Chapter Text
The twins huddled up on Thor’s couch, not looking anyone in the eye. “Is Hawkeye mad at us?” Raven asked in a small voice.
Steve settled cross legged on the floor. Downstairs, Thor and Bucky cleaned up the glass and blood while Natasha worked damage control on Clint. No one knew where Coulson went. Steve rubbed a hand over his face. “No, sweetie. He isn’t mad at you. He was just…surprised.”
“We’re sorry,” Thadcus whispered into his knees, curled up almost into a fetal position.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Tony padded into the living room and rustled a plastic bag in their direction. “I uh, I brought some ice cream, since waffles are out of the question for tonight.”
Thadcus mumbled something that sounded like “Not hungry.” Steve and Tony shared a look—as far as freak outs went, Clint’s was almost unavoidable but…
They were just children. They didn’t need to see that kind of outburst, let alone directed at them. And tomorrow would be a new day, but that didn’t mean Clint would get out of a good ass kicking. Tony stuffed the cartons of ice cream into the freezer.
“I miss Mom,” Raven piped up. Her bottom lip trembled. Beside her, Thadcus nodded and sniffled and tried to make himself impossibly smaller.
Steve blinked. For some reason he never put any thought to their mother, as if they had sprung fully formed from Loki’s forehead (and wasn’t that an image). “Do you know her phone number?”
They shook their heads. “She’s gone where phones don’t work,” Raven supplied.
Ice clutched at Steve’s chest. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “I miss Mom.”
Tony reappeared with their little backpacks in hand. He and Steve riffled through them, turning up spare clothes and coloring books but nothing that would help get them in touch with the twins’ mother. Assuming she’s still alive, Steve thought grimly. He knew Thor liked to use flowery language when he tiptoed around an unpleasant topic; it wasn’t a stretch to think of Loki doing the same if the mother of his children passed away unexpectedly. And then there would be Loki, an evil space sorcerer with a grudge and a brain like a sack of cats, alone with two children.
Steve felt the suspicion creep up on him. Loki’s not coming back for them. And wouldn’t that be like him? Dump his own kin on some bleeding hearts until they became convenient, like as human shields or the vessels of some kind of lunatic legacy. Steve wasn’t good with kids—never had been—but he found himself pulling Raven into a tight hug. Loki would have to put him in the ground before he laid a hand on either of them. The conviction of the thought cut through him like a knife, straight to the bone. He forced himself to breathe under the weight of it, and looked up to see Tony clutching Thadcus the same way, as the boy cried into his shirt, and Tony’s face was a rictus of several warring emotions, chief among them terror and rage and something Steve didn’t dare identify.
When Bucky and Thor returned to them, all agreed it was time to put the kids to bed. It was an hour long process before they were finally tucked into a bed in Thor’s spare room. Bucky told them a bedtime story, a fairytale of some sort, slipping into Russian without realizing halfway through, not that they noticed. He ran a nervous hand down the blanket, making sure they were warm enough before padding to the door, as silent as any assassin, turning out the light and pulling the door almost closed.
Steve called a team meeting.
Clint and Coulson sulked a hair too long, arriving to Thor’s kitchen table about fifteen minutes after everyone else.
“I’m sure there’s a private school that would love to have them,” Tony was saying, pushing his rocky road ice cream around the bowl.
“I know, but I don’t know if I would send them to Xavier’s,” Steve said. His rainbow sherbet turned a strange green color as he stirred it, but he wasn’t really looking at it.
“Don’t tell me Captain America has a thing against mutants.”
Steve rolled his eyes. “No, but I do have a problem with the fact that Charles Xavier likes to enlist his underage students into a child army to fight his fights for him. That I have a problem with.”
“Okay, fair point.”
“What the fuck?” Clint sputtered, because obviously Coulson wasn’t going to. His voice broke the spell of calm and silence fell upon the table. The temperature dropped. “You think we’re going to keep them?”
Bucky stood up from the table, his chair not making a single noise, and the look on his face reminded all of them that the Winter Soldier didn’t become a ghost story in the intelligence community by being nice. Menace rolled off him in waves. He pointed a single metal digit at Clint. “They’re sleeping. If you wake them, no one can save you from me.”
Steve cleared his throat. “Clint, Phil, have a seat. We were just discussing what’s going to happen with the twins.”
“You mean Loki’s obvious trap?” Clint growled, hands fisted at his sides.
“Have a seat, Barton,” Tony growled.
Coulson dropped into a chair and Clint followed, face pinched up with disgruntlement. Thor blew out a breath and pushed his bowl away. “While the hawk-eyed one may have overreacted when he saw the young ones, I must point out that we all thought the twins posed a threat to us. In the beginning, was it not you, Tony, who said they could have been traps set by my brother.”
“We’re pretty sure they’re not traps,” Tony cut in. “They’re kids, plain and simple.”
“How do you know!?” Clint snapped. “Loki could be playing you! He could have put some kind of mind whammy on you and you’d never know.”
Natasha pinched the bridge of her nose. “Clint, calm down.”
“No! I will not calm down!”
Thor frowned up at him. “Clinton, even if Loki ensorcelled us, he would not have been able to affect you, or the Son of Coul, or the Lady Natasha.”
“I’ve seen them myself, Clint,” Natasha stressed. “There’s nothing weird about them. They’re kids.”
“I don’t trust them.”
Steve laid a hand on Bucky’s shoulder to keep him seated. “Hawkeye, you don’t have to trust them. Just…stay out of the way, okay? No more violent outbursts in front of the kids; they don’t need that kind of stress in their lives.”
Clint rolled his eyes and stormed out of the room. “Let him go,” Coulson murmured as Natasha watched his retreating back. He turned to Steve and Thor, and accepted the bowl of ice cream when Tony pushed it into his hands.
Tony leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table and rubbing his palms together. “Schools, clothes, food, childcare, toys, what else do growing kids need?”
“Medical care,” Steve said, tacking it onto the mental to-do list. “We need to get their immunization records.”
Bucky groaned and pressed a hand over his eyes. “Thank God for vaccines.”
“So we’re really doing this?” Coulson said. He gripped the edge of the table to keep from pressing a hand over the scar on his chest. His knuckles whitened. “We’re going to keep them?”
Thor bristled. “They are my niece and nephew, Son of Coul. Have care how you speak.”
“We have no way of knowing when Loki is going to come back for them,” Steve explained, as gently as he could. Thor settled a little easier in his seat. “And if he doesn’t come back, there’s no telling if their mother will…will be in a position to retrieve them. And Thor’s right; he’s next of kin.”
“The tower is the safest place for them to be,” Tony added loyally.
“They also make the tower a target for anyone with a grudge against Loki, including the man himself,” Coulson reminded them, and it wasn’t lost on Steve that Coulson had replaced some unsavory, choice noun for ‘man’ at the last moment.
“And what’s your alternative?” Bucky growled. The plates along his metal arm recalibrated with the kind of quiet, solicitous noise that haunted Coulson’s dreams. “Drop them into the wonderful foster care system and hope no one finds them in the middle of suburbia and decides to level a few schools to get to them?”
“Phil,” Natasha said, “they’re here to stay. For as long as necessary.”
Hunter threw his car in park and killed the engine. He clambered out of the rusted vehicle and strode through the winding graveyard path to the proud weeping willow and its singular occupant. In a more romantic world, there might have been a full moon overhead, or at least a dark and stormy night about the place. However, the waning moon cast the kind of light that only serves to outline the dark, and the still, breathless air could not be bothered to stir the leaves of the trees. Hunter moved with purpose, long legs making quick work of the beaten trail, soft with rain and the sighs of mourners, and despite the macabre display he did not show fear. He was, after all, the second-most dangerous thing here.
“Aw hell, she was right,” he grunted in the tree’s shadow. They, the insular if ubiquitous They, lynched someone here. They hanged a man with a noose of clothesline on goddamn holy ground, in front of the dead and everybody. Hunter glared up at the body swinging in slow circles from a willow branch creaking from unaccustomed strain. “She was right. You don’t actually weigh enough to die like that.”
Loki made an indignant choking noise and scrabbled ineffectually against the clothesline at his neck.
“You just…flap around in the wind. Don’t look at me like that.” Hunter took out his pocket knife and got to work. “How did they get the jump on you, huh? Riddle me that, trickster man.”
Loki dropped to the soft, cool soil with a gasp. He curled up on the mushy grass and coughed, willing his trachea open. Hunter fished about his person and produced an apple, gold in color and strangely heavy. He pushed it into Loki’s hands and waited for the Norse god to bite into its unyielding flesh. Hunter sat on the ground and waited, practicing patience. “No one should be able to get the jump on you, Luke. It’s not right.”
Loki spat a seed into the ground, where it sizzled green before fizzing out. “I couldn’t fight back,” he rasped. He swiped his sleeve over his mouth. “They came…like an avalanche. But they don’t know what I am.”
Hunter shook his head and turned to watch a pair of headlights creeping to a stop at the wrought iron gates. “Yeah, they don’t know you’re an evil-minded sneaky bastard. But at least they went after you.”
Loki barked a humorless laugh and slowly, laboriously, got to his feet. “Amora thinks she’s funny,” he spat. Green eyes flashed in the wan moonlight, and Hunter found himself returning that terrible grin. “But I think I’m hilarious.”
“And where did you learn that from, I wonder,” Hunter grumbled to himself.
Clunky black boots marched up the soft cemetery path to meet them. A soft voice lilted on the air, crooning. “Hexes, and oh-oh-ohs they haunt me, like gho-oh-ohsts they want me, to let go-oh-oh, they won’t. Let. Go. Hexes and ohs…”
Bucky went from sleeping to wakefulness in a heartbeat, apparently without passing through any kind of interim between. The door pressed to his back was cool and solid, and behind it were the soft sounds of waking. Changes in breathing, the shuffling of small limbs, the rasp of bedclothes against sheets. He got to his feet in one fluid motion and opened the door. “Good morning,” he said, voice pitched softly in the way that Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, greeted him.
Raven knuckled at her eyes. Thadcus clambered over her and hit the ground running, little feet slapping the floor as he lurched to Bucky’s side. He lifted him into his arms—he was just a little too large to fit against his hip without being awkward—and suffered the child’s morning breath as he pecked him on the cheek. Raven took his free hand—the metal one—and then they padded down to the kitchen to hunt for breakfast.
Jane found her Norse god boyfriend curled up under her desk. “Thor. What are you doing?”
He glanced up at her, pressed a finger to his lips. Jane sighed and poured herself a cup of coffee, checking her emails on her phone while she drank. She hadn’t finished her first cup before the pap-pap-pap of small feet crossed the threshold of her lab. She blinked. “Hello.”
The little boy looked like a very young Loki, but all resemblance slipped away as he grinned. She had seen Loki himself up close and knew that he never smiled when he could smirk, never laughed if he could sneer. This child grinned, eyes lighting up like a beacon, and it was an honest smile of discovery, of knowing. “Hello,” he said softly, and reached under her desk to poke Thor, who had a near-identical grin on his face.
And then the little boy charged out the door, pap-pap-pap, and Thor followed after, his own tread eerily quiet for such a large man. Jane followed them, nursing a second cup of coffee.
Thadcus padded across Thor’s floor, finding Tony and Steve within minutes, and the queue of adults trailing him lengthened, ducklings all. He found Raven by her feet, where she crawled behind a couch but not far enough to hide all of her, and then they began searching in earnest.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to find him,” Steve said after some time. “Bucky is very good at hide and seek.”
Thadcus and Raven huffed near identical laughs. Jane set her drained cup on a handy counter and crossed her arms, entranced by the search.
They eventually found Bucky under the couch, limbs curled in against himself, body flattened as low as it could go.
“I didn’t even know he was under there!” Raven cried.
If Clint kept his distance from the kids, Natasha stuck to them like glue. Come afternoon she observed them closely, lips pursed and eyes narrowed, as if looking for some trap, some note of disingenuousness.
Raven stared back. The stares of children always haunted Natasha in public—with her bright red hair and symmetrical face, babies and toddlers watched her with unblinking attention on public transportation and when she stood in checkout lines. And those little stares did haunt her; they were always so uncomplicated, but still demanding. Raven stared up at Natasha from halfway across Thor’s living room and she was in no way measuring Natasha up or waiting for some kind of response. No, she merely felt the burn of Natasha’s gaze on her and returned it with interest.
They stared at each other, unblinking, neither looking away. Natasha sucked in her cheeks and made a fish face, the way she saw Clint do when small children looked at him too long. Raven’s brow furrowed, and she sucked in her own cheeks, overshooting the expression and making a suction noise with her face. “How do you do that?” she demanded, and tried again before Natasha could answer. She made another suction noise.
And another.
And another.
I’ve created a monster, Natasha realized as, on the other side of the room, Thadcus looked up from his coloring book and made an answering suction noise, this one louder than the ones his sister had been able to produce so far.
In hindsight, Tony should not have brought the kids to the store. He also probably shouldn’t have taken Steve with him, either, but the Frostiest Soldier hadn’t wanted to come for a laundry list of reasons and Thor didn’t trust anyone else to gently peel Dr. Foster away from her work for her requisite mealtimes and breaks. And Tony going alone was out of the question, because if left unsupervised he would have probably come back with a bag of oranges and a bottle of whiskey.
“What did you feed them for lunch?” Steve accused out of the side of his mouth. They paused at the entrance of the store to watch the twins yank a shopping cart from its corral, Raven yelling at top volume just to hear herself and Thadcus immediately clamoring to sit inside the basket.
“Cake.”
Steve made that face he made when he wanted to bodily lift Tony off the ground and shake him but couldn’t because there were too many witnesses.
“Cap, have you seen what the inside of my fridge looks like?” Tony countered dryly.
Steve shook his head with a sigh. “Alright, let’s just focus on making the most of this shopping trip. We can take the east aisles and make a sweep along the perimeter of the store and as long as we steer clear of the—Tony! Tony!”
Tony shot him a sloppy salute and pushed the cart at a brisk pace. “It’s a shopping trip, Cap. Not a military campaign.”
Steve loped alongside the cart. “Raven, get back here! No, put that back.”
“But we neeeeeeed it, Uncle Steve!” she wailed, clutching the big yellow box of cereal to her chest.
“Yeah, put it in the cart, sweetie,” Tony laughed.
Steve shot him another Look. “Tony, don’t undermine me in front of the kids,” he hissed.
“Seriously, you need to unclench.”
“You need to respect me. We need to present a unified front—“
“What part of this isn’t a military maneuver—“
“It’s just a metaphor, for shit’s sake—“
“We’re not your little soldiers and I won’t let you act like—“
“If we’re going to make this work—“
“Excuse me.”
Both superheroes shut their mouths and pointed apologetic if strained smiles at the store associate. For a moment Tony thought she was going to ask them to leave; going by the tightness of her ponytail, the dark circles under her eyes and the way some sticky purple substance spattered across her otherwise blue work shirt, she was not interested in dealing with anyone’s bullshit. But then she gave them her own apologetic if strained smile. “Did I see you two come in with a pair of kids?”
Tony blinked at her, then blinked at the cart. The conspicuously childless cart. “Shit. Shit! Shitshitshitshit—“
“Stop!” the woman commanded, and Tony’s mouth slammed shut again. Growing up with Peggy Carter and Maria Stark in your life will do that to you. “If you two keep fighting like that you won’t make it out of this alive,” she went on in a gentler tone. “How old are your kids?”
“They’re not—“
“Six,” Steve cut him off with a meaningful glare.
She nodded. “And reasonably smart? Take a walk down past frozen and check in the toy aisle. They’re either looking at ice cream or looking at toys.” She brandished a walkie-talkie while she gestured for the most immediate route they could take. “I’ll detour through electronics just to be safe.” Her radio unleashed a burst of static and she murmured into the receiver, “We got a Code Adam situation, Caucasian six-year-olds, twins. That’s a Code Adam.”
“You think they’re in toys,” Steve stressed, eying each passing shopper as if they might be hiding the twins in their pockets. “They’ve never been to this store before, they wouldn’t know where the toy aisle is.”
The worker raised an eyebrow at him. “Believe me, kids can get into anything if they want to. I got a few of my own, and let me tell you, they can sniff out candy, toys and trouble from a hundred paces.”
Raven and Thadcus were, in fact, in the toy aisle. One of them had found a shopping basket and they were methodically filling it with everything their eyes fell upon. By the time Tony, Steve and their new mission assist arrived to the scene, the basket overflowed with variations of princess-themed and car-themed toys.
Their associate and new best friend smirked at the tableau even as Raven and Thadcus froze, seeing the looks on Tony and Steve’s faces. “You can just set the basket aside and I’ll take care of it before I go on lunch,” she told them. “Oh, and we totally sell child leashes. Aisle ten, left hand side, eye-level.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Steve said, unleashing the full power of the Patriotic Glare on Raven and Thadcus, who radiated doe-eyed innocence and honest bafflement at the adults. “These two are going to put away all these toys.”
“Baby leashes aren’t a bad idea, though,” Tony added archly.
She chuckled and checked her watch. “Alright, well let me know if you guys need anything. I gotta get back on the clock in a minute here.” She patted at her pants pockets and produced a name badge, which she clipped to her collar. “And I’m Kerry, by the way.”
“Thank you, Kerry,” Steve sighed. “I think we can handle it from here.”
Thadcus scrabbled at the clips on his new child leash, annoyed. He could reach the little buckles well enough, but he didn’t have the dexterity or hand strength to undo them. “Why are you ruining my life?” he wheedled, pouting up at Tony.
“Because I’m a mean, heartless bastar—meanie,” he grunted, and dropped a jar of smooth peanut butter into the cart. Raven for her part seemed perfectly content with her new accessory; the leashes looked like little backpacks and secured around the kids’ chests with unyielding buckles. They put a pink monkey leash on her and clipped the other end to Steve’s belt. Thadcus had a blue elephant and Tony secured him directly to the cart.
The four moseyed up to the checkout and Tony took a long moment to admire their haul: a new pair of secondary shoes for both of the twins, a Pete the Cat puzzle, a Pete the Cat storybook (with a soundtrack included!), some Diplo blocks, assorted clothing, nutritional kid food, a booklet of stickers, a big ass tub of yogurt (for Steve), some fruit, and a noisy robot toy that Tony snuck into the cart when the kids hadn’t been looking. Steve had been looking though, but he didn’t say anything, merely gave Tony an indulgent eye roll.
Kerry checked them out, and if she noticed the twins glaring at her sullenly she gave every sign of being impervious to their disapproval. “I’m glad it all worked out,” she chuckled.
Watching her work was a thing of beauty. Tony usually didn’t bother with supermarkets—most everything he needed could be ordered online and would be sent to the Tower within three to five business days—but even his eye noticed the way Kerry moved. She scanned and bagged their items efficiently with a strategy honed with years of experience, and she worked to make every muscle movement count. And all of that apparently happened without any input from her higher faculties as she smoothly made small talk with them. “So how long have you two been together?”
Steve blushed. “We’re not like that,” he hurried to assure her, and for the first time Tony wondered what kind of picture he and Steve made, wandering around the store with a pair of kids in tow, bickering and talking about the twins and their new shared responsibilities.
Domestic, he realized, while Steve stammered and clumsily steered the conversation away from his and Tony’s unwedded bliss. They looked domestic. And it was such a banal realization, but for some reason it stuck with him even after he paid with his card and they loaded up the car with their loot and he drove through the cluster fuck of New York on a Saturday afternoon. Tony Stark never thought much about having a family, but he glanced in the rearview mirror at the twins while Steve droned about inflation pricing and seven dollars for yogurt is daylight robbery and he couldn’t help but wonder if this was what normal was supposed to feel like. A little fucked up, a little horrifying, but comfortable in its way.