Chapter 4
Step number one is to reign in the Barton angst, or at least to push it onto someone more capable than he, so Tony texts Natasha directly. She’ll probably murder Tony for it when she gets back, but today it feels worth it.
C’s soulmate rejected him, he writes. He’s devastated.
“Devastated” might imply a lot more wailing and gnashing of the teeth than has actually occurred, but there has definitely been enough miserable brooding to be concerning.
Tony’s sure that’ll get a response from Natasha, and is surprised when nothing comes. Next he tries: He’s holed up in his apartment and won’t come out, which is true, followed immediately by He’s listening to woeful Sarah MacLachlan music and eating ice cream by the gallon, which is not.
Not that Tony is worried about Clint—other people would definitely worry about his listless behavior, but not Tony, who sees no reason to worry because he’s going to actually fix it. He’ll fix everything, but first he needs Natasha to do her part and actually respond.
He ups the ante with: No one on the lower levels can work due to the distraction of his loud, sustained weeping, and later, cursing her continued silence, adds: JARVIS said Clint just ordered razor blades and Dermablend and looks very very very very upset.
He’s ready to write Natasha Romanov off as the world’s most terrible friend—or just a busy and preoccupied one, his traitorous mind tries to insist—and give up on the whole endeavor when his phone finally chimes.
Okay. I’ll call him.
*******
Step number two involves sandwiches and chips and drinks balanced in the crook of his arm, condensation seeping unpleasantly through the sleeve of his jacket.
When Tony barges in the secretary rises quickly from her seat before recognizing him and aborting the movement, kind of hovering for a moment before dropping back down into her chair. He gives her a knowing smirk before rapping once on Nick’s door and throwing it open.
“You never come home for dinner. Do you even eat dinner? Or human food? I brought—” He stops short.
There’s a chair in the office now, right in front of Nick’s desk, a hard plastic thing with no armrests, sitting uncomfortably low to the floor—it looks like it’s been dragged in from the world's most unforgiving interrogation room. That, or from the SHIELD cafeteria. But it’s something. It’s a chair. For him.
“Why does it feel like I’m being conditioned?” Tony demands, but he knows a peace offering when he sees one. It may be the world’s most reluctant and blatantly grudging olive branch, but Tony’s been on the giving end of enough similar gestures to accept it in the spirit intended. “What’s next—you gonna toss me a dog treat if I keep being good?”
“I’ll wait till you’ve stopped shitting on my rug,” Nick answers, but he’s fighting a wry twist to his lips that Tony suspects someday, in a million years, might grow into an actual, willing smile. “Figuratively speaking, of course.”
“Of course,” Tony agrees immediately. “Just ask Pepper; I’ve crapped on a lot of her metaphorical furniture as well.” He perches gingerly on the edge of the chair, and yes, it’s every bit as uncomfortable as he suspected it would be. “Dare I ask where the presents I sent over ended up?” He may or may not have arranged for a large number of leather armchairs to be delivered directly to Nick’s office that morning.
Nick opens a drawer and pulls out a card, flips it across the desk into Tony’s lap, landing neatly on top of his sandwich.
“SHIELD Reference and Archives kindly thanks you for your generous donation of twenty (20) reading chairs,” Tony reads, and hums thoughtfully before tucking the card into his jacket pocket. “I’m keeping this for my accountant; it'll give him a write-off boner.”
They spend the next ten minutes chewing in a fairly companionable silence. Nick eats his entire sandwich without picking anything off, which Tony counts as a ringing endorsement.
“Around the same time tomorrow?” he asks, and Nick raises an eyebrow.
“You trying to buy my friendship with food? Who’s conditioning who here?”
“I’ve won people over with a lot less.” Tony grins, and Nick’s mouth twitches up again.
*******
There’s a message from Bruce to the whole group—just a terse All good, think I’m getting closer, take care, but it makes Tony happy, imagining he can hear Bruce’s excitement laced through the words.
Maybe Bruce’s soulmate won’t meet him and decide We can’t ever have anything in common.
And Bruce won’t declare I don’t love you. I thought I’d feel…something.
Maybe they'll come together with a dramatic kiss and rush of excitement like in all the songs and books, like in every breathless magazine article, and Bruce will come home and tell them all about it.
*******
“Let’s see it, then.” Tony waggles his eyebrows suggestively. “I already showed you mine.”
Nick fixes him with a very admirable glower before setting his sandwich—turkey and cheese again; he’d seemed to like it earlier in the week, and Tony’s adventurism does not extend to food—and rolls up his shirt sleeve carefully. His soulmark has faded with time and looks more like an old scar than anything.
“Why did you do it?” Tony asks, settling back into his chair. It’s a little more comfortable after the Nick’s most recent addition—a hemorrhoid pillow thrown unceremoniously at Tony’s head when he arrived with dinner. “It doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.”
Nick shrugs. “It was kind of a spur of the moment thing, when I joined the army. Lots of guys do it then—people like the idea, you know, of someone back home pining for them. Writing letters, waiting for phone calls. You roll the dice and maybe get lucky, things aren’t so lonely anymore.” Nick pulls his shirtsleeve back down, working the button fastidiously. “Of course, I set the damned thing in motion and nothing happened. It was disappointing, but also kind of a relief; I only had to worry about myself out there. Then I got into SHIELD and wished I’d never done it. I gave everything I had to this place and didn’t have anything left—not even for a soulmate. This is no kind of life to pull someone else into. I was glad that the person never showed.”
Tony hums thoughtfully. He knows all too well how it feels to be so consumed, to the exclusion of everything else.
“Phil never activated his, you know,” Nick goes on. “Part of it was his thing with Barton, but it was moreso because Phil was practical to a fault. It wasn’t a good time, he’d always say. Maybe later. Maybe after this next big operation. Maybe when things settle down. Maybe tomorrow. But things never did settle down and he ended up with an alien spear through the heart he was afraid to give away.”
“No more tomorrows for him,” Tony observes carefully. “He was a good man.”
Nick looks away suddenly and shrugs uncomfortably, obviously not wanting to talk any more about it. The two had been best friends, and Tony kicks himself a little, even though Nick had been the one to bring him up.
“I guess you were plenty surprised that day,” Tony says. It feels like a safer topic than Coulson, but dangerous all the same. Anything to do with relationships was inherently dangerous. “When it turned out to be me.” He shifts slightly in the chair, steeling himself for the response.
“Well I sure didn’t see it coming,” Nick admits, then smiles. “But I wasn’t disappointed.”
*******
“This is all the result of a very long and confusing chain of events,” Clint insists, but he’s too bright-eyed, too eerily calm, too self-satisfied at the blood pooling beneath him.
“Yeah. Sure.” Tony rolls his eyes and works Clint’s cramped fists open as carefully as he can. There’s way too much blood for him to deal with, the skin flayed too deeply this time for to implement teamwide caretaking routine Bruce had established—bandages and a disappointed rebuke. “Christ, Clint, these need stitches.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Yes, they fucking do!” Tony has a lot more empathy for what Rhodey and Pepper and even Happy had gone through all those years, the three of them taking turns nursing Tony through the worst of his own self destructive spirals. This is exhausting and terrifying, and Tony both wants to hug Clint close and punch him right in his sad, stupid face. “Why did you do this?” Of course it’s not a fair question when Tony understands the ‘why’ perfectly well.
“I had to practice.” Clint goes for a willfully obtuse practicality, but his eyes are fixed on his injured hands and Tony allows himself to hope that this was just a mistake and not an escalation of depressive behavior. That Clint hadn’t meant it to go quite this far.
“Yeah, but use the safety gear. The armguards. The little—“ Tony waggles his own fingers obnoxiously in the air “—fingertip protection thingies. Whatever those things are called.”
“Finger tabs.” Clint lets Tony pull him to his feet, unsteady from blood loss and God-knows-how-many hours at the range.
“Well, wear them!” Tony sighs and tugs on the corner of nearby workout towel, ignoring the clatter of a dozen water bottles falling over as result. He tosses it to Clint, who winds it around his bloodier hand. “Hasn’t Natasha called you yet?”
Clint pauses and gives him a narrow eyed look. “You told her,” he sighs with dawning realization. “I figured she just guessed through her creepy Tasha-omniscience.”
“Well, what did she say?”
Tony has held out more than little hope that the Widow’s special brand of Barton TLC will be a magical cure-all that pulls him out of this endless funk. That dream is immediately dashed when Clint points out, “She knows even less about healthy relationships than we do!”
Tony didn’t really have any plan beyond that, except for angrily confronting Angela, which even he knew was a bad idea. All he can do is focus on and fix the immediate problem: get Barton to his apartment. Get a doctor. Get a bot to clean up all the blood in the range. And then…well, Tony has no idea what happens after that. All he knows is that what’s happening now has to stop, and soon.
“Listen, you need to talk to someone. A professional. Someone smarter about this stuff than me.”
Clint gives a surprised laugh that turns into a sick groan and pulls away from Tony’s grasp, leaning into a wall of lockers and cupboards, pressing his forehead into the cool metal. “You know, I think I’ll just stay here instead. If anyone wonders where I am, you can just tell ‘em that I’m right here, by Captain America’s locker.”
Tony sighs. “Clint. You’re not the first person to ever suffer a disappointment.” Some people run to find their soulmate only to discover a someone strung out on drugs or locked into prison. There are immigration issues, domestic violence. There’s all sorts of ways it can go bad, and as a result there are counselors and whole agencies that specialize in working out undesirable scenarios. “The two of you could figure something out. You could have a platonic friendship maybe. And if you can’t…” Tony lets the words hang, but Clint is certainly smart enough to fill them in himself. You can go on alone. Try to move on with your life.
Clint falls silent at that and doesn’t protest as Tony drags him the rest of the way to his apartment. He sits passively and keeps his bloody hands dripping steadily into the sink while Tony and JARVIS coordinate a medical house call. He doesn’t bother trying to explain his wounds when the doctor finally shows up, scolding and numbing and suturing.
*******
Tony watches from the safety of the doorway and texts Nick, who’s predictably still at SHIELD. Problem w/Barton; you get a break from my nightly dinner invasion.
Alright, comes the answer, then a few moments later Need some help?
A hasty No is his first reaction, because he’s Tony Goddamned Stark and has never needed help from anyone and never wants to. What’s more, Clint is his friend and this is Avengers Family business; they’ve stood as an insular group against the world for years and no outsiders need ever come in and try to change that. These friendships were hard won, and aside from the team and Rhodey and Pepper every other relationship has ended with a painfully learned lesson. But Tony’s finger hovers over the “n” button and he forces himself to push the impulse away, because he and Nick are trying. Clumsily, with chairs and sandwiches and awkward gestures, but trying all the same.
I guess, if you want to, Tony types out.
Then he deletes that in favor of I’d appreciate it.
Because they’re trying.
*******
Clint grumbles at being manhandled over to the couch but stills immediately at Nick’s warning look. He accepts a blanket and glass of water with relative good grace, but unsurprisingly draws a line in the sand when presented with the prescription bottle the doctor left behind.
“No drugs.”
“They’re just painkillers,” Tony tries, but Nick bypasses all reasoning and cajoling and barks “Take the pills!” with such authority that even Tony’s hands twitch automatically toward the medication. As it turns out he ends up opening the bottle anyway, Clint’s fingers still too numb to work the childproof cap.
“I’m calling you every time,” Tony marvels an hour later, his voice pitched low so as not to wake the archer asleep on the couch in between them. An alien movie that no one is watching plays quietly on the television. “Tweetie’s pants-pissing terror of your presence and disapproval is invaluable. Usually at this point we’d still be trying to get him to take the glass of water.”
“Scaring people is what I do,” Nick says inscrutably, then “He’ll be better once he can get back to work. Too much downtime is the downfall of any SHIELD agent.”
Nick pats Clint’s leg carefully and Tony frowns at the look of absentminded affection. He’s not jealous, per se…but maybe a tiny bit envious. It probably took Barton ten years of dedicated service to earn a solicitous gesture given only while he’s safely unconscious, which means that Tony would have to do something even grander to deserve one.
‘Flying a nuclear device through a wormhole and saving the city’ does comes to mind briefly.
“Is it a downfall even for you?” Tony asks, teasing, and settles back into the couch and pillows, not missing the way Nick’s eyes track the movement.
“Let me put it this way—last time I took a vacation I had my eye gouged out.”
“That’s gross,” Tony declares with a theatrical shudder, then grins happily at Nick’s honest-to-God-teeth-and-all laugh. He reaches over a lightly snoring Hawkeye to nudge Nick’s leg. “But it’s okay; I once cut a gaping hole in my own chest and filled it with a form of fusion power.”
“That’s even grosser,” Nick observes, and laughs again.