Chapter Text
He was still allowed to work through the night when Pepper was out of the country, if he wasn’t caught. Allowed was probably too strong a word to use.
While he could 3D print many of the components he preferred on occasion the feel of the tools in his hands. His music was just loud enough to slow the racing of his thoughts and the coffee black enough that he might get this done before Pepper came back and told him that even superheroes needed to sleep and tricked him into it with her feminine wiles. Such wiles that woman had.
His Music cuts out.
“Sir?”
“This better be important J,” he answers without looking up from the worktop.
“Yes Sir, there is a Mr Clint Barton at the security gates to the Tower’s garage.”
“Good for him,” he says lightly barely acknowledging the unimportance of random people who try to gain access to Iron Man and Avengers Tower. “Scan the car, tell him we have sharks with lasers on their heads to eat the paparazzi.”
JARVIS fails to take the hint and his fast pace, guitar led music fails to cut back in. “Mr Barton says you may remember him as Legolas.”
“Legolas? AGENT Barton?!” This makes him put down the screw driver.
“Mr Barton says you cannot be an agent of a defunct agency.”
“Does he now? Notify Hill.” He spins on his stool away from the work desk and the newly forgotten project. “Give me a visual.” The green blue of the holographic display flashes before him. He flicks his wrist to expand the camera view of the blond former SHIELD agent in a silver car. Data on the car and the occupants scrolls beside the video image. A quick beat on the image and he can hear the man’s fingertips tapping out an irregular rhythm on the outside of his car door.
“The archer formally known as Agent Barton?”
“Mr Stark,” Barton says looking towards the most obvious of the security cameras though Tony catches the way the man’s eyes flick quickly over three other harder to pin point lenses.
“We have you down as dead. Or Hydra. Or both.”
“‘Fraid you’re gonna have to change those records, man,” Barton says easily.
“Yeah?” Tony says raising an eyebrow, “Forgive me if I don’t rush to do that without some kind of evidence.”
“Fuck man, you gonna make me wake her? Even after New York?”
There is a kind of audacity to the light cursing that pisses Tony off. 3: 24 am in the morning, the clock in the corner of his display flashes and though he normally wouldn’t give two shits about the abstract nature of time, he gives plenty of fucks about former SHIELD agents thinking he is some kind of halfway house for lost spies. Fury and his lot always taking liberties, the kind of liberties that gets him almost stuck on the wrong side of wormholes and having fucking panic attacks.
“I didn’t exactly want to run with your lying liars who lie before Cap pulled a ‘the emperor has no clothes’ and you Katniss, your record for joining club evil isn’t exactly spotless,” he counts out the ways in which this is not happening, “So hows about you turn that impressively non-descript car around and make an appointment with… Wait. Wake who?”
“Sir, the vehicle has two other occupants,” JARVIS supplies and Tony drags across the data on the car.
“Yeah, a sleep deprived assassin,” Barton offers tiredly, “this ones on you Stark. Just you remember that. Tash. Tash. Wake up, we’re here.” The archers arm stretches out of view and is accompanied by the muffled sounds of his passenger coming to unhappily. There is the hushed sound of the man coxing a response as Tony flicks through his holographical scan of the vehicle pulling up the dimensions of the front seat passenger. Female, 5ft 4…
“Stark doesn’t trust me as far as he can throw me.” He recognizes that husky voice dripping with disdain. He flicks left for another camera angle to grab a better screen shot of a tired looking redhead.
“Agent Romanoff?” The last he heard of her was through Rogers. Gone to ground. Rebuilding covers destroyed in the fall. He’d had to go back to her files more than once feeling sick and strangely ashamed reading the history he couldn’t quite make fit with the woman who’d first come to him as Natalie Rushman from legal.
“Not an agent, Stark. Will you let us up? Captain Rogers will vouch for me.”
“That takes care of you and I suppose you think your word for the blond will work but what about person number three?” Flick and drag, cross hairs form around the heat signature in the back of the car, “Who’s really fucking small?” Faster than average heart rate for a person asleep. Britax B-Safe Infant car seat. “An infant?”
“Drive Clint,” she says allowing him to imagine the sigh that should go with the resignation in her voice. “He’ll let us up now just to hear the story.” Romanoff charming as always.
“Better be or Laser sharks,” he says glibly as the archer nods sharply at his partner’s orders.
“J allow our master assassin friends entry and pull up everything you have on Former Agent Barton and Former Agent Romanoff."
Natasha Romanoff leaves his elevator first. Her simple loose fitting sweater and pants tucked neatly into black boots makes her look very unlike Natalie or even Agent Romanoff. When she looks up at him standing on the raised mezzanine there is the familiar hardness in her eyes and the way her longer hair is still more reminiscent of blood than Pepper’s own strawberry waves.
“Agent Romanoff the no longer,” he grins, “missed me?”
Romanoff twists slightly towards the exiting archer, the curve of her mouth hardens a little and she throws a hand signal low next to her thigh towards her partner. For his part the archer shakes his head and shrugs unevenly. As Tony makes his way across the floor to the stairs he can see why the man’s shrug remained unilateral, a baby carrier in his left hand.
“So assassination and spy craft wasn’t giving you a high anymore and you decided to try your hand at kidnap?”
Romanoff growls. Tony raises his eyebrows.
“She’s mine,” Clint Barton says bluntly.
“That’s where you were when me and mine were being targeted by the shadowy organisation you worked for? Making more assassins?” Tony throws out as he gestures with his scotch.
“No,” Romanoff says, her voice low and forbidding, “that’s what I was doing.”
“You what?!”
“Tasha, you said this guy was a genius,” Barton says behind her.
“I also said he was a narcissist. You wanted to come here.”
“So when you said she was yours…” Natasha turns as he approaches clearly manoeuvring herself between him and Barton, between him and the baby carrier in Barton’s hand. “You meant the both of them.”
“Natasha isn’t anyone’s, Mr Stark.”
“You two made a…” he says fighting down a sudden sleep deprived feeling of hysteria.
“We need your help, they targeted you and yours? Imagine what they’d be willing to do to get their hands on the Black Widow’s daughter,” Barton says flatly, clearly unaffected by the way Romanoff stands between them like a wild animal protecting her young.
“You want my help? Aren’t you the two most deadly people on the planet?” he looks between the two former agents, Barton has a bearing he has always associated with Rhodey, an almost casual physical threat built into easy going body language and Romanoff has shed any of the coquettishness she’d used to play him so well and is all calculation and claws.
“I have a bow and arrows. I need superheroes.”
“Didn’t SHIELD have, I don’t know, fraternization rules?” Tony asks as Barton bends to lift a sleeping baby from the carrier. He won’t step closer with Romanoff standing in fighting stance between them, all he sees is a purple blanketed bundle pulled close to her father’s chest with surprising gentleness.
“I’ve never been great with rules Mr Stark and if what Natasha says is true neither have you,” he shakes his head, “She’s barely a month old. I can work, I can… this is the safest place for her.” Tony suspects this is the closest he will come to begging.
“Sir, Ms Hill says she’ll be here in twenty minutes.” Both agents look up at JARVIS’s interruption.
“I assume no one else knows about junior?”
“I have been keeping secrets for as long as I could speak,” Natasha says speaking suddenly.
“And stealing them too,” he answers her darkly, Natasha only stares unabashed. “Right, hey JARVIS make sure we’re recording when Hill finds out about baby Bond here.”
“Her name is Elizabeth,” Barton offers looking down at the bundle. Tony gets the sense that this piece of information is offered as the overture to a bargain.
Tony sighs, “Such a missed opportunity to name her Merida.”
“Merida?” Barton asks, a frown forming.
“Yeah, little red headed Scottish girl with a bow?” Nothing, “Brave? Disney Pixar?” Neither assassin reacts. “Seriously? Does no one on the team understand pop culture?”
“Team?” Natasha echoes.
“The Avengers? Heroes of New York?” he says expansively, “Even you should have heard of us.”
“Surely the Avengers initiative was shut down with SHIELD.”
“Didn’t you hear Ms Romanoff, I’m privatizing world peace.” At this Romanoff rolls her eyes but he takes it as a victory as she appears a fraction less likely to tear his head from his shoulders.
“Will you help us?” asks Barton.
“Don’t think I can refuse, I’m Pokemoning.”
“Pokemoning?!” Natasha says a soft kind of outrage in her voice.
“Gotta catch them all,” he smiles and takes his time with his scotch before continuing, “You two are part of the set… provided you don’t turn out to be octopus heads, of course.”
“We are not Hydra,” Natasha says.
Tony only nods at the cheapness of her word, “I have this fantastic new security coordinator, delightfully mean, gets along with Pep a little too much for my liking. She’ll be here in 20 minutes”
“18 minutes 12 seconds, Sir”
“Maria?” Barton asks and Tony sees Natasha give him the same kind of sharp nod he’d seen Barton give her in the car.
“She doesn’t let me call her that,” he answers casually, “Can I see the rug rat while we wait?”
Barton’s sharp eyes look towards his partner and he must see some kind of sign she will allow it because he shifts the child in his arms and steps closer. Tony leans forward, in the bundle there is an infant with a small round face, as fair as Natasha with full lips and delicate lashes closed against her cheeks, no hair as yet.
“You’re lucky, she takes after her Mom. Not that you aren’t a very handsome, totally able to kill me with your bare hands, guy”
“Lucky doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Barton says softly as the baby’s eyes open, “Nat, she’s waking up.”
Tash, Tasha, Nat, small names, intimate names all used so thoughtlessly for a woman as deadly as the spider she was named for, it’s as if Barton doesn’t fear her at all. “She’ll be hungry.”
“I take it she doesn’t eat shawarma yet?” and there is a second eye roll.
Natasha turns again excluding him more thoroughly though she quickly taps her chest, then pinching her thumbs and two fingers together motions downwards twice away from her body towards the infant in Barton’s arms. Her hands shift again, two peace sighs laid on top of each other circling away from her body before her dominate hand comes up to pinch and twist a pea sized piece of air at her temple. She seems to smirk before tapping her partner on the chest once and taking the squirming child from his arms.
“I’ll be in the lounge,” she says coolly.
“What was that?” Tony asks watching her circle wide so as not to brush past him to get to the mezzanine. When he turns back to the archer he sees the faint echo of the grin he must have flashed Natasha.
“ASL.”
“Latin, ASL…” Tony muses, then more loudly he adds, “You know I have multiple PHDs?”
“Careful, Man, you sound like you’re competing.” Barton hands were a fraction larger than proportionality should dictate and Tony watches with interest as the absence of the child makes Barton examine the callouses on his fingertips before pushing them down into his pockets. The dry response had born no hint of the usual deference or unease that people asking Tony Stark for favors layered over their speech. In a way it reminded him of Fury but without the pulpit like fervor or sense of omnipotence.
He grins brightly bringing his voice back to performance level, “Hi, have you met me? I’m awesome. I don’t compete.”
“If you did, I wouldn’t choose her to go up against. That woman performs miracles.” Barton’s eyes follow Natasha and the infant to the lounge on the upper level.
“I know that look. I see it in mirrors when I’m around Pepper.”
“Then you know I’ll do anything to keep them safe.”
“Yeah. I think I can help you out with that.” He takes another drink.