the leftovers from their potluck, there's a carton of milk, a case of red bull, and a salad that's seen better days.
"I think I get it now," Clint says, leaning against the counter as he takes advantage of the opportunity to survey the other man in one of his quieter moments. The day is obviously weighing heavy on Tony, a patchwork of bruises across his bare shoulders neatly delineating each impact. Clint dims the lights with the swipe of a hand, pitches his voice low, mindful of the headache. He'll admit to worrying when Tony passed out after the battle, knees buckling as he sank slowly. The armour had been heavier than Clint was expecting, and it had taken Steve's help to lower him to the ground gently. "You hosted lunch so we'd all feed you. Smart."
Aside from the yelling and the mechoctopi and the injuries, lunch had been kind of fun, actually. Thor is much more easy going when he isn't looking down on them mere mortals, Bruce has the dry sense of humour that's always appealed to Clint, and Steve's modern day pop culture is a blank slate that he can't wait to begin corrupting.
"Yeah, you're a regular Rachel Ray," Tony snipes back. There's no bite to it, though, joints popping quietly as he sits up properly. Clint kind of wonders how many late nights he's spent like this, nursing his wounds at a kitchen table much too large for its sole occupant when Pepper Potts is out of the city. It seems familiar in a sad, resigned sort of way that Clint recognizes from his own life, meals often a solitary affair and icepacks stashed in the freezer for the next time they'll be needed.
"You liked my cake," Clint says, pointing a finger at Tony, "and you know it."
"Yeah," Tony laughs. "I guess I did."
Clint grins back at him. "Now I know you're concussed. Go to bed, Stark."
"Aye aye, Hawkeye. There's plenty of--," Tony trails off, waves his hand to indicate the expansive nature of the house. "Pick a room, they should all be made up. I think Coulson took the one at the end of the hall. Let everyone else know, too." Clint nods, gives him a thumbs up. Tony snorts. "Sleep tight."
"Don't let the bed bugs bite," Clint calls after him. If he hears the soft breath of somebody touched by the sentiment and trying desperately to hide it, he keeps it to himself. He gets that, too.
-
Steve traces Coulson to one of the spare bedrooms on the upper floor, finds the agent sitting on the bed running through a range of motion for the muscles around the injury in slow circles. His ribs are wrapped. Steve can see the outline of the cloth bandage through the thin t-shirt, cloth bandage wrapped around the man's torso, looping up and around his shoulder to immobilize it.
He knocks on the open door, hovering outside until Phil waves him in. "I just wanted to check in on you, see how you're healing," he says. His knowledge of Phil as a person is mainly limited to the man's interactions with the Avengers (plus Pepper, who speaks very highly of him, he understands that Phil owes her twenty bucks for a bet and one hell of a drink for his death), but the picture their accounts form is a complimentary one. Steve doesn't need to know what his teammates think of the agent to know what sort of man he is, though. That was pretty much decided the moment Coulson left the bridge to confront Loki.
"Still sore," Phil admits. He holds himself carefully in a way that Steve remembers well. It's been years since he's waited out the slow ache of muscles knitting back together, ribs sore for weeks after the bruises disappeared. The healing factor takes care of that in a matter of hours now, days at the most. He still remembers it as if it were yesterday. He never was one to run from a fight, can see the same tendency in Coulson. It calls to mind memories of being a scrawny little kid from Brooklyn, makes him feel at home in the way dysfunctional family potlucks do and all the furniture in SHIELD's arsenal could never.
"I can imagine," Steve says. Phil smiles, soft and easy. "Getting stabbed will do that to a fella."
"It was worth it," Phil says. "As I understand it, it lead to you six saving the day." His eyes, sharp and clear, bear not the distant admiration of their first meeting but a foundation of respect instead. Steve returns it in kind. He didn't know the man who left Tony Stark staring at the bloodstain on the helicarrier, distant and raw and grieving, but he's grateful for the chance to know a man like that now.
"We had a little help," Steve says, noting the agent seems to be readying himself for bed. With wounds that fresh, Phil must still be on the kind of painkillers that render you asleep more often than not. He'll get out from underfoot soon enough, just as soon as he sees to the matter that had led him hear in the first place.
"I wanted to thank you for your service," he continues, stepping forward. He holds a hand out to shake, watches Phil's eyes track from his offered hand up his arm and through to his eyes. Phil makes an aborted noise, brow furrowing in confusion.
"SHIELD isn't strictly military--," Phil starts to explain. Steve shakes his head fondly.
"Where I come from, a man lays his life down to protect the safety of another, that counts as service."
Phil's eyes glass over, just for a second, expression warm and solemn and honoured. He takes Steve's hand, and Steve snaps out a crisp salute with the other, military precise.
-
Morning dawns…well, the same time as morning was always going to dawn, regardless of the previous day's activites. The Avengers begin to greet it sometime around nine, drifting down to the kitchen one by one.
Thor sets to brewing coffee with astonishing enthusiasm, which makes rather more sense when he explains this is a task Jane insists he learn. Phil's appearance in the kitchen is greeted with a chorus of good mornings from most and raised mugs from both Tony and Natasha, slumped over their mugs at the table, sore and tired and unwilling to entertain any personalities not also sore and tired the coffee kicks in. Bruce slides a bottle of Tylenol 3's across the table at them with the reasoning, "I hurt just looking at you two."
Clint flicks a tea towel over his shoulder, the last of the dried dishes still in his hand, and nods at Phil respectfully.
"So," Steve says, "Breakfast anyone?"
-
fin
Fandom: Avengers
Character(s): Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff, Thor, Phil Coulson
Rating: PG
Genre: Team building, character study
Pairing: Gen
Spoilers: Plot/character-centric spoilers for The Avengers.
Disclaimer: The Avengers doesn't belong to me, this is solely for fun. No copyright infringement is intended.
Word Count: ~5100
Warnings: References to canon character deaths.
Summary: Either way, Steve's secured the upcoming long weekend for a team barbeque. He hadn't phrased it quite that way, but Tony knows better. Barton's still trying to redeem himself, Natasha goes for her holster when Bruce's voice rises, Bruce apologizes to every building he passes, Steve's had exactly one conversation with SHIELD since the battle, and Thor's dicked off to Asgard.
A solid cheeseburger makes lots of things better. (It did for him, at least.)
-
Tapdancing on Tightropes
-
There's a little pizza place not far from the tower he orders from on nights like this, obstinately because they deliver in twenty whether it's Wednesday morning or Friday evening, really because they remember his order but never call him by name. It's a homegrown Mom & Pop; four years (three weeks, and two days; he is absolutely counting, there may come a time when he does not need to know how long it's been since Afghanistan, but today is not that day) ago, he wouldn't have known that. Now, he cares a little more about which businesses he supports. Somewhere, Christine Everheart is smug. Well, considering he launched her career as an international reporter with a four word response, she probably spends a lot of time being smug vis a vis Tony Stark, but the point stands.
The kitchen in the mansion still smells faintly of drywall from the remodelling he's been doing, knocking out walls in the basement to put a proper lab in, reinforcing the foundation in case of world endangerment and/or Hulk (where the two events may or may not be related), and outfitting each room with the peripherals necessary to install Jarvis properly. The workshop, still in progress (it had been finished, but well - driving nukes into space uses up a vibranium core faster than one would think, and synthesizing that has this nasty habit of destabilizing structures), has been well and truly christened while the kitchen remains largely untouched. The holographic screen on the far wall was installed yesterday, but the wires for the stove are still sitting on the counter, waiting to be hooked up. He does have priorities, after all.
It's been two days since the good Captain called to check in and see how everyone's holding up after the big battle. Fuck if Tony knows how the soldier got in contact with Natasha - carrier pigeon? Do pigeons fly in climates that cold? Does PETA know about this? Tony had given them each blank StarkTech phones with disabled-except-in-case-of-emergency GPS chips, his number programmed in under the ambiguous contact name '55.8.' Molar mass of iron. Bruce had laughed. Bruce is Tony's new favourite. He doubts Steve used the phone, though; carrier pigeon's much more likely.
Either way, Steve's secured the upcoming long weekend for a team barbeque. He hadn't phrased it quite that way, but Tony knows better. Barton's still trying to redeem himself for actions performed under Loki's mind control, Natasha's hand goes for her holster when Bruce's voice deviates from baseline mellow, Bruce apologizes to every building he passes, Steve's had exactly one conversation with SHIELD since the battle, and Thor's dicked off to Asgard. Wounds are still raw, tempers are running hot, and Tony knows from experience that the evening will go a lot smoother if there is food involved.
A solid cheeseburger makes lots of things better. (It did for him, at least.)
-
The clock ticks over to midnight, and Saturday morning finds Tony still in the basement, absentmindedly tooling around with a holographic wireframe of Barton's quiver he copied off SHIELD's servers when he'd hacked them back on the helicarrier. It's held his interests where a number of other projects have failed over the last few months, and that unsettles Tony.
In the years before Afghanistan, he remembers primarily being bored. Lacking challenge. Military funding prioritizes scale above elegance, the size of the explosion over the design of the bomb. He doesn't want to revert to those ways, values his work improving lives rather than risking them, but he can't afford to get attached to the Avengers. Relationships are easy to fuck up - people's reactions aren't consistent, their feelings aren't predictable, and their wounds aren't correctible. He needs something fulfilling to last him for when this phase ends, too.
"Captain Rogers will be here in nine hours, sir. A night's rest and a shower are recommended before that time," Jarvis says quietly.
"Are you saying I smell?"
"I have no olfactory receptors, sir. There is insufficient evidence for me to reach a conclusion."
"You're saying I smell."
"That assumption would be in line with previous observations Ms. Potts has made, yes."
Tony considers the matter, one arm deep inside the shaft of the quiver. Lines of light from the wireframe cut across his hand where it blocks the light source in the ceiling as he adjusts the positioning of the release mechanism at the bottom, increasing the size of the gear with a swipe of his fingers as the computer recalculates angle and arc length. How long has it been since he slept?
"Jarvis, auto save draft, put it on the personal server. You can give access to Barton if he asks, but I don't want Fury to think I'll design anything for SHIELD after the stunt he pulled." When he steps back from the table, Dummy obligingly sends one of the lab stools careening towards him with the usual abysmal aim. He catches it with one hand, sits on it.
"Eh, you're probably right. Night, Jarvis."
"Good night, sir. Don't let the bed bugs bite."
Tony smiles, and tells himself it's not entirely hollow.
-
Steve turns up bright and early, wearing a beat up Yankees cap and carrying a cooler full of wings.
Tony just stares at him. "Be more All-American. Seriously."
"Should I have brought a six-pack?" Steve asks politely. Tony sighs, stepping aside to let him in the door.
"Come on, we're setting up out back."
"You're hobbling, Tony."
"Well, we can't all be as spry as you in our old age, Cap."
Bruce knocks politely on the door, and comes bearing a fruit platter. Clint drops out of a tree about an hour in, chocolate cake in hand, and Natasha just appears in front of the grill at one point. A mixing bowl of pasta salad shows up on the table at about the same time.
A lightning flash in otherwise clear skies announces Thor's arrival moments before he lands on the ground in a kneel, hammer in hand, leaving behind intricate Asgardian patterns on the lawn. It would be rather more dramatic if he didn't follow the arrival up with making a beeline for Natasha just as she's yelling, "Order's up!" A keg of mead beams down with him, though, so Tony revises his opinion. Thor is his new favourite.
The camaraderie lasts through the first round of burgers, at which point Clint promptly puts his foot in his mouth by mentioning Director Fury.
"-Fury is a lying, manipulative, war-mongering--."
"-rich, coming from you, Stark --."
"-assassins who live in glass houses--."
"-like a bunch of children, one person at a time--."
"-shove it, Cap."
By this point, both Clint and Tony are on their feet and yelling, right up in each other's faces with little respect for personal space. Steve slips right up in between them, extending a hand on either side to force them apart.
Bruce takes off his glasses, rubbing a weary hand across his eyes. "All of you, shut up," he says quietly. Tony and Clint carry right on bickering as Steve's attempts to control the situation grow increasingly righteous. To Bruce, it feels just like that first day on the helicarrier. They're all heroes in their own right, too used to being the one with the plan, incapable of relinquishing control. What makes them strong as individual operatives will be their downfall as a team. They may have saved New York, but they've still got a long way to go.
"QUIET," he roars. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Natasha freeze, one hand on the gun he has no doubt is hidden at the small of her back. She may never come around to trusting him, not after the other guy chased her through the decks of a plummeting helicarrier. To her, he will always be an asset to be placated until needed, not a teammate.
"Tony, you need to realize that Clint was a SHIELD agent before all of this happened, and he has a lot of respect for Director Fury. Clint, you need to realize that Phase 2 rather unsettles most of us. We're not entirely comfortable with any of the defense organizations possessing unrivalled weaponry, as the nuke Tony drove into space can attest to. The powers that be were willing to level Manhattan, and it wouldn't have done a damn thing to close the portal."
Clint and Tony eye each other warily, but return to their seats. Steve retreats to the grill to see about glazing the wings with sauce. He looks torn, and they leave him to his thoughts. As a group, they have words to reconcile with actions, notions of Phase 2 to compare against the ground-to-air missile Fury launched in defense of a team he couldn't count on winning.
This is, of course, the moment the mechanical octopus crash lands in the pool. A jet of fire fifteen feet long beams out of the one tentacle sticking out of the water, setting two nearby lounge chairs on fire.
"Assemble!" Steve yells, declaration made less dramatic by the paper plate of pasta salad he is holding. "What?"
-
There are five mechoctopi on the ground and another dozen incoming before they have a plan more extensive than 'avoid getting burned', but Steve is a stickler for things like strategy. He holds court by the table they've flipped for cover, shield at the ready in one hand to deflect stray flames while everyone gears up. For Natasha, it involves switching jackets. Clint ducks up a tree and comes back with bow in hand. Earpieces are handed out in short order and everyone has orders in hand, ready to fight, except --.
-- except the Mark VII doesn't initialize properly, there's a fault in the wiring leftover from the Battle of New York, and the electromagnet-linked capacitor intended to provide emergency backup for the arc reactor just in case (he doesn't feel the shrapnel move when it is disconnected, he doesn't) shorts out the drones. The resulting sparks fry one of the repulsors - complicated things fail in complicated ways, fuck fuck fuck - something he doesn't realize until he throws his momentum into a last second bank right and ends up in the laundry room instead, an Iron Man shaped hole through two rooms worth of drywall and soundproofing. At least he hadn't gotten around to painting this section of the mansion yet.
He's dazed when he sits up in a heap, the padding in the suit breaking his fall but doing very little about the bruises he's sure to have in the morning. Jarvis murmurs apologies in his ear for missing the malfunction in scans as schematics for the arm pop up on the HUD, the problematic wiring highlighted as Jarvis runs background simulations for potential fixes in the field. "Missiles have not yet been refilled in the Mark VI, but it is flight capable," he offers, displaying the quickest path to its current location in the workshop. Tony makes an educated guess that this is how AIs display guilt.
"That the best you can do for me?"
"The wiring is irreparable at this juncture, and manoeuvring will be very difficult with a repulsor down."
"Difficult but not impossible. We've worked with worse."
"Sir, you have never tested--."
"-also don't have the luxury of changing clothes right now, gotta work with what we got." He gets to his feet, bracing himself on a broken shelf when the world washes out in shades of grey, balance gone heady with the thrum of a blood rush. His vision's sort of blurred - going head-first into a washing machine tends to shake the brain around the skull a little - but he doesn't need to grab tentacles very delicately by the hand when aiming centre-of-mass does the trick as well.
"Iron Man's down," he hears Cap say, and Tony realizes Jarvis must have cut communications with the team while he got himself back in order.
"Good man," he says, picking his way out of the wreckage that was once the pantry as Jarvis acquiesces to his creator's demands, running diagnostics on the rest of the suit's systems to check they're still up and running. "Iron Man's up," Tony corrects, dropping in on the open line. He stops just short of the fray in the backyard as Hulk's green foot lumbers past, a mechoctopus slung over either shoulder and a grin on his face. The big guy's in his element, with smashing not only forbidden by actively encouraged twice in as many weeks.
He looks up in time to see Natasha drop off Thor's back mid-air, landing on the head of an octopus doing battle with Steve, severing the electrical connection between brain and tentacle with one calculated sweep of the knife. Clint is actively riding one through its attempts to shake him off - fucking circus balance, that guy isn't fazed by the loop-de-loops one bit, whooping as they fly through the air - picking off the rest of the pack with arrows from his quiver. That settles it, Clint's his new favourite.
"Huh," Tony says. Steve and Natasha join him in surveying the technological wasteland of severed tentacles and exposed wires, having dealt with the octopus trying to wrap its tentacles around Steve's throat. Clint neutralizes his ride and drops down to join them, Thor landing soon after. Hulk chucks the last of the mechoctopi into a tree that it doesn't move from, and then, seeing nothing else he has been told to smash, jumps in the pool.
"Guess you didn't need me after all," Tony comments. Then he passes out.
-
Tony makes it as far as the workshop level before he realizes he has not actually escaped the tender loving care of his teammates, nursemaid Steve at the helm. When Jarvis won't let him in, he comes to the conclusion they have simply beaten a tactical retreat.
"What? This is ridiculous. Jarvis, override stark-omega-four-two-delta-niner. Open sesame."
The keypad flashes red at him. "Override not accepted. I'm sorry sir, your authentication codes have been temporarily disabled."
"By who? You have no protocols for mutiny, and last I checked, I'm still the Captain of this goddamned ship. My authentication codes trump everyone else."
"Ah, but sir, you added a failsafe last year after the… incident in Iowa. If I receive three of Ms. Potts, Colonel Rhodes, Agent Coulson, and Captain Rogers' override codes, I am authorized to lock you out of the workshop for a duration of twenty-four hours, to be extended to forty-eight if you cannot solve a differential equation chosen at random at the end of your exile. "
"Rhodey's in the Middle East, Pepper's in England, how the hell did you manage that?"
"I did not obtain Colonel Rhodes' code."
Tony goes still. Fury's schemes have schemes, but Tony has made a severe error in judgement - more than operating the suit drunk, more than strawberries, more than Iowa if the Director has slipped that one past them. He expects to be manipulated, to be kept in the dark on projects that might determine whether or not he will continue to support SHIELD, but lying about Phil's death, lying to the team? "Who gave you Coulson's?"
"Sir-" Jarvis begins. It is approximately the same time as Clint starts yelling, shortly followed by the klaxon on this level going off, meaning that somebody has triggered an alert. In the darkened workshop, the emergency light washes out the empty workbenches in hues of red. The alert is keyed to the main entrance and Bruce's biosignature, and Tony has just the most awful feeling he knows what's caused it.
He takes the stairs two at a time, finds his team at the top. He shoulders past Clint, who's braced on one knee behind the cover of the kitchen counter with an arrow already nocked, and Steve, wielding the door to the stove as a weapon in lieu of his shield. Thor comes hurtling down the stairs, hammer in hand. Fabric rustles at Tony's back as Natasha shifts past, stopping just a few feet before the scene with gun at the ready as she takes in the same sight as Tony.
In the foyer stands Bruce, shoulders a tight line of tension, one hand on the open door. Just over the threshold stands their intruder, clad in sweatpants and a t-shirt, one Agent Phil Coulson.
"You look great for a guy that's supposedly dead," Tony says.
Phil smiles blandly. "May I come in?"
-
They end up in the living room, which is intact but for two Iron Man shaped holes in opposing walls. Clint stays through Natasha's careful confirmation of Phil's identity before excusing himself under the guise of giving SHIELD an update on the mechoctopi. (His actual update consists of a fifteen second call to Maria Hill, where he patiently listens to the initial questions of the debrief, replies with "target neutralized", and hangs up.)
"Look, it's great that you're still alive," Tony says, never one to hold his tongue when the conversation calls for putting his foot in his mouth, "but mind telling us how that happened?"
It's easy enough to be grateful, except -
-- except Tony remembers a room draped in black, the only five words Clint said on that day a whispered apology, the careful way Natasha held herself at the edge of the proceedings between the Avengers and a sea of mourning agents, of standing with Pepper at Phil's graveside. He remembers putting a laser right through Loki in Phil's honour, something twisting deep in his chest even then.
It was real at the time, Phil says. Fury mourned you too, Tony thinks, and for the first time since they saved New York, Tony's feelings towards the man soften. He has seen many an emotion faked - to spare feelings, to fool, to manipulate - but grief is not one of them, and whatever else Fury has done, he had grieved Coulson's death, too.
Steve's focus does not vary from the agent before them, but when he speaks, his words are not his own. "Why?" he asks, sincere in the way he keeps an open mind. A figure flickers in the hallway. Phil's gaze wavers for a fleeting moment before he tells them of Loki's scepter stealing both body and mind, of being turned before being killed, of fighting for his soul before fighting for his life. It had taken three surgeries to fix his body, he says. He doesn't say what it took to fix his mind.
When the room falls quiet, Phil asks both Natasha and Thor to stick their fingers in their ears. When they have done so, he addresses Hawkeye directly in Czech. The figure in the hallway shifts for a minute and then disappears into the rest of the house.
Tony does not wonder if Coulson will be forgiven. People don't tend to hold grudges over secretly being alive, not when continuing to be dead hurts more.
-
When Tony has retreated to find ice and Steve has rescued the charred remains of their barbeque and Thor has been installed in the kitchen with a laptop, Jarvis to walk him through the basic mechanics of Skype, and Dr. Foster on the line, Phil excuses himself to one of the spare rooms.
It leaves just Bruce, faint lines of tension in his forehead revealing his general discomfort, and Natasha, legs folded underneath her as she watches him closely. The stance poses a disadvantage to her reaction time in case of an attack; though it's one he may not recognize, she means it as a sign of respect. They are unique, she and Bruce. Possessing trust issues a mile wide is par for the course with this team, but theirs is a two-way street. When Clint went off the reservation, it was common knowledge that he was not in control of his actions. Were it her, were it Bruce, she wonders if they would be given the same benefit of the doubt.
No, she doesn't trust him, but that's not something he should take personally. It took Clint two years, a through-and-through to his thigh, and one long night in Bolivia with a bottle of vodka. Bruce is a man who understands the nature of atonement in a way that the others do not, Tony's actions indirect and Clint's undertaken of a mind his own. For as long as the good doctor puts himself in the line of fire, she will join him in battle.
She says none of this to him. Experience has taught her to tread the lines of sentiment carefully lest they be turned against her. She has seen betrayal from both ends of the spectrum, the people she has both betrayed and been betrayed by shaping her formative years. Something tells her that this job is different - this team is different, and not in the obvious ways. There's Thor, who respects her enough not to protect her; Clint, and his absolute disregard for her past reputation; Steve, who calls because he wants her presence and not her abilities; and Tony, who thinks he's being subtle about the home he is designing to suit them all, one holographic interface at a time. She doesn't want to screw this up.
"You make a mean pasta salad," Bruce says. She looks up to find he's been watching her as she him, smiling in the self-deprecating way he has, genuine but restrained, quiet and understated always.
The woman who taught her to make it is six years gone. Natasha's visited her grave once since the funeral, a quiet glen by the river in Sochi. What catches Natasha off-guard is not that she remembers, but that she speaks of it. "It's a recipe I learned from my friend, Eva. She was trying to show me how to make kholodets, but we lacked gelatine."
Enough time has passed that the memory is fond rather than somber, the sound of Eva's lilting voice as she gestured with the utensils she stirred with filling the spaces between the silences. If Eva ever suspected she was the Black Widow, she never spoke of it, always referred to her as Natalia, and sometimes, milaya. Natasha counts Eva as her first real friend.
Bruce nods quietly, holds his silence as she remembers. "Eva," he says, meeting her eyes.
She smiles softly, thinking of the last good afternoon they had before everything went to hell. "Good night, Dr. Banner," she says, surprised by the warmth in her voice.
"Good night, Agent Romanoff."
-
Clint stumbles across Tony in the kitchen while he's busy thoroughly inspecting the ductwork of the house. There are grates screwed into inopportune locations as part of the workshop's filtration system; he'll have to see about relocating those if he is to spend any extended period of time here. Otherwise, things look comfortable. The vents are wider than standard, custom as the rest of the house is, breakers in the floor and microphones in the ceiling.
"Stark, please don't tell me you're using a canister of liquid nitrogen as an icepack."
"It's freon," Tony says, metal cylinder pressed to his forehead with one hand. He's sitting at the kitchen table, both eyes closed, and he doesn't look up when Clint drops from the vent to the kitchen counter.
"Frozen vegetables work in a pinch," Clint says, hopping onto the tile floor and taking the two steps to the freezer. "Or…not," he mutters, sweeping a less-than-impressed eye over the empty shelves. The fridge is slightly better, but not by much. Excluding the leftovers from their potluck, there's a carton of milk, a case of red bull, and a salad that's seen better days.
"I think I get it now," Clint says, leaning against the counter as he takes advantage of the opportunity to survey the other man in one of his quieter moments. The day is obviously weighing heavy on Tony, a patchwork of bruises across his bare shoulders neatly delineating each impact. Clint dims the lights with the swipe of a hand, pitches his voice low, mindful of the headache. He'll admit to worrying when Tony passed out after the battle, knees buckling as he sank slowly. The armour had been heavier than Clint was expecting, and it had taken Steve's help to lower him to the ground gently. "You hosted lunch so we'd all feed you. Smart."
Aside from the yelling and the mechoctopi and the injuries, lunch had been kind of fun, actually. Thor is much more easy going when he isn't looking down on them mere mortals, Bruce has the dry sense of humour that's always appealed to Clint, and Steve's modern day pop culture is a blank slate that he can't wait to begin corrupting.
"Yeah, you're a regular Rachel Ray," Tony snipes back. There's no bite to it, though, joints popping quietly as he sits up properly. Clint kind of wonders how many late nights he's spent like this, nursing his wounds at a kitchen table much too large for its sole occupant when Pepper Potts is out of the city. It seems familiar in a sad, resigned sort of way that Clint recognizes from his own life, meals often a solitary affair and icepacks stashed in the freezer for the next time they'll be needed.
"You liked my cake," Clint says, pointing a finger at Tony, "and you know it."
"Yeah," Tony laughs. "I guess I did."
Clint grins back at him. "Now I know you're concussed. Go to bed, Stark."
"Aye aye, Hawkeye. There's plenty of--," Tony trails off, waves his hand to indicate the expansive nature of the house. "Pick a room, they should all be made up. I think Coulson took the one at the end of the hall. Let everyone else know, too." Clint nods, gives him a thumbs up. Tony snorts. "Sleep tight."
"Don't let the bed bugs bite," Clint calls after him. If he hears the soft breath of somebody touched by the sentiment and trying desperately to hide it, he keeps it to himself. He gets that, too.
-
Steve traces Coulson to one of the spare bedrooms on the upper floor, finds the agent sitting on the bed running through a range of motion for the muscles around the injury in slow circles. His ribs are wrapped. Steve can see the outline of the cloth bandage through the thin t-shirt, cloth bandage wrapped around the man's torso, looping up and around his shoulder to immobilize it.
He knocks on the open door, hovering outside until Phil waves him in. "I just wanted to check in on you, see how you're healing," he says. His knowledge of Phil as a person is mainly limited to the man's interactions with the Avengers (plus Pepper, who speaks very highly of him, he understands that Phil owes her twenty bucks for a bet and one hell of a drink for his death), but the picture their accounts form is a complimentary one. Steve doesn't need to know what his teammates think of the agent to know what sort of man he is, though. That was pretty much decided the moment Coulson left the bridge to confront Loki.
"Still sore," Phil admits. He holds himself carefully in a way that Steve remembers well. It's been years since he's waited out the slow ache of muscles knitting back together, ribs sore for weeks after the bruises disappeared. The healing factor takes care of that in a matter of hours now, days at the most. He still remembers it as if it were yesterday. He never was one to run from a fight, can see the same tendency in Coulson. It calls to mind memories of being a scrawny little kid from Brooklyn, makes him feel at home in the way dysfunctional family potlucks do and all the furniture in SHIELD's arsenal could never.
"I can imagine," Steve says. Phil smiles, soft and easy. "Getting stabbed will do that to a fella."
"It was worth it," Phil says. "As I understand it, it lead to you six saving the day." His eyes, sharp and clear, bear not the distant admiration of their first meeting but a foundation of respect instead. Steve returns it in kind. He didn't know the man who left Tony Stark staring at the bloodstain on the helicarrier, distant and raw and grieving, but he's grateful for the chance to know a man like that now.
"We had a little help," Steve says, noting the agent seems to be readying himself for bed. With wounds that fresh, Phil must still be on the kind of painkillers that render you asleep more often than not. He'll get out from underfoot soon enough, just as soon as he sees to the matter that had led him hear in the first place.
"I wanted to thank you for your service," he continues, stepping forward. He holds a hand out to shake, watches Phil's eyes track from his offered hand up his arm and through to his eyes. Phil makes an aborted noise, brow furrowing in confusion.
"SHIELD isn't strictly military--," Phil starts to explain. Steve shakes his head fondly.
"Where I come from, a man lays his life down to protect the safety of another, that counts as service."
Phil's eyes glass over, just for a second, expression warm and solemn and honoured. He takes Steve's hand, and Steve snaps out a crisp salute with the other, military precise.
-
Morning dawns…well, the same time as morning was always going to dawn, regardless of the previous day's activites. The Avengers begin to greet it sometime around nine, drifting down to the kitchen one by one.
Thor sets to brewing coffee with astonishing enthusiasm, which makes rather more sense when he explains this is a task Jane insists he learn. Phil's appearance in the kitchen is greeted with a chorus of good mornings from most and raised mugs from both Tony and Natasha, slumped over their mugs at the table, sore and tired and unwilling to entertain any personalities not also sore and tired the coffee kicks in. Bruce slides a bottle of Tylenol 3's across the table at them with the reasoning, "I hurt just looking at you two."
Clint flicks a tea towel over his shoulder, the last of the dried dishes still in his hand, and nods at Phil respectfully.
"So," Steve says, "Breakfast anyone?"
-
fin