Chapter Text
“You know what we should do?” Hawkeye asked, lounging on the common area’s most comfortable couch.
“Dare I ask?” Natasha quipped, sitting atop the couch’s armrest, one hand reached down and playing with Clint’s hair.
“What idea does the Eye of the Hawk propose?” Thor asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, Christmas is coming up, right? But Stark hasn’t started decorating! I’m willing to bet he’s one of those who waits for the morning of Christmas Eve and does all the decorations in one go! So, what if we help him not procrastinate and get started on decorating early this year?”
It took a few seconds for anyone to respond.
“I’d say I regret asking, but this is the smartest idea I’ve heard come out of your mouth all week,” Natasha admitted.
“Oi, I have smart ideas sometimes!” Clint argued.
Dr Banner, who was sitting over by the counter in the kitchenette, frowned. “Do any of you remember Tony actually celebrating Christmas at all last time we were a team? I know my memories when Hulk is in control are blurry, but I don’t remember ever seeing Christmas decorations at the mansion.”
“Yeah, well, last time we spent Christmas on the Latverian border trying to keep Doom from making his neighboring countries go boom,” Clint pointed out. “And the year before that, we dealt with Thor’s jackass brother and his reindeer of death. So we were a bit preoccupied.”
Thor scowled. “I will not have you speak ill of Loki. Though he may be troubled, he is still my brother.”
Natasha raised an eyebrow. “He murdered 87 people in two days.”
“...He’s adopted.”
“Uh, guys? Change of topic? Please?” Clint asked, trying to not think about how Loki had turned his brain to spaghetti and almost made him kill everyone he loved.
He felt Natasha give a sharper tug against his hair, not enough to be actually painful but enough to derail his thoughts. “So, decorating. JARVIS, does Stark have some Christmas decorations in storage?”
“There are no Christmas lights or other holiday decorations in the tower, Miss Romanoff.”
“Great, so we start with a shopping trip,” Clint declared.
“Yes, we do,” Natasha agreed. “Banner, you’re with me. We’re going shopping. Barton, you and Thor start preparing a space where we can set everything up and start planning how to decorate a skyscraper.”
“Hey, who made you in charge!?” Clint complained as Natasha pulled her hand away from his hair and slid off her spot on the armrest to stand.
“Thor can fly and you like heights. You’re the best available team for the task. If you have extra time, try roping in Wilson and Rogers.”
“And Tony?” Clint asked.
Natasha shrugged. “Assuming you can drag him out of his lab without causing Mr Omniscient to almost go Skynet on our asses like last time, go for it. And, sorry, JARVIS.”
“No insult taken, Agent Romanoff.”
“Okay, fine,” Clint conceded. “But you’d better not pick the boring decorations! Actually… Take Thor with you, too, Tash. He’ll make sure you don’t pick boring stuff. I’ll get the others on-board. It can be a new team activity! Or at least that’s how I’ll sell it to Cap.”
The glare Natasha gave him promised suffering, but it would be well worth it for a colorful Christmas in the end.
Getting Sam on board proved to be so easy. All Clint had to do was pick up his phone and make a call and Sam was on his way, bringing along cookies as well as his boyfriend (which, Clint hadn’t known Sam had a boyfriend, but hey he wasn’t going to say no to an extra pair of hands). It was even better when Falcon’s boyfriend proved to be another “Falcon”, another guy with (less techy) wings who went by the name “Seagull”. Well, the name was according to Sam, at least; Riley vehemently argued against it.
Oh, Stark was going to get a kick out of this! Clint considered wrapping up the Riley dude in ribbon and putting him under the tree addressed to Stark with a note of “a new target to spoil with tech”, but he didn’t want to risk Wilson kicking him off a roof for giving away his boyfriend. So, Clint would need to come up with a different gift idea, unfortunately.
Getting Cap on board also proved fairly simple.
“Hey Cap! We’ve come up with a team bonding activity. Wanna join?”
“What sort of activity?”
“Aww, come on, you sound like Nat. No faith in me at all!” Clint complained. “We’re decorating the tower. For Christmas. You know, making a team tradition and all. We never got to decorate the mansion because we were always too busy on missions, but now? New team, new tradition, all that. Nat’s already gone with Bruce and Thor to do shopping, Sam’s coming over to help decorate and he’s bringing cookies and a boyfriend, and after you agree I’m going to go see if we can’t dig out Tony from whatever pile of inventions he’s buried himself under.”
“After I agree?” Steve asked, amused. “You’re making quite the assumption there, Hawkeye. Though, I guess it would be nice to celebrate Christmas with others again… that is something I miss from before.” Clint didn’t need to be a genius that Steve meant from before the ice.
“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Clint declared.
“Alright,” Steve laughed. “How can I help the cause?”
Clint considered his answer, and almost immediately an idea sprang into mind. “Well… you could try and see if Stark’s up for a chat. He’s more likely to talk with you than me.” Clint swore he was not avoiding talking to Stark. Nope. Definitely not stalling on doing something that risked the local friendly neighborhood AI from going nuclear on their arses.
Based on Cap’s gaze, the supersoldier knew exactly what Clint was doing. “Well, I do have to get changed into something more befitting the occasion. I’m sure you can handle talking to Tony just fine; it’ll be a team bonding exercise.”
Clint swore to himself as Cap headed off. Well played, Rogers. Well played.
It was at that moment that everything went to hell.
First, Stark hadn’t been in his lab anymore after all. He’d actually been in his room, having slept through most of the day after finishing a lab binge, which was valid. Clint had taken this as meaning that Tony would be in a better mood, so he chose to wait in the common area after JARVIS confirmed that Tony was on his way there.
Tony’s first stop was (predictably) the coffee machine. So Clint had gone ahead and set that up ahead of time. Stark’s expression of sheer confusion at pre-made coffee was well worth the effort.
Stark picked up the coffee and turned to face Clint, gesturing to the room with his free hand with an amused smile. “Pre-made coffee and a quiet lounge? What did you do, what do you want, who did you kill, Barton?”
“No one’s dead yet,” Clint replied. “Heads up though, Sam’s visiting and he’ll be bringing his boyfriend.”
“Wilson has a boyfriend?”
“I know, I was shocked, too! But they’re bringing cookies, and apparently Riley’s part of the bird club too, metal wings and all. And you know what they say, birds of a feather gotta stick together!”
“Metal wings, you say…” Tony echoed, clearly lost in thought.
“So, anyways, they’re helping to decorate the tower for Christmas! Nat, Bruce, Thor, and I talked about it, and it would be a really awesome team tradition to start—”
“You have fun with that.” Tony’s expression immediately morphed to one of displeasure, and the genius spun on his heel and began to walk towards the elevator.
“Wait, Tony—” Clint tried to will his feet to move and follow Tony, but they were rooted in place from shock.
“Christmas is not my holiday, Barton.” Tony stepped into the elevator. “Don’t drag me into any of your stupid ideas.” There was a sharp edge of warning to the genius’s tone, threatening a very unpleasant or else .
The elevator doors closed, and Clint was left wondering what the hell he’d done wrong.
Steve sighed when Clint told him what had happened with Tony. “I’ll try talking to him, but I can’t promise anything,” he told Clint.
“Can you at least try to find out why? Else Tasha will blame me for pissing off Stark.”
And that was how Steve found himself at the datacrux, where Tony was catching up on a sizable stack of reports, compiled from both his lab binge and the extended sleeptime (10 hours, a near record for Tony Stark). He paused in the doorway, watching for a moment. “Iron Man? Do you have a moment?”
Tony looked up. “You’re the last person I’d expect to give me a distraction from paperwork, Cap. What do you need?”
“I spoke with Clint—”
Tony frowned. “Oh hell, not this again. I thought I was clear when I said—”
“To not drag you into anything,” Steve finished, trying to placate the billionaire. “I know, he mentioned that. I’m not here to drag you into anything. But I am trying to get a better understanding of what’s going on.”
Tony rolled his eyes. “I don’t like Christmas. Plain and simple. They can celebrate, sure. Me? I want no part in any of that. Honestly. You say you hate Washington’s birthday or Thanksgiving, and nobody cares, but you say you hate Christmas, and people treat you like you’re a leper,” Tony complained.
Steve thought back to Tony’s file. Hadn’t Tony lost his parents on Christmas Eve? That sounded like a good reason to not want to celebrate Christmas. He nodded in understanding. He would make sure the others don’t bother Tony about it again, at least. Though, he figured Tony deserved an explanation, too. “Try not to be too harsh on them, They’re just excited to be celebrating the holidays as a team. It’s different for them, being together on a team in one of the richest and most technologically advanced towers in the world. But I’ll make sure they stay out of your hair, if that’s what you prefer.”
“One of the most? What other ones do you know that are more advanced?”
Steve knew this was Tony’s attempt at derailing the conversation with banter, but he indulged the genius for a moment. “I don’t know. The Burj Khalifa? The Taipei 101 and its massive damper system?”
Tony scowled melodramatically. “You wound me, Rogers.”
Natasha, Thor, and Bruce returned with a wide selection of Christmas decorations, the cargo having barely fit in their car. (Thor had ended up flying back, not able to fit in the backseat of the car amongst all of the boxes of Christmas lights.) Sam and his boyfriend Riley arrived not long after, with boxes of fresh cookies and two trays of festive peppermint coffees.
One of the coffees was sacrificed as an offering to appease their billionaire landlord, who happened to have a sweet tooth and a caffeine addition combined, which the peppermint lattes would address quite nicely. Natasha was sent to deliver it after Steve and Clint had filled her in on what she’d missed. It was a bummer that Tony wouldn’t be joining them, but in Clint’s opinion, it was the genius’s loss. Maybe if they did a really good job, not even Tony would be able to resist the holiday cheer?
The plan did not work out. At all.
Decorating the surface of a skyscraper proved trickier than any of them thought. After several hours of attempting to put up decorations (only for them to fall and have to be caught before they collided with a civilian on the pavement), the group decided to give up and just decorate the inside of the tower. They agreed to decorate only the lounge and their personal rooms, out of respect for Tony — no decorations in the lab or datacrux.
Afterwards, they all crashed in the lounge, putting on “Home Alone” after that won the vote of “best Christmas movie Cap needed to see” by Natasha’s tie-breaker vote. (Clint swore the vote was skewed. It was unfair that Sam and Riley each got a vote and then they voted for the same thing. Rigged.)
It may not have been the team tradition they’d been hoping for, but spending the day together had been a worthy experience nonetheless. (It was just a shame that they had been missing one of their own for it.)