ext_34821 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cap_ironman2008-05-17 04:51 am
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2008-05-17 04:51 am
Entry tags:
Hostages to Fortune 1/7
Title: Hostages to Fortune 1/7
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan.
Warnings: No much, really. Some swearing and violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: The sequel to Readjustment. Things are finally settling down, and the Avengers are settling in. It's time for disaster to strike again.
X-posted to Marvel Slash.
And again, our thanks totavella for the great beta job.
Hostages to Fortune
Tony's punch glanced off Steve's shoulder as Steve twisted his upper body back out of the way, and then Steve grabbed him by the arm and swept his foot around to knock Tony's legs out from under him.
Tony hit the mat hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. Then he simply lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling and gasping in air. The workout room in the Avengers Tower had high, white, very basic ceilings, nothing like the decorative plasterwork the Mansion had had.
"You're pulling your punches," Steve informed him. He crouched down beside Tony, hands resting loosely on his knees. "I shouldn't be able to do that so easily."
"I am not pulling my punches." Tony pushed himself up onto his elbows, glaring at Steve, who was looking down at him with an air of exasperated superiority.
"You're pulling your punches," Steve returned. "I can always tell when you are."
Not only had Tony not pulled that punch, he hadn't pulled any of the blows Steve had been shrugging off throughout this sparring session. It was possible that he was a little rusty, thanks to spending the past month letting his cracked ribs heal, but he was giving it everything he had, even though part of him winced every time he threw a punch at Steve. "Force equals mass times acceleration, and you have about forty pounds more mass than I do."
Steve raised his eyebrows. "Your point?"
"I have to hit you harder to knock you down than you have to in order to knock me down. It's basic physics."
Steve shook his head, smiling, and sat down on the mat beside Tony. "Would it help if I brought you coffee?" he asked.
"Maybe," Tony said, offering Steve a smile of his own. Yes, coffee would be good. "I should take a shower first, though. I have to leave in an hour." The process of dismantling the SHRA and revamping the Initiative had not gone as smoothly as they might have hoped; the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security had dragged their heels every step of the way, and Henry Gyrich had requested that Tony come to DC to light a fire under those officials who were reluctant to give up the notion of a government-controlled superhuman army.
At least the deploying of teenagers into combat situations had stopped; Gyrich and Rhodey's team had seen to that. Gyrich could sense which way the political winds were blowing, and he'd always known how to follow political trends.
"Can't you be a little late?" Steve asked, taking Tony by the wrist and pulling him up into a sitting position. He kept hold of Tony’s wrist for a moment longer, squeezing it lightly. "A quinjet can get you to DC in twenty minutes."
"And I have a nine o' clock meeting with Jack Kooning in an hour and a half."
Steve frowned. "I can't believe he's still pushing to keep the government-created superhero project. You'd think at this point he have given up on it."
"He tried to recruit Maya to investigate using Extremis to create super soldiers. Since it has a ninety percent fatality rate and has caused insanity in fifty percent of surviving test subjects, I made her tell him no." Actually, he'd begged her. It had been during those dark, empty weeks when Steve had been gone, and Kooning had wanted to use an Extremis-enhanced super soldier to replace him.
"Please tell me you didn't know about the ninety percent fatality rate when you shot yourself up with it."
"Okay," Tony said. "I won't." It wasn't as if he'd had much of a choice, but Steve was stubbornly clinging to his dislike of the Extremis. "I'll be gone for three days," he added. "Don't let Clint destroy the tower." He didn't mention that it would be the longest span of time they would be apart since Steve had come back. He wasn't that pathetic.
"I'd worry more about Hank destroying your lab." Steve grinned at him, then reached out and placed his free hand on the side of Tony's face, regarding him silently for a moment. "The cat will miss you," he said finally. "You're the one he likes best."
Tony turned his face into Steve's hand, closing his eyes. He wasn't looking forward to three nights spent alone. "I don't know why it keeps getting up on our bed," he said. "It's supposed to be Jarvis's." The cat probably kept jumping up onto the bed because Tony had invited it up there, one night during the SHRA hearings when Steve had been far away in Washington and Tony had been unable to sleep. However, there was no way he was going to admit that, particularly not to Steve, who seemed to be involved in some endless, petty war with the cat, which had begun sleeping in his shield and gnawing on its leather straps.
"I'll miss you, too." Tony's eyes were still closed, but he could hear the smile in Steve's voice. Steve leaned in and kissed him briefly, then pulled back, adding, "When you get back, we'll do this again, and I'll expect an actual challenge."
***
Monitor duty had never been Hank's favorite part of being an Avenger, but since he was off the active duty list for the foreseeable future (or at least, until he could find a way to balance chemicals in the bloodstream while shrinking, which was theoretically possible but not something he was entirely prepared to risk death-by-mood-stabilizer-overdose to test), he'd decided that there was no time like the present to get used to it, and had volunteered to handle communications while Tony was out of town.
It wasn't difficult work, by any means. It was just, as a rule, deeply boring. On the other hand, boring meant that nobody in New York was trying to blow anything up, which was always a plus.
And it was better than being grilled by the government and the media. Thank God they'd only needed Tony this time; Hank had made more than enough public, detailed confessions of all his sins for one lifetime. Trials, Avengers' court-martials, congressional hearings -- they were all the same, really, exercises in trying to justify yourself to groups of people who were all silently judging you.
The phone rang shrilly, and Hank steeled himself before picking it up -- there had been three calls this morning from various Daily Bugle reporters, all wanting an exclusive interview with the Avengers, all of which he'd turned down, since Steve refused to talk to any Bugle reporter other than Ben Urich.
"Avengers Tower," he said, already preparing for round four of the "no, we will not be giving any interviews until all of the libel suits have been settled," argument.
"Pym, I cannot believe you left me alone with the teenagers to play secretary." James Rhodes' voice was sharp and clear, but with the faint electronic hum in the background that meant he was using the War Machine armor's headset and mike rather than a telephone.
"I'm not playing secretary," Hank said, not at all defensively. "I'm monitoring communications."
"Fine. You're not playing secretary. Look, that's not why I called. Don't think I'm happy about it, but it's not why I called. I'm in New York for the next couple of days, trying to call in favors and draft somebody to be your replacement, and I wanted to give you guys a heads-up in case you needed back up for anything while I'm in town."
"That's good to hear," Hank told him. "With Tony in DC, we've got no firepower." They were going to have to do something about that eventually. They currently had two hand-to-hand specialists (Sam could fly, but he was a hand-to-hand fighter when you got right down to it), one archer, and Jan, whose stingers were effective, but who still wasn't really a powerhouse. Until Jan could master her new growing powers, Tony was their only big gun.
None of them had invulnerability or super-strength, either, which hadn't been an issue yet, but had the potential to be.
"Better Tony than me. I get enough anti-superhero shit on a daily basis as it is."
"Ah." Hank said. "I guess the protestors haven't gone home, then?" During his month-long stint at Camp Hammond, the angry men and women with "mutie go home" signs had been a semi-permanent fixture outside the base's front gate.
Rhodes snorted. "What do you think? Anyway, you have any idea who I can blackmail into replacing you? I mean, I know you're trying to fix things with your ex, but come on, you're leaving me in the lurch here."
Yes, he was, and he even felt guilty about it, if only slightly, but, "I had to get out. I had to." It was more than the opportunity to be an Avenger again, more than a second, well, fourth, shot at things with Jan. "It was only a matter of time before Gyrich and Dr. Blitzschlag would have had me cloning a superhero army for them, and I really don't want to become the government's better-looking answer to Armin Zola." Blitzschlag had made Hank's skin crawl, with his wild-eyed glee over the prospect of working with the man who'd created Ultron and cloned (so horribly unsuccessfully) a god. He'd been disturbingly comfortable with the idea of using people as government science experiments, and Hank strongly suspected that he was a former Nazi.
"Everything's changed since Tony and Reed and the rest of you blew the lid off everything. Blitzschlag is out, and there's an oversight committee looking into Van Patrick's death. I think his family is going to sue."
They'd have to get in a very long line first. Hank resisted the temptation to point out that that wasn't exactly an incentive to come back, letting Rhodes continue uninterrupted.
"Look, I'm desperate here. I spend half the day reminding Gauntlet that he's not allowed to call seventeen-year-olds pussies, and that Vance is going to telekinetically throw him through a wall if he calls the New Warriors baby-killers one more time, and the other half explaining to everyone who will listen why one horrific training accident shouldn't be allowed to shut down the program."
"At least you don't have to keep it classified anymore." Making the students cover up the death of one of their classmates had been one more thing Hank had hated having to do.
"Yeah, thanks for that, by the way." Rhodes' voice was not quite sarcastic, but only by a small margin. "You did hear the part where I said they're suing us?"
"I wish Scott Lang were still around. He would have been great at this." It wasn't just that Scott had been a father himself; he'd been legitimately good with children, and had had an enviable ability to put complex concepts into simple terms without sounding as if he was talking down to people. Hank himself had never quite mastered that. "You could try calling Ben Grimm for advice," he suggested. "He's got experience with kids. I'd suggest the X-Men, but most of them won't touch the Initiative with a ten foot pole." He'd had to promise to run a battery of DNA tests on active and deactivated X-genes in order to get Hank McCoy to bring in an empath and set up extra training for Trauma, when the trainee's fear-projection powers had gotten out of control. "Scott Summers might be willing to give you a lesson plan, but that's about the best you'll get."
"Yeah, I'll think about it," Rhodes said, in a tone of voice that implied that he had already dismissed the idea.
"Or you could try convincing some younger heroes to join you. I know Firestar hung up her cape, but she might be willing to help out now, especially since we've already got Vance on the project." Unless Vance's presence would be more of a deterrent, given that he and Angela had broken off their engagement ages ago. That didn't change the fact that Firestar would be good at teaching; she had always been level headed, and her struggles with her own powers would give her a good perspective on what some of the Initiative's new recruits were going through.
"Vance wanted to try and bring in Silverclaw, but Gyrich wants someone more experienced for your replacement. I'll think about Firestar, though. I guess what I really want is someone else with the same kind of perspective that you and I've got."
"Unfortunately, I think most of the people with our level of experience already have commitments." There were more and more superheroes becoming free agents again, now that the Initiative was no longer mandatory, but people who had already opted out of it weren't likely to want to get involved with it once more.
"I don't mean that kind of experience. You, me, hell, even Vance, we've all screwed up. We know having powers is a dangerous responsibility that you can't take for granted, but we also know making a mistake isn't the end of the world."
The kids who had seen Michael Van Patrick accidentally killed at the hands of one of his own classmates probably grasped that superpowers were dangerous. They were probably less than convinced that disastrous mistakes with them weren't the end of the world. Hank wasn't entirely sure of that himself.
Real screw-ups followed you around for the rest of your life.
"You got into a fistfight with a friend," Hank pointed out. "I created Ultron."
"It was a little too one-sided to call it a fistfight," Rhodes admitted, sounding chagrined. "Ultron was an accident. I meant to knock the hell out of Tony. He was just trying to stop me from being an idiot, and when Tony has to stop me from being an idiot, well, that's a wake up call all on its own. And speaking of Tony, tell him he better not steal any more of my teammates."
"You could tell him yourself."
"I will, next time I see him. Figures he'd go out of town right when I show up for a visit."
"I don't think he wanted to go." That was an understatement, actually. Tony had begun to wear a distinctly hunted look any time anyone connected with the government contacted them. He was handling all of it, and better than Hank would have, but nobody bounced back quickly from the kind of burnout Tony had been headed for after Doom and company attacked. Even a week later, when the hearings in DC had started, there had still been circles under his eyes.
"He'll be back tomorrow, anyway," Hank went on. And thank God for it. If Hank had privately thought that Steve sulked like a twelve-year-old any time Tony was gone before, it was only because he hadn't seen the way Steve was sulking now. If he'd been away another few days, things would probably have devolved to the point where Steve started picking fights with Clint to blow off steam, and Clint didn't need the encouragement.
"Great. I'll call back tomorrow."
"And I'll call you if we need the backup."
There was a click as the line went dead, Rhodes hanging up, and Hank went back to staring at the monitor screen and mentally calculating the drop in body weight produced by a shift from five-foot-ten to two inches, and what percentage of an average-sized dose of any given medication would have to be shifted out of one's body in the process in order to avoid toxicity.
***
"You have no idea how silly I feel flying on a commercial airline," Carol said, as she snatched her final bag from the luggage carousel. She was wearing jeans and a tight black t-shirt, stuff that wouldn't be wrinkled or otherwise ruined by sitting on a plane for hours, and her long, blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
"Why did you, then?" Clint shouldered her other bag and elaborated, "They don't even let you take toothpaste anymore."
"Or mascara." Carol shook her head, and said, "But it's more trouble than it's worth to try and take a general aviation aircraft into New York these days. I could just fly in under my own power, but," she hefted the suitcase she was holding, "it would just look silly flying through the sky toting Samsonite. Plus, I’d be screwed if I dropped it."
Clint had been to LaGuardia airport dozens of times, and it never got any less crowded. It wasn't that hard to get through the crowd, though, as long as you didn't mind shoving past people.
"I can't believe you're actually meeting with a publicist," Clint snorted, as they reached the exit into the main concourse, where there were three times as many people as there had been in baggage claim. "You've been in LA too long."
"You lived in LA for three years," Carol said. "Or was it five?"
"Yeah, but I never had a publicist."
"How else was I supposed to promote my book?" Carol edged around a trio of businessmen who were standing smack in the middle of the path to the main door, talking loudly to one another.
"So you really are writing a sequel?" Clint asked.
"Yep. In this one, the star pirates have to stop a time-traveling warlord from taking over their solar system."
If the first book had been based on Carol's time with the Starjammers... "Let me guess," Clint stepped in front of Carol and swung the door open with his free hand, "the evil warlord has an even more evil son who's gonna get his."
Carol shrugged. "Oh, he doesn't die. He just loses both legs in an unfortunate teleporter accident."
"You're sure he doesn't get turned inside out?" If it happened in zero gravity, Marcus's insides could float all around the spaceship.
"This isn't a comedy. I'm not writing Galaxy Quest, Clint."
"Well, It's good that you're here," Clint told her, dropping the topic of the book before they actually had to talk about Marcus and Kang. "We are one seriously underpowered set of Avengers. As awesome as I am, I can't punch somebody through a wall." Too bad Jen was also staying in LA; having She-Hulk on their side would be damn useful. Clint could remember a time when everyone was always complaining that all the superheroes were in New York; these days, it seemed like people were everywhere but New York.
Carol smiled, and shifted her suitcase up onto her shoulder. "Tell me you brought a car, and we're not taking public transport back to the city."
"I came from Stark Tower. Of course I brought a car." Clint pulled the keys out of his pocket and flourished them. "Red BMW convertible. You should see Tony's garage. It's like a Bond movie."
"BMW?"
"Cap wouldn't let me take the Ferrari." Because he was still inwardly convinced that Clint was nineteen, and would crash it into a building or something. The only time Clint had ever wrecked a car, it had been entirely Jen's doing. Cap, on the other hand, had been responsible for the destruction of no less than half a dozen of SHIELD's flying cars, and his Harley had been rebuilt twice.
The BMW wasn't as sexy as a Ferrari, but it still accelerated like a race-car. Carol insisted on driving, which Clint didn't blame her for; anyone would jump at the chance to drive a bright red European convertible, even in New York traffic.
"So," Carol said awkwardly, after they had crossed into Manhattan and Clint had finished teasing her for writing a book that was basically about a thinly veiled version of herself, "how's Tony doing?"
Clint blinked, and turned to look at her. "You've talked to him on the phone, haven't you? Why are you asking me?"
Carol snorted. "You know how Tony is. Asking him would be a waste of time, since he'd never actually say anything if something was wrong. And I can’t very well ask Steve."
"Why not?" Clint returned his eyes to the street ahead of them, just in time to catch the sign marking the next turn. "You go left here," he added. These days, if you wanted to know something about Tony, Steve was probably the best person to ask.
"So, Captain America, how's your boyfriend doing? He was a total wreck the whole time you were dead, and I was wondering if he'd gotten over that yet?"
"Right." Clint said. "I see what you mean. I don't know, he seems fine to me." He shook his head. "It's still weird hearing people talk about that. I only saw it on TV. It feels kind of like it never really happened, but then someone will say something, or not say something, and it's like they're all having this secret conversation that doesn't include me."
"Just ride it out. Eventually enough stuff will have happened that we'll all have different things to glare at each other over and avoid talking about, and then you'll feel right at home again."
That was mockery, wasn't it? They were all far too casual about coming back from the dead, Clint reflected. He had died, and then been brought back... somehow. He still wasn't sure exactly what Wanda had done, but since it had resulted in Clint Barton still walking around breathing air, he wasn't complaining.
Only, she had never told him why, and dying and coming back, getting a second chance... it ought to mean something, right? He hadn't had much time to think about it before, with everything going to hell, and then seeing Cap on the news, alive once more, and then all the reunions in DC, but he had time now, and the more he thought about it, the less sense it made. Why had Wanda chosen to bring him back, and not Vision, or her kids, or anyone else? She'd brought Simon back because they were in love, and had had that link thing going on. Cap coming back had this feeling of rightness to it; he deserved it, and people needed him, and it wasn't as if Clint thought he didn't deserve his own second shot at life (because he certainly hadn't deserved to die), but he wasn't Captain America. He didn't have people who needed him.
Clint wasn't the kind of guy who sat around pondering the meaning of his own existence, but it was starting to bug him.
But nobody else seemed to wonder about why he had come back, or even how. They'd just accepted it.
"It won't really feel like home until we're back in the Avengers Mansion," he said. Not that Tony's penthouse wasn't nice, but it wasn't home.
Carol turned a corner so sharply that Clint had to brace himself to keep from being thrown into the door. "I love this steering system. You know, I never got the whole story on what happened with you. Jut that it had something to do with Wanda. I don't blame you for staying out of the whole Registration mess, but you could have dropped us a message to let us know you were alive."
"Sorry about that." And now it was Clint's turn to be awkward. "I was pretty confused those first couple of months back. The only part I really remember was trying to hunt down the Witch, to see if I could get her to tell me what she'd done. Why she killed me. Why she brought me back."
"I guess you never found her." Carol's voice was suddenly flat. "Or she'd be in the Raft or the Negative Zone right now."
"I...” Clint looked down at his hands, picking at the edge of one of the calluses on his palm. "She had amnesia. She didn't remember me, didn't even remember who she was."
"And you left her there?" Carol's voice rose half an octave. "That's great. What happens if she gets angry and decides to say 'no more people?' She's too powerful to leave out there now that she's a crazy sociopath."
"I don't think she even knows she has powers anymore," Clint protested. It sounded like the lame excuse it was, since Omega-level mutants who didn't know how to use their powers were probably more even dangerous than Omega level mutants who did.
He couldn't remember why he hadn't brought her in. He couldn't even remember leaving. He barely remembered anything after he'd arrived on in that little town, except for... the sex. He remembered that part.
He'd gone there intending to force answers out of Wanda, to bring her back to justice, and then he'd left empty-handed, after sleeping with her. He'd tried not to examine the memories too closely, because he wasn't sure he wanted to remember the reasoning behind that.
He wouldn't have blackmailed Wanda into having sex with him in exchange for letting her go, would he?
Even if he hadn't... she'd had amnesia, had no idea who he was, no knowledge of their shared past. There had been a million and one reasons why sleeping with her had been a bad idea, and Clint had known all of them, and Wanda hadn't. And that felt uncomfortably like taking advantage of her.
Worse, he couldn't remember why he'd slept with her.
"What the hell were you thinking, Hawkeye? She's powerful enough to reshape the world, and she's crazy. And she hates us!"
"I don't remember what I was thinking," Clint admitted, still picking at the callus. Even with gloves, archery toughened your hands up. "Hell, I don't even remember where I found her."
There was a moment of silence, and then Clint said, softly, "I don't really remember most of what I was doing."
Carol sighed. "I know coming back to life like that is confusing-"
"No," Clint interrupted. "It wasn't that." He hadn't been able to bring himself to mention any of this to Cap, because he knew exactly how disappointed in him Steve would be, and he couldn't talk about it with Jan, because, well, he just couldn't. And he'd be damned if he'd admit any of it to Hank, after the way he'd gone after him for hitting Jan. There was Sam, but he treated Clint like he was Cap's stupid younger brother half the time. And Clint had only decided a week ago that he wasn't going to hold Tony's recent lapse into Big Brother is Watching insanity and inexplicable ability to turn Cap gay against him anymore. Mostly because the Big Brother thing had really been the government's fault, and, when he really thought about it, Cap had always been kind of gay.
Carol had lost memories before, and had done things she was less than proud of. And she was kind of like a guy, which somehow made the idea of talking about this less intimidating.
"I was so angry at her," he said, trying to explain, but not sure he could, since he didn’t really understand it himself. "For what she did to us, for what she did to me. I wanted her to explain. She must have gone crazy; she couldn't have done all of that if she wasn't crazy. I thought maybe I could... I don't know. Somebody needed to help her."
"No," Carol snapped, glaring at the cars ahead of them. "Somebody needed to stop her. She's a menace. Look what she did to us, to Scott, to Vision, to her own brother. You don't come back from that kind of crazy. That's supervillain crazy"
"Two months ago, that's what we all thought about Tony," Clint pointed out. You didn't just write your friends off, not if there was still a chance that there was anything left of them. "We've gone crazy or gone to the dark side before, some of us. Hank got so bad he had to be kicked off the team, and he ended up in jail." If Hank could fix things enough that Jan could forgive him, then there had to be something Clint could do to make up for this. There had to be. If he'd actually done anything. "Natasha started out working for the bad guys. There's that time Rhodey flipped out and had to be taken down by Tony. And, hell, there's you and Tony, with the drinking, both of you came back from that."
Carol stared fixedly at the back of the Lexus SUV in front of them, not looking at him. "What time with Rhodey? I've never heard about that."
"That's the only other time I was ever mad at the Witch." Clint shrugged slightly. "I don't know the whole story, she didn’t tell me until after everything was over. Apparently there was a while there, right after Tony stopped drinking, when Rhodey was having some kind of issues. Wanda saw him haul off and slug Tony once."
"So," Carol said. "Who hasn't wanted to do that occasionally? I threw him through the wing of an airliner once."
"Yeah, but since he's still alive, I'm guessing he was in the armor. That time he wasn't, and Rhodey was. And then he went on some kind of rampage, and Tony had to put on some suit of armor he'd made out of scrap metal in our lab and chase him down. But he's been great for years, and Hank's mostly sane now, so maybe-"
"Why have I never heard about this?" She sighed, shaking her head. "Did you do anything about it? Does anyone other than you, Wanda, and Tony even know?"
"By the time I found out, the whole thing was over," Clint said, feeling thoroughly on the defensive now. "That's why I was mad, because Wanda didn't tell me about it until it was too late to do anything."
"But did you tell anyone?" she pressed. "When people like us lose it, it's a big deal. You have to tell someone. The more people who know, the better the chance that if it happens again, somebody will step in before anyone gets hurt. If nothing else, you should have told Steve. If any of us had known about Wanda..."
"I slept with her. With Wanda," Clint blurted out. "And then I let her go."
"Okay, that--" she broke off, eyes widening. "You what?"
"It's funny. I meant to bring her back, and then I found her, and we had sex, and then I was on a plane headed back here. I was in the Heathrow airport when I saw the press conference you all held after you took down the Mandarin and Red Skull." He shrugged, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "I think maybe I took advantage of her somehow, like maybe we made some kind of trade." And what a way to prove himself worthy of that second shot at life; he hadn't deserved to die, but men who took advantage of women were scum.
Carol's hand tightened on the wheel. "You think you made some kind of trade? How can you think she let you fuck her in return for not bringing her it to face justice? You either did or you didn't."
Clint shrugged, desperately uncomfortable. "I don't know if I did. I don't remember. I don't remember deciding to do it, or deciding to come back. I don't even remember the sex all that well. It's kind of a blur."
"What do you mean, you don't remember? Were you drinking?"
Things would have made more sense if he had been, but there had been no alcohol involved. "No." Clint shook his head. "I just don't remember. The whole thing's kind of like a dream, like it happened to somebody else."
Carol frowned. "That almost sounds like mind-control, but even if she was faking the amnesia, Wanda's powers never worked like that." She hesitated, then shook her head. "Of course, she can manipulate reality on a global scale now, so God knows what she can and can't do."
"It can't be mind control," Clint protested. He wished it were. It would be an awfully convenient explanation for the memory loss, and it would mean that it wasn't his fault. "She didn't even know she had powers."
"Clint, does any of this sound like something you would do?"
He didn't want to think so, but... "I almost ended up working for the Russians just because Natasha slept with me."
Carol's lips twitched. "You were nineteen. Would you be that stupid now?"
"Well, no, but-"
"Just because she doesn't remember that she has powers doesn't mean she isn't using them unconsciously. People don't just lose all their memories, not in real life, not unless there's something they need to forget. Maybe she recognized you on some level, and because she didn't want to remember, she just, I don't know, made you go away."
"After sexing me up."
"Maybe she was lonely. Maybe some part of her wanted to reconnect with her past. Maybe she just wasn't done screwing with you, literally."
Maybe she had put some kind of whammy on him. As he'd said to Carol, the whole thing was like trying to remember a dream. Several weeks worth of his life were just gone.
"Honestly?" Carol said softly, "Normally, if a guy told me something like this, I'd call him a prick and kick him out of the car, but what you just described sounds an awful lot like what happened with Marcus." She grimaced. "I can't remember why I decided to go with him, I just know that I didn't really want to. Like one of those dreams where you don't want to do something, but you're watching yourself do it anyway."
It hadn't been like that, for Clint. Not exactly. There hadn't been any disgust or fear; he'd always thought that Wanda was attractive, always liked her. It was why her betrayal had hurt so badly. Mostly, there had just been a feeling of confusion over why he was there, why he was doing what he was doing. Like Carol said, it had been like watching himself from a distance, while someone else controlled his body.
"That's... it was a little like that, yeah."
Carol made a little half-laughing sound, either disgusted or amused or both. Clint couldn't tell which. "Then I can promise you, you didn't take advantage of her. If she put the whammy on you, even subconsciously, then she must have wanted it."
"Oh." He wasn't sure if that made things better, or much, much worse.
***
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonRated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan.
Warnings: No much, really. Some swearing and violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: The sequel to Readjustment. Things are finally settling down, and the Avengers are settling in. It's time for disaster to strike again.
X-posted to Marvel Slash.
And again, our thanks to
tavella for the great beta job.Tony's punch glanced off Steve's shoulder as Steve twisted his upper body back out of the way, and then Steve grabbed him by the arm and swept his foot around to knock Tony's legs out from under him.
Tony hit the mat hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. Then he simply lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling and gasping in air. The workout room in the Avengers Tower had high, white, very basic ceilings, nothing like the decorative plasterwork the Mansion had had.
"You're pulling your punches," Steve informed him. He crouched down beside Tony, hands resting loosely on his knees. "I shouldn't be able to do that so easily."
"I am not pulling my punches." Tony pushed himself up onto his elbows, glaring at Steve, who was looking down at him with an air of exasperated superiority.
"You're pulling your punches," Steve returned. "I can always tell when you are."
Not only had Tony not pulled that punch, he hadn't pulled any of the blows Steve had been shrugging off throughout this sparring session. It was possible that he was a little rusty, thanks to spending the past month letting his cracked ribs heal, but he was giving it everything he had, even though part of him winced every time he threw a punch at Steve. "Force equals mass times acceleration, and you have about forty pounds more mass than I do."
Steve raised his eyebrows. "Your point?"
"I have to hit you harder to knock you down than you have to in order to knock me down. It's basic physics."
Steve shook his head, smiling, and sat down on the mat beside Tony. "Would it help if I brought you coffee?" he asked.
"Maybe," Tony said, offering Steve a smile of his own. Yes, coffee would be good. "I should take a shower first, though. I have to leave in an hour." The process of dismantling the SHRA and revamping the Initiative had not gone as smoothly as they might have hoped; the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security had dragged their heels every step of the way, and Henry Gyrich had requested that Tony come to DC to light a fire under those officials who were reluctant to give up the notion of a government-controlled superhuman army.
At least the deploying of teenagers into combat situations had stopped; Gyrich and Rhodey's team had seen to that. Gyrich could sense which way the political winds were blowing, and he'd always known how to follow political trends.
"Can't you be a little late?" Steve asked, taking Tony by the wrist and pulling him up into a sitting position. He kept hold of Tony’s wrist for a moment longer, squeezing it lightly. "A quinjet can get you to DC in twenty minutes."
"And I have a nine o' clock meeting with Jack Kooning in an hour and a half."
Steve frowned. "I can't believe he's still pushing to keep the government-created superhero project. You'd think at this point he have given up on it."
"He tried to recruit Maya to investigate using Extremis to create super soldiers. Since it has a ninety percent fatality rate and has caused insanity in fifty percent of surviving test subjects, I made her tell him no." Actually, he'd begged her. It had been during those dark, empty weeks when Steve had been gone, and Kooning had wanted to use an Extremis-enhanced super soldier to replace him.
"Please tell me you didn't know about the ninety percent fatality rate when you shot yourself up with it."
"Okay," Tony said. "I won't." It wasn't as if he'd had much of a choice, but Steve was stubbornly clinging to his dislike of the Extremis. "I'll be gone for three days," he added. "Don't let Clint destroy the tower." He didn't mention that it would be the longest span of time they would be apart since Steve had come back. He wasn't that pathetic.
"I'd worry more about Hank destroying your lab." Steve grinned at him, then reached out and placed his free hand on the side of Tony's face, regarding him silently for a moment. "The cat will miss you," he said finally. "You're the one he likes best."
Tony turned his face into Steve's hand, closing his eyes. He wasn't looking forward to three nights spent alone. "I don't know why it keeps getting up on our bed," he said. "It's supposed to be Jarvis's." The cat probably kept jumping up onto the bed because Tony had invited it up there, one night during the SHRA hearings when Steve had been far away in Washington and Tony had been unable to sleep. However, there was no way he was going to admit that, particularly not to Steve, who seemed to be involved in some endless, petty war with the cat, which had begun sleeping in his shield and gnawing on its leather straps.
"I'll miss you, too." Tony's eyes were still closed, but he could hear the smile in Steve's voice. Steve leaned in and kissed him briefly, then pulled back, adding, "When you get back, we'll do this again, and I'll expect an actual challenge."
Monitor duty had never been Hank's favorite part of being an Avenger, but since he was off the active duty list for the foreseeable future (or at least, until he could find a way to balance chemicals in the bloodstream while shrinking, which was theoretically possible but not something he was entirely prepared to risk death-by-mood-stabilizer-overdose to test), he'd decided that there was no time like the present to get used to it, and had volunteered to handle communications while Tony was out of town.
It wasn't difficult work, by any means. It was just, as a rule, deeply boring. On the other hand, boring meant that nobody in New York was trying to blow anything up, which was always a plus.
And it was better than being grilled by the government and the media. Thank God they'd only needed Tony this time; Hank had made more than enough public, detailed confessions of all his sins for one lifetime. Trials, Avengers' court-martials, congressional hearings -- they were all the same, really, exercises in trying to justify yourself to groups of people who were all silently judging you.
The phone rang shrilly, and Hank steeled himself before picking it up -- there had been three calls this morning from various Daily Bugle reporters, all wanting an exclusive interview with the Avengers, all of which he'd turned down, since Steve refused to talk to any Bugle reporter other than Ben Urich.
"Avengers Tower," he said, already preparing for round four of the "no, we will not be giving any interviews until all of the libel suits have been settled," argument.
"Pym, I cannot believe you left me alone with the teenagers to play secretary." James Rhodes' voice was sharp and clear, but with the faint electronic hum in the background that meant he was using the War Machine armor's headset and mike rather than a telephone.
"I'm not playing secretary," Hank said, not at all defensively. "I'm monitoring communications."
"Fine. You're not playing secretary. Look, that's not why I called. Don't think I'm happy about it, but it's not why I called. I'm in New York for the next couple of days, trying to call in favors and draft somebody to be your replacement, and I wanted to give you guys a heads-up in case you needed back up for anything while I'm in town."
"That's good to hear," Hank told him. "With Tony in DC, we've got no firepower." They were going to have to do something about that eventually. They currently had two hand-to-hand specialists (Sam could fly, but he was a hand-to-hand fighter when you got right down to it), one archer, and Jan, whose stingers were effective, but who still wasn't really a powerhouse. Until Jan could master her new growing powers, Tony was their only big gun.
None of them had invulnerability or super-strength, either, which hadn't been an issue yet, but had the potential to be.
"Better Tony than me. I get enough anti-superhero shit on a daily basis as it is."
"Ah." Hank said. "I guess the protestors haven't gone home, then?" During his month-long stint at Camp Hammond, the angry men and women with "mutie go home" signs had been a semi-permanent fixture outside the base's front gate.
Rhodes snorted. "What do you think? Anyway, you have any idea who I can blackmail into replacing you? I mean, I know you're trying to fix things with your ex, but come on, you're leaving me in the lurch here."
Yes, he was, and he even felt guilty about it, if only slightly, but, "I had to get out. I had to." It was more than the opportunity to be an Avenger again, more than a second, well, fourth, shot at things with Jan. "It was only a matter of time before Gyrich and Dr. Blitzschlag would have had me cloning a superhero army for them, and I really don't want to become the government's better-looking answer to Armin Zola." Blitzschlag had made Hank's skin crawl, with his wild-eyed glee over the prospect of working with the man who'd created Ultron and cloned (so horribly unsuccessfully) a god. He'd been disturbingly comfortable with the idea of using people as government science experiments, and Hank strongly suspected that he was a former Nazi.
"Everything's changed since Tony and Reed and the rest of you blew the lid off everything. Blitzschlag is out, and there's an oversight committee looking into Van Patrick's death. I think his family is going to sue."
They'd have to get in a very long line first. Hank resisted the temptation to point out that that wasn't exactly an incentive to come back, letting Rhodes continue uninterrupted.
"Look, I'm desperate here. I spend half the day reminding Gauntlet that he's not allowed to call seventeen-year-olds pussies, and that Vance is going to telekinetically throw him through a wall if he calls the New Warriors baby-killers one more time, and the other half explaining to everyone who will listen why one horrific training accident shouldn't be allowed to shut down the program."
"At least you don't have to keep it classified anymore." Making the students cover up the death of one of their classmates had been one more thing Hank had hated having to do.
"Yeah, thanks for that, by the way." Rhodes' voice was not quite sarcastic, but only by a small margin. "You did hear the part where I said they're suing us?"
"I wish Scott Lang were still around. He would have been great at this." It wasn't just that Scott had been a father himself; he'd been legitimately good with children, and had had an enviable ability to put complex concepts into simple terms without sounding as if he was talking down to people. Hank himself had never quite mastered that. "You could try calling Ben Grimm for advice," he suggested. "He's got experience with kids. I'd suggest the X-Men, but most of them won't touch the Initiative with a ten foot pole." He'd had to promise to run a battery of DNA tests on active and deactivated X-genes in order to get Hank McCoy to bring in an empath and set up extra training for Trauma, when the trainee's fear-projection powers had gotten out of control. "Scott Summers might be willing to give you a lesson plan, but that's about the best you'll get."
"Yeah, I'll think about it," Rhodes said, in a tone of voice that implied that he had already dismissed the idea.
"Or you could try convincing some younger heroes to join you. I know Firestar hung up her cape, but she might be willing to help out now, especially since we've already got Vance on the project." Unless Vance's presence would be more of a deterrent, given that he and Angela had broken off their engagement ages ago. That didn't change the fact that Firestar would be good at teaching; she had always been level headed, and her struggles with her own powers would give her a good perspective on what some of the Initiative's new recruits were going through.
"Vance wanted to try and bring in Silverclaw, but Gyrich wants someone more experienced for your replacement. I'll think about Firestar, though. I guess what I really want is someone else with the same kind of perspective that you and I've got."
"Unfortunately, I think most of the people with our level of experience already have commitments." There were more and more superheroes becoming free agents again, now that the Initiative was no longer mandatory, but people who had already opted out of it weren't likely to want to get involved with it once more.
"I don't mean that kind of experience. You, me, hell, even Vance, we've all screwed up. We know having powers is a dangerous responsibility that you can't take for granted, but we also know making a mistake isn't the end of the world."
The kids who had seen Michael Van Patrick accidentally killed at the hands of one of his own classmates probably grasped that superpowers were dangerous. They were probably less than convinced that disastrous mistakes with them weren't the end of the world. Hank wasn't entirely sure of that himself.
Real screw-ups followed you around for the rest of your life.
"You got into a fistfight with a friend," Hank pointed out. "I created Ultron."
"It was a little too one-sided to call it a fistfight," Rhodes admitted, sounding chagrined. "Ultron was an accident. I meant to knock the hell out of Tony. He was just trying to stop me from being an idiot, and when Tony has to stop me from being an idiot, well, that's a wake up call all on its own. And speaking of Tony, tell him he better not steal any more of my teammates."
"You could tell him yourself."
"I will, next time I see him. Figures he'd go out of town right when I show up for a visit."
"I don't think he wanted to go." That was an understatement, actually. Tony had begun to wear a distinctly hunted look any time anyone connected with the government contacted them. He was handling all of it, and better than Hank would have, but nobody bounced back quickly from the kind of burnout Tony had been headed for after Doom and company attacked. Even a week later, when the hearings in DC had started, there had still been circles under his eyes.
"He'll be back tomorrow, anyway," Hank went on. And thank God for it. If Hank had privately thought that Steve sulked like a twelve-year-old any time Tony was gone before, it was only because he hadn't seen the way Steve was sulking now. If he'd been away another few days, things would probably have devolved to the point where Steve started picking fights with Clint to blow off steam, and Clint didn't need the encouragement.
"Great. I'll call back tomorrow."
"And I'll call you if we need the backup."
There was a click as the line went dead, Rhodes hanging up, and Hank went back to staring at the monitor screen and mentally calculating the drop in body weight produced by a shift from five-foot-ten to two inches, and what percentage of an average-sized dose of any given medication would have to be shifted out of one's body in the process in order to avoid toxicity.
"You have no idea how silly I feel flying on a commercial airline," Carol said, as she snatched her final bag from the luggage carousel. She was wearing jeans and a tight black t-shirt, stuff that wouldn't be wrinkled or otherwise ruined by sitting on a plane for hours, and her long, blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
"Why did you, then?" Clint shouldered her other bag and elaborated, "They don't even let you take toothpaste anymore."
"Or mascara." Carol shook her head, and said, "But it's more trouble than it's worth to try and take a general aviation aircraft into New York these days. I could just fly in under my own power, but," she hefted the suitcase she was holding, "it would just look silly flying through the sky toting Samsonite. Plus, I’d be screwed if I dropped it."
Clint had been to LaGuardia airport dozens of times, and it never got any less crowded. It wasn't that hard to get through the crowd, though, as long as you didn't mind shoving past people.
"I can't believe you're actually meeting with a publicist," Clint snorted, as they reached the exit into the main concourse, where there were three times as many people as there had been in baggage claim. "You've been in LA too long."
"You lived in LA for three years," Carol said. "Or was it five?"
"Yeah, but I never had a publicist."
"How else was I supposed to promote my book?" Carol edged around a trio of businessmen who were standing smack in the middle of the path to the main door, talking loudly to one another.
"So you really are writing a sequel?" Clint asked.
"Yep. In this one, the star pirates have to stop a time-traveling warlord from taking over their solar system."
If the first book had been based on Carol's time with the Starjammers... "Let me guess," Clint stepped in front of Carol and swung the door open with his free hand, "the evil warlord has an even more evil son who's gonna get his."
Carol shrugged. "Oh, he doesn't die. He just loses both legs in an unfortunate teleporter accident."
"You're sure he doesn't get turned inside out?" If it happened in zero gravity, Marcus's insides could float all around the spaceship.
"This isn't a comedy. I'm not writing Galaxy Quest, Clint."
"Well, It's good that you're here," Clint told her, dropping the topic of the book before they actually had to talk about Marcus and Kang. "We are one seriously underpowered set of Avengers. As awesome as I am, I can't punch somebody through a wall." Too bad Jen was also staying in LA; having She-Hulk on their side would be damn useful. Clint could remember a time when everyone was always complaining that all the superheroes were in New York; these days, it seemed like people were everywhere but New York.
Carol smiled, and shifted her suitcase up onto her shoulder. "Tell me you brought a car, and we're not taking public transport back to the city."
"I came from Stark Tower. Of course I brought a car." Clint pulled the keys out of his pocket and flourished them. "Red BMW convertible. You should see Tony's garage. It's like a Bond movie."
"BMW?"
"Cap wouldn't let me take the Ferrari." Because he was still inwardly convinced that Clint was nineteen, and would crash it into a building or something. The only time Clint had ever wrecked a car, it had been entirely Jen's doing. Cap, on the other hand, had been responsible for the destruction of no less than half a dozen of SHIELD's flying cars, and his Harley had been rebuilt twice.
The BMW wasn't as sexy as a Ferrari, but it still accelerated like a race-car. Carol insisted on driving, which Clint didn't blame her for; anyone would jump at the chance to drive a bright red European convertible, even in New York traffic.
"So," Carol said awkwardly, after they had crossed into Manhattan and Clint had finished teasing her for writing a book that was basically about a thinly veiled version of herself, "how's Tony doing?"
Clint blinked, and turned to look at her. "You've talked to him on the phone, haven't you? Why are you asking me?"
Carol snorted. "You know how Tony is. Asking him would be a waste of time, since he'd never actually say anything if something was wrong. And I can’t very well ask Steve."
"Why not?" Clint returned his eyes to the street ahead of them, just in time to catch the sign marking the next turn. "You go left here," he added. These days, if you wanted to know something about Tony, Steve was probably the best person to ask.
"So, Captain America, how's your boyfriend doing? He was a total wreck the whole time you were dead, and I was wondering if he'd gotten over that yet?"
"Right." Clint said. "I see what you mean. I don't know, he seems fine to me." He shook his head. "It's still weird hearing people talk about that. I only saw it on TV. It feels kind of like it never really happened, but then someone will say something, or not say something, and it's like they're all having this secret conversation that doesn't include me."
"Just ride it out. Eventually enough stuff will have happened that we'll all have different things to glare at each other over and avoid talking about, and then you'll feel right at home again."
That was mockery, wasn't it? They were all far too casual about coming back from the dead, Clint reflected. He had died, and then been brought back... somehow. He still wasn't sure exactly what Wanda had done, but since it had resulted in Clint Barton still walking around breathing air, he wasn't complaining.
Only, she had never told him why, and dying and coming back, getting a second chance... it ought to mean something, right? He hadn't had much time to think about it before, with everything going to hell, and then seeing Cap on the news, alive once more, and then all the reunions in DC, but he had time now, and the more he thought about it, the less sense it made. Why had Wanda chosen to bring him back, and not Vision, or her kids, or anyone else? She'd brought Simon back because they were in love, and had had that link thing going on. Cap coming back had this feeling of rightness to it; he deserved it, and people needed him, and it wasn't as if Clint thought he didn't deserve his own second shot at life (because he certainly hadn't deserved to die), but he wasn't Captain America. He didn't have people who needed him.
Clint wasn't the kind of guy who sat around pondering the meaning of his own existence, but it was starting to bug him.
But nobody else seemed to wonder about why he had come back, or even how. They'd just accepted it.
"It won't really feel like home until we're back in the Avengers Mansion," he said. Not that Tony's penthouse wasn't nice, but it wasn't home.
Carol turned a corner so sharply that Clint had to brace himself to keep from being thrown into the door. "I love this steering system. You know, I never got the whole story on what happened with you. Jut that it had something to do with Wanda. I don't blame you for staying out of the whole Registration mess, but you could have dropped us a message to let us know you were alive."
"Sorry about that." And now it was Clint's turn to be awkward. "I was pretty confused those first couple of months back. The only part I really remember was trying to hunt down the Witch, to see if I could get her to tell me what she'd done. Why she killed me. Why she brought me back."
"I guess you never found her." Carol's voice was suddenly flat. "Or she'd be in the Raft or the Negative Zone right now."
"I...” Clint looked down at his hands, picking at the edge of one of the calluses on his palm. "She had amnesia. She didn't remember me, didn't even remember who she was."
"And you left her there?" Carol's voice rose half an octave. "That's great. What happens if she gets angry and decides to say 'no more people?' She's too powerful to leave out there now that she's a crazy sociopath."
"I don't think she even knows she has powers anymore," Clint protested. It sounded like the lame excuse it was, since Omega-level mutants who didn't know how to use their powers were probably more even dangerous than Omega level mutants who did.
He couldn't remember why he hadn't brought her in. He couldn't even remember leaving. He barely remembered anything after he'd arrived on in that little town, except for... the sex. He remembered that part.
He'd gone there intending to force answers out of Wanda, to bring her back to justice, and then he'd left empty-handed, after sleeping with her. He'd tried not to examine the memories too closely, because he wasn't sure he wanted to remember the reasoning behind that.
He wouldn't have blackmailed Wanda into having sex with him in exchange for letting her go, would he?
Even if he hadn't... she'd had amnesia, had no idea who he was, no knowledge of their shared past. There had been a million and one reasons why sleeping with her had been a bad idea, and Clint had known all of them, and Wanda hadn't. And that felt uncomfortably like taking advantage of her.
Worse, he couldn't remember why he'd slept with her.
"What the hell were you thinking, Hawkeye? She's powerful enough to reshape the world, and she's crazy. And she hates us!"
"I don't remember what I was thinking," Clint admitted, still picking at the callus. Even with gloves, archery toughened your hands up. "Hell, I don't even remember where I found her."
There was a moment of silence, and then Clint said, softly, "I don't really remember most of what I was doing."
Carol sighed. "I know coming back to life like that is confusing-"
"No," Clint interrupted. "It wasn't that." He hadn't been able to bring himself to mention any of this to Cap, because he knew exactly how disappointed in him Steve would be, and he couldn't talk about it with Jan, because, well, he just couldn't. And he'd be damned if he'd admit any of it to Hank, after the way he'd gone after him for hitting Jan. There was Sam, but he treated Clint like he was Cap's stupid younger brother half the time. And Clint had only decided a week ago that he wasn't going to hold Tony's recent lapse into Big Brother is Watching insanity and inexplicable ability to turn Cap gay against him anymore. Mostly because the Big Brother thing had really been the government's fault, and, when he really thought about it, Cap had always been kind of gay.
Carol had lost memories before, and had done things she was less than proud of. And she was kind of like a guy, which somehow made the idea of talking about this less intimidating.
"I was so angry at her," he said, trying to explain, but not sure he could, since he didn’t really understand it himself. "For what she did to us, for what she did to me. I wanted her to explain. She must have gone crazy; she couldn't have done all of that if she wasn't crazy. I thought maybe I could... I don't know. Somebody needed to help her."
"No," Carol snapped, glaring at the cars ahead of them. "Somebody needed to stop her. She's a menace. Look what she did to us, to Scott, to Vision, to her own brother. You don't come back from that kind of crazy. That's supervillain crazy"
"Two months ago, that's what we all thought about Tony," Clint pointed out. You didn't just write your friends off, not if there was still a chance that there was anything left of them. "We've gone crazy or gone to the dark side before, some of us. Hank got so bad he had to be kicked off the team, and he ended up in jail." If Hank could fix things enough that Jan could forgive him, then there had to be something Clint could do to make up for this. There had to be. If he'd actually done anything. "Natasha started out working for the bad guys. There's that time Rhodey flipped out and had to be taken down by Tony. And, hell, there's you and Tony, with the drinking, both of you came back from that."
Carol stared fixedly at the back of the Lexus SUV in front of them, not looking at him. "What time with Rhodey? I've never heard about that."
"That's the only other time I was ever mad at the Witch." Clint shrugged slightly. "I don't know the whole story, she didn’t tell me until after everything was over. Apparently there was a while there, right after Tony stopped drinking, when Rhodey was having some kind of issues. Wanda saw him haul off and slug Tony once."
"So," Carol said. "Who hasn't wanted to do that occasionally? I threw him through the wing of an airliner once."
"Yeah, but since he's still alive, I'm guessing he was in the armor. That time he wasn't, and Rhodey was. And then he went on some kind of rampage, and Tony had to put on some suit of armor he'd made out of scrap metal in our lab and chase him down. But he's been great for years, and Hank's mostly sane now, so maybe-"
"Why have I never heard about this?" She sighed, shaking her head. "Did you do anything about it? Does anyone other than you, Wanda, and Tony even know?"
"By the time I found out, the whole thing was over," Clint said, feeling thoroughly on the defensive now. "That's why I was mad, because Wanda didn't tell me about it until it was too late to do anything."
"But did you tell anyone?" she pressed. "When people like us lose it, it's a big deal. You have to tell someone. The more people who know, the better the chance that if it happens again, somebody will step in before anyone gets hurt. If nothing else, you should have told Steve. If any of us had known about Wanda..."
"I slept with her. With Wanda," Clint blurted out. "And then I let her go."
"Okay, that--" she broke off, eyes widening. "You what?"
"It's funny. I meant to bring her back, and then I found her, and we had sex, and then I was on a plane headed back here. I was in the Heathrow airport when I saw the press conference you all held after you took down the Mandarin and Red Skull." He shrugged, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "I think maybe I took advantage of her somehow, like maybe we made some kind of trade." And what a way to prove himself worthy of that second shot at life; he hadn't deserved to die, but men who took advantage of women were scum.
Carol's hand tightened on the wheel. "You think you made some kind of trade? How can you think she let you fuck her in return for not bringing her it to face justice? You either did or you didn't."
Clint shrugged, desperately uncomfortable. "I don't know if I did. I don't remember. I don't remember deciding to do it, or deciding to come back. I don't even remember the sex all that well. It's kind of a blur."
"What do you mean, you don't remember? Were you drinking?"
Things would have made more sense if he had been, but there had been no alcohol involved. "No." Clint shook his head. "I just don't remember. The whole thing's kind of like a dream, like it happened to somebody else."
Carol frowned. "That almost sounds like mind-control, but even if she was faking the amnesia, Wanda's powers never worked like that." She hesitated, then shook her head. "Of course, she can manipulate reality on a global scale now, so God knows what she can and can't do."
"It can't be mind control," Clint protested. He wished it were. It would be an awfully convenient explanation for the memory loss, and it would mean that it wasn't his fault. "She didn't even know she had powers."
"Clint, does any of this sound like something you would do?"
He didn't want to think so, but... "I almost ended up working for the Russians just because Natasha slept with me."
Carol's lips twitched. "You were nineteen. Would you be that stupid now?"
"Well, no, but-"
"Just because she doesn't remember that she has powers doesn't mean she isn't using them unconsciously. People don't just lose all their memories, not in real life, not unless there's something they need to forget. Maybe she recognized you on some level, and because she didn't want to remember, she just, I don't know, made you go away."
"After sexing me up."
"Maybe she was lonely. Maybe some part of her wanted to reconnect with her past. Maybe she just wasn't done screwing with you, literally."
Maybe she had put some kind of whammy on him. As he'd said to Carol, the whole thing was like trying to remember a dream. Several weeks worth of his life were just gone.
"Honestly?" Carol said softly, "Normally, if a guy told me something like this, I'd call him a prick and kick him out of the car, but what you just described sounds an awful lot like what happened with Marcus." She grimaced. "I can't remember why I decided to go with him, I just know that I didn't really want to. Like one of those dreams where you don't want to do something, but you're watching yourself do it anyway."
It hadn't been like that, for Clint. Not exactly. There hadn't been any disgust or fear; he'd always thought that Wanda was attractive, always liked her. It was why her betrayal had hurt so badly. Mostly, there had just been a feeling of confusion over why he was there, why he was doing what he was doing. Like Carol said, it had been like watching himself from a distance, while someone else controlled his body.
"That's... it was a little like that, yeah."
Carol made a little half-laughing sound, either disgusted or amused or both. Clint couldn't tell which. "Then I can promise you, you didn't take advantage of her. If she put the whammy on you, even subconsciously, then she must have wanted it."
"Oh." He wasn't sure if that made things better, or much, much worse.
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven
no subject
Thanks! We... may be mentioning that later on ^_^.
Just thinking, Peter's a teacher, he is experienced, wellrounded and he's a scientist.
*Nods* Plus, he started being a superhero when he was a teenager, so he's got some perspective on what it's like for those kids. But Peter, like Daredevil, is one of those heroes who'd be really hard to take out of New York (I know Matt was in LA for a while while he was dating Natasha, but that whole thing ended poorly).
no subject
Yep, just ignore me, my mind just overthinks things when I'm reading a good fic ;-)
Let's say Peter got injured in some way, he's out of bed, but the doctor's tell him he can't do any actual big fights for at least a month or so if he wants to recover.
But being Peter, if he actually stayed in NY, there's no way he'd actually stick to the doctor's orders for that long.
Hence... working at the Initiative for a while, Peter gets to feel useful, and Camp Hammond gets someone with the skills, experience and actual teaching credentials to do the job.
no subject
I ought to get myself a Peeter icon one of these days. Also a Thor one.
no subject
No reason a fic like that would have to be about the kids, instead of being all about the adults and how they deal with the camp and being teachers.