Excused Absences

Nick was awoken up abruptly by Barton throwing himself onto the first chair he came across in his half-wake state. That chair just so happened to be the one that Nick fell asleep in the night before, now Nick was up half an hour later than he like to be and Barton just dropped his cereal on the floor.

“Clean that up,” Nick said, grabbing the folder of useless classified garbage off the table as he stood up. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“You made me drop it!”

“Why’d you fall asleep on the couch, Nicky?” Natasha asked from the kitchen table. “Long night?”

“We’ll talk when I get out,” He replied, ignoring the stupid nickname with the intention of it going away as many of the other ones did before walking out of the room. He didn’t even bother with a glare, those didn’t work on her.

When he was dressed and his briefcase was filled with May’s folder – because it was long and irritating, and he fell asleep reading it – and the budge report that he’d failed to finish last night, he made his way to the kitchen where a cup of steaming coffee was left on the counter.

There was no mischievous smile hidden behind Barton’s hand or an upward tilt of Romanoff’s lips as he took the cup, neither of those two facts stopped him from dumping the mug out and refilling it himself. Natasha rolled her eyes at the action as she filed her nails next to where Clint was finishing up his French homework, “When are you going to believe that we don’t want to poison you?”

Nick ignored the jabbed, addressing Clint, “Didn’t I tell you to do that yesterday?”

“Sure did,” He replied as he scribbled out the answer to question five.

“And you didn’t.”

“Nope.”

“I’ve got news,” Fury stated instead of chiding Clint for procrastinating. If Clint wanted to be last minute than it was not Nick’s problem.

“About the man that was here last night?” Natasha asked.

“What man?” Clint paused in his homework. “I didn’t hear anybody.”

Nick took a sip of his coffee while Natasha rolled her eyes but neither commented on the fact that he wouldn’t have because he didn’t sleep with his hearing aids on. Especially not after the months of red itchy, infected ears when he’d refused to take them out.

“Yeah,” Nick answered Natasha’s question.

“Wait, we’re going to get another one, aren’t we?” Clint asked, putting two and two together and concluding into a pout. “Well, I’m not sharing my room this time.”

“Natasha is.”

“That’s not fair!”

“I think it totally is.”

“Shut up, Clint.”

“She’s a girl,” Fury explained. “We’ve only got three rooms.”

“So, we move.”

Nick gave Natasha an unimpressed look, “No.”

“Then give her your room,” Natasha replied sharply. “The last one stole my mascara and a knife.”

“She’s a girl?” Clint asked curiously.

“Yes,” Fury answered him and then turned to Natasha, “And no.”

She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms in response, muttering that he was stupid in Russian.

“What’s her name?” Clint asked over Nick’s unimpressed expression at Natasha’s choice of wording. She stuck out her tongue. “Is she from New York? Is she a hot girl?”

“Ew gross, Clint! She’s practically your sister!”

“Is not!”

“Her name is Melinda,” Nick said before this turned into a full-fledged fight. He wasn’t in the mood for it, honestly.

“Can’t we just stick her in a guest room?” Natasha asked.

“You’re in the guest room,” Clint responded. “Ouch! Fury, she hit me!”

“Natasha, don’t do that,” Nick sighed, sipping his now lukewarm coffee. He was going to need more caffeine than this to deal with children today.

“Well, say it like you mean it.”

“We could draw straws,” Natasha suggested. “Shortest one gives up their room and has to sleep on the futon in the laundry room.”

“No,” Clint replied.

“No,” said Nick.

“Afraid you’ll lose, boys?”

“Do you think it would be a bad start to a healthy relationship if you make them sleep in the laundry room?” Nick asked over the rim of his ‘World’s Angriest Principal’ mug in the teacher’s lounge.

“You got a girlfriend staying over?” Victoria asked with a smirk. “Do you have a girlfriend, at all?”

Nick gave her a withering look that questioned just when the hell he would have found the time to meet anybody that wasn’t a high school student or bagging groceries at the store.

“You lost a bet,” Maria deduced, stating it as a statement of fact rather than a question before tucking back into her cold spaghetti.

“Something like that.”

“Was it the straws thing?” Victoria asked, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “You do know that they cheat at that, right?”

“I know.”

“And you let them?” Maria asked amused.

“Wait!” Victoria exclaimed, pushing her streaked red and black hair behind her ears before fixing Nick with a look of absolute disbelief. “Don’t tell me that the new files I got in administrations has something to do with you? The new student is one of yours, isn’t she? Melinda?”

“Melinda May.”

“Melinda May,” Victoria repeated softer.

“Is there an echo in here, Hand?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re getting a new kid?” Maria asked, having known Fury long enough to know him when he was angry and childless and for some reason, found the infestation of orphans at his home to be the most amusing thing about working at this school.

“Yes.”

“What’s her story?”

“Why’s she got to have a story, Hill?”

“They always do when they’re one of yours.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is,” Maria snorted. “And as a guidance counselor, it’d be beneficial if I know what it was.”

“Hill,” Fury said with a raised eyebrow as he sat his mug down a little too hard on a stack of report that he had planned to read over lunch. “You’re the assistant principal, not a guidance counselor.”

“I’m both until you get one that can stay in this place,” Maria countered with a raised eyebrow of her own. It had been four years and no one has lasted more than a few weeks, S.H.I.E.L.D. personal or civilian.

If it wasn’t for Maria then their actual guidance counselor Pepper Potts (well part-time guidance counselor, full time babysitter of one Tony Stark), bless her heart, would have been committed to a mental institute a long time ago.

“And don’t deflect the question. I swear, Natasha gets it from you.”

“Nick, I swear,” Victoria sighed exasperatedly before removing his mug from the file to reveal a coffee ring. “This is the reason Pierce doesn’t like you.”

“And here I thought it was my sparkling personality.”

“Is it a spy thing?” Maria asked, causing Victoria to involuntarily freeze up before eying the room around them. “Like Romanoff? You can tell us, we’re all spies here.”

“Maria!” Victoria hissed, looking for any eavesdroppers in the mostly empty room.

“We are, Nick.”

And it was true. Most of the staff were either ex-military, former C.I.A. or current S.H.I.E.L.D. but you didn’t exactly go around blabbing out the fact that you had previously been a spy or currently were a spy because you never really left the spy game behind you, just take a long-term job as a teacher.

Victoria was one of the highest ranking, hardest working agents in the organization. She had only stepped down after Project H.A.M.M.E.R went a little wary to care for her ailing mother. She came to work at Marvel High after her mother passed and boredom had set in. Nick had challenged her with the prehistoric disaster that was the administration office and she took him up on it.

Maria Hill was Fury’s right-hand man from the first day he met this straight from the academy eye-rolling know-it-all. She left field work at some point between the grenade going off and him leaving the hospital. She swore it wasn’t because of him (‘Come on, Nick, me? End my career for your sorry ass? If your ego got any better, it’d have an orbit!’) and had only told him that she worked security briefly for Stark Industries while getting her teaching license (‘It was unbearable and I’ve been tortured before’).

Nick thought that she might have higher clearance after she was reinstated as a part-time field agent with S.H.I.E.L.D. and it didn’t bother him at all. No, it didn’t. Not one bit.

He was only the principal of the damn school and only just principal because Pierce had a petty little superiority complex where he needed to make Nick an example of disobedience.

“I’m not deflecting the question.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m electing to not answer it on the account that I don’t want to.”

“And why is that?”

“There is nothing wrong with the kids in my care.”

“Clinton Barton, circus performer turned nuisance, put an arrow through every basketball in the gym on his first day with a bow that he stole,” Victoria stated like she was reading his file. “Or Natasha Romanoff, the manipulative ballerina that snapped a kid’s arm in half using a technique of the KGB. They’ve got issues, Nick.”

He glared.

“Not saying that there is something wrong with them,” Victoria explained, putting her hands up. “Now. You cannot honestly say that they came to this school in the best states of mind though.”

He couldn’t.

“And you’ve even stated before that the agency you foster from sends you problem kids.”

He did say that.

S.H.I.E.L.D. was that agency and they did have their problems.

“Property damage alone, Fury, I need to know,” Maria said, pushing her empty bowl away. “Barton shot so many pencils into my ceiling that it had to be replaced and Romanoff gave me a black eye. At least, give me some idea of what I’m dealing with.”

“It’s only fair,” Victoria added softly.

Nick considered their plea and thought back to the black lines of the S.H.I.E.L.D. folder sitting in his office. He thought of the smile of the little girl in the picture and the teenager he had not met, and on this rare occasion replied without any crypticness or deceit.

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s Coulson?” Clint asked as he dropped his tray of bruised fruit and cold pizza onto the small table cluttered with notebooks, tablets, and whatever Tony had dragged up from the labs.

He looked across the cafeteria trying to remember what the junior was wearing that day, scrutinizing with narrow eyes everyone who was not Phil Coulson.

“He’s not with the misfits,” He pointed in the general direction of Fitzsimmons’ debate about something physic-y and biological-y and… sleep? He did not think that he’d read their lips correctly but also, they talked so fast that it was hard to keep up. Daisy seemed to be haggling potato chips for pudding cups with Ward.

“Don’t call them that,” Someone mumbled – Bruce or Natasha, or whoever. Clint didn’t really care because Coulson was not there.

“And Lola’s in the parking lot,” Clint added. Lola, of course, being Phil Coulson’s beloved cherry red ’62 Corvette.

“Student Council had a meeting over lunch about the next fundraiser,” Natasha answered.

“Why can’t he just skip those, god,” Clint whined as he sat down in between Natasha and Tony. He bumped Tony’s elbow on purpose but he and Bruce were too wrapped up some equation that Clint didn’t care about to even notice that he caused Tony’s stylus to drag across his tablet.

“He’s the president,” Natasha pointed out.

“So?”

“So, he sets up the meeting, Big Bird,” Tony responded, not bothering to look up from Bruce’s notebook.

“Well, he’s going to miss the exciting news,” Clint beamed, smiling as all eyes at their table turned to him.

“Clint, no,” Natasha mumbled to him. “Does Fury even want us telling anybody?”

“Telling what?” Tony asked. “What is it? Fury finally tell you what he’s keeping under that eye patch?”

“He didn’t say not too, Nat.”

“Whatever,” Natasha rolled her eyes, not really putting up a fight because Clint was right. Nick didn’t say not to tell people.

“We’re getting a new kid,” Clint told everyone.

“So?” Tony was the first to respond. “New people come here all the time. Who cares? It’s not like it’s… oh, wait. Fury is getting a new kid? That’s different! That’s interesting! Keep talking, is it a-“

“Stark, shut it.”

“We don’t know much, honestly,” Natasha said.

“Her name is Melinda,” Clint added with a big smile and excited eyes. “We don’t know when she’s going to be here though but she’s getting Fury’s room.”

“Why?” Bruce asked.

“He lost a bet.”

“Ahh.”

“There’s something weird about it though,” Natasha spoke over Clint’s dramatic retelling of how they conned Principal Fury out of his own bedroom. “There was a guy over last night.”

“It was probably just the social worker,” Clint responded.

“It was after midnight, what social worker comes after midnight?”

“It could have been a friend or something,” Bruce reasoned, sitting down his pen to focus on the conversation. “I’m sure Fury has friends.”

“I’m not,” Tony countered. “Have you met the man? He’s about as friendly as a shark in an eyepatch.”

“Unbelievably, I’m with Tony on this,” Natasha cut in. “Nick didn’t look thrilled to see him, I couldn’t really hear their conversation but his body language was… stiff, like he was angry. And…and he had a folder.”

“Yeah,” Clint agreed. “Yeah, the one on the table! Looked like someone got trigger happy with a magic marker.”

“Yeah!”

“That’s really weird,” Tony said almost flippantly. “So, what are we talking? Like a spy or something?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“And Fury was really weird about it this morning,” Clint said to Natasha. “Like with you, he told me all he knew about when you’d be there and everything.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know,” she responded.

“It’s Fury,” Clint reasoned because Nick Fury knew everything except how to cook a proper meal, everything.

“Maybe,” Tony cut in loud enough to draw the attention of a few surrounding tables, “It’s something to do with his old spy days.”

“He’s not a spy,” Bruce said, pinching the bridge of his nose like an exasperated parent who had repeated those words on one too many occasions.

Natasha and Clint exchanged a look because it was not like Fury every said that he was a spy but it was not like he ever said that he wasn’t a spy either. And they both knew their arrival at his doorstep was in less than usual circumstances, but the very thought that the man that watched Disney movies and baked cookies with them was some badass spy, it was laughable.

“Yeah, he is,” Tony argued with ‘DUH’ ringing throughout his words. “My dad built some of the tech he used in the C.I.A.”

“You don’t even know if that’s true.”

“So?”

“Who’s your creditable source?” Bruce challenged. “Where’s your proof?”

“This isn’t an English paper, Brucey,” Tony snapped. “Come on, man, we are men of science! Don’t throw that English stuff at me.”

“We still have credible sources, Tony.”

“I heard my dad say it, credible enough?” Tony asked, ignoring Clint’s snort of ‘not really, no.’ “That’s why I go here instead of some fancy-smancy private school upstate.”

“Oh, you mean, it’s not just to annoy us?” Natasha asked sarcastically. “And this is a private school upstate.”

“It’s not a fancy one though,” He shrugged. “And I know you love me, Natasha.”

“Whatever, Stark.”

“I wish Coulson was here,” Clint whined.