Archive of Our Own ^beta

On the sixteenth of May, 2015, a Saturday with clear skies and birdsong from before daybreak, Pietro Maximoff wakes to the sound of his heart pounding in his ears, an erratic crashing of bloody waves against the shores of his eardrums, his ribcage. He lies there for a second, already half-upright, with pain in his elbows, his throat, his everywhere. His eyes are screwed shut, and it takes him longer than he’ll admit to talk himself into opening them.

He’s in a hospital room, and he hasn’t been in a hospital since he was seven and caught measles, and his mother had been so worried about him! It’s the first time since she died that he’s been in a hospital, in a bed not his own, a makeshift, duct-taped camp bed tucked next to Wanda’s, keeping her safe between him and the wall in the refuge. Wanda, he thinks, God, his baby sister. Is she alright? Did she get out alive?

Daring himself to open his eyes, at last, at last, he takes in the sterile white of the walls, the sleek, advanced technology surrounding him, showing all of his vitals. He watches the IV bag attached to his elbow for a moment before realising, slow, familiar, comfortable, that he is not alone. Turning his head, he finds the old man asleep in the chair, arms folded, one ankle on the opposite knee, head turned to rest his cheek against the back of the chair. He doesn’t look very comfortable, but he’s dressed comfortably, well-worn sweatpants and a T-shirt with words he can’t read properly right now.

He watches Clint through half-closed eyes for several long moments before the old man abruptly grins.

‘Didn’t see this coming, did you?’ he asks, and his eyes are immediately focused on Pietro as he rolls his shoulders, stretching his legs out before getting to his feet.

His back pops in three places before he crosses to sit next to him on the bed. He reaches out, brushes his fingers over Pietro’s hair, smoothes it out of his face before flicking his nose.

‘Welcome back, punk.’

On the sixteenth of May, 2015, a Saturday with clear skies and birdsong from before daybreak, Pietro Maximoff wakes in a hospital bed in New York, under the careful watch of Helen Cho and Clint Barton.

As Helen checks him over – and despite Clint’s rolled eyes that suggest an extended debate on the matter, she insists on doing it herself – Pietro asks what happened.

‘You died,’ Clint tells him, because there’s no nice way of saying it and no sense in mollycoddling him.

Pietro opens his mouth to let Helen check his tongue, and his teeth and so on, and when she lets him go, he croaks out a, ‘no thanks to you.’

Clint grins, but it’s sad. Pietro doesn’t feel guilt, not for him, but he feels something. Sympathy, perhaps. Empathy, most likely. Death is hard, and even though it had been Pietro’s choice, even though he had decided to jump in the way to protect him (but if anyone asked, it would be on record that Pietro did it for the kid, and not for the old man with the kind, tired eyes and the warm, open palms), he knows what it’s like. To lose someone and feel like it’s your fault.

‘No,’ Clint agrees, ‘no thanks to me.’

Helen pinches Pietro’s elbow, and he jumps. He almost falls out bed. Clint steadies him, straightens him up, and gets him back against the pillows.

‘Careful, there,’ he says, easy-going. Pietro wonders how often Clint has been in a hospital bed like this one. ‘We’re trying to get you home, kiddo, not keep you here longer.’

Pietro grumbles something under his breath. He’s fairly certain that even though Clint doesn’t understand it, he knows what Pietro just said regardless.

Once Helen is done with the examination, has got all the data she needs, she disappears, and leaves Clint to help Pietro into proper clothes, and get him safely to his feet.

‘We’re looking at getting you home on Monday morning,’ Clint tells him.

‘I don’t have a home,’ Pietro replies.

Chuckling, Clint ruffles his hair, tells him that he does, if he wants one.

Pietro says he’d like to think about it, and Clint tells him to take his time.

It’s only when Clint is gone that Pietro looks at his hands, actually looks at them, and then shoves them up the back of shirt, feels the smooth skin where there is no evidence that he’d been shot. Then he takes a deep breath. And another one. And a third for good measure.

Then he buries his face in shaking hands and cries.

-0-0-0-

 Wanda looks good. Well no, that’s wrong, she looks stressed and terrified and confused, and she looks so hopeful Pietro feels sick for it, but she looks good. She’s clearly been well-fed, and well-looked-after, her hair looking thicker and her eyes brighter, skin warmer.

‘Wanda,’ he breathes, and she punches Clint in the face before kissing his cheeks and thanking him profusely.

(He had warned the archer that she would do it, and Clint had agreed that she could have that punch free, because he did kind of deserve it for this trick.)

She turns to her brother then, turns to him, to Pietro, and he feels his heart catch. He’d thought, in that split-second as he shoved Clint and that kid out of the way, he’d thought, I’m never going to see her again, and it had hurt more than the bullets. He’d thought that it was sad that he didn’t get to see her one last time and say goodbye, tell her to be good, to not date boys out of respect for him, to not cause too much trouble, ‘cause he wouldn’t be there anymore. He’d been so scared.

But here she is, digging her hands under his arms to haul him up and out of the wheelchair, even though he is quite capable of standing, and she’s squeezing him tight enough that it hurts. He suspects she’s using her powers, maybe by accident. He’d understand if that was what was happening. He’d be using his, too.

‘I love you,’ he whispers, and she laughs, almost lifts him off his feet. Definitely using her powers.

‘Don’t you ever leave me again, you ass.’

He eases his arms around her, buries his face in her neck. She smells of new perfume and fresh laundry, and maybe he squeezes her tight enough that her toes are brushing the grass, maybe not.

‘I won’t,’ he says, quiet, ‘I won’t.’

He doesn’t know how long they stand there. His shirt is wet with Wanda’s tears, but her neck doesn’t fare much better. She keeps running her hand up and down his back, and he feels the warm pulse of her powers as she feels out his skin, prods and pokes and determines that there aren’t, in fact, any scars.

(Later, she will press her fingertip to every non-existent bullet hole, and tell him the order they hit him. He won’t know how to react, so he won’t. She won’t ever touch those invisible marks again.)

Eventually, too soon, Wanda peels away enough to touch his face, brush her fingers over his stubble and the dark circles under his eyes, trace the shapes of his features like she’s memorising them all over again.

‘I got resurrected,’ he teases, but he’s looking at her too, hands still on her arms. ‘I didn’t get surgery.’

‘Shut up,’ she says, rubs her thumbs over his eyebrows. ‘Just shut up.’

He shuts up, and lets her touch his face as much as she wants.

‘Kids?’

Wanda pauses, and then rests her hands on Pietro’s arms, turns to find Clint waiting for them on the porch. He offers them a smile.

‘Come on in,’ he says, ‘we need to get Pietro settled in, don’t we?’

Wanda tucks her hands under her brother’s arms and helps him sit back down. He’s quite capable of doing it himself, but he won’t deny that having her support him is nice, keeping his pace level so he doesn’t drop himself too fast and break his tailbone or something equally ridiculous.

‘I’m not an invalid,’ he grumbles.

‘Shut up, punk,’ she grumbles back, and moves to the back of the chair to help him manoeuvre over the grass.

‘I’m twelve minutes older than you,’ he reminds her, and idly pushes at the wheels. He suspects he’s not actually on the grass any more, that she’s got him lifted an inch or so higher to make it easier.

‘You’ll be happy here,’ she replies, ignoring him. She talks quietly, as though she doesn’t want Clint to hear.

‘Are you happy?’ he asks, just as quiet.

She doesn’t reply. Clint steps down off the porch to help lift the wheelchair up the steps, and Pietro makes a joke about being treated like royalty. His sister laughs, tells him that he’s a king, and something cracks in his chest. He keeps his hands in his lap, fisted against his thighs. Clint sees them shaking, and squeezes his shoulder once they’ve got him in the house.

-0-0-0-

Cooper is nice. A quiet boy, quieter than his sister, but not as nervous. Lila is skittish for the first few hours, hiding behind her dad’s legs and her momma’s skirts, but once she’s waited him out, watched him for long enough that she decides he’s alright, she gets gradually louder and more boisterous, back, he assumes, to her usual ways. By the way Clint raises his arms and twists just right to avoid Lila when she comes careening through on some errand or another, she is definitely almost always like this. Cooper is sedate, compared.

Either way, Pietro likes him, likes the peace that surrounds him. When it’s bedtime, he takes his telescope and clambers out onto the sunroom’s roof.

‘Is that safe?’ Pietro asks.

‘Mm-hm,’ Coop replies, a wad of papers between his teeth. Taking them out, he explains that he does this every night.

‘Sometimes, momma lets me go out on the field but this is good, too.’

Pietro settles down in the camp bed, curls up facing the wall and tries not to move. He’s fairly sure that it takes Cooper a long time to fall asleep, uncomfortable with Pietro’s shivering body on the other side of the room, and he listens to the boy fidget.

‘Pietro?’ he whispers, but Pietro pretends to be asleep, swallowing around the bile in his throat.  ‘Goodnight.’

A few long, tense seconds pass, and then Pietro’s shoulders relax, incrementally.

‘Goodnight, Cooper.’

Content now, the boy audibly rolls over, mattress creaking and sheets rustling, and several minutes later, his breathing evens out. Pietro rolls onto his back, and stares at the starlight coming through the still-open blinds until his eyes burn like the acid in his throat.

-0-0-0-

Lila watches him count out his pills the next morning, chin in her hands, feet audibly kicking against the table.

‘Dad has to take a lot of pills too,’ she offers, ‘only sometimes, though. If he’s been gone a while, at work.’

Pietro stares at the bright array of pills and tablets in his palm. His eyes turn up, to where she sits opposite him. When she sees him look, she smiles. It’s Clint’s smile, with missing teeth and softer skin. He takes a deep breath, two, three.

Out of nowhere, breathing is suddenly very, very hard, and he drops the pills, his hands shaking.

‘Momma!’ Lila yells, and jumps from her chair to rush to the door. ‘Dad!’

Neither of them yell back, there’s just a clatter of furniture that Pietro barely hears over the rush of blood in his ears. Clint is there where he wasn’t before, hands under his arms, hauling him up before tucking an arm under his knees.

‘Up we go,’ he hums. ‘There we go, you’re alright.’

He chokes on his breath, and in some logical part of him buried deep beneath the tremors and the gasping and the agony, he knows that picking up someone having a panic attack and carrying them around is not the wisest move, but then Clint is setting him down, and Laura’s arms are replacing his. She smells nice, camomile tea and citrus shampoo, and she’s warm, soft.

‘Shush, sweetheart,’ she breathes, twists to draw him closer, and he goes, hiccupping over her shoulder as he trembles. Clint hesitates for a moment, Pietro can feel his gaze lingering, tracing the non-existent scars beneath his T-shirt, but then he’s disappearing. As his heart steadies, he can hear him talking to his daughter, thanking her for calling them immediately.

‘I dropped,’ he starts, but Laura shushes him again, smoothes her hand over his hair, teases the tangles.

‘Don’t think about anything just yet,’ she hums, ‘just sit quietly and breathe for me?’

He nods, sinks against her, lets her press kisses to his jaw and ear, rest her brow against his scalp as his head settles on her shoulder, pressing against her neck. He feels weak in all the wrong ways, and he hates it.

‘There we go,’ she hums a few minutes later. ‘There we go. Do you want to talk about it?’

He shakes his head, breathes in the soft smell of her shower gel. He’s not sure who used the other’s, but it’s the same as Clint’s.

‘That’s okay,’ she assures him, kisses his hair and eases him upright so she can look at him head-on. ‘It’s okay, Pietro, I promise. If you ever want to talk about, I’m here, okay? I’ll listen, and I’ll not breathe a word of it if you don’t want me to.’

 He swallows.

‘I dropped my pills,’ he says, turns his head to look towards the kitchen. ‘I’m supposed to take them.’

‘You can take them in a minute,’ she says, ‘come on, help me up.’

He jerks to his feet, a blur of motion before he settles, off-balance, and rocks back onto his heels.

‘It’s going to take some getting used to,’ Laura teases, taking his hands when he offers them, and he braces her as she gets to her feet. ‘I thought Clint was fast, but goodness.’

She guides him back towards the kitchen, where Clint’s tidied up the dropped pills and is reading the list while Lila draws in an activity book he must have taken through for her.

‘Thank you,’ Pietro says to her, once Laura’s got him safely back in his chair by the stacked boxes of medication. ‘For calling the – your – for calling.’

‘Momma,’ Lila says, ‘we call her Momma, and Dad’s just Dad.’

‘Well, thank you for calling them.’

Lila smiles, and pulls the page of her activity book out, pushing it across the table to him.

‘I drew this for you,’ she says.

He looks at the picture, a cat, coloured in brown and silver.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

(When Clint sets him up in the guest room, Pietro asks for some tape, and sticks it above the bed.)

-0-0-0-

He stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, streaked with steam and the vapour left behind in the shape of his fingers, for several long minutes. He catalogues the wet twist of his hair, plastered to his brow and around his ears, the shadow of dark stubble on his jaw, day-old and he swallows hard at the thought that someone had shaved him. It had been demeaning, to have to be put in the shower, to have Clint see him naked and know that he was watching his back to see if the scars would spontaneously appear and begin bleeding all over again. Even now, he waits outside, listening with those too-strong hearing aids of his, to make sure that he doesn’t hurt himself.

Nausea bubbles in his oesophagus and his fingers squeak against the porcelain of the sink. His eyes are too-blue, wide and terrified, jaw tight.

Take a deep breath, he tells himself. Take a deep breath, you’re alright. You’re alive.

‘I’m alive,’ he whispers, and bruises his knees throwing himself over the toilet.

-0-0-0-

A few weeks after he first sleeps through the night without waking, he throws himself down the stairs. This is a slight over-exaggeration. He didn’t mean to throw himself down the stairs. It’s just. His foot slipped, stepping too fast and overshooting the tread, and then he overcompensated, and then next thing he knew, he was in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, spilled out over the floor like one of Lila’s rag dolls, limbs akimbo and blood already streaming from his nose.

It’s been almost three months since he arrived at the farm, and he knows that Clint and Laura are beginning to run out of ideas. Wanda’s mostly entirely moved out to Avengers HQ, and Bucky’s mostly entirely moved in, so they have other things to worry about beside his inability to stop running into walls, and he hates that he’s worrying them. So he stays lying on the floor with a bloody nose and ringing ears, and toys with the idea that he might never get “better.” He’s better mentally, most of the way back to normal, with the nightmares becoming rarer by the night, even if he still has panic attacks, and stresses too much about everything not in his power, but physically? Nowhere near “better.”

The doors to his left, leading to the TV room, swing open, and Laura appears by his head. Her hair’s raked back into a loose ponytail. She’s wearing cute little running shorts. Pietro can see half a tattoo. He never thought she’d have a tattoo.

‘Hello,’ he says, and she laughs, crouches to help him up. Her skin is warm, her face flushed.

‘Are you alright?’ she asks, and manages to get him back onto his feet, ‘come on, let’s get you sat down.’

‘I’m fine,’ he assures her. ‘Missed a step.’

She snorts, and says, ‘missed three more like.’

She gets him sat down in the TV room, disappearing into the adjoining bathroom, returning with a wet cloth and the First Aid kit. Pietro stares blankly at the screen. Some unfashionable woman with an over-enthusiastic voice is chanting numbers and talking about lunges and Pietro thinks she’s going too slow.

Laura wipes his bloody nose and presses the cold cloth to the bump on his head, checking him over with the steady familiarity of having done this two dozen times already. This is the second time that Pietro’s fallen down the stairs, so he doesn’t know why she’s so calm.

He asks.

‘You’ve met my husband,’ she replies, and the dimples in her cheeks give away the smile she’s biting back.

He chuckles, and whines when it pulls at his nose.

‘Have I broken it?’ he asks, and Laura brushes her fingers down it.

‘No, sweetheart,’ she assures, and presses a kiss between his eyebrows. ‘You’re fine. Just a bit banged up. You’ll survive.’

The woman on the television is doing some move where her elbow touches her knee. Laura looks over her shoulder and sighs, reaches for the remote and presses pause. It’s not the most flattering pause screen she’s ever gotten.

‘What is that?’ Pietro asks, gestures at the screen.

‘A workout tape,’ Laura replies, and moves to flop onto the couch next to him.

Pietro frowns, looks at the woman on the screen before looking at Laura, gives her a not-at-all subtle once-over.

‘You don’t need to work out,’ he says, as though personally offended.

She laughs, and pats his thigh. ‘You’re sweet. But you can’t be around superheroes for twenty years without wanting to keep your fitness up, you know? I couldn’t ever keep up with Clint, but I always – besides, it’ll do me good, you know? Exercise is good for you.’

He supposes so.

‘What does this tape do?’ he asks. ‘It looks slow.’

‘It’s the beginner’s tape,’ she explains, and sets it back to the beginning. ‘I can’t just start up where I used to, I might wet myself.’

Pietro stares at her, horrified. She grins, pleased.

Clint appears in the doorway, covered in paint.

‘I didn’t hear screaming, so I take it everything’s alright?’ he asks.

‘He’ll live,’ Laura says.

At the same, Pietro says, ‘I’m alright.’

Laura gives him a look, and he pretends to be innocent.

‘Alright, well take it easy,’ Clint says, looking at them both. ‘And give me a call if you need me for anything.’

They both promise to do so and he takes barely ten steps away from the door before returning.

‘And you,’ he says, points at his wife, who takes her turn at pretending to be innocent.

‘Me?’ she asks.

‘Yes, you. You take it easy.’

She salutes him. ‘Yes, sir.’

He narrows his eyes, but Laura promises, sincerely, that she’s taking it easy.

‘I know what I’m doing, honey. I’ve done it twice before.’

He huffs out a breath, and it’s such a fatherly sound that Pietro feels something pinch in his chest.

‘Keep an eye on her,’ Clint tells Pietro, who nods blankly.

Laura laughs at her husband as he stomps off back to whatever he’d been doing before Pietro fell down the stairs.

‘What a loser,’ she sniffs, and turns back to the television, stretching her legs out a bit before getting back into the routine.

After the cold compress she’d made him hold to his temple had gotten warm, Pietro sets it down on the end table, and gets to his feet, slips into the space beside her and follows the routine. It’s slow going, because his body’s inclination is to move faster, to speed through the movements. Laura watches him from the corner of her eye, smiling to herself at the focused look on his face, the intense concentration as he struggles to keep his movements measured, matched to the instructor and to Laura.

 They work out in a comfortable silence, following the instructor through to the end of the routine, and then Laura’s pausing it during the interlude to flop onto the couch. Pietro hits the cushions far faster than she does, and they both look a bit startled.

‘You didn’t mean to do it that fast,’ she says, and he shakes his head.

‘No. But that was – I did well.’

‘You did very well,’ she agrees, and reaches over to ruffle his hair. ‘I’m impressed. I do this every evening, after the kids have gone to bed, if you wanted to join me. I’m only doing it now because I didn’t get to last night.’

Pietro tells her that he’ll consider it. He hits the wall on his way out of the room, and Laura tries not to laugh at him.

-0-0-0-

It’s a funny thing, death, dying. The process, the sensation, the feeling of bullets tearing through your gut, smashing into your ribs, ripping your lungs to shreds.

It’s funny, that.

Didn’t see that coming, not that. Saw the death, saw the pain, saw the injury. Didn’t see the extent.

Wanda always said that was his weakness. He never looked too far ahead, so intent on the here and the now. Long distance was not his thing.

Clint was long distance, Pietro thinks, and there’s a warm rush of – of – something. The old man had kept this place secret for years, had hidden it away, hidden away a family he loved more than he could get oxygen in his lungs to declare it. Pietro hadn’t seen that coming. Clint saw distance better than anyone he’d known, anyone he knew now.

There’s a part of him, even as each bullet tears into him anew, that knows he’s in his bed on the farm, that the smell in his nose isn’t his blood, isn’t gunpowder and dust and death, is just fabric softener, the flavoured water he’d knocked over soaking into the carpet, the doggy smell of Lucky yapping at his bedside. He knows this, mind and body and soul, and yet.

And yet.

He wakes screaming, and Clint is there, hand on Pietro’s back and guiding him to the side, leaning him forward, head over the bin in his hand.

Pietro gurgles a thanks, and spends the next ten minutes throwing up.

Bile, he thinks. That’s what the rush was. Sickness welling in his gut and up his oesophagus. 

Wanda is nowhere to be seen. He tries to ask.

‘Hush,’ Clint says, ‘hush.’

Pietro doesn’t ask again.

Clint runs a hand through his hair. Over the blood rushing in his ears, Pietro hears him talk to someone – Laura, he thinks. Wanda says that Nat calls her Mommahawk, as an affectionate term. The others have started doing it. Pietro thinks that he could do that too, get behind that kind of endearment. It’s nice, inoffensive. Hawks are great.

Hawks saved his life, technically. He gave it for a hawk, but the hawk didn’t let him go.

‘Fucking birds,’ he grunts, and Clint laughs.

‘Fucking birds,’ he agrees.

-0-0-0-

The first Saturday after arriving, the hawkbabies throw themselves onto Pietro’s bed, yelling at the top of their lungs. According to the digital clock on his bedside table, it’s 06:51, and Pietro is as far from about this revelation as he could get if he were in space.

‘Go away,’ he grumbles, but they’re tugging at his hands, and he has to stay limp otherwise either he or the pair of them will get hurt in the resulting speeding crash.

Halfway out of bed, they tell him that he has to come with them.

‘Why?’ he asks.

‘Saturday morning,’ Cooper explains, as though it’s obvious.

Pietro reminds him that he is not American.

Lila looks scandalised.

‘Cartoons, Piet!’ she exclaims.

‘How do your parents sleep through this noise?’ Pietro replies, and then wrinkles his nose. ‘Cartoons? Since when?’

The pair of them are staring at him now.

‘You haven’t watched cartoons?’ Cooper asks.

‘Pietro,’ Lila huffs, as though it’s a personal outrage.

‘Look,’ he starts. ‘See. I am from Sokovia. We were very poor. There were troubles. Fights. We did not have time for cartoons.’

It’s too early in the morning for his brain to properly translate between two languages, so he does the best he can and hopes they can fill in the blanks. At seven and nine, they probably can, right? Right.

They continue to stare, and then tug even harder.

‘C’mon,’ Lila whines, ‘we gotta watch ‘em, you gotta see.’

Pietro manages to make it down the stairs without an accident, though he does have to go down on his ass one step at a time, and Cooper holds the wheelchair steady for him so he can sit down. Half an hour later, Wanda joins them, and makes them all breakfast. Three hours later, Clint and Laura manage to haul themselves out of bed, and are not surprised in the least by the pile of limbs and cereal bits that’s formed on the couch. Pietro gets very attached to the nineties’ shows.

(The first time he accidentally calls Clint – or was it Laura? He’s not sure, because they were both laughing too much – by sitting on his phone, which had been some kind of “glad you’re alive, I guess” gift from Stark, he has a moment of the purest glee when the first thing he hears are the words “Now this is a story all about how – ”)

-0-0-0-

Nathaniel is born on the twenty-seventh, nine days after Pietro comes to the farm, and over a month early. Laura had cursed herself blue, very loudly in the middle of the night, and in the immediate bedlam that followed, Pietro and Wanda had stood blinking stupidly with their hands holding their smaller counterparts’ shoulders to keep them from getting underfoot.

‘Hey,’ Clint had said, one eye on Laura as she eased herself down the stairs. ‘Your momma’s gone into labour – all three of you have been such trouble, you know that? All three of you – so I’m gonna – I’m gonna take her to the hospital in Marshalltown, so hopefully she won’t kill me on the way. I mean, I’m here this time? Sure, we don’t have S.H.I.E.L.D.’s medical facilities, but it’s still – ‘

‘Clinton Francis Barton!’ Laura had bellowed. ‘Get down here!’

He’d winced, and then yelled back, ‘coming!’

Pietro is still sure he’d heard her say, ‘not in me, you aren’t.’

‘Will you look after them?’ Clint had asked, looking at the twins and gesturing at his kids, who’d been pulling faces at each other.

‘Momma having Nathaniel?’ Cooper had asked.

‘Mm. Punks?’

Wanda had nodded, assured him that they’d be looked after. ‘Take your time at the hospital, we can handle it.’

They’d stood there for maybe ten minutes, waiting for the truck’s engine to fade into silence, and then they’d herded the hawkbabies back into bed with promises of sweets before ten if they behaved.

Pietro hates him. Nathaniel, he means. He hates him. He shouldn’t hate him, because he’s a premature baby and the spitting image of his father, and for a preemie, he’s fat. But he hates him.

Hate is too strong a word. It’s not really hate. It’s jealousy. He’s jealous of a premature baby. He’s twenty, and he’s jealous of an infant. What a fucking joke.

He knows, logically, in the part of him removed from his emotions and able to view it objectively, that being jealous of a premature baby is stupid. Maybe that’s why he’s jealous; there is nothing Nathaniel can do, at barely days old, to warrant jealousy or hatred. Wanda had looked into his head when he first came home, unable to stop herself, and had seen only goodness there, the warm familiarity of his mother’s heartbeat against his, the brush of his father’s hand over his head. She had said that it was one of the nicest things to feel, given what her previous ventures into thoughts and minds had given her.

Being jealous of that, of the kindness and the innocence, it makes him feel even guiltier. And then it becomes a vicious cycle, because he hates Nathaniel more for making him feel guilty about feeling jealous. Laura is not his mother, and Clint is definitely, definitely, not his father. They aren’t his to stake claims on, but a week was not enough. He needs more time, more attention. After so long without, after spending half of his life with only sister – and then, once he’d talked her into agreeing to volunteering for the experiments, he’d lost her too, for a time, trapped on the other side of the wall only barely able to hear her voice through their cages – he feels like he can be a bit selfish, a bit desperate.

Anyone would be, he thinks. Wanda probably wants their attention as much as he does, but she’s better at hiding it, better at getting on with things. She didn’t die, though. He needs them more.

Nathaniel needs them more than he does. He knows this, and he lies awake for several nights thinking about how much he knows it.

Then, one day, without warning, Clint tugs Pietro’s arm into a suitable shape and eases Nathaniel into it.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘watch him for five, would you? Coop just tripped over one of his books trying to – actually I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but Lila was involved – and there’s blood everywhere, so I gotta – just watch him for me, okay?’

And then he’s gone, and Pietro is left sat on the couch where he spends most of his time these days, TV playing a low-volume news report about Sokovia. Wanda is playing with building blocks, arranging them into rude words in Sokovian, hovering in front of her face with the now-familiar red trails of her thoughts holding them up, and Pietro knows from the way the blocks are shaking that she’s listening, that she’s as worried as he is.

Turning his gaze to the tot in his arm, he sets him on his lap, arranges his legs to rest comfortably against his own, and supports him with one hand around his back, the other on his neck, the way Clint and Laura had shown all four of them, keeping him upright and secure. His hands aren’t shaking.

‘You look just like your father,’ he whispers, in Sokovian, and Nathaniel blinks up at him, like he’s acknowledging it.

‘He likes the sound of it,’ Wanda says, echoing her brother and reverting to Sokovian, and Nathaniel’s eyes flicker red as Wanda brushes across his mind. ‘Sokovian sounds nice to him.’

Pietro tilts his head a little, smiles.

‘You look just like your father,’ he repeats, a little bit louder. ‘But you have your mother’s eyes. They’re very brown, just like hers. Darker, though. Hers are like gold in sunlight. Yours are chocolate. You’ll like chocolate when you’re old enough.’

Nathaniel makes a soft noise, a gentle coo of acknowledgement, and Pietro smiles. Nathaniel is too young to smile back, but Wanda says he likes smiles.

‘Of course he likes smiles. I have a wonderful smile.’

Wanda snorts, and her blocks call him a very rude name indeed.

Rolling his eyes, Pietro changes his grip to adjust Nathaniel’s onesie, and only then, as he tugs the leg hole lower to sit more comfortably, does he see what’s emblazoned across the baby’s chest.

Wanda is there before he cracks, and shifts Nathaniel Pietro Barton to rest against his big brother’s chest, her arms looping around said brother’s neck to pull him in and kiss his hair.

‘You’re okay,’ she whispers, pressing the words into his thoughts and leaving him no room to escape them. ‘You’re okay. They love you, Piet. We all do. You’re okay.’

Nathaniel clutches at Pietro’s T-shirt, sadly without his name printed on, and sighs softly, wriggling close. Pietro shifts his hand, holds him as tight to him as he dares, feels his heart beat against his palm.

‘Guess I can’t hate you now, little brother,’ he says to the baby, who just coos again. ‘Not when you’ve got my name.’

-0-0-0-

After two weeks, Clint tells him that as long as he promises not to use the stairs unsupervised, he can just, you know, not use the wheelchair.

‘It gets in the way and you don’t really need it,’ he says with a shrug, tosses a pear at Pietro, who fumbles the catch, but stops it from hitting the floor.

They don’t talk about the fact he overbalanced when he lunged to catch it, and ended up on the floor himself, hitting it fast enough to bruise his arm and hip.

‘I don’t need it,’ Pietro says, and Clint shrugs again.

‘You’re alright,’ he tells the boy, ‘better than I expected you to be. Helen talked about you like you’d be in the chair for the rest of your life, but naw, you’re alright.’

‘Naw,’ Pietro echoes, trying to imitate the accent that always creeps in, and Clint throws a banana at him too.

‘But honestly,’ he says, ‘you’re doing real good, punk. Just need to get your power back under control, and then it’s like you never – well, you’ll be good as new.’

 Pietro throws the banana back, and Clint catches it without looking.

‘It would be nice,’ he agrees with a nod.

Two hours later, after being called back inside for dinner, he loses control and ends up crashing through the mercifully open back door and only stops when he gets caught up in the beaded curtain hanging loose in the kitchen doorway to catch the breeze and make gentle click-clack noises that newly-born and even more newly-home Nathaniel seems to enjoy. Unfortunately, because life seems to hate Pietro, given that he’s on his second go, and that’s not fair, he gets tangled in it at speed, ends up ripping the bar down from the frame, and he and the curtain go crashing to the floor with a pathetically weak scream.

‘I hate everything,’ he groans, ‘I hate it.’

Clint manages to not laugh too much as he rounds the table to help detangle the cords and pick Pietro up out of the wreckage. He’s shaking again, and it takes a few tries for him to get his feet under him, but they’ve mostly worked out the routine for these episodes, and Clint braces his feet to give Pietro something to balance himself against as he gets his equilibrium back.

‘I hate it,’ Pietro repeats, and lets Clint hold him upright until he can bear to face the indignity of pulling the curtain down.

‘It’s alright,’ Clint laughs, finally letting go of Pietro’s arms to ruffle his hair. ‘We needed a new curtain anyway.’

-0-0-0-

A knock at the door startles Pietro awake, and he rubs his face, gets the grit from his eyes before slurring out a ‘come in.’

It’s still dark outside, and he can tell from the rumbling snores at the other end of the hall that both Clint and Laura are asleep. The hawkbabies – he still thinks that nickname of theirs is strangely, sickeningly sweet – are probably asleep too. It just leaves his sister, who slips into his room with so little noise he wouldn’t have known she was there if he hadn’t looked.

He’s still not over how much better she looks for being here. There’s colour in her cheeks, her hair a healthy, sleep-tangled braid over her shoulder. Her pyjamas are soft and warm, a little too big for her, but she always wore her pyjamas too big. He starts to smile, but her eyes are worried, so he just gestures her in, and she shuts the door before shoving him to the side and climbing into bed next to him.

They lie there for a minute, staring at the ceiling in silence. Pietro starts falling asleep again, because it’s the middle of the night and Clint’s been pushing him to start doing light exercises again, try and get some control of his powers back. Those same light exercises are exhaustingly hard, and Pietro’s honestly not sure if it’s because he’s still recovering or Clint is fitter than he looks.

‘Are you happy here?’ Wanda asks after the silence has lulled him just enough, and he huffs, sleepy and barely responsive. ‘Pietro.’

‘Hm? Yes. Yes, sure.’

Her arm folds back and slaps his chest with the back of her hand, barely more than a tap.

‘Don’t go to sleep, I’m trying to talk to you.’

‘Can’t we talk later?’ he asks, ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

He can feel Wanda’s gaze burning into the side of his face.

‘When are we going to get a chance to talk?’ she asks, ‘I need to talk to you about this. Being here. We need to talk about it.’

 She needs to talk about it, he thinks. He’s quite happy eating Laura’s cooking and having it easy for a while. The kids are great, and the adults are great too. Clint, despite being the very epitome of a grumpy old man, is good to them, great, even. He took them in without question, brought them home as though it was the plan all along, and never asked anything from them.

It’s not been long, a month or so, but it’s been enough. If Clint had other plans for them, he’d have made that clear. He’s not that patient.

After a moment considering all of these things, Pietro relays them to Wanda as best he can.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’m not questioning them. I’m questioning us.’

‘We need to do this in the morning,’ Pietro tells her, ‘I’m not awake enough to be talking about this.’

‘Brother.’

Pietro groans and pushes himself upright, leaning up against the wall to look at her. ‘Let’s go outside.’

‘Clint will wake up before we get to the bottom of the stairs,’ she tells him. ‘He always wakes up.’

‘And? He’ll know to keep that beak of his out of it.’

Wanda bites her lip before nodding. ‘Alright,’ she agrees, ‘alright. Come on; let me get your coat.’

There’s a dressing gown on the back of the door, and she helps him into it, even though he’s really quite capable. He’s mostly – mostly – got his powers back under control, but Wanda seems to want to baby him a while longer. He’s fine with that, to be honest, and she leads him downstairs to find his shoes so they can go outside.

Sat on the swing seat on the porch, Wanda steadying the motion with a wave of her hand, they look out over the garden. A few dozen feet away, a bird of some sort preens atop the log pile. The twins sit in silence for a while, Wanda idly rocking the seat with gentle sweeps of her hand, and Pietro tries not to fall asleep. They listen, in wait for Clint coming to check on them, but he never does, and so Pietro opens his mouth.

‘If you want to go, they won’t stop you,’ he tells his sister, who, for all of the twelve minutes difference, is still somehow so naive. Maybe dying changed him, maybe something Strucker did was the cause. He wasn’t like this before, he knows. ‘But where would you go?’

‘Captain America offered me a place on the Avengers team,’ she says, quiet, as though it will keep the world from hearing it. ‘He – before I came here, he found me while I was waiting for debrief, and he said that when everything was done, he could use my help on the team. I mean. Clint said he wasn’t going to go back unless he was needed by Natasha, and Banner’s gone, right? He said something about Stark not coming back – I wouldn’t have even considered it if Stark was going to be there. But it’s a chance. I said I needed to think about it. I still thought you were dead. I hadn’t had time to grieve yet. Shock, I think.’

She’s quiet for a moment, and the words fall like fresh snow around them, settling against their skin before melting into it. When she next speaks, she sounds a little guilty, like she’s admitting to a wrong-doing.

‘I could accept the place.’

‘You should,’ Pietro agrees. ‘It’d be good for you, I think.’

‘He would let you join as well. He’s a good man. Clint would vouch for you. He said he’d already vouched for me, that’s why the Captain even considered me.’

Pietro shakes his head. ‘I think I’m going to hang back a while. I don’t think I’m up for it right now. I can still barely stand up without hitting the wall.’

Wanda nods. ‘I understand. The offer is there either way.’

They fall back into silence. Somewhere nearby, a cricket starts chirping.

‘Sis,’ Pietro starts, and then pauses, picks at a stray thread on his dressing gown. ‘Listen, if you want to go – ‘

‘I don’t want to go,’ she says, sharp. Her voice rings too loud in the silence, echoes against the overhang. ‘That’s the problem. I don’t want to go, but we don’t belong here.’

We. We, we, we.

Pietro frowns. ‘Don’t belong?’

Wanda rubs a hand over her mouth, and Pietro digs his heels into the decking to stop the swinging from getting too erratic. She visibly casts about for a reason why she feels the way she does.

‘We aren’t Bartons, Piet.’

‘We don’t have to be,’ he says, and continues to frown. ‘Why are you being like this? I would have thought you’d want to stay.’

‘You were supposed to be dead,’ she spits.

‘Oh.’

Wanda gets to her feet and begins to pace, eyes blazing fire-red. Pietro watches her; his time with Laura has taught him to wait patiently. The babies squabble, sibling rivalry. Laura laughs about it a lot, but she teaches him the art of waiting for them to own up to who started it, to what really happened. He waits now, watches Wanda as she wrestles the right words free from the tangled web of her veins.

‘I don’t – I don’t hate you for it,’ she says, ‘I don’t. I promise. It was not your fault that you died. It wasn’t Clint’s fault, or the boy’s. It was all Ultron. It was all of us. We were all to blame. Too many things happened. But you were supposed to be dead. You died. I felt it. I felt your heart stop, Piet, because mine stopped too. It felt like I had nothing there anymore, because you were gone! You’d gone, and you’d left me, and I was – I was trying, Piet, I was trying so hard.’

He doesn’t say anything, just sits there watching her, waiting for the next volley of words.

‘And I was – I wasn’t okay! I was never going to be okay. But I was trying! I was finding ways to, to think about something else. The Avengers was – I could have gone, Piet, I could have gone and I could have forgotten that my soul was lost. That my heart was ash in what’s left of Novi Grad. I could have pretended.’

‘You don’t need to pretend,’ he says, and she gives him a dirty look.

‘I know that!’ she crows. ‘I know that I don’t have to, because you are here!’

‘You think I’m holding you back,’ he says, the realisation too startling to keep it to himself, and so startling that the words leave his mouth in English instead of the native, natural Sokovian. ‘You think you cannot leave because I am here.’

She glares off at the woods. Pietro wants to go exploring the woods, but Laura and Clint both tell him no, not until he can control his speed.

‘Sister,’ he starts, and then shakes his head, gets slowly to his feet. ‘Wanda. You can go. You need to go. It will be better for you. I’ve always been the one talking you into stupid things – it’s my fault we’re like this! If it hadn’t been for me, we’d never have been with Strucker, and we’d never have been like this. We’d still be in – well, Novi Grad is gone, but Sokovia isn’t. We’d be there. But we aren’t. I won’t make you do something for me again, not when you can live a life you want. We – we cannot stay together forever.’

Her heart breaks in her eyes all over again. He feels sick.

‘You want me gone?’

‘I want you happy,’ he disagrees. ‘And you’ll be happy here, for a time. But this is not your life.’

‘I didn’t think it was yours,’ she whispers, all of the anger gone from her now, washed away with a heavy sigh.

‘I’m a different man,’ he tells her, gentle. ‘I’m different now. We both are. You need the Avengers. They need you.’

He smiles then, starts to reach for her, but stops, hands shaking. He clenches his fists, drops his hands to his sides.

‘I saw the way you looked at him. He is there. You could look at him some more. He looked at you, too.’

‘Who?’ she asks, but Pietro just continues to smile.

‘Besides,’ he says, stretching his arms above his head and moving to stand by the railing, looking out over the field. ‘Isn’t it time you – what’s the saying? – flew the nest?’

She groans, and shoves his arm.

‘That was awful, you’re awful. I’m going to move out and never come back.’

He laughs, and wraps his arm around her shoulders. They stand there in silence for a few moments.

‘Will you stay here?’ she asks, quiet, mumbling it into the fleece of his dressing gown.

‘I think so,’ he says. ‘I like it here. They like me. It’s not our home. But it’s a home. A good one. I will be happy here. And I will still be here when you come home.’

 She takes a deep breath. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘Good.’

He kisses her hair, squeezes her shoulder.

-0-0-0-

When Clint’s let him out of the wheelchair, the first thing he does is try to talk Laura into letting him go running with Cooper. She tells him he better not dare.

He goes anyway, teases his little brother, and immediately goes face-first into a bush. Cooper is nice enough to not tease him too badly, and they talk a bit of fishing. Pietro misses catching fish, and has been wondering, for a few days now, with Laura’s attention primarily on her baby, how he can help out around the house. At the moment, bumping into everything and waking in a cold sweat with his voice hoarse from screaming every other night, he’s not doing a whole lot to help. It had been a mess before, but now that Nathaniel’s been born, he’s even more in the way.

Catching fish for dinner, good fish, the best ones he can get his quick little hands on, that’d be good. Wanda knows more recipes than he does, after all. If he catches them, and Wanda prepares the recipes, yeah, yeah that’d be good. Laura would probably still want to cook it, but that’d be nice, right?

When they get back, Laura has her hands on her hips, but she’s smiling like she’s proud of him.

-0-0-0-

Borrowing Clint’s shorts (unworn for the better part of a decade, sitting in the bottom of a drawer doing absolutely nothing but taking up room he would probably rather use for more useless things like his Kevlar trousers or waterproof socks or whatever) gets old fast. Pietro hadn’t thought, the first time that he got dragged out clothes shopping with Clint, to get shorts. Underwear and jeans had been far higher up the list than jersey shorts, or shorts in general. He’d not worn shorts since he was twelve, but in the late evening heat as he and Laura work their way up the difficulty in workout tapes, he finds that doing it in jeans is getting difficult, and despite being taller than the old man, he’s slimmer, and the elastic in the waist is beginning to give.

‘This is stupid,’ he says the third time the shorts slip off his waist and leave him stood on foot with his boxers (as ridiculously patterned as anyone would expect) on show. ‘This is the stupidest.’

Laura, in the same pose, laughs, and then makes pathetic noises, dropping her foot and doubling over, clutching at her belly.

‘Oh, God, Piet,’ she whines, ‘why do you do this to me, sweetheart? Why do you have to do this to me?’

Grumbling as he hikes the shorts up and tightens the cord for the fourth time, he tells her to go to the bathroom.

When she’s back, he’s doing his best to knot it in a way that it won’t come undone. She steps in to help.

‘We’ll go shopping tomorrow,’ she says, pats his arm, ‘get you some more shorts.’

‘Like yours?’ he asks, gestures at the running shorts that she always wears.

‘If you like,’ she agrees.

They go to Cedar Rapids, because the mall is better, and Pietro lets her lead him to the sports stores, where they spend probably too long looking at the selection of running shorts.

By accident, he stumbles across a pair in a shiny silver fabric. He holds them in his hands, looks at Laura. She looks back.

‘They’re horrible,’ he says. He looks at them, turns them to make the shine shift and change. ‘I love them.’

Laura finds his size, and puts them in the basket without another word.

Armed with Clint’s credit card and Laura’s less dire taste in clothes, they build him up a suitable workout wardrobe, consisting primarily of blues and greys, though he does venture out into reds, just to match her typical orange-and-red combo. Laura gets a few things that she’s found she needs now, and as they make their way to the tills, Pietro pauses.

‘Sweatbands,’ he says, pointing. ‘Do they work?’

Laura shrugs. ‘Never used them, so I couldn’t say. Look, there’s some grey ones there.’

He reaches up where she’s pointing and takes them off the hook, looking at them briefly before putting them in the basket.

‘Do you want the matching headband, too?’ Laura asks.

There’s a split second where he considers it.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no, it might clash with my hair.’

She chuckles, and steps to the till that calls them forward.

-0-0-0-

Pietro is the first to call Clint ‘dad,’ or rather, he calls him oče, which gets him a sharp look from his sister, but as they’re in the middle of a conversation, in Sokovian, there isn’t much she can do. Clint doesn’t notice, sat in earshot, but occupied with Lila sprawled out over his lap reading with him, and the twins both glance at him, but he’s laughing at a joke in the book.

‘Piet,’ Wanda starts, but Pietro forges on as though he hadn’t said a thing.

Nat visits a few days later, brings a bag of souvenirs from her latest foray into international shenanigans, and Pietro doesn’t know why he thinks Sokovian is safe. She picks up languages terrifyingly fast, and there had been a lot of Sokovian getting thrown around that day. She glances over her shoulder when she hears him mumble to his sister about Clint and honestly, he forgets what he was about to say, because her eyes are very green and fixed very pointedly on his.

‘And what?’ he challenges, but she just smiles and turns back to Cooper.

 -0-0-0-

When Wanda first goes to Avengers HQ, Clint goes to file some paperwork with her, so that support had it in solid fact that he was the one they called if something went wrong on a mission, because Wanda wants him to be the one that, if she has to be saved, is the one saving her. Pietro goes with them, because it’s his baby sister, and he knows, if she’d gone to university like she’d always talked about, he’d have followed her to her dorm and made sure she had a friend before he left.

It’s not quite university, but he wants to be sure she’s going to be well looked after.

He takes one look at the building, sleek and new and very expensive looking, the logo emblazoned neatly on the side, and his heart lurches into his throat, lunch quickly following it.

‘You’re alright,’ Clint assures him, hand warm on the back of his neck. ‘You’re alright, I’ve got you. Piet, can you breathe for me?’

Wanda dithers, and it’s oddly comforting.

‘It’s a panic attack,’ Clint tells her, hand still warm on Pietro’s neck, thumb rubbing gentle over the knob of bone it finds. ‘He’ll be alright when he starts breathing, Pietro, honestly, even Nathaniel listens to me more than you and he’s a week old.’

Pietro tunes him out, because as calm and even as Clint’s voice is, it isn’t helping. The warm weight on his neck is a help, and he focuses on that as he tries to regulate his breathing. He feels like he can’t, and he knows his collar isn’t too tight because it’s sitting around his collarbones, a looser V-neck than he normally wears because he’d not really wanted to get dressed this morning, dreading the flight to Stark’s tower, and then the drive upstate to the Facility, and Facility.

‘Pietro,’ Clint barks, and he jerks upright, but Clint’s got hold of him before he stumbles over himself. ‘Look at me,’ he continues, softer, dragging him around until his back’s to the building and all he can see is Clint and the open expanse of nothing behind him, looking like home. ‘There we go, that’s better. Piet? I want you to follow my breathing, okay?’

He glances over the boy’s shoulder at his sister, and lets her in enough that she sees what he wants her to do. A nod, and she rushes off up the path to get one of the medical staff.

Once Pietro stops looking at HQ, he stops thinking about it, and begins to calm down quickly enough, following Clint’s steady breathing and soft in-two-three, out-two-three, until his heart settles back in his ribcage where it belongs. He takes a deep breath, holds it, exhales hard.

‘Better?’ Clint asks, and without asking for permission or giving any warning, Pietro shoves himself into Clint’s arms, buries his face in his neck, and weeps.

Sighing, Clint holds him close, and shushes him quietly, pressing a kiss to his hair.

‘You’re alright, punk,’ he hums, rubs his back. ‘You’re alright.’

Wanda comes trotting back and hesitates for a couple of staggered steps, a medical officer next to her, worried about her brother.

‘Clint?’ she calls, ‘I brought a nurse!’

Pietro goes stiff, and then jerks out of Clint’s arms, hurriedly scrubs his face while he’s got his back turned. It takes him a minute to build up to turning around, by which time Wanda has made it the rest of the way down the path, and he meets her gaze as steady as he can.

If he holds her a little too tight when they leave her in her quarters, well, she doesn’t need to say anything.

-0-0-0-

‘I don’t want to be an Avenger,’ he says one evening as he stretches out while Laura fiddles with the cables behind the television.

The Avengers had come over, and Sam had challenged Clint, Steve and Bucky, loudly, to a rematch on Mario Kart. Bucky had been reluctant to play, but Lila had helped herself to a seat on his lap and if she was controlling most of the racing, well, nobody really minded, since Clint still won. Sam had been grumbling about blue shells all afternoon.

Laura pauses, and straightens with a handful of cables. Pietro doesn’t know what half of them are for, and suspects, from the way she eyes them like snakes, that she doesn’t either.

‘You don’t have to be,’ she says.

On the other side of the house, in the kitchen, there is loud laughter and Laura’s favourite boys talking over each other. Wanda and Nat’s voices are sharp compared to the baritone cacophony, and though neither of them are really listening to what’s being said, just being able to hear their voices over the din is enough.

‘Wanda,’ Pietro starts, and Laura gives up trying to detangle the cables, and yanks the one she wants.

‘Is an Avenger, and that’s okay. She’s a grown woman, Piet, she can handle herself.’

‘I’ve never done anything else,’ he says, ‘it’s been just us for so long, and I don’t – what else is there?’

Laura smiles, and it’s sad, almost.

‘You’re so like Clint, you know that? I see him when I first met him in you. It’s okay, Piet, I promise. You’ll find where you fit eventually, and you can stay here – you will stay here – for as long as you need until you find that place.’

‘I’m not like the old man,’ Pietro grumbles, and Laura laughs, finally gets the right cable in the right port and the TV flickers to the sleep screen of the player.

‘You’re exactly like the old man. Now, come on, punk, time to dance.’

A few weeks later, he tells her, ‘I don’t want to be a superhero either. I don’t want to be out there. I can’t do it anymore.’

Laura had been making breakfast, but pauses to look back at him, sat at the table. His hair’s getting long again, and it’s swept to the side, an agitated gesture from the boy.

‘You don’t have to,’ she tells him, and sets her paring knife down to go and touch his cheek, rub the dark smudge under his eye. ‘You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be, sweetheart.’

He sighs, a hot, heavy sigh with a pout and averted gaze.

‘You’ll get there,’ Laura tells him, gives him a gentle pat to the cheek and heads back to breakfast. ‘And no matter what you decide, we’ll support you, you know that.’

He nods to himself, mumbles a thanks, and sits there staring out of the window until the kids come down. Lila is very eager to tell him about a dream she had, and he perks up immediately, no trace of his pouting, dejected self left under the enthusiasm he displays to his little sister.

-0-0-0-

Clint gives him this look when he brings it up, and Pietro sort of shrugs.

‘Well, alright,’ Clint hedges, but he doesn’t look too sure. ‘As long as you’re gonna eat it, I guess.’

Pietro assures him that he knows at least half of them like lamb, which is why he brought it up.

‘I would have said pig, but.’ He shrugs.

‘It’s pig,’ Clint agrees, and nods, adds it to the list scrawled on the back of his hand. ‘Is there anything else I need? Spices or whatever?’

‘Wanda’ll know,’ Pietro says, and Clint disappears off to find her.

When he gets back from the store, truck bed full of goods, there’s a whole lamb in the mix. Pietro and Wanda make off with it and the bag of herbs and spices Wanda had told him he’d need. Lila trails after them, curious, and when Thor crashes onto the farm, he immediately makes for them and their inactivity-addled attempts at trussing.

 ‘That is not deep enough,’ he says, ‘you will burn the meat.’

Pietro, who is doing his best, squints up at him.

 ‘Go away,’ he says.

‘We don’t need your help,’ Wanda adds, not that she’s being much help either.

Thor raises an eyebrow, and turns to look at Clint, who’s busy arguing with Steve about the fire pit.

‘Your children are unruly!’ he calls.

‘Kids, behave!’ Clint calls back without even turning, and goes straight back defending his choice in firewood.

Pietro and Wanda both wrinkle their noses, but Pietro pulls the spit free and shoves it in Thor’s direction. Dropping his hammer onto the bench, which makes Wanda bounce a little, he rounds the table to Pietro’s side and takes the spit. He’s careful, but his motions are effortless, having trussed larger and more complicated beasts than a lamb for centuries now.

It doesn’t take long for the three of them to get it trussed and ready for cooking, and Pietro grumbles out a thanks.

‘We haven’t done it for so long,’ he muses, as Thor disappears to find Cooper, who is sticking close to Bucky’s side for who-knows-why. ‘This.’

Wanda nods, looks at their handiwork. ‘Before Stark,’ she agrees.

They’re solemn for a heartbeat, and then Lila is bounding over to say they’ve got the fire started, Dad wants to know how long it needs to burn.

‘Three hours or so,’ Wanda says, ‘it needs to be hot.’

 ‘Water is wet,’ Lila replies, in a tone Pietro recognises immediately as Clint’s more sarcastic one. He suspects that Lila does not understand entirely what she’s saying.

‘The fire has to be out,’ Wanda adds, ‘there must be no flames.’

Lila mouths the instructions back to herself before nodding and trotting off back to Clint. Pietro takes the lamb back inside to stay in the cooler, and Laura collars him for help with the dishes.

They get the lamb on the rotisserie, and Thor supervises, offering his advice as they get it going. The wood is just the right kind of smoke, a fruit wood – Clint had listened, and Pietro feels warmer for the thought that Clint trusts their judgement than he does for the embers not a foot away from him – that’s smouldering just right.

‘I am surprised there is not a pig,’ Thor says. ‘A boar would be a fine addition to the feast.’

Pietro shrugs. Wanda has disappeared again, and he suspects he’ll find her canoodling her not-yet-boyfriend behind the barn later.

‘We’re Jewish,’ he says, and Thor looks a little blank. ‘It’s complicated. Jewish people don’t eat pig.’

‘That is a shame.’

‘Dad said the same thing. Still does.’

 Tony demands Thor’s attention in a most urgent matter, which Pietro suspects is actually not at all important and he just wants someone to back him up on something he’s wrong about, and Pietro is left alone. After ten or so minutes alone watching the lamb – Clint had set up a mechanical rotisserie, so all Pietro has to do is make sure it doesn’t burn – Bucky approaches at his usual creeping pace. He’s new to the farm, Pietro knows, new like Pietro was. He hasn’t found his place yet, still working out how he fits. Lucky is at his heel, tail wagging.

‘Hello,’ Bucky says, falls in beside him.

‘Hey,’ Pietro replies. ‘It’s lamb.’

‘I can tell,’ Bucky nods. ‘I remember the smell. I do not remember if I like it.’

‘Do you need to remember?’

Bucky thinks about this, and absently reaches down to scratch behind one of Lucky’s ears.

‘I suppose not,’ he decides.

They stand there quietly for a few minutes. The rest of the Bartons and the Avengers are a whirlwind of noise and motion, and it’s nice. It’s familiar in ways they’d both forgotten about. Lila squeals in delight as Steve obligingly lifts her up with one hand and props her on his shoulder, still in the middle of a conversation with Sam. Clint and Tony are arm-wrestling, Laura and Pepper resolutely ignoring them to discuss lunch sometime next week. Cooper and Jane sit at the table, discussing the stars. Nat and Bruce are skirting each other, trying to avoid communicating or even looking at each other, but always end up at the same place in the same spot. It’s too loud and too much is happening, but it’s nice. It’s homey, like the apartment building and the summer Brooklyn streets, and they alternate between watching it and the lamb turning on the spit.

‘Are you happy here?’ Bucky asks, quiet, like he doesn’t want to be heard.

Pietro thinks about it. The lamb turns another rotation.

Steve calls to Bucky, asks if he can hold Lila on one shoulder too, she really wants to know.

‘It’s vitally important,’ he adds, and Lila nods fervently.

‘The most important!’

‘Musical shoulders,’ Bucky says, and attempts a smile before nodding to Pietro and taking his leave.

-0-0-0-

One afternoon, Pietro is helping Laura with the laundry, because now that he and his sister are here, and there’s a new baby throwing up on his onesies, there is more laundry to do, and it’s only fair he helps if she’s going to be doing most of it, and she rifles through the pockets of Clint’s jeans.

‘He’s forever leaving loose change in there,’ she says, ‘the number of times he’s had to take the machine apart to fish out a nickel he forgot about! I managed to train him out of leaving notes loose in his pockets, because honestly, having half a dozen fifties go through the wash got old fast, but he’s hopeless when it comes to loose change. Mind you, Dad did the same thing. I think it’s just something dads do.’

Pietro nods, and pulls out another pair of jeans, shoves his hands into the pockets to check for anything. He finds a bloody tissue – Lila had tripped, he remembers, and had a nosebleed from the collision with the floor – but nothing else. Clint’s pockets checked, Laura shoves the load into the barrel and sets it to wash.

He’d gone out on a mission – even though he’d said he wouldn’t do that anymore, because he wasn’t needed, Wanda had asked for him to accompany them, and he couldn’t exactly say no – so Laura’s got a blood-stained uniform to clean too, so while the load of jeans is going through, she sets about working on the blood stains.

Rifling through the pockets of the vest, because mission gear or not, Clint was not above keeping them full of loose change and broken arrowheads, Laura makes a confused little noise, and pulls a photograph free of the inner pocket.

‘Huh,’ she says, and hands it over to Pietro, who cranes his neck to see.

It’s a photo of her and the kids, before Nathaniel, before she was even pregnant maybe. It’s creased at the corners, worn white at the folds, and Pietro smiles at the beaming smiles being directed to the camera – to Clint, who probably took the photo for this very purpose.

‘Does he do this a lot?’ he asks. ‘Carry a picture?’

Laura shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t put it past him.’

Pietro looks at the picture some more, hauls himself up onto the counter to sit there with his legs dangling – Laura pushes one of them to the side to get at the dryer under him – and then he says, ‘I had a picture like this. Mine was little. A little picture of my family.’

‘Yeah?’ she asks, glances up, handful of socks halfway into the dryer. ‘A nice picture?’

He nods, and the photo trembles a little, his fingers shaking.

‘It was very nice. I looked at it every day.’

‘Looked? Past tense?’

He looks at her then, and sets the photograph down, clenches his fists against his thighs.

‘It was lost. In Sokovia. I do not have it now.’

She smiles, sad. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ he assures her, and gives her a soft tap of his heel against her arm. ‘I – it was nice to have it, to look at it. But I don’t need to look at it now.’

She looks at him like she thinks he’s full of shit. He supposes he is. He misses his little picture like a limb, but he has more to look at now. Bigger pictures. The hawkbabies have made a giant poster on a long strip of lining paper left over from a redecoration in Pietro’s room. It’s bright and colourful and they used three pots of glitter and neither Clint nor Laura had owned up to purchasing the glitter, so it had stayed on the floor for three days before Clint had enough of passing through the kitchen and coming out the other side up to his knees in gold and silver and swept it up.

‘We have lots of pictures,’ Laura hedges then, and shoves the last of the clothes into the dryer before straightening up and climbing onto the counter next to him.

There’s no shame on her face about using the lip of the dryer’s door to boost herself up the extra couple of inches, because the counter is higher than her hip and she isn’t that flexible these days. She bumps him with an elbow, and they sit there looking out of the window.

‘I don’t need a picture,’ Pietro tells her, ‘little or big or old or new or anything. I don’t need one. I got – I have – a bigger picture, of you and the old man and the hawkbabies. I don’t need this, a photograph. I have this.’

He gestures, and Laura wants to tease him that there is more to life than the utility room surrounded by laundry, but his hands are shaking and his English is failing him.

‘You have this,’ she agrees, and they sit there for several long minutes before Laura pats his leg, and he’s being sent out to go and peg the un-dryable items on the line.