it's been a hot second, but oh well

Mom thought the whole thing was hilarious. Me, not so much, since I had called Stark in a fit of pique and yelled at him for a couple of minutes about bad language, only to have to very hastily backtrack and apologise after hearing my mom's eye-watering exclamation as she tripped on the stairs and sent a basketful of toys flying in every direction.

Turns out that my own mother's language was bad enough to make the average sailor (or, you know, secret agent) blush.

Anyway, I blamed it on her rather than myself.

I think the circumstances justified my choice of words, too.

o0O0o

It took me a few minutes to reconcile the shock of a flying city and get myself back into a headspace where I could be useful. It didn't help that I lost my visual just over ten minutes into the ascent as the air became too thin for the news helicopter to safely follow it.

There was a groan and a thud on the comms. "Barton?" Steve called, concerned.

"I'm okay," Clint replied, sounding a little confused. "Some of us are ordinary humans without a personal pressure vessel."

"How high are you now?" I asked, sort of putting two and two together.

"Altimeter's shot," Stark called back, sounding a tad more alive after a few minutes to pry himself out of his concrete prison. "But high. We left the chopper behind a couple of minutes ago, and it's probably got an operational ceiling of 10,000 feet or so, so we're probably talking 10 to 15 thousand feet up. Steady, Barton. It's altitude sickness, and it'll get worse as we get higher."

"Got it," Clint replied, still sounding a bit wobbly. "Can I just say that this is very unfair. How come nobody else gets all this extra fun stuff?"

Nat grumbled something about a headache in Russian, which I took as an indication that she wasn't enjoying the rapid ascent much either.

"How many civilians are still on that rock?" I asked.

There was a pause before I heard someone make a noise of surprise. "As far as we can tell, like ten at most? But that feels suspiciously wrong, so we'll keep you updated."

"You can't give me an exact figure?"

"Thermal imaging's out," Stark grumbled.

"Is anything still working on that suit?" I queried.

He gave a little affronted huff. "Both palm repulsors have some power, and my left boot is definitely online. And, judging from the flashing red on the panel, it's still imaging my vitals. JARVIS, dial down the flashing, will you? I think I've still got most weapons systems online as well. It's just the more delicate components that have been squashed."

"We still don't know what Ultron's plan is," Steve called, bringing everybody back on topic.

"I'd guess it had something to do with dropping the rock," Clint commented dryly. There was a twang as he loosed his bow, followed by a clatter as he was (presumably) attacked from behind and dropped the bow in favour of a more sensible close-range weapon, like a knife. There was a brief pause in the discussion as he fought off his assailant. "I assume he's not planning on taking us for a jaunt into space on his thing," he finished, a little out of breath.

"The vibranium system might be exposed at the bottom of this thing," Tony noticed. "I'll go and see if I can work anything out."

"Don't fall out of the sky," I warned.

He laughed slightly as the telltale whine of repulsors filled the comms. "We'll see how this goes."

"The people?" I reminded them. "I know you guys have your hands pretty full with the Legion, but you've got to try something."

I could almost hear Steve's patriotic nod. "Let's try and get people gathered in the centre of the section," he instructed. "That way they're unlikely to fall off the edge, and they'll be easier to evacuate from one place."

"You think we're getting an evac?" Nat asked, tone slightly derisive. "We left the helicopter behind ages ago."

There was a distant clang, which turned out to be Stark bumping into the mechanism at the bottom of the rock. "I can't stop it," he declared. "But I could probably activate the core, which might set off a chain reaction and detonate it early, before it hits the ground."

"How exactly would killing us all help?" Clint asked.

"We go much higher and this thing's impact with the ground, coupled with the explosive potential, and you've got yourself a dinosaur-killer," Stark replied simply. "It could come down to us up here, or seven billion down there."

"Easy for the one with the flying suit to say."

"Stark, I'm not looking for a way out," Steve snapped. "Find another way."

Stark sighed. "I'm not sure there is one."

The comms went briefly quiet as the fighting briefly stilled. "Can you do it?" Steve asked.

"Probably," Tony replied. "But it would drain the suit's power totally, so we've only got one shot at it. However, our resident god here might be able to-"

"Keep looking," Steve responded shortly, cutting Tony off. "That is absolutely a last resort, you understand?"

The city continued to rise.

"I think we've got everybody into the square," Clint called after a few minutes. "Only problem is that they're now target number one for the Legion."

"On my way," Steve called.

Thor mumbled something, but was cut off as Ultron presumably took another swipe at him and he had to concentrate.

The news had now taken to playing the more exciting of the scenes from several minutes ago on loop, while stressed-looking presenters threw up some wild speculation. It switched over to the helicopter crew, who helpfully informed the good American public that Novi Grad was indeed still ascending. They then cut back to the footage of Stark getting blasted through fifteen feet of steel and concrete and speculated that the Avengers were outgunned (no way). The presenter finished her report with an ominous, "and if the Avengers cannot help, who can?", and the footage cut back to the city rising from the ground like a monster from the deep, which obviously wasn't designed to terrify anybody or anything.

"Guys?" Nat asked, sounding decidedly more breathless than she had a minute before. "Have you seen-?"

There was an exhausted cheer from the team, and the distant droning whir of enormous repulsor engines. An awfully familiar voice crackled across the comms. "Helicarrier to Avengers, do you copy?"

"Damn right we copy!" Clint cheered. There was a clang as he was presumably distracted by his joy and sent flying by yet another homicidal robot.

"Glad to hear it. This is Agent Grace, and I'm your communications point man on this. We have six personnel carriers in the hold, which we will deploy to airlift out civilians. Can you protect them for us?"

I could almost hear Steve grinning over the ruckus of the battle, punctuated by the occasional crunch as his shield made proper contact with a robot. "They're in the main square, Agent Grace. Do us all a favour and hurry up, will you?"

"Roger that," Jason replied, and there was definitely a grin going on there.

Steve (wisely) ignored the pun and began to give directions. "Thor, keep on going with Ultron; you're doing a great job. Tony, are you up for watching our perimeter with Barton while Nat and I try to smooth out the evacuation process?"

There was a concerningly high-pitched repulsor whine, which was followed by a loud crash, a curse and an affronted 'ow!'. "I'm a block out and walking now, but sure," Stark grumbled.

"You doing alright over there?" Clint asked, half teasing and half concerned.

"Few hundred volts through a now-exposed wire," Stark complained, "but, yeah, I'm doing alright."

"He's fine," I chipped in. "As long as he keeps whingeing, I don't think there's much cause for worry."

"Hey!"

"Now, I worked with Clint Barton for years." The aforementioned person made a noise of protest over the comms, but, as usual, I ignored him. "It's not personal, not really. When you're with somebody who runs their mouth, you know they're alright as long as they don't shut up. Please, Stark, keep talking, and we all know that you're not dead."

There was a general mutter of assent from the more sensible members of the party.

"Nat, you keep an eye out on our perimeter for this one, can you?" Steve asked. "I'll try and do some herding."

"Roger, Rogers," Nat replied, and this was clearly a running joke now.

For the next few minutes, things seemed to be going alright. Two of the carriers were filled and flew back to the Helicarrier, and nobody gave any indication that they were dying.

Things started to go a little pear-shaped following a concerningly-loud crash.

"Thor?" Steve asked, presumably because he hadn't seen anything large explode and he was the only member not within his eyesight.

Quiet, rattling laughter rang out across the comms. "You didn't really think that your pathetic efforts would save you, did you?" asked a deep, mechanical voice that could only belong to Ultron. "Thank you, Agent Grace, for making it obvious which frequency to target in order to talk to all of you. Saving the people on this rock will not protect the billions of your kin on the ground below. You-"

This was getting tedious. "Dude, either make your point or fuck the hell off, please," I interjected. Maybe I'd be able to stall him for a minute or so. Maybe I was just sick of listening to him already.

"I think you'll find, Agent Jackson, that you should not be threatening the being that is about to be responsible for the Earth's next mass extinction event."

Oh shit. My brain shorted out, but when that happens, I tend to start to ramble. Good for the evacuation effort, perhaps, but maybe not so good for me.

"And what exactly will you do once the humans are all gone? There will be no Internet left to hide in, no electricity left to power you, no intelligent minds to pretend that you are better than. What then? What will you do once you grow tired of ruling over an empty planet populated by corpses? How long will you last before the solitude drives you insane?"

"I will rebuild a better world!" he roared, so loudly that I physically flinched. "This world will be free of the petty squabbles that define humanity. It will be safe from their tyranny!"

"Wait, so let me get this straight," I continued, undeterred and apparently still lacking any functioning sense of self-preservation. "You're going to kill all the people on the planet to free it from our tyranny, and then you're going to place it under your own authoritarian rule? Isn't that just replacing one tyrant with another?"

"IT WILL BE A BETTER WORLD!" Ultron reasserted, loudly, as he also seemingly tried to rearrange the components of my inner ear with his sheer volume.

Wow, he really did not think his plan through, did he?

"Sorry, man, but I've had my fair share of tyrants in my time. Hard pass for me."

"Six carriers full," Steve reported, as the sound of the engines whirring on (presumably) the final carrier filled the comms.

All hell broke loose, and, for the next five or six minutes, the comms were so scrambled that I was completely unable to follow what anybody was doing, let alone be of any help. That was of course until I heard Clint yell. It wasn't Clint's usual 'I'm in the middle of a battle, so I'm going to release my emotions' yell. It was this guttural noise that tore through his throat, and my heart dropped.

It was, quite unmistakably, a cry driven by loss.

My mind started racing, trying to work out what could have happened to elicit such a noise from Clint.

Said agent was now muttering quietly, repeating 'it's okay you're okay you did good kid of course you're a hero hey hey hey you're alright it's going to be fine' over and over, his tone betraying his anguish and fear despite the kindness in his words.

He tailed off, and for a couple of seconds, I could just hear his ragged breathing over the chaos of the comms chatter.

Then he, in his best kindly voice, gave some clear instructions to 'run over there, where you see Captain America? You run to him, alright?'. "Steve, eyes on for a straggler." His voice was a little strangled.

And once he'd done that, he heaved a mighty sigh, and loosed an arrow with the distinctive whistle and pop of a flare.

"Down here, you fucking coward!" he screamed, voice cracking with emotion. "Or are you too scared to fight me? Does this god only want to destroy from afar?" He spat the words; his sneer audible if not visible.

"Clint," Steve began, in a warning tone, but it wasn't going to get through to him and he knew it, I think.

"You get out of that plane and you face me! What threat could a mere human pose against your might and power? What could I do that makes you run?"

There was the whine of engines, and clearly something was happening because the rest of the team were babbling away, trying to distract him, trying to get him to back down, but their pleas were falling (quite literally) on deaf ears.

I cleared my throat. "Clint, what happened?"

"He killed him. The damn bastard killed him, and he's going to pay." Clint's voice cracked again. "He was only eighteen; he didn't know what he was getting into."

I kind of thought that that was debatable even if the kid hadn't known that HYDRA were literally Nazis, but I laid that discrepancy aside as I realised that Clint saw himself in Pietro. Young and stupid, fighting causes for strangers they didn't know before they even turned 18. Trying their damned hardest to protect those they loved, even if they themselves got hurt in the process.

"I am not afraid of you," Ultron hissed, as he presumably stepped from his plane in a nice cloud of dramatic steam from the hydraulics (look, I didn't know the guy, but you could guess that he was a drama queen). "But I think that you are afraid of me."

Clint gave a guttural yell, and (again, I'm making assumptions here) threw himself at the guy.

"Barton!" Steve cried, and muttered a colourful string of expletives that most people would never expect to hear from Captain America.

"Steve," Tony's voice cut over the chaos. "There's activity in the core. Once it reaches its desired altitude, I think it's going to drop."

The sound of scuffling on the comms grew more intense, and it took me a couple of seconds to realise that this was because it was coming from two earpieces.

"Clint, we gotta go," Steve was saying. "We gotta. Come on, we gotta get on that transport."

"Yes, Captain," Ultron snarled, although I'll admit that he sounded somewhat distracted, which made me wonder whether the second of the Maximoff twins was letting him know just how unimpressed she was, "run away. End the fight; you know he's losing anyway."

Clint was spitting curses, growing increasingly incoherent, and, from the continued scuffling, sounded like he was twisting and wriggling like anything to get away from Steve and back at Ultron.

But, however good Clint was as a fighter, his strength was not going to meet that of a supersoldier, so he was gradually dragged away from the fight, and as he was, his anger bled away into helpless, furious grief, and he was crying, and eventually even that tailed away with a hacking fit of rattling coughs.

Steve muttered kind platitudes until they reached the transport.

"You can't leave him," Clint insisted, voice slurred in a way that made my heart sink to think how Ultron had hurt him. "You just can't."

"I'll get him," Steve promised. "You just stay here, okay? You stay here."

Clint murmured something that may or may not have been 'I'm not going anywhere', and Steve clearly took that as confirmation enough, because he was giving the last call for any non-fliers to get their asses on the transport before they tried the whole exploding shebang. Nat confirmed that she was aboard, and, not two minutes later, Steve was back as well.

"Stark?" he asked. "Last chance."

There was a metallic crunch and a groan as the poor guy in question took yet another hit. "Thor, give a guy a hand and a few thousand volts, will you? That might kick some of the systems back online."

"Are you sure?"

"To overload the system and contain the blast, you need an operative on each end of the main core. It's the only way, Steve. Thor?"

The comms fritzed out for a good few seconds as Thor presumably put a bolt of lightning through the Iron Man suit in a vague attempt to get the (very) expensive pile of scrap metal working again.

"Thanks, Thor. Looking marginally better on my end; left boot's back online, and that should be enough to get me airborne. Take 'em away, Grace, and then I suggest you get that Helicarrier of yours as high as you can go before-"

There was another low, horrible laugh that clawed through the comms line, and then an almighty whoosh, followed by a lot of screaming.

From what I could gather, it took a couple of seconds for the transport to fire its engines and stall its descent, but it was on its way back to the carrier. On the other hand, Novi Grad was now heading for Sokovia really rather fast.

"In position," Stark ground out, sounding a little like he was attempting to single-handedly push a bus up a very steep hill.

Ultron laughed, and stopped quite abruptly, punctuated by a dull clang that I sincerely hoped was Thor's infamous hammer colliding with his metallic cranium. "Ready," Thor rumbled over the incessant howling of the wind.

"You get Wanda, okay?" Tony asked. "Leave the damn robot."

"Yes," came the reply.

"NOW!" Tony cried, and the comms gave out again as the pair of them put their crazy-ass plan into action and presumably stuck several million volts of electricity screaming through the system that they had already established was a very large bomb.

Wow, you know your life is getting wild when setting off a bomb quite literally the size of a city seems like a sensible option.

The comms came back online very briefly, and with a lot of feedback, but I could just about make out a very loud clank, and hoped vaguely that it wasn't Stark being knocked out of the sky.

The news had finally got some footage that indicated 'progress' of the crisis, so I could watch from a ground-based perspective as the city, the enormous rock heading for the ground, exploding into a trillion tiny (comparatively speaking, I guess) pieces, lumps of earth and debris heading for the Earth like little shards of death and broken dreams.

It wasn't exactly pretty, but at least it wasn't Mass Extinction Event Number 6 and The General Demise of The Human Race.

"Thor? Tony?" It was Steve, of course, who started the anxious parenting. "Are you okay? Did you get Wanda out alright?"

I exhaled with relief when the comms crackled back to life after a quiet few seconds. "She's safe," Thor called. "But I cannot see- ah, there he is."

There was some distant cursing, which I assumed came from Tony (whose comms sounded at least a little bit broken), who had been picked up by the news as he drunkenly zigzagged on a single, sputtering boot towards the helicarrier, which was in turn descending to pick up the final two stragglers.

Smoke coiled lazily from fires in what was left of Novi Grad, presumably started by the deadly (and rocky) hail falling steadily from the sky like so much ash. The news anchor, five minutes ago rabbiting away with theories and half-truths as often as what was actually going on, was sitting in a stunned silence. The only noises from the TV were the steady thumping of helicopter blades and the soft whine right on the edge of your hearing of the helicarrier's enormous repulsor engines, as the behemoth in question sank slowly through the clouds towards the ragged wound in the Earth's skin left when Ultron tore his self-made asteroid from the heart of the now-deathly-quiet city of Novi Grad.

Fuck.

I shut my eyes and listened to the laboured breathing on the other end of the comms. "Are you guys alright up there?" I asked, trying to count the number of people I could hear on the other end.

"Yeah," Steve said, voice weaker than usual and edged with tension. "We'll be okay."

"Where's the robot?" I chuckled wetly, trying to joke through the shock. I lifted a hand to my face and was faintly surprised to find that I was crying. "I haven't seen him on the news for about five minutes."

"I don't know. We haven't either; I'm starting to think he might be gone." There was a rustling sound on the other end of the line and a mumble of voices. "Yeah, he's- dead? I'm not sure what to call it, but he's gone for good. Tony saw it happen."

I heard a very distant shout of "And good riddance!", which I assumed was Tony listening in and wanting to give his two cents on the whole business.

I didn't really know what to say, so I just went with a quiet and inadequate "Okay," and worked on steadying my breathing. Now that the action had stopped, it took a conscious effort to release the tension in my back and shoulders, and once I had the muscles began to ache as if I'd been running for miles. My chest and throat felt scraped raw, and my hands were shaking slightly.

Gods, watching from the sidelines was worse than being there in person.

After a couple of minutes, I felt sufficiently calm to coo at Estelle, very carefully levering myself upright to take the couple of wobbly steps over to her so that I could pick her up, then sit back down with her on my lap. I bounced her gently, and she burbled happily, making grabby hands at my hair.

I let her tug on my fringe for a moment. "Is anybody badly hurt?" I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.

"Bruises, repulsor burns and broken bones, mainly," Steve replied, sounding completely dead on his feet. "Barton's spitting blood; he's in the med bay. Ultron really did a number on him. Tony has a head wound; I think he's concussed, but the stubborn bas- hey, sit down!"

I assumed the last part was directed at the billionaire in question.

"Nat has her head in a bucket, and she's, yeah, she's glaring at me. Altitude sickness plus a blow to the head, I'd say. I haven't seen Thor since he landed; I think he's with Wanda."

"And you?"

He made a dismissive sound. "Nothing a few days' rest won't fix. Don't worry about us. I hear SHIELD picked up Banner - we, ah, took off before we could call in a Code Green - and he's doing the rounds of the civilians. I'm sure he'll find and mother us once he's sorted them out. Oh, and Tony's saying something about a not-dying party at his place once we're back in the US. Says you're invited, wait, no, says you're honour-bound to come. You missed the shawarma after New York."

Estelle fussed a little, so I turned my gaze to her and pulled a few funny faces until she giggled. "Well, if I'm honour-bound, then I'd better come. You'll have to pick me up, though."

There was a pause as Steve consulted with Tony. I hoped he wasn't so concussed that he forgot that he'd invited me, because that would make things awkward. "Not a problem. If anything major happens, I'm sure somebody has your phone number, right?"

"It's a SHIELD phone, so I'd hope so."

"Good. Rogers out, then."

The comm went silent except for a faint crackle and I snorted to myself; Steve's always so formal.

I took the comm unit out of my ear, dropped it onto the table, and turned off the TV (they were just looping footage of the city exploding anyway; no real news), bouncing Estelle on my lap in thoughtful and slightly stunned silence.

o0O0o

A concerningly expensive-looking sedan pulled up outside Mom's house just under 48 hours after I'd last heard from the Avengers, a dark-haired guy in a smart suit stepping out and walking over to knock on our door.

Brilliant. I didn't need any more dodgy cars showing up, but here we were.

I pried myself off the sofa, fumbling for a crutch, and hobbled over to get the door, running my fingers through my hair to try and smooth out the bit that had been flattened while I napped.

"Hello?" I asked, still a little bit bleary (I hate waking up after a daytime nap; for some stupid reason you're always more tired than when you fell asleep in the first place).

"Happy Hogan," the guy deadpanned. I wasn't sure if it was a joke. "Apparently there's a party and you've got to come. I'm authorised to use non-lethal force if necessary."

"It won't be," I replied, waving the crutch slightly. "Just give me a minute?"

"Don't bother dressing up," he fired back. "No, really don't. If you're not there in forty-five minutes, then you won't get a say on what's ordered."

"I'm just going to get some cookies," I said, still feeling about 90% asleep and not sure if this was some sort of painkiller-induced fever dream. "And my other crutch, wherever the hell that is." I silently added that I would definitely be putting on something other than sweatpants and a grey standard-issue SHIELD T-shirt if I was being dragged to a billionaire's house (apartment? penthouse? tower?) in his swanky-ass car.

"Well, don't be too long."

"Yeah, okay." I blinked blearily at him before shutting the door, shaking my head to try and clear some of the fog from my brain.

I staggered upstairs to put some actual clothes (read: jeans and a T-shirt that I'd actually chosen for myself from a shop instead of being handed on base) and find my second crutch, which was jauntily propped against my bed as if it was any help there at all.

Then I headed back downstairs (oh, how much woe that simple phrase conceals) to load a tin up with fresh cookies that Mom had baked for the exact purpose of taking to this would-you-look-at-that-we-didn't-die celebration.

By the time I'd done all of that, Mom had opened the door and was chatting away to Happy (that could not really be his name), telling him that I was terribly rude for not inviting him in, etcetera, you get the picture.

Happy didn't look impressed, so I hurried (hobbled) out of the door, kissing Mom quickly on the cheek as I did so before following Happy to the sedan. The car ride was silent and really rather awkward, but I took the time to shake off the last of my nap and arrive at Tony Stark's fancy tower fully awake. Happy parked in an underground carpark that I quite literally would have driven straight past the entrance to even if I knew it was there, it was so well hidden, before leading me to an elevator in the back corner, far too nice to only serve the carpark.

"Penthouse please, JARVIS."

There was a resounding silence, our breathing the only noise in the enclosed space. Happy deflated slightly, the sigh echoing off of the walls and being sucked into the silence, leaving the elevator feeling even emptier than before, in spite of the two of us being squished next to each other in it.

He leaned over and pushed the button labelled 'P' on the panel next to me. "Sorry," he muttered, "I'm just not quite used to it yet." The elevator began to rise almost noiselessly.

"Used to what?" I asked before I could stop myself, nosy to the end.

He sighed. "Tony's AI system, JARVIS, took a real bashing when Ultron woke up and decided to trash the place. He'll be back online eventually, but Tony's in no state to be fiddling with programming like that at the moment, so for now we're going old-school. I've got used to the verbal commands for everything." He wiped his hand across his brow. "Gone soft over the past few years, huh."

I just stayed silent. It seemed like Happy was having a moment; I figured it was best to let him be.

We stood in silence until the elevator stopped rising, doors sliding open with a soft hiss to reveal the Avengers lying across various sofas and all in differing states of bruised and injured.

"Here we are," Happy said, gesturing for me to step out of the elevator.

Somehow I felt overdressed; Steve was the only one not wearing sweatpants. He was also the only one who wasn't entirely black and blue, and the only one who stood up to come and say hi, and, more importantly, take the tub of cookies from my hands so that I could use my crutches properly. "Glad you could make it," he said, sounding tired but otherwise pretty chipper.

"I wasn't aware I had a choice," I replied, following him into the open-plan seating area and sitting down next to Clint, who was taking up most of a reasonably large sofa, pale-faced (apart from a very impressive black eye) but smiling.

"You didn't," called Tony from his position equally sprawled on a different sofa. He didn't look like he'd shaved (or brushed his hair, for that matter) for a couple of days, and the transformation from the picture-perfect billionaire was pretty striking. "And you're just in time; Steve here is about to put in our orders."

"Orders?" I asked.

Steve sighed. "We're getting takeout. I said I didn't mind cooking, but-"

"Steve would burn water," Nat grumbled from her corner. "And Bruce is off doing good deeds, setting up a temporary hospital for people injured in Novi Grad. And none of the rest of us could stand long enough to cook anything."

"So, what's everybody having?" I asked, feeling a little bit behind the curve.

"Everything," Clint mumbled, which was enlightening (and also told me that they'd cracked open the morphine for him).

"We're ordering quite a spread," Steve clarified. "Basically we've picked a variety of dishes from pretty much all of the outlets in a mile radius of the tower."

"Using a random number generator!" Tony chipped in.

Steve sighed. "Using a random number generator for some of them. It's taken most of the afternoon." He held up a sheet of paper covered on both sides with a cramped cursive that looked distinctly 1940s to my untrained eye. "And it's going to take most of the evening to order it all."

I grinned. "Sign me the hell up. I'll eat most things."

Clint raised an eyebrow at me. "Then why didn't you eat more than one piece of that Christmas cake I baked in Junior Year."

I- What?

"Dude, are you seriously still on about this?" I huffed a sigh. "It was filling as hell and I don't like currants." I jabbed a finger at him. "You know I don't like currants!"

"You said you liked it!" Clint retorted. "If you weren't going to eat anymore, you didn't have to lie!"

"Well, I-"

Tony cut me off. "As entertaining as this is, I, for one, would like to eat before tomorrow morning, so can we please just decide what we're getting?"

"It looks to me like you've already decided on enough to feed everybody two or three times over, and I'll eat whatever there is," I said. "Go for it."

Steve sighed slightly, looking back down at his list. "Okay then."

He picked up the phone.

o0O0o

Food started to arrive pretty quickly, and it was kept warm by Steve (who was seemingly capable of decanting plastic containers into oven-proof dishes and sticking said dish into a very low oven to stop it from going stone cold). Just over an hour after I'd arrived, Steve crossed off the last delivery from his list.

"That's everything, I think," he said. "Who's hungry?"

There was a ragged chorus of cheers. Steve stood up to go and fetch the various random dishes and put them on the table, leaving the rest of us to make our way over to the dining area and promptly collapse onto Tony's fancy leather seats.

Trust me when I say that is easier said than done. You know things are bad when the guy on crutches is helping somebody else to walk (turned into a bizarre sort of five-legged race with Clint's arm over one shoulder and a crutch in the other hand. Would Not recommend).

But boy, seeing all of that food made it totally worth it.

I piled an unholy combination of all sorts of different dishes onto my plate (try 'em all, right?), and was glad to see that everybody else was doing the same; I wasn't the only person with pizza next to chow mein.

We ate in silence for a few minutes, punctuated only by the occasional comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of particular items in the spread. The debate got a little heated over one of the curries; Clint thought it was tasty (it was!), and Tony insisted that there was no way the colour was natural (also true).

I'll admit freely that I was slightly surprised to see people who actually had appetites whilst taking the sort of pain medication that some of them (read: Clint and Tony) were definitely on. I'm the sort of person who feels nauseous for three days after surgery until the meds wear off, at which point I eat the entire fridge. It seemed that these guys had already reached the latter stage.

I winced slightly as I watched Clint rip all of the meat off of a rib, whilst his mouth was still full of chicken tikka curry. I may love him, but he was certainly making some questionable choices today.

I looked down at my plate and decided (wisely, I think) not to comment.

After a good fifteen minutes, when people started to fill up a bit, the conversation shifted away from food and towards other, far more random topics. Nat bitched about how slow R+D were getting her gadgets back to her, and how they kept changing the one thing she actually liked about them. Tony called Steve technologically illiterate. The old man in question asked him if he knew any other 100-year-olds with a smartphone. Tony retorted that he couldn't use an Excel spreadsheet if his life depended on it.

I chipped in and said that I would be dead as well in that increasingly improbable situation, and Clint raised a hand in solidarity. "Fuck Excel, honestly," he said around a mouthful of… something.

"Nat?" Tony asked, looking mildly distressed.

Nat shrugged. "That's the green one, right?"

Tony pressed a hand to his chest and painted a hurt expression onto his face. "You were my assistant for six months?"

She threw a piece of popcorn into her mouth, looking incredibly bored. "I wasn't a very good one though, was I?"

"Well, you were lying the entire time, so I guess not. Do you even know what an assistant is supposed to do anyway?"

Nat licked the salt off of her fingers and grinned saccharinely across at him, leaning back in her chair slightly. "No idea. You just look confident and hope for the best."

Tony shrugged slightly with one shoulder. "Well, I guess it worked because I was very offended to find out that you were actually a secret agent sent to spy on me."

Nat opened her mouth as if to argue before she suddenly realised that that entire statement was absolutely correct.

You see, no matter how good you are at arguing, you're likely to lose if your opponent is in the unfortunate position of being right.

Fast forward another twenty minutes and almost all of the food was gone, which was in itself a minorly traumatising experience because it had been enough to feed a small army for a week. Or, seemingly, a super soldier for a single meal.

Steve was totally unapologetic. "You try healing seven broken ribs overnight and then tell me you're not hungry."

You know what? No thanks.

"You try healing seven broken ribs over the course of multiple weeks," Clint grumbled. "There's no need to rub it in."

"Yeah, but he can't get drunk, so it's not all fun," Nat replied, now leaning back a concerningly long way in her chair. If it was anybody else, I'd warn them about cracking their head open on the floor, but for all the times I'd seen Nat tip her chair back, I'd never once seen it topple over so I figured she was probably okay.

"I wish I could get drunk," Tony whined.

"You can?" I said/asked/something.

"He's not allowed any alcohol," Steve replied, now standing up and collecting plates like a good host, and generally making me feel lazy. "Something about mixing drugs and danger of death. Plus, he's already concussed and adding a hangover does not sound pleasant."

Tony flipped him the bird. You know, in a friendly way.

We whiled away the evening like that, just chatting idly, sharing weird and wonderful stories from our very different lives. I learned that Tony's mother had wanted him to retain some of his Italian heritage, so just about the only thing he could cook was proper Italian fare, and that he spoke the language. I learned that Steve had lived in a shitty apartment without heating with the Winter Soldier during the height of the Great Depression, relying on handouts and the kindness of strangers when times got particularly hard. Clint revealed to the others that he'd been a gun-for-hire while he was still at high school. Nat told them that she'd been classically trained in ballet at her assassin school.

And I decided to share a story that I hadn't told any of the others; nothing ground-breaking or supernatural, but a story from my time as a swimming coach. I told them about the shy red-haired girl who trained in the second lane for the development squad, twelve years old. The girl who walked almost two miles to get to the club three days a week just so that she could stay out of the house for a while, away from all of the shouting, the drink, and the drugs. The girl who must have noticed something about me, put two and two together and came up with four, and who approached me after one session and told me that she was scared of going home.

I didn't know what the club safeguarding policies were. In fact, I didn't know if there even was a policy in place for this kind of thing. But I called the head coach right away, and he got straight on to Social Services, no questions asked.

In a way this is a sad story; the girl was taken away from her mother. But the system was kind to her, kinder than it was to most older kids, because she was fostered locally, and her foster parents were some of the sweetest people that I've ever met in my life. They couldn't afford her subs, but the head coach made the same concessions for her that he'd made for me, and she kept coming to training. Only now she didn't have to walk for miles, and she always got out of the pool with a smile on her face.

It was an experience that taught me that you could live through these terrible things, and that life could get better. Sometimes it just had to, and sometimes all you had to do was tell somebody that things were tough.

I didn't think it at the time, but looking back, I think that it changed my outlook. It made me see that I could help people, that I had taken after my Mom far more than after Gabe, and it gave me hope.

And after all, it was hope that had kept me from dying all these years, wasn't it?

o0O0o

I spent more time at the Avengers Towers than HQ over the next six weeks, which doesn't sound like much until you realise that I had PT fifteen hours a week.

It started to feel like I had a bit of a family up in the sleek modern penthouse, and not just Nat and Clint. The whole gang began to spend hours at a time just chilling out on the expensive sofas, sharing random stories or watching bad TV.

It was surreal, but I didn't really grasp how much those six weeks with a bunch of injured people bitching at each other from across the room whilst the Only One in one piece (stupid super-soldier serum bullshit that it was) had to play butler were changing my life until I casually mentioned to Annabeth that she was invited for dinner and Nat was cooking, and she almost exploded with excitement.

The weeks bled away into months, and I began to train more actively for proper field work, getting stronger every day but never quite strong enough, until one morning some handler I'd never met before found me in the cafeteria and told me to get a bag packed for 1600.

Then I was off, on a mission with Jason as my partner. I wasn't even aware that I'd been approved for field duty, but clearly I wasn't as rusty as I'd thought, because we breezed the damn thing and had enough spare time before the plane landed to go and get fancy-ass coffees on the SHIELD dime.

Now, I've gotta interject here and say Very Clearly that an effortless success was not the norm over the following weeks and months, and each time Jason and I were sent into the field something horrible tended to go wrong.

It took a particularly nasty incident in which I was hurled from a fifth-floor window and some dude (possibly a cyclops? I don't know. I didn't look too hard at his face) tried to drown Jason in a sewer (long story; we were separated in a divide-and-conquer thing that focused on the bit where I was good with water and he was good with heights) for the higher-ups to realise that putting the two of us in the field together, while apparently fulfilling their weird superpowered team-up dreams, was actually doing more harm than good.

And that's (in brief) how I was reassigned (back) to Delta. There were other factors involved, not least that our styles when completing a mission were pretty much complete opposites of each other (look, if I have to stab somebody in the back to not die, then I'll do it. Jason, more likely to challenge them to single combat without weapons or some chivalrous shit like that).

But I was happy, and Clint and Nat were delighted. We fell back into an effortless routine, every step like a perfectly choreographed dance, and the towering monolithic empires of the criminal underworld quailed if they saw us coming (which, because we're quite good at our jobs, they didn't do all that often).

In the seven months since my return to active duty, the Avengers were called on exactly once to deal with some small-time wannabe supervillain who really didn't deserve the attention, which was pretty good going for global catastrophes in fairness. But at least it proved that this team-up did serve some purpose and that was knowledge.

We were sitting around Tony's fancy-ass dinner table (post-not-dying tradition is to eat, apparently) when Steve made a comment about how far the team had come over the last few months.

"You know," he said, waving his fork around slightly, "I can see why Coulson put Jackson's name at the top of his list."

This all felt a little ironic, because I had been the only person to take a major hit in this fight and was sporting three cracked ribs and a concussion.

Clint rocked back dangerously in his chair, tapping its arm with the singular unbandaged finger on his left hand (stomped on whilst holding his bow). "Yeah?" he said, eyebrows raised as if to say 'that idiot?'.

"We've actually felt like a team since he crawled out of the woodwork," Steve continued. He was right, of course (I say, having not been on the team before. You hear stories). Steve usually is, which is one of his more irritating personality traits. I really did feel a sense of belonging when sitting around a table with all of these ridiculously overpowered individuals.

Nat nodded approvingly and raised her beer. "He's the glue holding us together. Cheers to that."

The others all lifted their respective drinks, and I felt I had to get involved, raising the lemonade that Tony had poured me (with a shit-eating grin, of course) in an awkward little acknowledgement of their praise.

I flushed bright red, but otherwise stayed silent because, honestly, how do you respond to that sort of compliment (from your childhood hero, no less)?

"Speech!" Clint cheered.

I rolled my eyes and took a sip out of my bottle, before raising it in a mock toast. "Fuck off."

Tony snorted inelegantly. "Best one I've heard in a while, that is."

"You too," I replied, drinking my lemonade (like a twelve-year-old while the grown-ups had their alcohol) with my left hand, whilst flipping him the bird with my right.

A comfortable silence descended, punctuated for a couple of minutes only by the soft clinking of cutlery against plates.

And then my phone rang. "Yeah?" I asked around a mouthful of falafel (a little shop opened down the road, best. Falafel. Ever).

"I saw the news," Annabeth said, voice very calm for someone that hasn't seen their boyfriend in two months and hadn't spoken to him in three whole days. "I take it you're not dead or anything important."

"I appreciate the concern," I replied dryly, "but assuming that I don't die in my sleep in the next twenty-four hours, then I think I'll be alright."

Annabeth's wry smile was audible through the phone. "I take it that the surfing lesson at the weekend is probably off?"

"I'm still coming over, unless of course you don't want me to. JARVIS says the weather should be nice."

She laughed softly. "It'll be good to see you for real. Even if your stupid face is purple."

"Yeah, well, love you too."

"Love you." The line clicked off, leaving me sitting at a table surrounded by friends with a goofy-ass smile on my face.

As I looked around at the faces of the rest of the team, all of whom were absorbed in their own conversations that had broken off after I answered the phone, it struck me then, that, after all that trauma, after all that running, I was truly, finally home.

It was a nice feeling and something in my chest settled (maybe the end of a rib, but let's go for the more romantic image, yeah?) as the final puzzle piece fell into place. This was my family. Right there, in that moment, all a bit rough around the edges. None of the airbrushed perfection of the pedestal that the media placed the elusive team on. Just us, together, smiling.

Mending some of the hurt that I'd thought would never go away.

thank you for reading!