Dire Miscalculations
Tony had a lot of bad habits; bad habit number one was trying to solve his problems via sex. It used to be sex and alcohol but being stuck underground, literally, with a small group of people made drinking significantly less fun. Sex, given that people rarely recognized him or only thought he looked like himself, was a much easier and more fun way to spend his nights and for a little while he could forget about all the shit that just happened and relax some. The only problem he had to deal with was the annoying tendency for alphas to try and get him to submit to them, which, no. His entire life someone had been trying to control him via Commands and after the disaster that was Afghanistan he had developed something of a phobic reaction to it. He strongly disliked the idea that instead of treating him like a human being people thought it was okay to try and make him into their marionette with little to no regard to his own feelings on the subject. They could have just asked and he’d probably be happy to go along with their plans but no, instead people decided they’d rather strip him of his basic human rights in order to get laid. It took just about everything he had to no try and rip those people’s throats out with his teeth.
The only alphas he had had good experiences with consistently were Rhodey and Pepper, neither ever tried to Command him to do anything, even when it would make their lives easier. They treated him like an equal and he paid them the same respect, much to everyone’s surprise. He was well known for being an absolute shameless asshole, and both Pepper and Rhodey were well known for not putting up with anyone’s shit. People seemed to expect them to hate each other but the only reason they acted the way they did was because they were consistently treated like shit for things they couldn’t help. Tony was an omega, Pepper a woman, and Rhodey was a black man. None of them took too kindly for being seen as only those things and when they had all come across each other they had gotten along great. Rhodey was Tony’s oldest and arguably only friend, though he did count Pepper, but she was also paid to stick around. He did trust her implicitly though and that was not something he handed out lightly, there were things he trusted Pepper with that he didn’t even trust Rhodey with, like his company. In Rhodey’s defence that was because he knew nothing about business whereas Pepper was more capable than him and it was his business.
He sat on a stool on the far end of the bar, way out of the way from where he usually sat, but he really couldn’t stand being the centre of attention anymore. It was difficult to go from a space where there was mutual respect, community, and team work to an area where he was so blatantly subhuman. He had no idea how people who were significantly less privileged than him handled it. Even Loki, whom he hated with a passion at the moment, treated him with more respect than half the patrons here and the same was true in the reverse and they spent half their time trying to verbally murder each other. “You’re terrible at conspicuous, even when you aren’t trying to grab the attention of everyone in the room you still draw their attention.” He turns to find Loki standing to his left with a split lip and a gash across his nose. There was probably more damage but it looked like he had done a good job covering the bruises with makeup.
“Well you’re not dead, that makes at least one of us,” he mumbles. He could have done without Loki but he doesn’t mention that because there was no need for needless cruelty, at least at the moment.
Loki nods, “two of us actually, Nat is with us. By ‘us’ I mean I couldn’t manage to shake my pesky bother,” he says even though they both know he probably didn’t try that hard.
Tony shrugs, he’s met Thor a few times and aside from being annoyingly attentive to Loki he didn’t seem like an awful person. Besides, they had a number of precautions in place in case they did end up in bad company so if worst came to worst they were covered. “Let’s go then,” he says and downs the rest of his drink. He had better things to do that get hit on by gross people.
Loki remains suspiciously quiet on the way back to the parking lot, which probably didn’t bode well but he ignores it for now. “By the way we’re in your car, we stole one to get this far,” Loki tells him as they come up the vehicle with two extra people in it. He sighs but accepts it because he’s the one driving, which was all he really needed out of the situation.
They get in and Tony looks in the rear view mirror to find Natasha giving him an irritated look, “what happened?” they ask in sync. They both remain silent so Tony decides to go first, “no sign of Clint, Fitzsimmons escaped and I expect they are capable enough to get back here. I have no idea what exactly prompted the takeover but it appears that S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA are one in the same and HYDRA decided yesterday was a good over throw day.”
Natasha nods but doesn’t say anything right away, which is bad, “so you haven’t heard anything at all from Clint?” she asks. The two were best friends and the two that started their ragtag group of freaks, if he lost Clint he was in for a world of hell.
“So far? Nothing, but this is Clint, he’s been in some pretty insane positions and made it out the other side,” he says because it’s true. He was one of the only people there without a super power of some sort and unlike Tony he wasn’t a genius who could make up for it with a super suit, or Loki, who was so good at exploiting people’s psychological weakness he didn’t need an actual super power to bring people to their knees. Clint was good enough that he didn’t need Nat’s somewhat enhanced abilities, Wanda’s mental manipulation, Skye’s ability to manipulate matter, Bruce’s giant green rage monster form, or Fitzsimmons’ insane amount of brain power.
Natasha gives him a hard look in the rear view mirror but Tony had actual faith that Clint would make it out just fine. The guy was freakishly resilient. “So what happened on your end?” he asks.
Natasha shrugs, “pretty much what you just described. Thor went to work, shit hit the fan, Loki caught wind of it and took off, I took off after him because someone needed to make sure he didn’t die and when we got there S.H.I.E.L.D was fighting itself. Guess we know why now,” she says.
Thor frowns, “where are you getting this information?” he asks.
Loki gives Nata look, “sorry Thor,” he says without sounding very remorseful at all. Thor’s eyebrows draw together just as Nat punches him, effectively knocking him out.
*
Clint was more than a little annoyed when Bobbi and Coulson managed to fuck him over after they landed that stupid helicarrier. Had he been paying the proper amount of attention to them he probably could have avoided being knocked out but he was sloppy and now he was sitting on Coulson’s couch marveling at the sheer amount of S.H.I.E.L.D shit he owned. Bobbi had run off to go find Hunter a few hours ago so at least that left him with only Coulson to escape from and the guy was an absolute neat freak. It shouldn’t be hard to irritate him into leaving him alone long enough for him to shimmy out a window or something. “The amount of shit you have with ‘S.H.I.E.L.D’ written somewhere on it is troubling,” he says and picks up a S.H.I.E.L.D mug off the coffee table and walking away with it, setting it down on the T.V stand.
Predictably Coulson goes over to retrieve the mug as soon as Clint walks away from it, bringing it to the attached kitchen area. He lived in a nice apartment at least, open concept, that was going to make escape a pain in the ass. “I like my job,” he says in his defense.
Clint snorts and picks up a S.H.I.E.L.D towel that seemed to be the only thing out of place in the entire apartment, “you wash your ass with S.H.I.E.L.D, that is more than a job, it’s an obsession,” he says. There were various other S.H.I.E.L.D things, sweaters, shirts, a wallet, several mugs, shoes, the bag he was using to pack his things, boxers for gods sakes.
“It is not,” Coulson protests, trying to shove a S.H.I.E.L.D hat into his bag before Clint sees it an fails miserably.
“Sure,” he says cheerily and walks off to explore the rest of the apartment. Sound traveled well, Coulson probably thought he could keep track of him easily that way. He was soon to be mistaken but Clint forgave him for the oversight.
The rest of the apartment was as meticulous as the living and kitchen area; the bedroom didn’t even look like it was used at all. The only other room in the house was dedicated solely to Captain America stuff. Comics, bobble heads, posters, shields, action figures, if it was collectable it there was at least one of them in that room. He makes sure to make plenty of noise shuffling things around, Coulson shows up within seconds to shoo him out. “Leave my pop vinyls alone,” he says, snatching a Captain America bobble head out of his hand, “those are rare,” he mumbles, rearranging the figures.
Clint snorts and pokes on in the head, “dust collectors,” he says flippantly, “absolutely useless.”
Coulson fixes the figure he touched, “it is not a dust collector, it’s a collectable!” he says, trying to insert himself between Clint and the precious pop vinyl figures without much success.
“Dust collector,” Clint says and flicks the head of one of the pop vinyl Captain Americas, knocking it over.
“Out, out you go, you can wait for me in the hallway!” Coulson says, physically grabbing Clint and pushing him out of the room. In his defense he was gentle about it rather than straight up shoving him out. Clint would have punched him in the face if the situation was reversed and Coulson was fucking with his archery equipment, he had more patience than Clint had thought.
Not that it mattered. Clint goes willingly and as soon as Coulson shuts the door to his apartment he walks off, happy that Coulson’s dumb ass willingly let him go. He should have known that would last like two seconds but he still doesn’t expect to be tackled from behind less than twelve seconds later, “was that necessary?” he mumbles under Coulson’s weight, “why even bother to keep me around?”
“First off yes, that was necessary, and I keep you around because HYDRA has taken over S.H.I.E.L.D and that gives them a lot of resources, being linked to me paints a target on your back. I don’t want you to die because of me,” he says. As far as reasons go that wasn’t horrible, but it was still stupid.
“I can take care of myself, thank you,” he mumbles and lets Coulson pull him up.
“You have no idea what HYDRA is capable of,” Coulson says, looking genuinely worried for him.
Clint raises an eyebrow, “and you do? Last I checked you dedicated your life to working for them, and just so you know I know exactly what HYDRA is capable of.” Coulson at least has the sense to look ashamed.
*
Fitz insisted on getting food even though they didn’t actually need it. But no, Fitz was horribly cranky when hungry and neither one of them wanted to deal with his irritation at the moment. They get back into the car to find the two agents they thought they had ditched back at the S.H.I.E.L.D facility in it, “hey,” the blonde one says like this was a regular thing.
Fitz rolls his eyes, “what do you two want?” he snaps, irritated from hunger.
“Fitz!” Jemma scolds, she wasn’t going to get killed by a couple of possibly HYDRA agents because Fitz was hungry.
“What?” he asks, “What are they going to do, shoot us in the middle of a parking lot?”
“Yes, probably and now we’re going to get killed because you haven’t eaten a damn granola bar,” she hisses. She was going to kick his ass in heaven for this.
“Uhh, we aren’t going to kill you, I mean if we were we wouldn’t have bothered with being seen,” the brunette says, “we are curious as to who you’re working for though, you were taking orders from someone when you escaped and we’re curious as to who. It isn’t like infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D is easy, though you two seemed to manage just fine.”
Jemma and Fitz exchange a glance, “how do you know we infiltrated anything? For all you know we’re HYDRA agents that’ve been purposefully tracking you,” Jemma says, raising an eyebrow.
The brunette snorts, “I know HYDRA, you aren’t them,” he says, his jaw clenching. Blondie gives him a worried glance but quickly turns his attention back to Fitz.
“Obviously not considering you’ve been working for them without knowing,” she says logically. This earns her some very dirty looks, particularly from the brunette though the blonde was only slightly less terrifying.
“Jemma!” Fitz scolds, giving her the same look she had given him only a few minutes before.
“What? It’s true, that’s not my fault,” she says, shrugging. “So why are you two here? There’s no real reason for you to care about who we work for, or what we we’re doing in S.H.I.E.L.D or HYDRA.” Her thought process was logical, as it usually was, and they didn’t seem to have much interest in harming either her of Fitz, they had plenty of opportunity and hadn’t followed through on it and they hadn’t.
The blonde sighs, “we literally just had our worlds turned upside down, you’re something to focus on,” he says.
The brunette gives him a look, “Steve!” he hisses.
The blonde, Steve, shrugs, “what are they going to do with that information? Nothing useful,” he points out.
She exchanges another look with Fitz; “well then now that we have that settled do you two want water?” she asks and finds a couple of water bottles. They should have known something was wrong before they took the drinks, she just bought drinks and she wouldn’t need to do that if she already had some in the car, but as always they were underestimated for being small jumpy omegas. Idiots.
“How much time do you think we have until they come to?” Fitz asks, glancing at the two alphas that were now half asleep in the back seat.
“We should make it back before they wake up if we speed,” she says lightly, pulling her seatbelt across her chest, “put your seat belt on Fitz, if we get in an accident you can’t handle any more brain damage, you’ve only just started to mostly get your brain function back,” she says, scolding him lightly.
*
Clint has been in some sticky situations and on a scale of one to ten this wasn’t all that bad. Coulson was like a box full of violent kittens, sure they bit and scratched, but they were mostly harmless and also cute. Not that Coulson was cute… well okay he was, but Clint wasn’t looking. When he had started giving Coulson directions he hadn’t expected him to listen, let alone continue following his instructions for over an hour. He took it though, adjusting to the new situation quickly and making a plan for incapacitating Coulson so he could get back to Tony’s lair without having to worry about him causing trouble for everyone.
Coulson was intelligent, a good agent, and he was highly trained so naturally knocking him out would be incredibly easy. Alphas were easy and they always fell for the same shit no matter how many times Clint pulled the same tricks. They might claim it was some sort of biological reaction to help an omega in need but Clint saw through that crap, what it was was underestimating omegas because they were supposedly naturally weak, demure, and submissive. Being underestimated was especially true for women, the amount of times Wanda and Nat just walked into random government buildings, or pulled the ‘hurt omega’ act and got carried in was insane. It was hard to believe people were that stupid but the people they tended to deal with typically viewed omegas in a particularly bad light, more so if they fell into other minorities. He guessed in a lot of ways it made their jobs easier in the long run.
With Coulson he started out small, complaining about a head ache, rubbing his temples, pretending like he was pretending that he wasn’t in pain. He spread it out over about an hour or so before he made his symptoms worse, trying to curl up in his seat and leaning his head against the window. Coulson eventually frowns, “are you okay?” he asks, reaching over to try and feel Clint’s forehead.
Clint smacks his hand away, “don’t touch me,” he snaps, curling up tighter in his seat.
Coulson gives him another look but leaves him be for another few minutes before asking again if he was okay. Clint gives him a snappy and sarcastic response and Coulson slows down the car, presumably to get a closer look at Clint. He found that stupid considering Clint had already told him to fuck off, it wasn’t like Coulson could do much when he didn’t want help.
But he pulls over anyways, which was exactly what Clint wanted, and gets out to go check on him. Clint had already managed to wiggle out of his seatbelt by the time Coulson opened the door. “Clint,” he says softly, reaching out to him, “are you-” his words are cut off by Clint’s fist to his face. Coulson stumbles back, surprised, and Clint is already on him, sending him head first into the side of the car. He almost feels bad, Coulson wasn’t a bad person, not really, but he had his suspicions and besides, Tony’s lair was super-secret. Coulson couldn’t know where it was.
*
Loki looks from Tony to the cell and raises an eyebrow at the three alphas that had, for now, been tossed in a cell Bruce had made to be Hulk proof so they certainly couldn’t escape it. They all blink awake at roughly the same time looking confused in Coulson and the blonde’s case, but the brunette looked pissed. “What the fuck?” he snaps, glaring at everything in his immediate field of vision. It was almost funny but Tony was most interested in the guy’s arm, it was impressive and when he looked a little less murderous Tony was so checking it out.
Clint looked pleased when Coulson manages to find him, blinking a few times in confusion, “what the hell, Clint?” he asks.
Clint grins, “nice role reversal, eh?” he says, entirely way too satisfied with the situation.
“What is this?” blondie asks, looking like a confused ball of fluff. He would have been cute if Tony didn’t hate the guy so much.
“This,” Loki says, “is what happens when you’re stupid enough to underestimate people. Don’t worry, we don’t want you dead. For now.” Loki walks off in a subtle air of dramatics because he is an absolute drama queen but he refused to admit it.
The brunette looks around and settles his gaze on Tony, “you,” he says, “have some fucking explaining to do, and not just about where you’ve been for the last two years.”
Tony smiles, “clever one you are, I’ll explain when I feel like it,” he says and walks away, Clint following behind. There was no way he was giving them what they wanted right away, all in due time, also Wanda had to determine whether or not they were threats.