Bruce found Francis huddled under Tony's workshop desk. Tony was repairing the right foot of his armor with the music only slightly too loud. "Hi."
Francis looked up from his tablet. "Hello."
Bruce settled himself on the floor and leaned around the corner of Tony's desk to watch him work for a moment before refocusing on the boy. "Thank you for helping us find Clint."
He looked up at Bruce in surprise. "Uhm, you're welcome?" He frowned and looked down at his tablet. "Do you know what the noise is? Mr. Stark just shook his head and said he'd explain later. Then he started banging on that boot."
"It's Tony's favorite kind of music." He held out his hand. "How about you come with me and we get Tony some food?"
Francis smiled and crawled out from his hiding spot. "Tony is hungry."
"Yeah." Bruce typed a note that he'd taken Francis and that he was not pleased with Tony's way of saving the other guy which meant they were going to have a talk onto Tony's main screen. He picked up Francis, who stiffened and held his breath. "Sorry, I'll...just put you back down."
Francis grabbed on to him. "No! I'm okay." He licked his lips. "I like when you treat me like I am more than a Pretender."
Bruce sighed. "I would like you to explain what being a Pretender is, if you don't mind." He hefted Francis a little higher on his hip. "Let's go find some food first."
Coulson went looking for Clint five seconds after he found the man's bed empty. Thor and Steve were sleeping, and from the look of it, Clint had gone out through the ceiling.
Phil took his suit jacket off, then his tie, and finally his dress shirt. Then he sighed as he pulled a chair over to be able to scramble up into the air duct, his chest and back complaining the whole way. "I should just sic Natasha on you, Barton."
He crawled until he hit a junction where Stark had enlarged the duct more than would be considered normal. Clint had a small nest there with blankets stolen from team movie nights. The man himself was huddled under several blankets in the back corner of the nest.
"Agent Barton." Coulson eased himself up until he could see Clint clearly. "Report, Barton."
Clint blinked and his fingers curled further into the blanket he was pulling around himself. "Compromised, sir."
Phil sighed and pulled himself the rest of the way into Barton's nest. "I know that, Clint. Now what else is there to report?"
Clint thumbed his split lip. "I'm not who I said I was?"
Phil carefully gathered Clint to him, blankets and all. "I know that too. It doesn't change who you are to this team, Barton."
With a snort, Clint leaned into his embrace. "I told them no. I said I wouldn't do it anymore."
It took a lot of soothing, but Phil finally managed to get Clint to sleep. He eased them back against the wall of the ductwork and sighed as his chest went from aching to hurting like a bitch.
Phil worked his phone out of his pocket and dialed. "Natasha, tell Cap that I'm in the ducts with Barton and not to come in after us."
Natasha muttered to herself as she hung up from talking to Coulson. She settled herself on Clint's bed and started looking through the files JARVIS had managed to pull off the Centre's mainframe before the Hulk had destroyed the place. It was a lot of information.
She ignored anything on females, skimmed a bit on recovery methods for drug inductions, and finally stopped at Pretenders. She frowned as she found Clint. It was even labeled Clint, with codes for dates. She pulled up the oldest one.
"Where's Clint?" Steve was rubbing his eyes as he sat up.
She pointed at the chair with Phil's shirt, jacket, and tie draped over it. "In the ducts with Coulson. He said not to come in after them."
Steve glanced at the opening and then stretched. He looked at Thor still sleeping in the armchair against the far wall. "I wouldn't fit anyway." He settled on the edge of the bed and looked at her screen. "What have you found?"
"Clint's childhood." She clicked the video file and then watched silently.
The view point was from up high, so she figured security footage. The tiny boy, Clint, on screen fitted a final block to the tower he was building. "I'm finished now! Can I go home?"
An adult appeared and backhanded Clint. "You were sold to us! You don't have a home." He took Clint by the scruff of the neck and turned him to look at the tower of blocks. "You are only as good as the last completed simulation you run." Then the man knocked apart the tower and told Clint to do it again, better this time.
Little Clint took heaving breaths, obviously trying to control his sobbing, as he picked up blocks.
Natasha turned it off. "If the Hulk hadn't of already tore that place down..."
Steve pulled her into a one arm hug. "We would have blown it sky high. I promise you that."
She turned her face into his neck for a moment before pulling away. "I'm going to see if there is video of what they did to him while we thought he was de-aged."
Steve cleared his throat and stood up. "I need to go find Stark. If you can get them out of the ducts we'll all bunk down in the movie watching room." He laid his hand on her shoulder. "Don't view too much of that in a stretch, please."
She nodded seriously as she opened another video.
Steve found Tony in his workshop with Francis and Bruce. They were eating. Steve stepped inside and the boy's eyes got huge.
"You're bigger than any of the Cleaners."
Tony motioned Steve to come over. "Francis was just telling us about his life before he came to live with us." Tony looked down at the boy. "He liked his math simulations best."
Francis ducked his head and picked at the taco he had been eating. "Angles are fun."
Bruce looked at them both and then raised his eyebrows at Steve. With a flick of his head, Steve tried to explain needing to talk to Tony without saying anything.
Bruce seemed to get it as he grabbed up plates. "Come with me Francis, we'll find Betty, and she can show you fractals."
They left with Francis casting worried looks back at them. Tony looked up at Steve and then waved at the seat across from him.
"What's got your panites in a bunch, Cap?"
Steve forced himself to ignore Tony's awful word choice. "They abused Clint."
Tony nodded. "JARVIS darken the wall and don't let Francis back in for right now."
"As you wish, sir." The glass wall and door went dark and there was a clank in the door frame.
"Pull up the footage we've sorted on Clint and mini-Clint. Find me that one where they drown him."
Steve sat down in a daze. "Drown him?"
Tony shrugged as the screen next to him flared to life with a video of a teenage Clint being held underwater. "It looks like a precursor to SEAL training or something. Torture-proofing?" Tony flicked his fingers and the view changed to a smaller Clint in camouflage fatigues. "They had him pretending to be a prisoner of war at eight years old. Eight!"
"That wasn't the bad stuff."
Steve and Tony both jumped as Clint slipped out of the ceiling onto his corner perch. Behind him came Phil at a much slower pace.
Tony snorted. "They half-drowned you. Starved you. What exactly do you consider to be worse, Barton?"
Clint calmly flicked through the files and started one up. "Jarod had already done this. They were having me do it to 'check' his work. He'd started to really rebel by then. I hadn't yet. I didn't have anyone to tell me what was happening wasn't normal." Clint pointed at the equations he was writing in the video. "What's that look like to you?"
Tony squinted and then his face twitched and he pulled back. "Damn." He grabbed Clint's arm and pulled him down between Steve and Tony until his face was inches from Tony's. "You are not responsible. At all."
Clint shrugged. "Jarod came up with it. I'm sure they told him it was for some medical application, rather than bioweaponry applications."
Steve tried to work out what was happening in the video. "What is it?"
Tony turned it off. "Anthrax."
Coulson pinched the bridge of his nose. "I need to call Director Fury."
Clint flipped to another video. "This one I didn't mind so much. Pretending you was sort of cool."
They watched as a very small child, Clint, in a tailored tuxedo spat at an adult. "I'll make you all sorry!"
Tony gasped. "Shit, shit, shit!" He threw a hand out and shoved the screen backwards. The video froze and Tony stood there, hunched in on himself, breathing hard.
Steve looked at Clint, who seemed worried. Coulson took Steve's elbow and propelled him towards Tony, then Coulson gathered up Clint and they left, through the door. Steve eased up to Tony who had clamped a hand over his mouth and was taking deep breaths through his nose.
"Tony?"
Tony shook his head, with his hand still on his mouth and then started blinking fast. He dropped his hand. "I need Pepper." He started fumbling for his phone. Steve got it out from under a pile of debris on Tony's desk and handed it to him. Tony smiled wide. "Thanks, Cap."
Steve hated that particular smile because it was Tony's emptiest one. "Tony, why don't you sit down, okay?"
Tony more fell into his chair then sat, but it was better than nothing. Steve hovered as Tony called Pepper.
"What, Tony? I'm in the middle..."
"I need a school, Pepper."
"You need a what?"
Tony flicked through the videos absently. "I need a school. Last night I might have helped liberate 87 children ranging in age from four years old to adult, all with no parents because the place they were being held in had the parents killed. Most of them are currently in the hospital because they'd never been outside since being taken. The panic attacks rivaled anything I've ever come close to having. And I'm not about to put them into the foster care system willy-nilly."
"Tony, what are you talking about?"
Tony frowned and held the phone out to him. "Here, you talk to her." Then he wandered out of the workshop.
"Ma'am?"
Pepper sounded exasperated. "Is he drunk? Did he get drunk around a de-aged Clint?"
"Uhm. No." Steve suddenly remembered he could take the phone with him, so he started after Tony. "Clint wasn't de-aged, it was actually something called a clone. Which no one has explained to me. Or what Anthrax is. Anyway, we got Clint back, but with him we also got a lot of other kids."
"Clones!? Anthrax? Oh, my God." There was a bunch of noise on Pepper's side of the line. "I will be there in three hours. If Tony isn't drunk then what was wrong with him?"
"He has shell shock, I think."
"Why...No, nevermind. Three hours."
"Thank you, Pepper." He hit the red button that stopped the call as he caught up with and took ahold of Tony's elbow. "Come on, this way, Tony."
When Natasha appeared out of nowhere to herd Bruce and Francis into the big living room they used for watching movies, Bruce didn't argue. She had that focused poise he remembered from before he first startled her.
There was a pile of blankets and pillows someone had made out of the couch and the area in front of it. Thor was in the nearest corner and Betty smiled at them from the edge where she was smoothing out a blanket. Natasha lifted Francis directly into the middle of it.
"Have you gotten to watch any movies yet?"
Francis frowned. "I'm not allowed."
Bruce closed his eyes to rein himself in and felt Betty's hand touch his forearm.
"It's okay, Bruce."
He nodded and crawled into the nest to sit next to Francis.
"Well, you are allowed now, Francis." Natasha spread a blanket over them. "You remember how we said you helped us find our teammate, Clint?"
Francis nodded.
"He's going to met you and I don't know how that will go because he's really tired right now."
"They hurt him."
Bruce wrapped an arm around Francis' back and he could feel the tension in his small muscles. "Yes, they did."
Francis lifted his chin. "I won't hurt him more. I promise."
Natasha smiled at him. "I know." She eased herself in beside Thor, who was watching silently.
Coulson appeared with Barton in tow, who froze in the doorway.
"Damn." Clint blinked and rubbed his eyes. He stared and Francis stared back. Coulson nudged him and Clint came closer. "It wasn't just Jarod."
Francis cocked his head. "Do I have to run sims against him? I always lose."
Clint crawled into the nest and leaned against Natasha. "Oh, no." He closed his eyes. "No sims."
Coulson, pulled on a sweatshirt as he settled on the floor with his back against the pile of pillows, facing the door. "You aren't going to run sims, Francis."
"Francis?" Clint's eyes came open. "You named him Francis?"
Coulson grinned and turned his head to look at the boy. "Told you it would annoy him."
Francis giggled and nodded.
Tony felt like he was walking through air that had somehow turned solid. Or frozen without freezing him. Something. He could tell he wasn't working right, like his operating system had taken a bad hit from a hack or virus. He let Steve steer him because Tony was busy concentrating on breathing without choking or sobbing. They had picked apart his first kidnapping. Picked it apart and inflicted it on Clint. On who knows how many of those terrified kids.
He was going to find the part of the Council that had originated the Centre and he was going to tear them apart. He started plotting just how he was going to destroy them.
Twin noises of distress brought him out of it. Tony blinked several times and found both Clint and Francis giving him horrified looks.
"What? Was I talking out loud?" He flopped down between them and checked the rest of the group ranged around them. No one else looked horrified, so it couldn't have been him plotting murder and mayhem then.
Clint wrapped his arm around Tony's shoulders, which really felt odd. He thought about shrugging Clint off, but then Francis laid himself over so he was holding down Tony's legs. Tony just let go and stopped thinking at all.
"No, you just felt...awful." Clint closed his eyes with a sigh.
Steve settled at Tony's feet, near Coulson. "What movie are we watching this time?"
Francis wiggled until his legs were across Bruce's lap. "Ms. Betty said we should watch The Lion King. She says it is animated. What does animated mean?"
Coulson waited until most of them had fallen asleep partway through the sequel before calling the Director. "Boss, we have a problem."
Fury looked up and then back down at something off screen and frowned. "I assume this has to do with the abduction of Dr. Elizabeth Ross."
"Only peripherally, Boss." Coulson frowned. "When I first came to SHIELD I was sent on a short mission in an attempt to get more solid intel on the Centre."
Fury's eyes snapped up at that. "What happened?"
Betty came around the end of the nest. "I wasn't abducted."
Coulson glanced at her and then back to the Director. "I might have allowed the Avengers to destroy the Centre's main establishment. And sent into custody approximately a hundred and fifty adults while removing numerous subjects, to include children, from the premises."
"And I wasn't informed prior to the operation."
Coulson let a some of his 'fuck you, sir' face show. "If I had informed you, sir, you would have been required to seek approval from the Council."
Fury inclined his head in acknowledgement. "How badly is this going to go?"
"Stark is pissed off. Right along with Captain Rogers, Boss."
With a nod, Fury frowned at something out of frame again. "Coulson are you already replacing those trading cards?"
He smiled. "No, sir. Stark has his AI doing it for him. I assume I'm supposed to be surprised when they give them to me."
Fury's face as Coulson ended the call was priceless.
He tapped his fingers on his chest near the tender side of his scar. "JARVIS, how are the children we rescued doing?"
Thor shifted and Coulson watched him as JARVIS rattled off the various conditions of the kids.
"Thank you, JARVIS."
Thor pushed his hair back out of his face. "We will not be required to relinquish Francis to a different authority?"
Coulson glanced at the sleeping heap of people beside him. "I'd like to see someone try to make us. We will need to establish proper identification for him though." That was going to be mildly annoying. He supposed the easiest would be to make Francis Clint's child on paper. Coulson looked at them where they were both flopped all over Stark and everyone was limp in sleep.
Betty sat cross-legged in front of him. "I was not abducted and I won't allow anyone to say I was."
Coulson nodded tiredly. "JARVIS, doesn't Stark have something drawn up to employ Dr. Ross in Stark Tower?"
"The contract for Dr. Ross to become a consultant is stored on the local server, sir."
Betty covered her mouth with her hands. "Oh." She bounced a little. "I...really?"
Coulson nodded and jerked a thumb at Stark. "He does occasionally plan ahead."
She beamed and wrapped up Coulson in a tight hug.
