Clint secretly loves Saturday mornings in the diner. It had started as a hungover suggestion, passed from floor to floor by JARVIS, for Tony to open a diner in the newly renamed and rebuilt Avengers Tower so they didn't have to go out for for breakfast. Some days supervising the robot kitchen while it cooked was still too much effort, and there was no shame in that. (Okay, there was probably supposed to be at least some shame, judging by Pepper's eyeroll.)
Once the diner was open, Phil had decided it would be a good team-building exercise to make them all work shifts together. The fact that he decided this while chasing Tony out of his office for the fifth time in under three hours shouldn't matter, he'd told them. Now they had to find time for a shift a week, Avengers missions permitting. Clint suspected that some of the bad guys found the whole thing amusing and were planning their attacks around lunch rushes, but he couldn't prove anything and SHIELD refused to supply the data to back him up. Besides, it had really only been funny the first week, with the roller skates.
Even after the uniform change, their first few months were rough. Customers were mostly coming to see superheroes sniping at each other while they tried to run a diner, since the best thing you could say about the food was that it was imaginative. Clint and Thor were finally removed from the kitchen after a week spent pestering Coulson to come down for lunch ended with him sending the two of them down to medical to make sure they didn't have brain tumors affecting their taste buds. The team had to spend the next four months rotating through the kitchen with a trained professional to make sure they didn't test out anything they saw on an Iron Chef midnight marathon or substitute Skittles for fruit again or, like one exciting morning during Week 6, put Dummy in charge of the grill.
But now they were just past their six month mark at the diner, and they had a rhythm. Saturday mornings meant Thor and Bruce working the grill, concocting some kind of waffle masterpiece. Steve was up front, seating people and chatting with families who were waiting for a table. Natasha and Tony were serving, the competition to see who could make more in tips keeping them motivated. And Clint was behind the counter, serving coffee and keeping an eye out for any problems that might come up. They called back and forth to each other across the restaurant, trading insults and jokes and, during one particularly good run on the radio, songs.
Clint eyed Coulson, who was keeping an eye on them while finishing up paperwork in his usual corner booth and laughed. Even he seemed surprised at how well the team-building worked.