A story titled "A New Beginning"

Or, the one in which Tony gains a family

It was quite a number of months after the Battle of Manhatten (as the media had dubbed it) that Tony noticed that something had changed. The city of New York had gradually revived from its brief alien invasion – the city infrastructure was less, well, flattened than before, and you could walk freely around the city without accidently setting off a Chitauri mine or stepping in rotting alien corpse. Stark Tower was once again up and running, although most of the country had by this point renamed it the "Avenger's Tower" as a tribute to the lone flickering "A" which was left on the side of the building, and it being known as the home of a certain group of misfit heroes.

Tony still wasn't quite sure how it happened that he ended up living with a super soldier, two spy/assassins, and a huge, green rage-machine, but at the end of the day, he wasn't going to complain about it. It had been awkward at first, as although they had worked out rather quickly how to be an effective team, being neighbours? That was a completely different story.

None of them, Tony mused, had ever really lived within normal social neighbourhoods before. Bruce had lived in self-imposed isolation for years, the Captain was from the 1940's, and Hawkeye and Black Widow were likely from some spy breeding programme. The most socially adjusted was probably Thor, and that only applied to his own people on his own planet, which is where he had been since he transported Loki back home. As for Tony himself, well, aside from his stint in college he had never been exactly exposed to normal social interaction, what with his father always working or looking for Captain America or being just too goddamn busy to share more than a sentence worth of conversation at a time with his son. His mother was just as bad, either throwing herself into her latest charity cause or being too blind drunk to care. Jarvis and Ana and Aunt Peggy did the best they could, but they were gone and Tony was left only with his 'bots, JARVIS (who was programmed to interact with him for God's sake) and Pepper, who must be somewhat crazy anyway for sticking around despite (and because of) the tonnes of shit he has put her through.

So yeah, Tony knew from the start that the new living arrangements were going to take some time to get used to. And eventually, the team did get used to each other. They knew that Cap would get up at 6:30 every morning without fail, and that Bruce meditates regularly to keep calm. They learnt that Widow and Hawkeye would stay in each other's bedrooms but nothing of that sort would happen, and that Tony was constantly working on some sort of project.

Tony thought that that was where their boundaries would settle, that they would work well as a team and interact as neighbours would, but nothing more. However, the team ploughed through his expectations with the introduction of team dinners and team 'bonding' nights. It started when Tony actually emerged out of his workshop (for once) with the intention of ordering something more nourishing to eat than DUM-E's smoothies (again, shocker). He had dragged Bruce out from his adjoining lab, then they both proceeded to bump into Cap, and Clint had yelled his and Widow's orders from a vent whilst Tony was on the phone (which had scared the shit out of him by the way). So they had all ended up eating together. Team dinner abruptly evolved into team movie night when it was discovered that Cap hadn't yet watched Star Wars. Team dinners started occurring more and more often, and almost all of them would end with either a movie night, or video games night, or bombard-Capsicle-with-21st-century-trivia night.

What was weirdest, Tony had decided, was when everyone was doing their own separate, completely different thing, but in the same room. Bruce might be reading, Clint whooping Steve's ass at Mariokart, Natasha painting her nails (and she could still manage to look terrifying whist doing this) and Tony creating specs for new equipment or writing an SI report, but they would all be together and interacting with each other, and it was just all so domestic that Tony wondered what in the hell had happened to them all. It was like whenever Tony had stayed at Jarvis' house – the butler would usually be cleaning something (and he said he didn't have a complex), his wife Ana would usually knit or play the piano, and little Tony would scribble out drawings, because he knew that Jarvis would at least look at them and maybe they would go on the fridge.

It was like family, Tony realised. The Avengers weren't neighbours, each separated by their own separate floor, they weren't flatmates who shared a house but lived independently, they were a family who lived together and did things together, even if it was just sitting in relative silence. It was a completely alien concept to all of them, and Tony knew it was going to be difficult because, truly, they didn't really know the first thing about each other, not the stuff that really mattered, but God's and aliens and whoever else be damned if Tony wasn't going to fight to keep this.

And though it was never said aloud, all of the others agreed with him. They embraced their new beginnings as a family.