Chapter 3
*******
Tont tries to avoid it and can’t. He sends out another call to the team. Check in. Tell me you’re alive.
Ping! Ping! Steve and Natasha.
Nothing from Clint, who’s probably still pissed. He hasn’t returned to the Tower, hasn’t shown up anywhere at SHIELD.
Bruce’s tone chimes eventually, along with a text message: Missed connection; think soulmate was flying to where *I* was while I was flying to where *she* was. Haha!
Like two helicarriers passing in the night, Tony answers immediately, trying not to be disappointed when a smiley face is the only answer he receives.
*******
Pepper won’t let him come back to work, and there are still four long weeks to wait.
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” he asks.
“You’re supposed to try,” she snaps before hanging up on him and blocking his phone number.
So Tony goes to Nick’s office, relishing the way his secretary stands up to yell and just as quickly snaps her mouth shut. He’s got rights here, and enough emotional and legal clout to get into that office whenever he wishes. Tony smirks at the secretary and reminds himself that he’s a responsible adult and will in no way abuse this newfound power.
Except for all the ways that he totally will.
“What the hell??” Nick demands. His desk is an impressively messy thing in the center of a huge but windowless room, stacks of papers in varying heights held down by empty coffee cups in a rainbow of colors.
“I’ve come calling,” Tony says, tipping an imaginary hat. “I thought I’d spend a little time with my significant—” He stops suddenly, turning a full circle. “What the—? There isn’t even a chair in here! Well, besides yours, that is.” He frowns at the leather monstrosity the SHIELD Director is parked in. “So when you have a meeting the other person just stands the whole time?”
“If I have a meeting I schedule a conference room. This is where I work. Not where I meet.” Nick still looks incredibly put out, but he hasn’t told Tony to leave. That must mean he doesn’t really mind…or that he’s summoned security by pushing a button hidden under the desk. It means one of those things, surely. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I felt like talking.” For lack of anywhere to sit, Tony leans against the edge of the desk instead, feigning nonchalance, regretting he chose an angle that digs so uncomfortably in his thigh. He straightens back up instead, crosses his arms. Feels foolish. Uncrosses them.
They stare at each other for a few long moments. Luckily Tony's ability for his mouth to run completely independently of his brain saves the day.
“So…Cap and the Widow. Who would have seen that coming, huh?” Tony grins conspiratorially and peers at the diplomas on Fury’s wall, wondering if they’d been faked. “One day they're perfectly platonic friends and the next—bonded sex fiends! Beach Bunny and the Star Spangled Speedo, honeymooning on a tropical island." Tony nods at the diplomas and moves to some pictures of Nick shaking hands with various American presidents. "Then there's our Hulkie, sniffing out the love of his life—isn’t she gonna get a nasty surprise during their first lovers’ spat! And Barton—well, I really hope the guy has a Mommy kink.”
“What do you want?” Fury asks, more gently this time.
“I want a chair,” Tony snaps back, suddenly vehement, as surprised by the words as Nick, who glowers back. “In here. For me.”
“This is my office. There’s room for you at the apartment. You don’t need a chair here.”
They stare at each other again, until Tony throws up his hands in frustration. “Right. Sure.” He barely resists the impulse to knock one of the paper towers over as he passes by the desk on his way out the door.
*******
Nick still isn’t home, and Tony has reached the terminal end of the work he can do—or cares to do—on his tablet from the dubious comfort of the couch. Instead he spends the next couple of hours eating chips and watching amateur youtube videos of Avengers’ fights, complete with colorful filmmaker comments. WarMachinesgrrrrl98 is especially humorous, and there aren’t enough “thumbs up” clicks in the world to express Tony’s joy every time she refers to Steve as “Cappy McMurica”.
But after a while even watching the Hulk punching buildings set in time to “Gonna Make You Sweat” loses its luster, and Tony’s eyes travel to the side of the screen, full of related and suggested videos. Only out of a combination of morbid curiosity and a desire to go ahead and make this the worst night ever does Tony click on “10 Greatest Soulmate Reveals—Number 7 Will Make You Cry!!!”.
“Fuck you both,” he grits out at the teenagers dramatically activating their soulbonds at their high school graduation, everyone weeping and cheering.
Clip number three is of a pair of famous authors from the 1800’s who corresponded throughout the duration of their self-determined marriages, only to find they were soulbound to one another later in life. Historians speculate now that both had murdered their spouses and then faked their bond, but popular culture refuses to accept it; there’s countless sappy movies about their so-called eternal love.
“Oh Lord, not this again.” Number five is the most overplayed footage of recent years, a man suffering from an extreme case of ego that had decided to run to find his soulmate once both marks activated. He also just so happened to have a full camera crew and coordinated media coverage, but everyone manages to ignore that part. The man ran the length of one and a half states, and spent the last few hours running on bleeding feet, his shoes long since fallen apart, bawling his eyes out and stumbling. He and his husband and their newly adopted baby have been reality show darlings ever since. “Take a cab next time, you weepy moron.”
Clip number seven is of two soldiers that the Army grudgingly moved heaven and earth to get to one another, despite being in a literal war zone. Tony fast forwards through their story hastily, on the off chance that it actually does make him cry.
And reveal number ten is a twist, or a trick, or however people want to see it—“It’s your story!” the announcer trills cheerfully. “For all the people still waiting for their other half…keep your hopes up! The next great love story may be yours!”
*******
Nick comes home only long enough to go immediately to bed. Then he reappears suddenly at 2am, pulling on his shirt and grumbling, nearly startling Tony off his couch, still awake and morosely watching “Adventure Time”.
“What’s wrong?” Tony asks. “Is the world ending?” He hasn’t gotten any alerts from JARVIS but fishes his phone off of the coffee table anyway. There’s nothing. He thumbs over the screen again. Still nothing.
“It’s not anything you need to worry about.” Nick glares sleepily. “Go back to your cartoons. Or better yet, go to your actual bed; it’s ass o’clock.”
“Where are you going?” Tony demands, but he's already gone.
*******
A couple of hours later Nick returns—and Tony is still on the couch, thank you very much—in a thunderously bad mood, which isn’t a surprise, but dragging in an incredibly intoxicated Hawkeye alongside him, which is.
“Clint!” Tony jumps up, grabbing for him as Nick shoves the archer roughly in his direction. “Jesus, what happened to you?”
“You should see the other guy!” Clint slurs triumphantly, smiling and blinking hard. He reeks of vodka and has obviously been in a fight, his left cheek swollen and a vibrant purple and dried blood spiking up the hair around his left ear. He frowns suddenly, thinking. “Wait…guys. You should see the other guys. I beat them up,” he adds unnecessarily.
“Take care of him,” Nick snaps. “I have to be at the office in three hours and I want to attempt to get some sleep before that.” He storms off to his bedroom, muttering curses to himself.
“There’s probably a first aid kit around here somewhere.” Tony runs his fingers carefully over Barton’s face before stopping himself. He has no idea what a broken bone feels like, and can’t do anything about one anyway. “There’s a box of grenades in the coat closet; a first aid kit doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.”
“Don’t need first aid,” Clint protests, slumping hard against him, his voice muffled against Tony’s shoulder. The archer is wearing a collared, button-down shirt and khaki pants, an unflattering combination that Tony has never seen Clint attempt outside of reluctantly attended weddings and one very ill-fated church attempt with Steve. “They checked me over at the jail. I just wanna throw up and go to sleep.”
“Alright, but you’re sleeping in the spare bedroom. I’ve just started to break in that couch.”
*******
“What happened?” Tony asks finally. Clint had, in fact, thrown up copiously and dramatically, before sprawling out in the yellow and grey guest bed. His eyes are closed, face slack with almost-sleep and intoxication, grimacing occasionally in discomfort. “Who’d you get in a fight with?”
“Some guys. I dunno who.” He mumbles something else, unintelligible.
“Why?”
“They were laughing at her. At us.”
Shit. The woman. Clint’s geriatric soulmate. Tony searches his memory briefly. “Angela?”
“Yeah.” Clint’s face contorts into something pained. “This whole…this whole thing has been such a clusterfuck. Being alone forever is better than this.”
“Not a good fit?” Tony asks uneasily, even though he already knows the answer. Theoretically, they’re supposed to be a perfect fit—that’s the appeal of the whole institution, why people agree to it in the first place.
Though, like Barton, Tony and Nick are proof positive that this isn’t always the case.
“She’s so much older than me,” Clint says desperately, rolling over to bury his face in the pillow, hiding his expression. “More than thirty years older. She’s going to retire soon.”
“That must be really hard,” Tony says as sympathetically as he can muster, patting Clint awkwardly on the back.
“She said we look ridiculous together. That we don’t have anything in common, that we never could.”
Tony’s brain shorts out for a second and his hand hovers uncertainly in the air as he tries to reconcile what he’d thought with what he was hearing. “She’s—wait. She’s rejecting you??”
“Angie’s been waiting for her soulmate since she was twenty-five years old. She finally decided that they’d died, or had just never activated their mark. Here she’s waited for more than forty years…and then in waltzes me—young enough to be her son and an ex-carnie government-sanctioned contract killer to boot. She fucking freaked!”
“God, Clint, I’m so sorry.”
“I would try, you know? To make it work, I would try. But she says we look ridiculous, that it’s a mistake, it’s a joke. We’ve tried to hang out, to get to know each other, just, you know, to be cordial if nothing else. And we go out and we’re trying and there’s these guys and they laughed. And she was embarrassed. So ashamed. Because of me. Because of this!” He thrusts his arm into Tony’s face suddenly. His soulmark is a long, deep red slash high on his wrist.
“I’m sorry,” Tony says again, helplessly.
“She’s right, it’s a joke. A cruel joke. And it’s funny, right? Just like those guys thought. They laughed because it’s just…so…fucking…funny.” He makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat that’s more like sobs than laughter, pulling the quilt up under his chin.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” Tony says quietly.
“I do,” Clint insists, screwing his eyes shut tightly. “I really really really do.”
“Look, maybe you should—"
“Shhhhhhh.” Clint’s hand snakes out from the blanket to clumsily pinch Tony’s lips shut, but his usually perfect aim is off and he just manages to stick one of his fingers halfway up Tony’s nose. “Stop talking.”
“Things will be better tomorrow.” It’s all Tony can think to offer, the only thing he can hope for the both of them at this point. That tomorrow will somehow be magically different than today.
“You’re so lucky,” Clint slurs. “Fury. What a catch. And look at the two of you, already living here together. So lucky.”
He obviously hasn’t noticed that this isn’t just a spare bedroom they’re holed up in, hasn’t noticed Tony’s overnight bag and few possessions strewn around messily. It’s not as great as you would think, he wants to say, but there’s no point; Clint is already asleep and wouldn’t want to hear it anyway. Tony and Nick’s differences are almost comical compared to a full out rejection.
*******
As usual, Nick is up by six and rattling around in the kitchen, so Tony sighs and drags himself out of bed. Out of couch, rather—Clint still has occupancy of the bed. Nick’s head snaps up from his coffee.
“Sorry, was I loud?” He doesn’t look particularly sorry, and maybe that’s understandable—he’d been up most of the night, too. “Where’s Barton?”
Tony pours himself a cup, though there won’t be enough caffeine in the world to keep him awake once Nick leaves. “Sleeping it off. Did he tell you want happened?”
“A bit.” Nick’s voice is carefully guarded. “And the rest wasn’t hard to guess.” He drains his coffee and sighs. “Keep an eye on him; he can be an impulsive little bastard before he decides to pull himself together.”
Tony absolutely does not want to imagine what that could mean. “Keep an eye on him?” he echoes doubtfully. “Do I look like the nurturing type? Like I could help anyone going through a crisis?”
“Then call Romanov and have her come take care of him.”
“She and Captain America are still on vacation, bonding sexually.” Tony waggles his eyebrows as suggestively as possible, but it somehow doesn’t sound as funny as it did in his head.
Nick grimaces. “Right.”
“This is a mess. Clint’s whole life has been ruined by this stupid—” Tony gestures with vague helplessness “—soulmate debacle.”
“I think it’s a little early to draw that kind of conclusion,” Nick observes wryly. “It’s only been a few weeks. Some people need to ease into things. Not everyone can fall into each other’s arms like Romanov and Rogers, now can they?”
“I guess not,” Tony says wistfully.
“Nope,” Nick agrees.
*******
A few hours later Tony is awakened again, this time by Clint staggering through the room toward the kitchen, one hand clamped over his eyes and the other groping blindly in front of him. Tony sighs and wraps a blanket around himself before following.
“Clint.”
“Ugh. Just don’t.”
Weepy, drunk Clint Barton has been replaced by grumpy, hungover Clint Barton, and it’s not much of an improvement. The archer moves through the kitchen with a suspicious familiarity, opening cabinets to find coffee supplies and a box of snack cakes without a single misstep. He even fishes out a bottle of Tylenol from a drawer full of odds and ends. Tony has lived here—well, in the evenings and alternating with Nick’s nights spent at the Tower, anyway—for two weeks and he still has no idea where anything is.
Tony waits till the archer has finished his second cup of coffee before trying again. “Where was she?” he asks, and Clint raises a questioning eyebrow. “Angela. You said the two of you went out, some guys gave you shit, then you got into a fight. Fury was the one that sprung you from jail, so where was she?”
“I don’t know. She left sometime before the police came.” Clint focuses on opening the cellophane on his chocolate cupcake as quietly as possible. His bruises look both dramatic and painful this morning.
“Maybe she’s not worth being sad over. You’re a good person; you don’t deserve this. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Angela is just a shitty soulmate?”
Clint glares. “Don’t say that.”
“Are you in love with her?” Tony demands, and Clint’s scornful eyeroll is answer enough. “Do you want to be?”
“The sheets on the bed were musty,” Clint says out of nowhere, then smirks at Tony’s confusion. “They’re musty as hell because they’ve been on that bed forever. Nick didn’t think to change them, and you haven’t been sleeping in that bed to even know they smell bad.”
He’d been drunk and upset and unobservant last night, but this morning he’s apparently right back to being his clear-eyed namesake. Tony isn’t keen to be on the receiving end of any soul crushing insights so early in the day any more than Clint wants to talk about his own disappointments.
“Fury is awesome,” Clint says with a frowning glare that would make his mentor proud. “He’s a badass. He’s also a shrewd, crafty motherfucker. Why aren’t you in love with him?”
“Well,” Tony blusters, “I hardly know him.”
“And that’s your own damned fault,” Clint points out angrily, then sighs. He picks up his cupcake again with an unhappy smile. “Maybe that’s because it’s actually you and me, Tony. We’re the shitty soulmates.”
Maybe they are. Tony is a billionaire genius and Clint is a secret agent and master archer—both of them should be seen as a catch, the jewel in someone’s crown. Instead both somehow seem to be the embodiment of another person's disappointment, a broken dream made flesh.
And maybe it won’t be just them. What will Bruce’s soulmate say, when they finally meet and he or she discovers their other half turns into a Hulk? What will Steve do when the honeymoon period wears off, when he wakes up one morning and remembers that Natasha has killed countless numbers of people? What will she think when she realizes that Steve might never be able to overlook that?
They don’t talk on the drive back to the Tower, and Tony blares the radio to cover any awkwardness. Other than a muted thunk when Clint rests his head against the window he might as well be driving alone.
*******
“JARVIS, this is bad. JARVIS, this sucks donkey balls!” The sentiment is heartfelt, for sure, but JARVIS’ answering silence is rather pointed, obviously dreading—as much as an artificial intelligence can dread anything—what Tony might possibly request next. It hadn't even occurred to him, but now that it does Tony fights a smile in anticipation. And just like that, his morose brooding pops like a bubble.
“I need a pal right now, J,” Tony singsongs. “I need someone to be on my side. I need a...bro!” He gives in and laughs as JARVIS seems to sigh with his entire incorporeal being. Years ago a very drunk Tony had programed him to respond exclusively in bro-speak if specifically prompted, and it has brought the inventor no limit of joy ever since. “JARVIS, this sucks,” he says again meaningfully.
“It sure as shit does,” the AI intones in his usual clipped, British tones, still somehow managing to sound bland and offended at the same time.
“What are we gonna do about it? Everything’s a mess. How are we going to fix things?”
“I don’t know, but I got your back…bro,” JARVIS says stiffly, and Tony laughs, already feeling a hundred pounds lighter.
“Well,” he says finally, “I can probably come up with a few ideas.”