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Laura Barton, it turns out, is not a fan of spontaneity. Which is funny when she lets herself think about it, because between her husband and his partner, not to mention her children, the days of careful planning and unexpected surprises have long gone out the window.
(Her alcohol intake and number of over-the-counter medications, however, has gone up.)
It’s partially why, in the end, she’s not all that surprised when she receives a call from Clint, who tells her he’s coming home for awhile -- and bringing a few guests.
“What do you mean, bringing a few guests?” Laura asks suspiciously, while Lila tugs at Laura’s jeans, holding out a carton of cubed pineapples. She can practically hear Clint wincing over the phone.
“I mean, I may have invited a few people home,” he clarifies casually. Laura instantly picks up on the inflection in his voice and sighs.
“How many people is a few people?”
“Erm.” Clint’s voice turns sheepish. “Like, two, maybe? The Maximoff girl. And Cap’s friend, Barnes. And Nat, obviously.”
“You’re bringing the kid’s sister here, and the guy who you told me once threatened Captain America?” Laura doesn’t bother to hide the suspicion coloring her tone as she sticks the phone between her ear and her shoulder and takes a few pieces of pineapple from her daughter. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Well, they kind of need help,” Clint says slowly. “I mean, not help...just like, a place to sort things out. And they don’t really have anywhere to set down roots.”
“None of you people do,” Laura cuts in, feeling only a little bad that she’s being so curt. She likes the Avengers, most of the time, even when they invade her house with little warning and step on her children’s toys.
“I know. Anyway, look, I figured getting them away from here is the best way to make them feel normal.”
Laura counts to ten silently, feeling the beginnings of a stress headache. “I’m your wife, Clint. I’m not a therapist. Or a halfway house mediator, for that matter.”
“I know,” Clint says hurriedly. “And I’m not expecting you to be. I just want to give them a place that feels like home, okay?”
Laura sighs heavily. “I need to feed the baby,” she responds, and Clint’s silent on the other end of the phone.
“I’ll bring you cannolis from the Lower East Side,” he offers, and his voice is filled with the hopeful tone of someone who is trying very hard to make an apology without the usual addition of puppy dog eyes. “The chocolate filling ones, with chocolate chips.”
“Add in a package of Stumptown Coffee, and a pizza from Two Bros, and you’re almost forgiven,” Laura says, rubbing her forehead. Clint laughs and then hangs up.
Four days later, Laura’s up to her arms in fingerpainting while Nathaniel naps in his bassinet, and the front door opens slowly followed by Clint’s patented "honey? I’m home." He’s holding out a large white carton and wearing a sheepish grin, his sides flanked by both Natasha and Wanda, who look amused and apprehensive, respectively. Bucky Barnes is trailing behind him, looking like he’s crawled out of multiple layers of a dirt covered past, his eyes darting nervously around the decorated home and his metal arm hidden underneath a long coat.
Laura hugs Clint, who goes straight to the kids after kissing her for a long time, and then Natasha, who claims, “don’t worry about welcoming me in, I already know where everything is,” before walking up the stairs with her bag. Laura is left standing in the middle of a still messy living room with Clint’s teammates; Bucky looks supremely out of place and Wanda doesn’t look like she’s acclimating that much better. Laura walks over to Wanda and holds out her hands; Wanda flinches a little at the gesture, like she’s not sure if she should reciprocate, before shrugging out of her red leather jacket.
“You need a shower,” is what Laura wants to say when she turns to Bucky, but she doesn’t. What she does say is, “let me take your coat and put on some tea.”
She stashes their clothing in one of the rooms Clint is currently in the middle of renovating and then heats up a kettle of hot water, inviting Bucky and Wanda sit down at the table, which they do, albeit a bit awkwardly.
“My name is James,” Bucky offers finally, as if he’s killing him to try to be civil, or maybe, Laura thinks, he doesn’t know how to be civil. Laura pours apricot flavored tea into one of Clint’s I HATE MORNINGS mug and hands him a homemade scone.
“Laura,” she says and Bucky looks up as he bites into the snack.
“I knew someone named Laura, once. Before the war,” he says, dropping crumbs on the table. Laura doesn’t consider herself the most knowledgeable about people’s pasts when it comes the ones involved in Clint’s world, save for Natasha. But from what she knows of Bucky Barnes -- James -- she thinks that she can be content with the bare details. Wanda sits beside him in silence, wrapping a strand of dark hair around her finger as she watches the exchange with wide eyes.
“Clint told me that you like blueberries,” Laura says, when the girl doesn’t offer any words of her own. “My son just picked some last week, if you want to try them. Farm fresh, home grown, too.”
Wanda meets her gaze curiously, a tentative smile settling on her lips. “I do like blueberries,” she says quietly and Laura starts rummaging around in the fridge. She hands over a large carton and Wanda looks down before picking up a fistful of berries with slim fingers.
“Thank you,” she says as she puts them in her mouth, and Bucky continues to eat his scone with one hand. Cooper and Lila yell at each other from upstairs, and Laura hears the telltale sign of the water running through the pipes, an indication that Clint’s gotten in the shower.
And Laura thinks about how it’s going to be a very long day.
***
There are a number of things that Laura Barton, simple girl from Iowa, never thought she’d be doing with her life; they include living on a farm with an assassin and Avenger husband and talking about things like aliens and the end of the world as if it’s yesterday’s news. Now, Laura figures she can add “housing a formerly brainwashed super soldier and an enhanced orphan” to that list.
“He’s just trying to help,” Natasha says to Laura as they start their walk around the farm’s property together. It's barely five in the morning and Laura has left Clint with baby duty, which she knows may or may not have been her subtle way of showing him that she’s still a little annoyed.
Laura exhales loudly, fingers clutched around her favorite mug -- a pottery-glazed cup with two butterflies on the side. “I guess I should just be glad he didn’t call me and tell me you’re all coming for Thanksgiving dinner or something,” she says, watching the blue-grey sky brighten with hues of new-dawn pink. “Or that he was found bleeding in a dumpster. That was the last call I got where I wanted to kill him. He said he got patched up by some blind guy and his girlfriend.”
“Don’t be so concerned, he went to a hospital,” Natasha says offhandedly, sipping on her own coffee as they walk further away from the house. “I made sure of it.” She smiles at Laura. “I don’t know how you deal with him sometimes.”
“Honestly, I don’t know how you do, either,” Laura admits. Laura had the domestic annoyances when it came to Clint, the house projects he took on when it was too much, the nights he woke the children because he tripped down the stairs, the inevitable whining that always came with Laura taking down the string of Christmas lights at the end of January. But she knows it’s nothing compared to what Natasha has dealt with, the professional and more dire annoyances: the times he disappeared off the radar without anyone knowing, the times Natasha had to rush him to the hospital because he had incurred another injury by accident, whether it was because he fell off the roof or because he cut himself while trying to wield a knife. By the time Laura and Natasha make it back to the house, Clint’s gotten Nathaniel fed and dressed along with Lila and Cooper, and he’s making another pot of coffee while the kids play on the porch and Nathaniel lies in his portable crib. Bucky is eating sunnyside up eggs with a full glass of orange juice while Wanda finishes getting dressed upstairs.
“This is good,” Bucky remarks, his mouth full, and Laura thinks he looks marginally better than had looked yesterday. Whether it’s because of the shower or the sleep, she doesn’t know, but the bags around his eyes have receded and his long hair, while still greasy and tangled, is at least less stringy. Clint’s dressed him in one of his flannel shirts and an old pair of jeans, an outfit that can almost help him pass as normal, save for the metal fingers Laura can see holding his coffee cup.
“Clint’s pretty good at the breakfast thing,” agrees Laura, pouring herself another cup of coffee. “He can make a really good frittata, if you ask him nicely.”
“I will always make frittata, and you don’t even have to ask,” Clint promises, sliding an egg onto a plate for Wanda. “Anyway, Bucky specifically asked for eggs, so I made eggs.”
“There was a really good diner that I used to go to all the time, in Brooklyn, that had eggs,” Bucky says after a few more bites. “The best eggs, actually. And they had the best coffee and best bagels anyone had ever tasted. The kind of stuff my mom used to make.”
“What happened to them?” Laura finds herself asking as Clint starts to clean the frying pan. “Your parents?”
Bucky looks uncomfortable at the question. “I don’t really know,” he admits. “I mean, I went to war, and then I kind of got...indisposed. If you could call it that.” He looks down at his arm, and then back up. “I should probably find out one day, right?”
Laura hesitates, taking a drink. “Sometimes, things are better if they’re kept in the past,” she says. “But if you’re looking to find a way back, sometimes it’s a good place to start.”
“Yeah.” Bucky nods. “I was thinking of looking up some information, you know, just to see if there was anything out there. Maybe Steve would know. I don’t remember much before I was...well, this thing.”
“Understandable,” Laura says carefully, deciding not to push the subject further. “More juice?” When Bucky nods, Laura takes his cup and refills it, deciding to pour a glass for Wanda as well, when she hears her approaching the kitchen.
“Sleep okay?” Laura asks as Wanda slides into the chair. With Natasha offering to take the couch, Laura had been able to afford Bucky and Wanda space in the two guest bedrooms.
“I did, thank you,” Wanda replies as Laura puts a glass down onto the table. She then takes out the carton of blueberries from the fridge, pouring a few into a small blue bowl and putting them next to Wanda’s plate.
The smile that Wanda gives her is bigger than the one Laura had received yesterday, and she smiles back.
***
After breakfast, Laura lets Natasha and Clint handle clean-up duties around the kitchen and then heads into town, determined to reclaim some sense of normalcy by running her usual weekend errands, even if her home life has been turned upside down. She stops at the farmstand for more vegetables and then at the dry cleaners to pick up last week’s clothing and some of Clint’s shirts, and after a stop at the bank and also the library to pick up new books, she decides that after all of this, she at least deserves to be treated to some personal pampering.
“Do you ever have those days when you want to kill your spouse?” Laura asks as her regular manicurist, a curly haired Jewish woman named Susan, places her fingers in a bowl of warm water. “I mean, you love them, and you know they’re trying to do something good, but sometimes you just want to scream at them forever.”
Susan laughs, taking Laura’s other hand and picking up a nail file. “When my husband and I first got married, I thought every day was going to end with me having a funeral,” she says. “His funeral, naturally, because I would have been too furious to do anything but kill him. Now I pick and choose my battles, but there are still things that he does that make me angry.”
“I know there’s that whole, ‘love is never supposed to be easy' thing,” Laura says, thinking of Clint and his crooked smile, the one he always gives her when he’s trying to apologize for something. Susan laughs again.
“Trust me. If it was supposed to be easy, it wouldn’t be love.” She hums to herself. “So what did your husband do that got you so angry, anyway?”
Laura knows she can’t say the actual reason out loud, so she tries to figure out a response that’s appropriate. “He brought some people home without my permission,” she says, knowing the answer sounds laughably tame for the amount of annoyance she’s projecting. “I think he expects me to be something for them.”
Susan nods slowly. “Well, from what you’ve told me about your husband, he seems to be pretty headstrong when it comes to helping people.”
Laura sighs. “Believe me, I know. Would you also believe that’s why I love him?”
Susan doesn’t respond, just smiles again and starts filing away at Laura’s nails with gentle ease. By the time Laura makes her way back to the farm, pulling groceries and dry cleaning out of the back of the car, it’s mid-afternoon. Clint has taken Nathaniel and the kids for a walk, leaving Bucky, Wanda and Natasha sitting around on the porch, each of them sprawled out casually along the wooden planks.
“...so anyway, Steve won’t admit any of this, I know, but he had a huge sailor mouth when we were kids,” Bucky is saying. “He would get in trouble all the time for swearing. When the Commandos and I were doing stuff together, he would constantly just spew out all these profanities. Got him in so much hot water. We thought it was hysterical.”
“Captain America: A gift to the world,” Natasha drones as Laura walks up the porch steps.
“Having fun?” She surveys the scene in front of her, noticing how Wanda has taken to moving a little closer to Natasha.
“Just relaxing,” Natasha says easily, waving Laura inside with a small nod that alerts her to the fact that for the moment, everything’s okay. Laura breathes a sigh of relief and walks in the door, starting to unpack the groceries while being careful of her new manicure.
“Can I help you with anything?”
Laura turns in surprise at the small, accented voice that filters in behind her, finding that Wanda has followed her inside and is standing in the kitchen entryway.
“Sure,” she says, motioning towards a brown bag. “Cans and boxes go in the cabinets over here, everything else goes in the fridge except for the packages that say ‘keep frozen’ on them.”
Wanda starts unearthing cartons and both of them work in silence, until Wanda finally speaks again.
“Is this where you all went when you had to run away?” She asks. “After I made your husband’s team do terrible things?”
“Yes,” says Laura with a nod. “Clint thought this was somewhere that everyone would be safe.”
Wanda looks sad. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I did not mean to do those things. I do not know if I would have done them if I wasn’t inside his head...or if he was not inside mine.”
Laura picks up a package of corn, examining its contents. “You know what I’ve learned, being married to Clint?” she asks and Wanda shakes her head. “Beating yourself up for your past, no matter what you did or didn’t do, is a terrible habit. And it never ends well.” She smiles gently as Wanda looks up.
“I have nightmares, sometimes,” she offers. “Of the things he did to me. Of my brother. I did not see my brother and what happened when he died, but I dream of it. It is as if I was there.”
Laura watches the way Wanda’s body language changes as she talks, the way she suddenly draws in on herself as if she’s embarrassed about her own words, and stops working.
“I’ll be right back,” she tells the girl, walking upstairs and going into the bedroom. Laura walks over to the desk by the window and pulls out a drawer, sifting through a few old receipts and baby photos before she finds what she’s looking for. Smiling to herself, she tucks the worn, leather-bound notebook between her fingers and walks back downstairs.
“You know what helped Clint? When he came to me and told me these same things, after that alien attack?” She sits down at the table and then slides the journal over to Wanda. “He wrote his dreams down, the ones that he could remember. Sometimes it was hard, but looking at the words made his thoughts tangible. It was a way that he could face what his fears were, rather than them being some phantom feeling.”
Wanda looks both surprised and confused at the same time, reaching out to take the notebook before flipping through its blank pages. “This is mine?”
“If you want it to be,” Laura says with a shrug. “I had bought it awhile ago, for my pregnancy, but I never ended up using it. We have so much stuff piling up here...it could use a good home.”
Wanda looks down, tracing her fingers over the embossed, dark green leather of the journal’s cover, as if it’s a form of treasure. “Thank you,” she says quietly, picking it up, and Laura notices her eyes are saying more than her words are.
“Of course,” Laura responds, sitting back in her chair. “Anytime.”
***
There’s nothing normal about having dinner with a band of superheroes who have all been around the block, Laura knows, but when the five of them sit down for dinner that night, it somehow doesn’t feel entirely strange.
Or maybe, Laura thinks, watching Wanda cut her food into small bites the same way Lila would and watching Bucky carefully pass a plate of salad with his metal arm, it’s because Clint has been right after all. It’s hard for Laura to look at the two people sitting in front of her and think about how less than 24 hours ago, they were the equivalent of two scared children forced into an uncomfortable situation that they didn’t ask for.
“I think it’s helped them,” Clint says afterwards as they clean up, glancing over to where Wanda is engaged in a game with Cooper in the living room, while Bucky allows a curious Lila to touch his arm. “Being here, being normal. Showing them that you can be treated with kindness, and not judged because of your actions.”
“All that because I fed Wanda some blueberries and you made eggs?” Laura asks mildly. “I didn’t exactly do that the first time you brought Natasha home.”
Clint snorts. “Well, I’d argue that blueberries and eggs are a lot easier these days than nightmares and sleepwalking,” he says, and Laura sighs, reaching out and putting her palm against the side of his face.
“You know, sometimes you do things that I want to kill you for,” she admits. “And sometimes, your heart is exactly in the right place for the right reasons.” She kisses him gently before pulling away. “You do alright, Clint.”
“Yeah?” Clint blushes slightly at her words, and Laura nods.
“Yes,” she says, going back to her clean-up. “Don’t let it go to your head, though. I’m not here to take in every stray trauma survivor that comes out of your avenging. I do have limits.”
Clint laughs shortly and then crosses his arms with a nod.
“Fully understandable.”
“I mean it, Clint.” Laura turns around, sponge in hand, and raises an eyebrow. “I’m not a halfway house.”
“You have my word,” Clint says a little defensively, but he’s smiling. “No more rogue superheroes. Well, not unless the world is ending. Okay?”
Laura knows she can’t really argue with that, so she lets herself mentally accept it, smiling back.
“Okay.”
***
When Laura Barton opens the door the next morning to grab the paper, the last thing she expects to see is a dark-haired girl leaning against the doorframe. She’s wearing a distressed leather jacket, her jeans are the epitome of having seen better days, and her eyes are hidden behind a pair of dark aviators.
“Can I help you?” Laura asks a bit uncertainly, stepping back as the girl straightens up.
“Yeah,” she says. “My name is Jessica Jones. I got your name and address from someone I met in a dumpster.” The drone of her voice matches the bored, almost blank look on her face. “He said you could help me.”
Laura stares at the girl in front of her, willing herself to say calm, and then --
“Clint!”
Ten seconds later, there’s shuffling behind her and a bleary-eyed, messy haired Clint Barton is standing in the foyer with a toothbrush stuck inside his mouth.
"Wha?”