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“How about this one!?” Clint shouts across the parking lot tightly filled with Christmas trees and the families gawking at them.
Kate manages to hear him over the sounds of children playing hide and seek and tinny holiday music blasting out of the hanging speakers. She looks around the tree she’s currently considering--a luscious full pine just begging to be covered in tinsel--and sees Clint admiring a tall tree at the edge of the lot. She pats an especially needle-y branch in front of her and vows, “I’ll be back,” before setting a determined pace to catch up with Clint.
He’s standing with hands on his hips when she finally falls in line by his side. “Isn’t she a beaut?” he asks without looking at her.
Kate humors him and walks around the tree, pretending to inspect every part like she’s seriously considering rejecting the beautiful pine on the other end of the lot. The one in front of her looks passable if you stand right where she had been next to Clint. Everywhere else, however, is a shit show. There are giant gaps in the branches, entire branches with no needles, and a large spot of brown needles that fall to the cement when she shakes them. This tree is definitely a ‘no’.
She’s about to open her mouth and tell him ‘no-way’ when Clint says, “It’s also fifty percent off.”
That changes everything. “It’s perfect!”
It turns out that most Lyft drivers have a thing against transporting Christmas trees. Kate and Clint decide to walk the damn thing home themselves after multiple calls to other Avengers fall through. The two of them grumble about it the entire way back to Clint’s apartment building and then the entire way up the stairs to his apartment. By the time they have the tree standing (mostly) straight in the corner, all of their plans to go out and grab a bite to eat have turned into daydreams about frozen pizzas.
“How many do you want?” Clint asks as he looks through the freezer.
Kate looks up from where she’s testing all the tangled Christmas lights. Surprisingly, more than half still work. She responds with, “How many slices?”
“No, how many pizzas?”
Kate squints and tries to decide if it’s a real question. “How many do you have?”
Clint takes a second to count through the freezer. “Fourteen.”
“PIZZAS?! ”
He shrugs. “There was a deal. And my superpower is knowing when there is a good deal on frozen pizzas.”
Kate chuckles. “Make me two, one cheese and one....ugh, I don’t care. Whatever you got is fine.” She could always eat the rest when it’s cold later. “I think we have enough lights to cover most of the tree if we use the space strategically.”
“Sounds good,” Clint says as he puts the frozen pizzas in the oven. “Want to watch Winter Friends?”
The tree stands half decorated in the corner. Kate’s going to run out tomorrow and grab more tinsel to cover up the parts that she couldn’t hide any other way, but she’ll take it for now. There’s only a few pieces of pizza left uneaten on paper plates between them as Clint tries to figure out how to get the station with this holiday special he keeps talking about.
“I’ve never heard of this,” she tells him while he clicks buttons on three separate remotes to change the channel. At the same time she’s digging through different apps on her phone to figure out an alternative method to control the TV. The Kaplans have a TV that can do it. The longer she has no luck figuring it out, the more she finds that feature useful.
Clint shrugs as he finally gives up and crouches in front of the TV to manually fix the problem. “I hadn’t either since Simone and the kids showed me last year.”
The program starts right as Clint finally manages to get the right channel. Kate’s never heard the theme song yet it feels incredibly familiar, as if it’s the exact same tune she’d heard in front of every other cartoon she’s seen. She settles in with the belief she's going to see something she’s seen thousands of times before--cute animals and superheroes, combined into an entertaining superteam.
Kate settles into the couch and watches as the brightly colored action unfolds. In it a small puppy named Lilly discovers that her father is actually working for The Sun. (Which, what the fuck? How does that make sense?) This is causing some sort of problem for the Winter Friends which Kate can’t really understand. The Winter Friends had clearly never been to LA because somehow The Sun is screwing with their winter holiday buzz by making it too warm to do...things. Kate’s vague on the details.
“Why does this seem so relevant to my life?” she asks once they’ve reached the part where Lilly has to convince a group of younger-looking Winter Friends to help defeat The Sun after Lilly makes an especially strong-worded speech about the importance of families you choose.
“I know, right?!” Clint responds, apparently reading her mind. “Especially the part where Steve has to find his brother.”
Kate looks at him with nothing but confusion. Are they even watching the same thing?
When it’s over Clint goes straight to the kitchen and grabs a beer out of the fridge. “That was fun,” he tells her as he sits back down on the couch.
“Yeah,” she responds, still distracted by sorting through her own thoughts. Clint’s patient as she thinks and waits as she forms what she wants to say. “Thank you for letting me stay over while I figure stuff out. It’s the first major holiday without my family. I’m glad I’m not alone.”
“No problem. Mi Casa su casa and all that.”
“Really, Clint, it means a lot to me.” She feels odd saying it aloud.
Clint raises his bottle of beer in a toast. “I’m glad,” he says. “Also shitty families are really common for Avengers. It’s in most of our resumes. It’s a little rarer to have a supervillain for a parent, but you’re not the only one. Jess’s dad was Hydra, and of course Wanda and Pietro’s is sometimes a supervillain, I guess, I don’t always know what’s going on with the X-Men.”
Kate knows he’s trying to make her feel better. It’s maybe, kinda, sorta, working. “Glad I have such good company with women you’ve slept with,” she jokes.
“Women I care about, you mean,” he clarifies. “They’re also my friends.”
Kate wants to say something about how Clint feels closer to her then anyone she shares DNA with, but she abstains. Instead she snarks about the tree and the cheap frozen pizza, and Clint’s plans for New Years Eve.
She leaves the fact that Clint's her family, now, unsaid.