Incredibly Busy and Terribly Important
*
“Star Trek lied to me,” Tony moans, and elbows Clint sharply when he doesn’t get a response.
“How’s that?” comes reluctantly from somewhere under the blanket.
“Star Trek always promised me that being forcibly bathed by a blue, bosomy alien female would be insanely hot, but it just isn’t.” Instead it was a humiliating and uncomfortable and even somewhat painful process—one that, even if Tony escapes this hell and lives to be a thousand years old, plans to never discuss with anyone else. “There is no way to quantify how fucking traumatic that was.”
Clint lowers the blanket long enough to throw him a commiserating look. “I might have a bit of an idea,” he says wryly.
“Maybe we’ll become a mystery,” Tony offers, staring at the ceiling. There’s a faint pattern sweeping across it that hadn’t noticed before, looking almost like seashells. “People will always talk about the three Avengers that just disappeared, wonder what happened to us. No one will know for sure—there’ll be wild theories about us living in South America living under fake names, grainy photos sold to shitty magazines.”
“Kinda like Bigfoot.” Clint burrows into Tony’s side, flipping the blanket over him also, probably hoping to siphon off some body heat. Neither of them can hardly stand to be touched anymore, but it is different at night, when everything is still and they’re alone. It’s cold where they are.
“People will talk about us like they do about the lost colony of Roanoke, or what happened aboard the Mary Celeste. Where Amelia Earhart ended up. Who killed Kennedy.”
“The CIA murdered Kennedy.”
Tony draws back in sudden interest. “Really? Did SHIELD tell you that? Why did the CIA kill him?”
Clint doesn’t open his eyes; the latest tangle with Big Blue has bled all the fight out of him. “That’s classified,” he murmurs, yawning.
“Best case scenario, we’re on another planet; worst case scenario, an alternate dimension. Either way SHIELD is a billion miles away, and we’re doomed to spend the rest of our lives as an alien housewife’s pillow pets. You’re seriously concerned about what is and isn’t ‘classified’ at this point??”
Clint hums in acknowledgement. “Okay, I made it up. I don’t know who killed Kennedy.” He shrugs carefully and leans forward, missing the warmth, until Tony settles back against him. “I’d tell you if I did.”
“Don’t toy with my emotions, Hawkeye,” Tony says finally. He closes his eyes and pulls the blanket up to his chin. All this time and it still feels unpleasantly strange under his fingers, the material and even the color nothing like what they have back home. “I was actually happy for a minute there.”
*
“We have a lot of things to talk about, prepare for,” Tony insists, ignoring Clint’s eye roll.
“Mmmhmm. We are incredibly busy and terribly important.”
The assassin has long ceased pretending to humor him, but Tony doesn’t care. “It’s time for a new plan.” None of the other plans have resulted in anything other than blackened eyes or bruised ribs—Tony’s only just stopped pissing blood from the beating that followed their last escape attempt—but he doesn’t care about that either. “It’s time to start playing the long game.”
It’s clear they’re unlikely to fight their way out, not if what became of the Hulk is any indication, so learning to communicate and make an appeal to reason is their best hope. But the language doesn’t seem to follow any rules that Tony understands, and Clint, who speaks four languages fluently, can’t make any sense of it either. It doesn’t matter much with Big Blue; the male alien barely speaks to them other than to bark something, pointing with a stabbing finger to get his meaning across. Get over there. Come here. Go away.
His mate is different. She talks all the time in a trilling of garbled vowels and nonsense consonant combinations. Each object seems to have fifty different names, with words repeated so rarely that it’s impossible make a map of—the whole thing would be a great psychological trick if Tony thought it was in any way deliberate. The female fawns over them incessantly but speaks to her mate in a different tone—sharper and deeper, even while still smiling and affectionate.
“That’s her grown-up voice,” Tony decides. His fingers pick compulsively at his collar. “That saccharine cootchy cootchy coo one? That’s how people talk to infants and yappy little dogs.”
“I’m pretty sure Big Blue’s name is Amvi or Ambi. Or maybe...Almvi." Cling sighs loudly. "Something like that.”
Tony shakes his head, the chain rattling delicately against his neck. It looks more decorative than anything, but the links are resistant to anything they’ve tried. “I think that’s just their word for spouse, or mate, or ‘other giant blue person sharing my house’, because he calls her that too. She calls herself Nama.” He rolls his eyes. “Almost every goddamned word they say has ‘ama’ in it. Stupid, impossible language.”
Clint scoffs. “Nama is what she calls us, genius.”
“Nope.”
“She says it all the time.”
And so she does, fussing at their clothes and petting their hair, pawing constantly at both of them, pulling them into unwilling embraces, the word littered constantly amongst so many affectionate others.
“That’s what she calls herself,” Tony insists, temporarily giving up on the collar. “Haven’t you ever heard babytalk? Goo goo, ga ga, and all that? People always refer to themselves in third person.” He bats his eyelashes and pulls on a syrupy smile, his voice pitched higher and wildly inflected as he strokes Clint’s arm like a kitten. “Aww, Tony loves you, Baby Bird. Tony is gonna get us the hell out of here, yes he is! And then Tony is going to burn this house to the ground and it’s going to be so perfect, yes it fucking is!”
Clint jerks his arm away and sighs. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Oh, I am. Nama. Nama the Mama.”
*
He’s proven right later, while she’s threading her large hands through his hair, scratching at his scalp with careful claws. He calls her Mama and her answering smile is radiant and happy. She draws him close and Tony goes agreeably enough, schooling his expression into something that resembles contentment.
Clint hesitates before moving to her other side, and she beams with delight to have both of them so willingly in her arms.
*
It’s time to eat, and Big Blue grabs the bowl before Mama can. Tony and Clint exchange a wary look.
Any attention from Blue never leads to anything good.
He slams down a bowl of food and gestures roughly to it, and Tony edges over carefully, trying to stay out of reach. Blue has brought them the weird, red flaky things that look like giant scabs and Tony shakes his head determinedly. He draws himself to full height, only slightly more than half of Big Blue’s, trying to sound as authoritative as possible.
“No. No way. No.”
They’d tried that food once, near the beginning, when the visceral aversion was finally overpowered by hunger. Tony had thrown up continuously until his throat was so raw it bled; Mama had been horrified and Big Blue angry at the mess. Either he’s forgotten this stuff is toxic to the humans or thinks they’d been overreacting, decided to try it again.
Or maybe he wants to poison them. Maybe he’s tired of the small creatures he snatched up weeks ago, trophies from a war they hadn’t even known they were fighting, and gifted to his mate. The Hulk he had kept for himself, taking him away to whatever place lies beyond that open doorway.
Clint shakes his head and wrinkles his nose in the universal sign of disgust. “No,” he agrees.
For all that the aliens’ language is indecipherable, Big Blue recognizes many of their words well enough, and doesn’t like that one. He points again, eyes narrowed in warning. Mama hovers behind him, wringing her hands in a curiously human manner. She murmurs something and Big Blue snaps back at her, still glaring at them. Mama retreats into silence, her eyes meeting Tony’s in apology.
Blue steps forward and grabs Tony’s shirt, bunching up the fabric in his fist, lifting him from the ground before issuing a final warning through gritted teeth.
“I said no.”
The throw sends him sprawling into Clint, the two of them going to the floor in an unsightly heap. Tony's hand goes to his mouth and comes away bloody and he braces himself for the next hit or kick. Big Blue looks down at the protective arm Clint snakes around Tony's chest and laughs, shaking his head at the futility of the gesture. He pours a second bowl of food and saunters out the open doorway to torment Bruce with it.
The first bowl stays on the floor all day, untouched, and Mama doesn’t dare replace it with anything else.
*
“Bruce!” Clint shouts as loudly as he can, cupping his hands around his mouth.
Sound carries differently here, never seeming to escape area it originates. Only rarely can they hear the faint roars of the Hulk from beyond the doorway, and they never hear anything from the back rooms that Mama and Big Blue disappear into.
“Bruce!” Clint takes a deep breath, even that sounding ragged, his throat torn with volume and effort. “Bruuuuuuce!”
Tony flaps a hand at him, listening, tensed at the end of his chain. “Hold up; you’ve got to give him a chance to respond.”
But Clint can only be patient for a moment before he demands, “Well?”
There’s a faint sound, a “nnnnnnn” that might be either be Bruce calling back or a hefty dose of wishful thinking. Or maybe it’s the wind, not that they’ve ever heard a wind here before.
“Well??”
“Shhh!” Tony strains, listening, cranes his neck as though the few additional inches will help at all, but this time there’s nothing, not even just his imagination supplying a sound. “Maybe I heard him,” Tony says, shrugging, trying not to let the disappointment show. “But maybe not.”
“Bruce is alive,” Clint insists.
He almost certainly is. They take food and water out to him; one time even a blanket. Big Blue goes out for hours and comes back smirking, covered in splashes of bright red blood. All of that must mean that Bruce and the Hulk are alive.
Dead things don’t bleed.
*
“Tony.” He stabs himself forcefully in the sternum with his finger, then points it toward the door. “Bruce.” Indicates the archer pooled in her lap. “Clint.”
Mama narrows her eyes, mouth pressed into a hard line; she doesn’t like for them to speak this much. She glares at Tony, running her hand possessively through Clint’s hair. He’s become her favorite now that he’s stopped the repeated escape attempts and retreated into a quiet pliability, resigning himself to the longer strategy of waiting for an opportunity to appear. Clint sits passively as she croons and caresses, and that’s just the way she likes it. What she doesn’t like is for them to speak, doesn’t like being reminded that they aren’t really pets, are actually thinking, autonomous beings and not her playthings.
“My name is Tony,” he insists.
She snaps back something angrily in her own language, and Clint blinks blearily awake from her crushing embrace. “What’s going on?”
“Clint.” Tony jabs a finger in his direction. “His name is Clint.”
She shakes her head, snaps her fingers in sharp warning when Tony opens his mouth again. “We have names, you blue bitch.”
She doesn't know the word but understands the tone easily enough, standing suddenly, sending Clint tumbling to the floor. He rolls into a crouched position, ready to spring to Tony’s defense if it turns physical. Tony’s eyes dart between him and a seething Mama, weighing their chances and finding them lacking. She’s the weaker of the two aliens, but still stronger than either Avenger.
“Tony,” he says one last time before relenting, settling back with a sigh against the wall.
Mama watches him suspiciously for a moment, ready for another outburst, smiling in relief when it doesn’t come.
*
Sometimes Mama is happy, doing her various tasks around the house, singing to herself or chatting at them. She works at some strange machine that Tony would love to get close enough to examine, producing clothing that fits the Avengers better and better with each attempt. She smiles indulgently at their unhappy expressions as she gestures for them to lift their arms so she can undress and redress them again and again and again. Her oversolicitousness is exhausting.
More often she cries all day, unclips their chains from the living area and reattaches them in her bedroom, lays with crushed them against her chest. She pets and strokes endlessly, everywhere. She cries, then sleeps, then wakes up to cry some more, an Avenger or two clutched in her arms all the while.
*
“Come on, brainstorm with me.”
“I can’t,” the archer snarls. “I’m busy. I’m incredibly busy.” He alternates between jumping jacks and lunges, breathing hard, all part of his ongoing effort to stay strong and limber in spite of their forced inactivity.
Tony sighs to himself, recognizing the signs, knowing where this is all headed. “Things to plan and prepare for,” he agrees easily, pretending not to notice the quick glare this earns him. He makes a show of scanning the room, trying to spot anything that would aid in an escape, hopeful to notice something he hasn’t before.
“I spy with my little eye…an alien stovetop!” It’s laden with utensils but all the way across the room, far beyond their reach. Unless Mama decides to helpfully lob a knife in their direction, it’s all useless to them. “I spy with my little eye…a painting of a big blue blob holding a little blue blob.” Maybe there’s a nail holding it up. If Tony can just figure out how to levitate, maybe he can knock down the picture and pry that nail out.
Clint closes his eyes in an attempt to tune out Tony and retreat into his exercise, drops to the floor for push-ups. He does them a little too quickly to hold proper form and the chain rattles and chimes incessantly against his collar and the floor. Clint pulls a face at the sound, eyes closed even more tightly, mutters an almost inaudible “Fuck.”
“I spy,” Tony drawls quickly, hoping to ward off the impending outburst, “with my little eye…a big shelf of stupid books.”
Mama likes to sit them in front of her and read aloud, her voice even more exaggerated and affected than usual, her gray eyes wide, her mouth contorting into a huge smiles and deep frowns. Tony has no idea what any of it is about, but always smiles and makes approving noises just the way she likes, nods dutifully when she gestures, asking wordlessly if they want to hear another.
“Fuck.” The word is louder this time as Clint abandons his exercise and springs to his feet.
He’s lost a lot of muscle mass from lack of food and forced inactivity, but he still pulls himself nimbly up the chain all the way to the top, where the cursed thing is secured to a bar near the ceiling. He swears through gritted teeth, pulling at it, searching for any way to slip it off. These rare episodes of wild-eyed anger are the closest thing to a meltdown Clint will allow himself.
“Clint.”
It won’t break. They’ve tried so many times, in every way Tony can think of, and nothing has worked. The links are fine and almost decorative, reminding Tony more of something Pepper would wear as a belt than a restraint, but the metal is unbendable, unbreakable, something comparable to vibranium or even admantium. Tony has made countless jokes about mithril and tiny dwarven blacksmiths, none of them especially funny.
The chain won’t break, but Clint refuses to believe that, the same way he initially refused to believe they were off Earth, the way he refuses to believe any of Tony’s theories or admit that they’ll likely live out the rest of their lives here. Clint cannot accept an unescapable scenario, a world where he can’t fight himself free, where the Hulk is not the strongest, where all Tony’s plans come to nothing.
“Fuck you, you fucking thing! You can just—” The words trail off into an indecipherable muttering as Clint loops the chain over and around the bar, working the links together.
“Clint,” Tony tries again, because any second now the archer is going to launch himself to the ground, hoping to break the chain with force and momentum and his bodyweight, and it isn’t going to work this time any more than it had the others. “You’ve got it wound too many times. It’s too short to reach the floor.”
Clint raises his head long enough to bare his teeth briefly in an uncanny resemblance of Big Blue, then deliberately winds the chain over the bar again, his eyes challenging.
“You’re going to snap your fucking neck!” Tony scrambles to his feet to stare helplessly up at his friend.
“Good!” Clint declares, and leaps.
His neck doesn’t break.
Neither does the chain.
*
Their progress with the language hasn’t gone anywhere, aside from Tony’s insistence that he has figured out the words for shut up and water. But there’s a pattern to the rest of it, to the resting and eating, even if it they do not match Earth’s rhythms even slightly. A rhythm to Mama’s chores—when she cleans, when she drags them into a bath, when she starts working on her sewing machine.
And there’s another pattern only identifiable with the passage of time, and it is one of Big Blue’s movements. The way he gets angrier and angrier at Mama, goes out to torment the Hulk more regularly, but instead of returning sated is even angrier, often deciding to terrorize his mate’s pets. The pattern increases in pace and escalates in severity until it all ends with him wearing armor and weapons and standing in front of her. Ready to go away again and fight for whatever the hell it is he believes in.
Mama stands before him, looking sad and resigned. He swirls his hand over her cheek, then traces it up her jawline. That's the end of the pattern, the last thing he does before he leaves.
It means love, Tony thinks, or maybe goodbye.
“Good fucking riddance,” Tony mutters as quietly as possible as he and Clint watch the scene from their wall, hopeful not to be noticed and receive a parting kick on Big Blue’s way out the door. “This concludes another very special episode of ‘Intergalactic Warlords and the Women Who Love Them’.”
Clint’s lips barely move. “I hope they’re still fighting against Asgard. And that he dies. Slowly, and with great pain.”
It was Asgard’s fight, but they'd all gone gladly. Thor asked for help and Tony had immediately said yes, agreed without a second thought, because Thor was his friend, and had done more than his fair share of helping out Earth. Tony can’t imagine how horrible Thor must’ve felt when they were captured from a fight that he promised would be simple. He has certainly insisted that Heimdall search the universe to find them, but it’s been months and no one has come.
So it all must mean that Heimdall cannot see them.
Tony is sure it’s the house that shields them from view, maybe even including the property beyond, since the Hulk is outside and no one has found him either. It’s probably just a fool’s hope—Clint certainly thinks so, and refuses to even discuss it—to be thinking of wards and magic and folded space, but it’s the only thing that make any sense. The Avengers won’t have given up and Thor won’t have let his people stop looking. Tony and Clint and Bruce just need to get to a place where they can be seen. If they can just get through that open doorway, so tantalizingly close, and to the world beyond, Tony thinks they will be found.
He’s sure he is right.
He has to be right.
*
Mama is happy with Big Blue is gone, at least at first. She sings and cleans and fawns over them both, bubbling over with endless babytalk, dressing and undressing them and patting and hugging long past the point that Tony’s all touched out, skin crawling and ready to scream.
But soon enough she’s crying again, louder wails than she allows herself when Blue is around, sometimes wanting them close, sometimes shutting herself away into the other rooms.
“How can she miss him?” Tony wonders. “He’s only slightly less shitty to her than he is to us.”
“It’s not just him she’s crying about,” Clint offers inexplicably, then shrugs at Tony’s questioning look. He picks at his collar and the chain ineffectually, fingers clumsy from the cold. “Anyway, he loves her a little; he gave her us. And he did that because he’s a bastard.”
“Well, that’s for sure.”
“No.” Clint gives up on the chain to frown at Tony. “He took us because he’s a bastard, and because he knows he is. He’s a bastard to her and a bastard in general and at some point he did something awful. Beat her up, probably. Hurt her. We’re the equivalent of apology puppies—all that’s missing was a box with holes and a big ribbon on top.”
That sounds more than plausible; it sounds right, but Tony still asks, “Why do you think that?”
“I knew a woman like her once. And a guy just like him.”
*
Big Blue returns just as the last of their bruises have faded.
*
“Do ‘The Piano Man.’” When Clint gives him a dirty look, probably at the length of the song, Tony quickly amends, “How about just the chorus, then?”
Clint dutifully complies, but his enthusiasm for the project, which had probably been completely counterfeit in the first place, has obviously waned. “None of this is teaching you anything,” he points out finally, hands falling silent.
“Okay, then we’ll switch to the important stuff. Show me how to say ‘Tony is handsome and has a huge cock.’” He grins with good humor that is every bit as phony as Clint's, then asks, “Which one of those was ‘cock’?”
Clint arranges his fingers before tapping his nose delicately with a wry smirk.
“Which one was ‘handsome’?”
Clint circles his hand before touching his nose again in an almost identical manner to ‘cock’, and Tony wonders, not for the first time, if it’s all a joke, if Clint is just making up gibberish to amuse himself and pass the time.
“Also important to Avenger life: ‘Thor ate your secret snacks; I was not involved and take no responsibility.’”
With all the blows they’ve taken to the head it was only a matter of time, and Tony really should have seen this coming. He’s a genius that should anticipate everything and account for all the variables, especially when it comes to the number of ways things can go wrong. But he hadn’t foreseen this, hadn’t known quite what to think as Clint steadily grew more and more uncommunicative, assuming it was a perfectly understandable reaction to their situation. And after everything they’ve seen and been through, it shouldn’t have hurt so much when Hawkeye finally told him—in no big deal, just updating you tone that was both carefully nonchalant and over enunciated—that his hearing implant had stopped working.
Clint was passive and patient as Tony cupped his chin and turned his head back and forth, as if he could see through layers of skin and bone, as if he could fix the implant here with no tools, as if he had even the slightest idea how the thing worked. Clint let him look and fret and think, his expression neutral until Tony released his face with a sigh and dropped their foreheads together, letting the action speak to the heartbreak he couldn’t express, his grief that yet another thing had been taken from them.
“Do ‘Tony is always right, and Steve is always wrong’,” Tony says now, his voice carefully light. This time he recognizes the Captain America namesign when it comes, imitates it before he can feel self conscious, his finger tracing the circular shape of a shield into the air.
Clint repeats the sign in subtle correction, nodding when Tony gets it right.
“This time I want ‘Natasha Romanov is a clandestine snuggler.’”
But as soon as the words leave his mouth Tony knows that he played the wrong note, accidentally hitting ‘painful’ while aiming for ‘funny’. Clint’s hands stutter in the air before dropping into his lap.
“I’m tired of this.”
Tony wearily scrubs his hand across his face, remembering only at the last moment to move his hand away from his mouth before speaking. “Me too."