Disclaimer: I do not own the original canon nor am I making any profit from writing this piece. All works are accredited to their original authors, performers, and producers while this piece is mine. No copyright infringement is intended. I acknowledge that all views and opinions expressed herein are merely my interpretations of the characters and situations found within the original canon and may not reflect the views and opinions of the original author(s), producer(s), and/or other people.
Warnings: This story may contain material that is not suitable for all audiences and may offend some readers. Please exercise understanding of personal sensitivities before and during reading.
Author's Note(s): A while back I stumbled upon a Facebook post of someone's Tumblr headcanon that Natasha steals the other Avengers' clothes to intimidate them and I wrote Thief, with a bunch of intention (and plans! Like I have very extensive notes on things) to write up a happy-ish little series about the Avengers actually being a family living together in the tower and figuring out how their interpersonal hierarchy was going to shake out. Lore was the one who really wanted me to continue the concept beyond the single oneshot and over many nights at his favorite Waffle House we had hammered out most of the details. About three days after I had started this piece was when Lore was killed. That's my only reason why it has taken me this long to actually finish it.
Challenge/Competition Block:
Stacked with: Winter Bingo; RC; NCR; FF; SoC; LL; NC; SI(N); ToS; BAON; FPC; Long Haul (N); Slicing Life (N); Truth (N); Neurodivergent (N); Fear Inside (N)
Space Address (Prompt): 5B (Gift)
Representation: BC Use; Superhero Social Dynamics;
Bonus Challenge(s): Gingersnap; Second Verse (Not a Lamp; Ladylike; Nontraditional; Found Family; Wabi Sabi; Middle Name; Tomorrow's Shade; Unwanted Advice; Unicorn; Lock & Key; Fruit Fly; Not Mozart; Endless Wonder; Casper's House; Creature Feature; Machismo; Lovely Coconuts; Under the Bridge; Bandstand; Head of Perseus; Most Human Bean)
Word Count: 2371
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Dominance Games
Scientist
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Tony Stark was many things—genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, to name a few of his favorites. He knew that asshole, brat, and prankster worked as well. Rhodey liked to call him 'fucking lunatic' and Pep had her own sweet descriptions for him depending on what she wanted him to get done at any given time. His favorite there was 'God', just as a passing fancy—maybe, only on occasion, he did enjoy 'pet' as well, but hey, who's to judge what a man does in the privacy of his own tower? Where was he going with this again? Oh, yes—Tony Stark was many things and among those things lurked a very important thing. It was like The Thing and everyone forgot about it.
Tony Stark was a scientist. He totally did the science thing also known as the experiment thing. He was an engineer by trade, but he's picked up things from the other sciences over the years (hello, genius remember? Does no one do the reading?). The softer sciences weren't the exceptions people tended to assumed. It wasn't like he could trust just any shrink with the details of his fucked-up thoughts—too many classified projects—and besides, in order to make JARVIS, he had to understand people. Even Dummy, his first bot, had required some basic psychology.
So Tony totally knew this—this being the Avengers living in his aforementioned tower—was either going to end in disaster or be the best thing to have ever happened, no in between. Given his track record, probably the former, because, let's face it, he just had one of those faces that people loved to stab in the back. (That sentence got away from him. Just pretend that it made perfect sense.) There really wasn't any way that Earth's mightiest heroes were going to be able to live together without killing each other (his money was totally on Widow coming out on top) or finally wising up to the fact that Tony Stark had a firm grasp on the title 'fucked-up asshole'. It would be okay, eventually, when they finally left. It would be okay because he knew—he knew—that he was not a hero, not really.
The Merchant of Death could never be.
None of that stopped him from noticing things—little areas where he could help. They say money can't buy love, and maybe that's true, but Tony could (and has more than once) buyncompanionship. Everyone had a price, even if it was just in the things that could be purchased rather than the money itself. For all that he was a colossal fuck-up, Tony did know how to pay attention to people, and probably even better, he now had JARVIS to keep track of things in case he missed something. J was awesome about things like that.
Cap liked his coffee black and unaltered and strong enough match him in deadlifts (and he appreciated the random art supplies Tony had left anonymously in the kitchen on his floor, especially when he couldn't sleep). Barton had the incredibly bird-like tendency to build nests in a variety of places (it only took him a week to find the new access point to the dead space in between his floor and Natasha's; it was instantly his favorite nest). Natasha liked to craft—particularly sewing and crochet (never knitting; Tony didn't want to even think about why that may be, thank you very much)—and because Tony understood that need to create things that weren't used to kill people, he kept a room full of fabrics and yarns well-stocked and his mouth shut, even when something new showed up in his closet. Bruce was tougher to figure out, but he liked his teas, which gave Tony a starting point beyond playing in the R&D labs.
Things were weird for a bit, well, weirder than expected when there were five superheroes living under the same roof with another one staying there often. Natasha had done the rounds on their closets. Not even the rarely present Thor had managed to escape the unauthorized borrowing. Things had settled down after he and Bruce had walked in on her cooking while wearing Bruce's fuchsia boxers and his Black Sabbath shirt. The former assassin still stole Steve's hoody occasionally, when Cap had been especially bossy in non-official areas—which Tony approved of, off the record, because watching her stare down Captain America was the highlight of his day.
He probably had a fetish for scary redheads—don't judge. It could totally be a thing and even if it wasn't, he could probably make it one because hello, billionaire. You know, if said scary redheads didn't murder him for suggesting it.
Regardless of what the clothing thing had been about, it appeared to have set off a free-for-all among the more physically oriented Avengers. Honestly, the main trio proceeding with the physical contests were Thor, Steve, and Natasha. Clint had taken up the role of chaperone for the trio—which thank fuck that he had, because Tony had watched the video of their sparring matches. His tower was probably only standing because of Clint's refereeing. Widow was brutal and had no qualms about using Steve's stupid hesitance about hitting a woman against him; Thor had no such hesitance after the first time she had landed a blow and held back nothing. That Natasha could take it just gave evidence to Tony's working theory that the Red Room had access to some variation of the Super Soldier serum.
—Not that Tony had originally formulated that theory because of Aunt Peggy's investigative reports into the Red Widow program or anything. Those reports are still classified, thank you, and Tony was the paragon of respecting boundaries. JARVIS, on the other hand…
Bruce had looked bemused when he had interrupted Tony researching the pack dynamics of various creatures, but in the end, the physicist had just shaken his head before proceeding to ask about potential polymer-fabric development. Tony had no problem shelving his research into what was happening in his tower in favor of attempting to make what he was totally going to call "Hulk-pants" no matter what Bruce argued. That the resulting textile was a very particular shade of purple really was just a coincidence—but Tony adored the reactor-blue tie that showed up in his collection just the same.
It didn't take long for Tony to find enough information to confirm his previous theory about what Natasha was doing with the clothes stealing. He also found (buried) on the SHIELD servers enough reports to realize that this was not new behavior for the super spy. She stole clothes from nearly every member of the SHIELD hierarchy that had worked directly with her in the time since she had been pulled into the organization by Clint. Not everyone had appreciated it or had rolled over for her like the Avengers had. Dum-Dum Dugan, the last of the Howlies to retire from active service, hadn't given an inch the first time she had stolen that outdated bowler from his head and put it on her own. Dum-Dum certainly didn't share Cap's hesitation about her gender if the footage was anything to go by. Tony thought that his opinion of Natasha couldn't get any higher, but by the madness of Tesla, the Widow had guts. Tony needed to introduce her to Aunt Peggy, because while he acknowledged why Fury passed down the order for the two to never be introduced to each other, Tony was going to do some electing of his own.
Come to think of it, Aunt Peggy was probably why Dum-Dum didn't hold back against Natasha. Anyone who knew a woman who had once killed a man with a stapler while not even mussing her makeup and wearing heels would know that women were just as dangerous as men, if not more so. Seriously. Scary redheads could totally be a thing. He'd bet a Ferrari that Barton would agree with him on that.
'Huh.'
Tony scrolled back through the classified file and triple-checked all the retracted bits. When he didn't find what he was looking for, he had JARVIS search the information as well. It seemed an odd omission, but there were no reports of scuffles between Widow and Barton over the habitual theft of the archer's clothes. And it was habitual—not a week would go by without a notation being made that Widow was wearing something belonging to Hawkeye, small or large. That matched what Tony and JARVIS had observed of Widow's behavior in the Tower. Natasha definitely had a thing about getting literally into Barton's pants, specifically his sweats. Tony then found the mission report on what he was going to call The Extraction, capital letters completely deserved, and he was already considering a copyright for it before creating a cinematic franchise for it with a whole website of blogs dedicated to it.
Just damn.
As a matter of policy, SHIELD does not negotiate if their agents were captured. They don't work to extract them, as a matter of course. Everyone was expendable if the numbers didn't run in their favor, which they never did. Three years after Barton had been sent to scrub the former Red Widow and ended up making a different call, Barton managed to get nabbed by a Hydra knockoff. Widow had been kept stateside with Coulson while Hawkeye had been sent alone with a different handler than normal. He had done everything by the book, but the exit plan had been compromised by the handler and specifically to capture the incredible Hawkeye. Following established policy, Fury had declared Barton lost in action and unrecoverable. Because he's not stupid, Fury had Agent Coulson inform the Widow. It's probably what kept the Director alive, because Widow had disabled Coulson before going AWOL—and hot damn was the older agent spry. No wonder Fury had been maneuvering for Agent to be the official handler for the Initiative. Tony doubted that there were many agents capable of potentially keeping up with a metahuman without being one themselves (and Coulson was a baseline according to every test JARVIS had run over the years).
When SHIELD recovered the two agents in Budapest a month later, a new policy was passed down from the office of the Director. Neither Hawkeye or Black Widow would work under any handler except Coulson and any exit plan put in place by SHIELD would be ignored. Tony was kind of surprised that they hadn't also insisted on only working together, but at the same time, not really—there were some concessions that Fury would not have been able to grant without losing face. The message had still been sent and received: Agent was a package deal with Hawkeye and Widow.
Tony made a note of the Agent's birthdate of record being a week away before he had JARVIS arrange for their floors to be stocked with their preferred brands of liquor. He debated briefly grabbing Agent's favorite doughnuts himself, but in the end, he didn't want to invite the public's attention any more than necessary. When the case of bagged pastries arrived, Tony did make a point to deliver it personally—to Barton's floor, since he was less likely to stab in him in the neck if this turned into another fiasco like buying Rhodey that car back at MIT. Knowing that paranoia was probably more a habit by now than a disorder, Tony made certain that he didn't disturb anything while making his delivery of sealed goods.
Tony didn't fully understand the quilt that showed up on the couch he had in his lab. He definitely didn't understand how Barton had fit in the tiny air vent that JARVIS had him coming through to deliver it, but the quilt itself was a bigger conundrum than a carnie cum assassin-spy seemingly breaking the laws of physics (after all Cap's shield did that all the time). Tony knew that Natasha had to have made it, but her color scheme was throwing him off. Once again, she had worked in the blue of an arc reactor's power core, but this time there was other colors: Hulk-green, royal purple, steel gray, and a deep maroon that wasn't even close to the red he used for the suit. The quilting had been done in a glossy black and was just a repetitious pattern of the Widow hourglass. The moment he touched it, Tony didn't want to stop. It was so soft and just made for kneading like he was a fucking cat.
He sat down on the couch, pulling the blanket against his face. Shockingly, the fabric had a scent that Tony had not smelled since before he had been sent to boarding school: Ana's lemon hamantaschen cookies. He had no idea how Natasha could have known about the memory, let alone been able to replicate the exact spice blend Ana had created. Jarvis had tried for years before his death and never been able to do so. It was only after the death of his parents that Tony had gone through the quarters of the old butler that had been sealed after his death and found the recipe on a bit of cardstock tucked into Ana's mikrah.
Tony laid down on his couch, curling as much around his new blanket as under it. He let himself breath in the scent of the main woman who raised him. Memories washed over him. Ana had loved coffee but had always insisted on dancing while fixing it. She had loved to dance, and honestly, every little thing was a reason to do so. Happy? Dance to show it. Bad day? Dance to cheer yourself up. Ana couldn't carry a melody in a bucket with a lid on it, but that had never stopped her from singing as she twirled around the kitchen of the manor, her still-vibrant hair flaming behind her.
Huh.
Maybe his obsession with scary redheads was just that they tended to mean home to him.
That would certainly be worth researching.
But later, because right then, Tony was going to take a nap. Don't judge. It was his tower. He could nap if he wanted.
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An Ending
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