Paint My Spirit Gold (Kate/Tony)
Kate meets Tony Stark at her high school graduation party.
Well, “meet” is probably not the right word—both too much and too little.
She’s been cornered by one of her dad’s senator friends—Ward something-something from who the fuck cares—and he’s got wandering hands and alcohol on his breath.
And Tony Stark rounds the corner.
Honestly, Kate isn’t expecting any help from him, he’s probably already drunk, and she’s kneeing the senator in the groin when he rushes over and punches senator whathisname square in the face—and the guy crumples.
“I think I had that handled but thank you all the same.”
“Wow,” Stark says. “Never coldcocked a senator before.” He shakes his fist out, catches Kate’s expression. “What? Oh. Oh, shit. Are we-?”
“I think so,” Kate’s set her lips in a grim line.
“Jesus. How old are you, anyway?”
“Um. You realize this is my graduation party, right? I’m eighteen.”
Something in his expression shifts and Kate glares. “No. Nope. Go fuck yourself.”
“You have a potty mouth for a nine-year-old,” he smirks. “And I did just save you.”
“I don’t need you to save me, Stark,” she says, and Tony Stark’s face twists in a way—she’s not sure what it means. “I never will.”
.
She debates telling her team, but, well, she’s never been good at keeping stuff secret from them.
Teddy’s fanboying is utterly predictable, as is his dismay at her dislike of Tony. He’s a hopeless romantic about soulmates.
“Not everybody can be like you and Billy,” Kate reminds him.
.
She does keep in touch with Tony, sort of vaguely—Kate sends letters and Tony sends tech, and they don’t ever really talk about anything—certainly not Kate’s team, or her archery, or Tony’s drinking, or the fact that every month there’s a picture of him in a tabloid having a fling with a model or athlete or actress—or that every time he does, something angry in Kate twists up, flaring over something soft and painful inside of her.
They talk more after Afghanistan, but they still don’t really talk.
And then Tony—well, he’s Iron Man. He’s doing okay at it, honestly, she kind of expected more crashing-and-burning, and she starts bringing him up when she and her team get debriefed by SHIELD, just to see Phil’s eye twitch.
And then he starts going off the deep end—putting Pepper in charge of SI—which actually seems like a good idea—getting drunk in the suit—he starts buying her stuff—ridiculous things, a 1940s Roadster, an organic farm in Montana, a cello, a concert hall to go with it, an amethyst pendant the size of her thumb—
She comes to Malibu, probably to yell at him, she doesn’t have a plan worked out yet, and Coulson lets her in.
Which is how she finds out he was dying, and she definitely yells at him.
And how Tony finds out that his soulmate is part of the Avengers Initiative.
So, there’s that.
(“Hawkeye?” he says. “What the hell kind of name is that?”
“What the hell kind of name is Iron Man?”
She refuses the armor-Iron Arrow no thank you-but takes the explosive arrows—and the net arrow, and the taser arrow, and the putty arrow.
“Can you make a boomerang arrow?” Clint asks Tony when they meet for the first time.
“Clint, what the hell would you need a boomerang arrow for?” she asks, but it’s too late. She knows that look in Tony’s eyes, and unfortunately it is the mad-scientist glint.)
Tony tries to call her as he’s hauling a nuke into space. She doesn’t answer, which is to be expected—undoubtedly, she’s in the thick of things in New York, and the thought, while not welcome, is a little comforting.
Kate is there.
Kate will take care of things.
She is the last thing he thinks about as he sees stars no human has ever viewed before, as the world goes dark around him, he thinks, I wish I had--
.
Everyone’s hanging around as JARVIS finishes pulling the mangled suit off of Tony. He feels bruised and raw and very much like a crab peeled from its shell when the elevator dings and deposits his soulmate.
JARVIS’s protocols had been changed long ago to give her access to all of his residences, though Tony is supposed to be given adequate warning, thanks JARVIS. Not for the first time Tony wonders if JARVIS and Kate conspire against him together.
She’s standing at the elevator, the armor he’d made her a few months ago looking battered, Kate herself looking worse for the wear.
(The armor had been a fight. It’s not a suit, and it looks more like what Thor wears than what Tony wears, only it’s obnoxiously purple; light and flexible enough for her to shoot and move freely and he hates that he could wrap her in a suit and keep her safe and she won’t, she refuses to stay safe—)
“Tony,” and she sounds more vulnerable than he’s ever heard her. “Tony, did you just fly a nuke into space?”
The team falls silent, heads swiveling like they’re watching a tennis match.
“Um,” He rubs the back of his neck with his scraped-up palm. “Yeah. That was me.” He moves his hand to rub her words that brush right up against the bottom of the arc reactor. “I tried to call.”
“Call?” her face is carefully blank. “You were—you were,” her voice tangles with a gasp in her throat and her bow drops from her fingers and clatters to the floor. “Tony,” she pelts across the room; he opens his arms but she stops before she makes it into his arms and shoves against his chest. “How dare you, Tony! How could you—you don’t—" she’s got fistfuls of his shirt and is shaking him; she’s shaking just in general, he realizes.
“Hawkeye,” his hands stroke up her arms, cup her shoulders. “Kate, I’m fine. Look, I’m right here. I’m awesome.”
She shoves him away, paces across broken glass. “No, you’re not. You’re awful.”
His grin is sad, self-deprecating. “Yeah, I know.”
She lets out a strangled cry and flings herself at him, arms circling his neck, legs around his waist, and he clutches her close. “Don’t do that again, Tony, please.”
“You got it, boss,” he presses his face into her neck, tangles his fingers into the long, dark strands of her hair, takes a few shaky breaths. He can’t hold her close enough, can’t feel enough of her skin, and he really should have made her armor easier to get off.
She tugs at his hair, pulls his face from her neck, and kisses him.
It’s the first time they’ve kissed—really kissed, because he’s not counting a polite peck on New Year’s—and he doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this, the furious needy way she bites at him, the way her body flexes against his, and he’s going to have to redesign her suit because this is ridiculous, where are the buckles? He knows there are buckles he remembers seeing them in the rendering.
He’s making a go of it, though, trying to take the flexible plates off of her, when someone very loudly clears their throat, and Tony suddenly remembers that there are other people in the room besides him and Kate.
“Are we going to get food?” Clint sighs, leaning against Natasha. “Or should we leave you two alone?”
“What’s—I thought Pepper?” Bruce looks a little lost, well, that just seems to be his natural state, Tony thinks.
“Nah,” Clint settles more comfortably against Natasha as Kate starts nipping at Tony’s neck, which, fuck. “Pepper and Rhodey.”
“Hey,” a voice calls from the balcony. “Are we getting food or what?”
It’s what appears to be a well-spoken, mini-Hulk with wings. One of Kate’s team, then. Kate growls against Tony's neck and drops her feet to the floor, which is actually maybe the worst part of today.
“Yeah, fine,” she says. “Food. We all need food and sugar.”
.
(“Wow,” Tony sounds a little shocked, even to his own ears, his fingers stroking across his words along her spine. “So I should fly nukes into space more often.”
Kate stops tracing the circle of the arc reactor to smack his shoulder. “No. Bad Tony.”
“That’s not what you were saying five min—ow!”
Tony makes a note-to-self about archers and pinchy fingers.)
.
After the Mandarin (“Tony, you are a dumbass, we are leaving now.”), and his soulmate getting kidnapped by one of his enemies (“I wasn’t kidnapped, I thought I could turn her; also, maybe I was kidnapped a little—do you see where Killian burned my neck when he grabbed me? Do you? Un-fucking-acceptable, Stark.”), and Kate getting forcibly injected with Extremis and seeing her plummet to her doom only to have her kill Killian (“I’m not the princess kidnapped by the dragon, I am the motherfucking dragon.”), Tony tweaks Extremis. He can’t flush it from her system, but after some therapy and anger and Tony creating a heat-resistant bowstring for her, she seems acclimated to it. Maybe excited is a better word, excited about no more concussions.
And he has the heart surgery, and Kate has this expression when she sees the dish full of shrapnel—and she cries.
The Extremis was still a little unstable in her system at that point, and the tears had steamed from her cheeks.
(curled up next to him when he’s recovering: “I used to put my head on your chest and think about all that metal under my ear. Trying to kill you. Worried it would.”)
They go to New York after a few months, since the Malibu place is slightly built-up rubble, and Kate spends a lot of time with Other Hawkeye. It’s fine, Tony has a lot of stuff on his plate. He doesn’t know what they get up to, and he likes it that way. He enjoys not having heart attacks.
He does know that since Extremis, his soulmark burns a little every so often. Since they’ve been in New York, it’s gotten worse, a couple of times a day. It’s not painful, just hot, like the blast from opening the oven door.
It’s weird, to be so connected to a person that something like Extremis affects him, too.
.
Tony gets out of his car outside of Clint’s building just in time to see Kate fall off the roof.
The suit coming on isn’t even a conscious thought, but it’s too late, he’s too late, she’s already on the ground—can she heal from that high of a fall? He doesn’t know, doesn’t have any idea—
He kneels by her side and she groans, doesn’t open her eyes.
“Kate? Bishop! Can you hear me? JARVIS get a—"
“Were you aiming for the trash can?” Clint, the man Tony will be killing shortly, hollers down. “Oh. Stark. Um, shit.”
Kate groans again, her whole body glowing like an ember, hotter, brighter, as she sits, and finally opens her eyes.
“Oh. Hi, Tony.”
Tony’s chest is burning with her, and—are you—
“Have you been throwing yourself off of buildings this whole week?” Tony shouts.
“Uh.”
“What was the plan if you couldn’t regenerate from a fall? What ambulance would you have called?”
“We started small,” Kate begins. “Down stairs and stuff.”
“We wrote it down!” Someone—Darcy Lewis?—shouts down. “It was for science!”
.
(When they have angry, then not-so-angry, then sweet and tender sex later, Tony finds out that in her new, occasionally very literal afterglow, Kate can set the bed on fire.
Actual fire.)