Still no Jen – but more team madness shits and giggles…
Sometimes I think I'm only writing this so that Tony Stark can give me intermittent fits of laughter. Now even Bruce Banner is joining in!
Oh, and fangingertastic who commented a couple of chapters ago: Jen will get her whump on. But who's she gonna hit?
Chapter Twenty-One – Get Me Out Of Here
"I will owe you a favour if you get me out of here without having to tell him about it," Clint turned to Natasha. She pursed her lips and tilted her head, considering the offer.
"Two favours," he bargained desperately. "I'll run interference for you and the Captain to have a proper date. Somewhere private, away from the Tower."
"Before you offer her your soul," Banner interjected dryly, "I should point out that JARVIS is helping to analyse all this data, and at the end of the day anything JARVIS knows, Stark can find out."
"Oh, fuck it," Clint kicked a nearby gym ball clean across the room. "If you lotare my team now, I guess I can't keep secrets anyway. I'm hungry. Can we go get breakfast and talk about it then?"
"What a good idea," Banner said, giggling like a schoolgirl, "we can all get to watch Steve snort coffee out his nose when you explain just how you found out you've been turned into a Norse sex god."
"I am not – oh, for fuck's sake. Let's go."
It already felt odd, sitting around a table eating together, without Thor. But he had promised he'd be back soon, within a few weeks, he hoped. Tony was already in the process of transferring Thor's girlfriend, Jane Foster, who Clint had met very briefly in New Mexico, into the Avengers Initiative. S.H.I.E.L.D. had sent her to Norway to keep her out of the way while Loki was on Earth, but Thor wanted her close, so she would come to Avengers Tower and join them.
They were already becoming a team, Clint thought, looking around at the others. With all that implied. It shouldn't work: they were all alpha males and Natasha was not one to take orders, but somehow all of their strengths seemed to mesh when under stress.
Of course, it helped that they all had a sense of humour. Which currently was turned on him, the butt of every joke this morning. Well, the ones that weren't directed at Steve's blushes, anyway. Honestly Clint knew that they were actually concerned about him; the Captain especially, who had been through a transformation from regular human to super-soldier, and knew how difficult it was to adjust.
"I don't seem to be having difficulty adjusting," Clint tried to explain. "Honestly, it's only because, well, the sex was so mind-blowing, and then afterwards things were just slightly different. It seems to be incremental, so I hardly notice the change."
"It's not as incremental as you think," Banner said. He'd been messing feverishly with his StarkSlate for the last few minutes. "I just got that lot of test results from S.H.I.E.L.D. Your IQ in those was no different to in your last tests a couple of years ago, but in your test results this morning you've jumped 12 points."
"Not just your IQ, either," Natasha put in. "I'd say you're up eight to ten percent in your physicals."
"Eight point seven eight," Banner gave her an approving nod. "But it's primarily in your speed. Your strength and stamina is marginally better, but your reflexes are way up. Which makes sense if Loki interfered with your brain chemistry. That would flow on to your reflexes."
"Well," Tony rubbed his hands together. Fortunately he'd been caught up enough in the Science! of it all not to rib Clint too much. Yet. "Off you go then."
"What?" Clint looked at him, bemused.
"Since you've declined to adopt Bruce's abstinence protocol, go and do the dirty again, oh Norse sex god, so we can do some more tests and compare the results! Oh, and Miss Svendson starts Monday, by the way, and I'm not paying her to screw you during office hours, keep it on your own time."
Clint glared at Tony. "For the last time," he kept his voice low. They were already getting enough looks in the diner, mainly because of Tony's inability to be quiet. "I am not a Norse sex god!"
And he walked out of the restaurant, trying very hard to keep his dignity intact despite the chuckles and snorts of laughter which followed him, and Tony's shout of "Denial's not just a river in Egypt, Barton!"
Clint headed back to his apartment to shower and change. It was close to noon; a perfectly reasonable hour to go and find Jen, he thought. She would have had plenty of sleep by now. He looked at his own eyes in the mirror as he shaved off his stubble carefully. He didn't even look tired. Did he need to sleep any more, even? He still needed to eat; but then so did Thor and Loki. His taste buds were the one sense that didn't seem enhanced, so far.
Clint paused, looking at his reflection, and leaned closer. Were his eyes a different colour? Jen had said something, in the throes of passion last night, about his eyes glowing gold. There had always been tiny gold-yellow flecks in the greenish-blue of his irises, but they looked bigger. And brighter. More – metallic? And the green-blue colour wasn't right, either. It had always been a variable colour, sometimes more blue, sometimes quite green, sometimes grey depending on his mood. Right now the colour was more blue-violet than anything else, not exactly a shade he'd ever seen in his own eyes before.
He debated calling Banner. And then thought, no, fuck it, I want to see Jen. Instead he picked up his phone and took careful photos of his own eyes, guided by JARVIS, who politely didn't ask him any questions, but agreed to forward the images to Banner after a twenty minute delay, with a request to add them to the baseline data.
Clint didn't bother with the combat gear this time. He put on black cargo pants and his favourite black leather jacket over a dark red T-shirt, and just put a few things in his soft black bow-bag with the folding bow. He did put on his boots and ankle-holsters, though. And a couple of knives in his jacket sleeves. And his belt with a selection of darts built into the buckle. And then he left, trying to look casual, just a regular guy carrying a gym bag through the streets of New York at lunchtime.
When he got to Jen's apartment building, though, he politely greeted the doorman and asked him to buzz up to Jen's apartment. The guy – a different, younger man to the one who'd been on duty last night – gave him a bit of a hostile look.
"Some kinda party going on up there? Residents are supposed to register them. Whatever, go on up. I'll key the lift."
Clint gave him an odd look, and then nodded. Who had gone up to Jen's apartment before him? He didn't inquire, didn't want to tip the doorman off that there might be a problem. He just smiled in a friendly way and said "Cool, it'll be a surprise!" and tipped the guy a twenty.
On the 41st floor, Clint dropped into spy mode. There was no one in the corridors, and he carried one of Stark's devices that fuzzed him out of surveillance footage anyway, so he paused for a moment to fish out his lockpicks and walked on silent cat feet towards Jen's apartment. The door was firmly shut, so he silently and gently slid a pick into the first lock and went to work.
He was concentrating so hard on turning the third lock without making a sound that the metallic click behind him made him jump. It was so obviously the racking of a pistol slide, at a range of about twelve feet, that he froze, computing distance, angles, trajectory – all from one click – damn.
Too far to jump the guy, too close for him to miss, even if he wasn't much good. And whoever it was, was no amateur. An amateur would have tried to get right up close and put the gun to his head.
"Who are you, asshole?" said an angry male voice. "And why the fuck are you trying to break into my sister's apartment?"
A/N Soundtrack for this chapter:
Help!: The Beatles
Lost And Running: Powderfinger
Self Esteem: The Offspring
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