Chapter Text
It started with a party invitation, hand delivered to her by an awkward-looking Stark intern, who didn’t speak a word to her the whole five seconds he was at her door. Imogen wondered what had prompted them to ever hire him as he hightailed it down the stairs, and if this was a regular sort of task for a Stark intern, or if Tony was messing with her. He liked messing with her, on the rare occasion that he remembered she existed.
Imogen shut the door and opened up the invitation. It was a black piece of paper, the time and date and address typed out in comic sans, in letters that were almost too big for the page. It was for the same party that invitations had already been handed out all over Avengers Tower - for a ‘celebration of the Avenger’s efforts’, which really just meant a party for the sake of a party. Especially since the most recent mission she knew about that the Avengers had been on was little more than a PR stunt in Africa somewhere. They hadn’t even taken their whole team, just Iron Man and Captain America and a few of the newer members that Imogen didn’t know so well. Some of them, she’d never even met.
And Tony Stark wanted her to go to a party for them, so much that he’d printed off this dumb attempt at an invitation and signed it at the bottom. She laughed to herself and threw the paper to the side. She didn’t go to his parties unless Clint dragged her along, and Clint had been out of the country for three weeks now (SHIELD business, he’d said, and little more. She wasn’t privy to SHIELD’s movements anymore).
She’d forgotten about the party by the next day, when her phone rang in the middle of the afternoon while she was out running. She remembered it pretty quickly once saw Tony Stark’s caller ID, and hit ignore immediately. He rang again, and then once more after that for good measure.
She gave up on the fourth call, sick of listening to her own ringtone. “What?” she snapped into the phone the moment she answered the call, before Stark could have the first word.
“Hello to you too,” the voice of Tony Stark replied, completely unfazed by her unfriendly greeting. “Do they teach kids any manners these days, or do you just always answer the phone like that?”
“Aren’t you famous for having absolutely no manners at all?” Imogen shot back, dropping her pace to a walk. She could use a break anyway, if she had to.
“I’m rich. I’m allowed to be rude,” Tony insisted. His logic seemed flawed, but he didn’t give Imogen a chance to question it. “Anyway, I just need to know if you’re coming tomorrow. It’s important.”
“To your party?” she questioned, trying to figure out why exactly it was imperative she come to this stupid celebration.
“No, to my funeral,” Tony said dryly. “I hope you’re recording this fascinating conversation, because it’s the last time you’ll ever talk to me, and I know how much you love the sound of my voice.”
“Wow, that’s tragic,” she replied, not in the least bit sympathetic. “You should have told me earlier, I would have sent flowers. I saw some nice ones in the supermarket the other day.”
“Touching,” he said and then tired quickly of the banter. “Really though, party. Coming? Yes?”
She sighed into the phone, already hearing an argument coming. “I don’t come to parties, Stark,” she told him flatly, like being blunt could deter him at all.
Predictably, he steamrolled over her immediately. “Yes you do,” he insisted. “You came to the Christmas party. And that other boring thing that Happy did last month.”
“Team dinner?” she asked, and rolled her eyes as she stopped at a set of traffic lights. “I was paid to go to that. By your company. How do you even know that anyway?”
“One day you will realise that I know everything. And my computer knows everything else.”
“Not creepy at all.”
“I’m trying to improve your social life, not selling your social security number online, god.”
She huffed in annoyance and crossed the street, turning towards home once she reached the other side. She’d run far enough today. “My social doesn’t need improving,” she said in no uncertain terms. “And definitely not from you. I’ve already learnt that lesson.”
“Come on, Varsity, give me a break.” She heard something clink and whir in the background, and then Stark grunted as he lifted something with a long creeeeak. “Only party I’ll ever invite you to, I promise. Come over and we can pinky swear. You just gotta come to this one thing.”
“Why?” she asked.
“What d’you mean why?” he replied, sounding genuinely confused.
“Why do I absolutely have to come to this party?” she expanded, annoyed at having to explain herself.
“Oh.” Another bang and then a grinding noise. She didn’t even want to know what he was doing. “I’ve got someone you have to meet. You’ve got lots in common, you’re both rude, neither of you will come to my parties. It’s a match made in Heaven.”
“A match made in Heaven,” she repeated flatly.
“You don’t trust me?” Tony asked, feigning hurt.
“No,” she replied very definitely. “I really don’t.”
“You are breaking my heart,” he told her emphatically, and then swore as the sound of glass breaking filtered down the phone line. “Hey Pidgeon, I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow night?”
There was a long pause while she considered her options, which were pretty limited unless she wanted to put some serious effort into avoiding this party. There wasn’t much you could do to avoid Tony Stark when he was determined to annoy you. “Yeah,” she sighed finally, relenting. “Alright.”
She could practically hear his smug expression down the phone line. “Nice doing business with you, Varsity,” he said and then hung up, before she could even start a snappy reply.
Rolling her eyes again, Imogen tucked her phone into her pocket and broke into a jog again, covering the ground with a steady, regular stride. Just two days of this nonsense, one night out to appease him, and Tony Stark would leave her alone again. She could do that. She’d had worse weekends.
Imogen was starting to like regular life, much to her surprise. It had been a year and a half since she’d left SHIELD and HYDRA and destroyed INTEL, and nine months since any kind of spy had come looking for her. It was nice, training for fun rather than actual fights, and not having to look over her shoulder every time she left her apartment. She hadn’t really realised what she was missing out on until she’d actually left all the spy stuff behind.
There were still loose ends out there, of course. Will, her brother, was still missing, having disappeared before JARVIS could come back online that one time he’d managed to lay siege to Avengers Tower. He hadn’t tried again since, nor had he surfaced anywhere else. And Lena had talked her way out of incarceration, because apparently she was far more cunning than Imogen had given her credit for. Currently, she was living in a mansion in California, making money off of not talking about how she’d been ‘kidnapped’ and ‘tortured’ by INTEL. As far as Imogen was concerned, she could take her money and stay there with her false story and her burnt face.
And then of course, there was the ice that was always climbing up and down her fingers and freezing things she didn’t want frozen. She’d never wanted any kind of superpower, and now that she had one, she wanted it even less. That problem was currently being tackled by Stark Industries, who had discreetly hired a pair of scientists specialising in biology and chemistry who were (in Imogen’s opinion) way too excited to work on the project. She’d spent hours with them so far, with no success – she had no more control than before, and they hadn’t found any way to remove the effects of whatever Lena had done to her.
It didn’t take her long to reach home once she was able to run without distraction. She’d even almost put Tony Stark and the party she didn’t want to go to out of her mind; until she stepped in her front door and her phone started ringing again. Pulling a face, she threw her keys on the kitchen bench and answered. “Hello?” she said without looking at caller ID and headed for the stairs.
“Imogen!” Happy Hogan’s voice replied, both relieved and mildly stressed at the same time, a talent that only he possessed. She was fairly sure the man was going to have a heart attack before he was 60. “Listen, I had you down for a shift tomorrow night, but I just got a call saying you won’t be working, and I just need to know-”
“Yeah,” she said, cutting him off before he could work himself up into too much of a sweat. Working security at Avengers Tower was a decent job most days, but when she had to take calls from a flustered Happy…well. People weren’t really her strong suit. “Apparently I have a party to go to that night, so you’ll have to find someone else to work.”
“But I don’t have anyone else,” Happy insisted, very put out by her refusal to fix his problem. “I’ve got double staff on already, and you know what it’s like to try and convince the junior team to work on a Friday night.”
“And I don’t want to go to a party,” she said, reaching the top of the stairs. “But Tony Stark keeps insisting I go, so you’ll just have to figure it out.”
“Wait, what?” he asked in surprise. “What do you mean, Tony wants you to come to the party, why would he-”
“It’s a long story, Happy,” she replied and sat on her bed to pull off her shoes. “Just call Kase and tell him you’ll buy him M&P’s pizza if he’ll work. He’ll do anything for their pizza.”
There was a pause. “Okay,” he relented, though he still sounded pretty uptight about it. Happy wasn’t so relaxed when he didn’t feel like he was in charge. “You’d better tell me the full story on Monday morning though.”
“Mhm,” Imogen hummed in reply without really thinking about it. He wouldn’t get any gossip from her anyway. “Goodbye Happy,” she said when he didn’t start on anything else, and waited only three seconds for his return farewell before hanging up on him in the middle of his ‘goodbye’.
She had a performance review in a couple of weeks, she remembered as she turned on the shower. She could already imagine the things he’d be bringing up after that phone call.
-----
The party was held on the upper floors of Avengers Tower, up in the big, open lounge and games space that was most frequently used by the Avengers themselves. When she arrived, there was already a crowd of people in the lobby, where it seemed a secondary gathering was taking place. A lot of people in Avengers costumes, she noticed as she passed through, and several little groups who had dressed more sensibly but looked very perturbed at still not being able to get in.
A group of girls dressed more to go clubbing than anything else eyeballed Imogen as she squeezed past them, lips curling at her jeans and leather jacket look, and she glared right back until she was past them, and almost at the elevators.
Happy himself was running security on this side of the room, she found with mild surprise. He gave her his most perturbed expression as she approached, and lifted the tablet in his hands.
“Name?” he asked her pointedly, fixing his eyes on his tablet screen.
“I literally work for you,” Imogen replied blankly.
“Nope,” Happy said. “I have to do this properly, or there’s no point doing it at all. Name, please.”
She rolled her eyes and gave up. “Imogen Haylock.”
He searched his digital list of names, tapped the screen several times, and then stepped out of the way so that she could enter the elevator. “Have a good evening,” he said in parting, all stiff and formal and absolutely ridiculous. She could only shake her head as she joined the group of people already waiting to go up.
Two more people entered the elevator after her, and then they took the short ascent up 80 floors. Imogen spent the whole ride trying not to listen to a pair of women behind her who were wondering out loud if Captain America would be there.
There was a good crowd of people gathered upstairs, though not quite as bad as the throngs that inhabited the lobby. Tony was nowhere to be seen, so she went to the bar first for a drink to fill her hands with, and then wandered up to the deck that overlooked the room on one side and the city on the other.
She lingered there for a few minutes, idly scanning the crowd, but there was no sign of Tony or any other kind of special guest she was supposed to meet. Most of the room was just rich friends of Stark and employees of SI, and a smattering of other people who had gotten invites one way or another. She vaguely knew the faces from SI, having passed them all in the hallways at least once, but the rest of the crowd was a sea of strangers. And no Tony. She sighed, and leant on the railing.
“You look lost,” a female voice said behind her. Imogen visibly jumped and whipped around to face them, almost spilling her drink. Wanda Maximoff stood before her, a tall, dark European girl who she’d managed to never even catch sight of in the six months since Wanda had come back from Sokovia with the Avengers.
Imogen didn’t know much about the girl; she came from Sokovia, obviously, and she had some freaky kind of powers that let her do all sorts of cool things. She’d been showing up more and more often on Avengers missions lately, and the media loved it; the Scarlet Witch, they called her, and wrote story after story about her abilities.
She didn’t spend much time at the Tower, for whatever reason. The Avengers had a facility upstate now but even so, most of them still came down to New York regularly for their own reasons. Wanda Maximoff did not. She stayed upstate almost exclusively.
“I’m looking for someone,” Imogen replied, not friendly nor unfriendly, and cast her eyes over the crowd below.
The Maximoff girl joined her at the edge of the balcony, looking down. “Who are you looking for?” she asked, and there was a strange sort of look in her eyes that gave Imogen the feeling she wasn’t really seeing the crowd at all.
“Tony Stark,” she said, and the focus returned to the other girl’s eyes like the snap of a rubber band.
“You know Stark?” Wanda asked, and Imogen tried not to be offended at the mild surprise in her voice.
“Yeah,” she affirmed. “I’m a friend of Clint – Hawkeye. You’re Wanda, right?”
Wanda’s face filled with recognition. “Yes!” she replied and smiled. “He talks about you sometimes. You are Imogen?”
“I am, yeah,” Imogen said, and wondered at the fact that Clint talked about her to other people; to other Avengers. Even now, it hadn’t really sunk in that she was only living about three steps away from all the Avengers drama and the new SHIELD and everything she kept trying to pretend she’d left behind.
“Stark is at the bar now, I think,” Wanda said, and pointed across the room. Sure enough, she had picked Tony out of the crowd, dressed casually and leaning across the bar as he gave the tender instructions.
“I have to go,” the other girl continued, almost apologetic.
“Thanks for the tip,” Imogen said in reply and pushed off the railing. The other girl smiled and then walked away, disappearing between a group of people in mere seconds.
Imogen went the other way, down the stairs and across the room to the bar. Stark was still there, nursing a scotch and watching the crowd he’d put together mingle. She leant against the bar pointedly, right in his like of vision, so that he absolutely couldn’t miss her.
“Pidgeon!” he said brightly. “I was starting to think Happy had stopped you at the front door.”
She snorted in derision. “Happy only thinks he’s in control of everything here.”
“See,” Tony said and finished his drink in one mouthful. “This is why you’re on varsity, and Happy isn’t.”
“You made Happy Head Of Security,” Imogen pointed out as a nameless bartender who she might recognise as an intern came over to refill Tony’s glass. “How is that not varsity?”
“Happy’s a nerd,” Tony said, and then received his scotch back. “Anyway. You, Varsity, are going to save my life this week. Come with me.” He took his glass and stood up abruptly, wandering away.
“What?” she called after him, and swore as she put her own drink down and chased after him, darting through the small crowd. Stark didn’t listen to her, not even when she caught up to him, meandering aimlessly through the crowd.
“What do you mean?” she demanded, striding along next to him.
“Over here,” he said and turned left, through a wide archway and into a smaller sitting area adjacent to a pool table. There was a small group of younger people here, immersed in a lively game of pool on one side of the room and deep discussion on the other. In the middle of it all, sitting at the end of one sofa looking bored, a boy with a shock of silver hair watched the pool game with a scowl on his face. What, exactly, he hated about pool was unclear, as was the reason for his distinct lack of friends.
“Maximoff!” Stark called, his voice loud and sharp, and over the babble of the crowd, the boy heard him and looked up. He was only slightly less disgusted at the sight of Tony Stark than he was at the game, according to his expression as he got up off the couch and walked across the room, dragging his feet. What had Tony done to him? Imogen wondered, slightly amused.
“What?” he asked as he drew to a halt. His voice surprised Imogen; he had a Sokovian accent, like Wanda. The same last name too, actually. Were they related? Siblings? She hadn’t heard anything about a second Sokovian Avenger.
“Okay, first of all, it’s a party, not a funeral, so lighten up,” Tony said. The boy scoffed. “Second, this is Imogen, your new best friend.” He pointed at Imogen. The boy looked at her with fresh interest, and then dismissed her offhandedly.
“I don’t need a new friend,” he announced, all attitude.
Tony stared at him for a second, and then turned to Imogen, very resolutely ignoring him. “Imogen, this is Wanda’s brother, Pietro…you’ve met Wanda, right?” Imogen nodded. “She got all the manners in the family, obviously. And the hair.”
“Obviously,” Imogen agreed, stuffing her hands in her pockets and watching Pietro’s face darken.
“I don’t need American friends,” he spat at Tony. “Not from you.” He stormed off then, brushing past Tony as he went. Tony didn’t even react, just let him go, looking mildly amused.
“Is that who you told me I had to meet?” Imogen asked when he was gone, rounding on Stark.
Tony shrugged and took a good mouthful of his scotch. “I might have exaggerated a bit yesterday,” he replied easily, infuriatingly upbeat.
“Why did we absolutely have to meet again?” she questioned, not particularly happy at having been talked into coming to this dumb party just to be insulted by a stranger.
“Ah.” Tony looked uncomfortable suddenly. “He’s staying here for two weeks and I need someone to keep him distracted until he leaves. He doesn’t like me, and I can’t work while he’s hanging around messing up my stuff.”
“So send him back upstate,” Imogen suggested with not a hint of sympathy for him.
“If only it were that simple, Deep Thought. He’s only here because he’s currently suspended from the base there. And if he goes anywhere else someone’s going to ask him for a visa or something, and who knows what trouble he’ll get into after that. Kid’s a magnet for disaster, just like you.”
She stared at him for a second, trying to pick a place to start unpacking that. “Does he have a visa?” was the first thing to burst out of her mouth, though it was not the question she had intended to ask.
“He might technically be classed as an illegal immigrant,” Tony admitted.
“What?” she replied, and almost laughed at how ridiculous it was. “The Avengers are sneaking people into the country now?”
“Hey, it’s nothing SHIELD hasn’t been doing for years anyway,” he said defensively, and then slung an arm around her shoulders and guided her back out into the main room. “And I’ve tried to get him a visa or a passport or something. It’s not my fault he refuses to reside in this country legally.”
“He sounds like an idiot,” Imogen said very decisively, and caught a glimpse of Pietro between the crowd. He was on the other side of the room now, with his sister. It looked like they were arguing. Tony steered her in the opposite direction.
“Don’t worry,” he said as they walked. “I’ve got a hundred other people you can meet, and they’re all here legally.”