A/N: So sorry for going two weeks between updates without warning! I will most likely be switching to bi-weekly updates for the sake of my own sanity because I have several writing projects going at the moment and a one-week turnaround on chapters is kind of much. Thanks so much for bearing with me and for all your encouragement - especially Katla who gave me some inspiration for this chapter, and my beta reader, Malintzin. Hope you enjoy the update, and if you have an extra moment, let me know! There are a few cameos from the MCU who made this really fun to write. :)
5. Family Values
"Look who's home for the holidays."
Tony's voice reverberated in the underground parking lot, which Bruce and Natasha had been crossing toward the brightly lit entryway to the attached building. They stopped and turned to see him emerging from the passenger door of what appeared to be a new Tesla, although it was a little hard to tell with the spatter of Upstate New York snow and mud. The driver's seat was empty, and Tony hadn't bothered to pull in between the lines. Not that space was at a premium.
"This isn't exactly home," Bruce said, indicating the pair of glass doors, each etched with a large encircled A. He'd been to the Avengers Facility before, used the lab, even stayed in Natasha's suite for a few days when he re-joined the team after his stint in Asgard, but never lived here. It wasn't like the Tower, where they'd resumed residence for a few months in the wake of the Infinity Wars while they figured out their relationship and made future plans.
"True," came Tony's unexpected agreeable reply, punctuated by the slam of the car door behind him.
"And we're not here for the holidays," Natasha added as he approached.
"Yeah, you know how when couples have been together for a long time they start sounding like each other?"
Bruce glanced at Natasha, who darted her eyes up at him as the corner of her mouth curled. "Pretty sure Pepper's still waiting for that to happen," he muttered.
"I didn't think you'd been together for that long," Tony concluded as though Bruce hadn't commented. "Anyway, I'm expecting you to host a New Year's Eve party at your home."
He looked at Bruce as he said it, perhaps anticipating Natasha's reply. "I've seen what houses look like after you've partied in them, Stark."
"Malibu was a long time ago."
"I remember one that ended even worse than Malibu."
"That was just as much Bruce's fault as mine," Tony shot back, wheeling on him. "You know I thought about crashing the party at your aunt's, but in the end I just couldn't deal with Ohio."
Over Tony's shoulder, Bruce sought Natasha's gaze, silently begging her for help. He hadn't seen Tony since summer, at their housewarming, and while he'd missed his friend, and seeing him now was the only part of this meeting he felt good about, he wasn't used to how dizzying it could be to interact with him.
"Ohio's not that bad," she said, her sarcastic smirk softening into a reassuring smile. "We went to Dayton Mall and the Aviation Heritage Park."
"Do they have a Gamma Radiation Heritage Park?"
Tony looked back and forth between them with the eagerness of a puppy. Bruce almost hated to disappoint him. Or maybe Natasha was rubbing off on him, and it would be fun.
"Thankfully, no," he said.
There wasn't time to watch Tony's face fall before Natasha added, waggling her brows at Bruce, "They have been discussing a Hulk monument, though."
He shook his head, gloved fingers going up to pinch the bridge of his nose, but the bone Natasha had thrown Tony wasn't enough.
He sniffed. "Until they do more than discuss, Dayton is officially the most boring Avenger hometown."
"What about if they do get one?" Bruce asked, curious in spite of himself.
"When," Natasha added, nudging his arm with her shoulder. "We agreed to talk in whens not ifs, remember?"
With reference to adopting children-but of course Bruce had no intention of mentioning that in front of Tony. Yet.
"Then Dayton will still be the most boring Avenger hometown. But it'll get an E for effort," Tony added, magnanimously.
"Hey, boring isn't bad," Bruce said. "I hope life stays boring."
"I must be getting old, because I hope so, too, buddy." He reached out and clasped Bruce's shoulder, giving it a little squeeze. Then he turned Bruce toward the doors and gave him a little nudge to walk. "After your New Year's Eve party."
"Can you even stay awake till midnight anymore?" asked Natasha, the click of her boot heels-the ones Bruce had given her for Christmas-echoing off the concrete.
Tony whipped his head back to glare at her. "Are you calling me old?"
"You just called yourself-" Bruce stopped short as Tony swung back to glare at him.
"Not the same thing. Do you let her talk to you that way, Brucie? Nice beard, by the way." He reached out, as though to touch it, but Natasha distracted him.
"Nice ride, by the way. Christmas present?"
"Not for Happy, if that's the self-driving Tesla," Bruce joked. "Putting a man out of a job? At Christmastime?"
"If he'd rather drive, he'd better do it," Natasha added. "And decrease the chauffeur population."
"Um, you're doing that sounding like each other thing again," Tony said. "I'll let you take her out after the meeting. I'll even let you sit in the driver's seat."
"Of the self-driving car," Bruce said. "Gee."
Despite the sarcastic streak Tony always brought out in him, Bruce enjoyed the banter. Conversation with Natasha had felt strained since Christmas. She hadn't brought up the darker aspects of his childhood again since their argument in the mall, but she didn't have to for him to feel that the subject was still open, like a sore with the scab picked off. He didn't know how to close it back up again, except to give it enough time that it would eventually just go away. Tony brought a welcome distraction-and not just from Bruce's domestic woes, but from his worry about this meeting they'd been summoned to the Avengers Facility for.
He reconsidered that opinion when they went inside and met Vision gliding down the staircase to the conference room. "Bruce," Tony said, grabbing his arm, "you, me, and our son, all together again."
"We, er, were all together during the Infinity War."
"Really?" Natasha murmured as they stopped at the foot of the stairs. "Of all the problems with that statement, that's the one you address?"
"Hello, Tony," said Vision. Even after all this time, it still jarred Bruce hear JARVIS' voice call him anything besides Mr. Stark. At least he still greeted him, "Dr. Banner," though Tony took issue with this.
"I know our little family's had its share of dysfunction, especially the fighting on different sides and all-"
"I had no part in that," Bruce interjected.
"-but hindsight is 20/20, so I see now that was clearly a case of adolescent rebellion brought on by your absentee father here." Tony patted Bruce's shoulder, which sagged beneath his hand with his own sigh. "Formality can't be helping to bridge the gap between us. I'm not saying you have to call him Dad, but maybe at least Bruce?"
Vision fixed Bruce with his eerily bright, unblinking gaze. "Do you want me to call you-?"
"BRUCE!" Thor hailed like the onset of a thunderstorm, striding into the lobby as the automatic doors parted for him, cape flapping behind him. "Friend of Asgard, I did not expect to be brothers-in-arms again."
His crushing embrace prevented Bruce from vocalizing anything to the contrary, though he could hear Tony in the background still offering Vision a word of paternal advice. "You don't have to go that big. But the general idea is good. Warmth. Friendship. Family."
There were some obvious differences between Phil Coulson as SHIELD Director and his predecessor, most of them superficial. At the moment, the one that stood out most to Natasha was that Fury would never thank anyone for attending a meeting during the holidays and promising to keep it brief so they could get back to their homes and families. Then again, if Coulson didn't have Audrey-and his in-laws- waiting for him back home, maybe he would be more like Fury.
"As most of you know," he said, getting up from his seat at the top of the conference table, pushing the swivel chair under the table as he stepped around to stand behind it, "since her retirement Ms. Romanoff has been consulting for various security organizations. Most recently for the FBI, whom she advised to hand off a case to SHIELD."
Seated to the left of Coulson's empty chair, Steve opened his mouth, presumably to protest that the Avengers weren't SHIELD.
"But this is more Avenger-level stuff than SHIELD," Jessica Jones beat him to the punch, verbal reflexes still lightning fast despite her languid feet-propped-on-the-table posture that spoke of being bored with this meeting already. "So maybe you should just skip the opening monologue and tell us who the bad guys are so we can go kick their asses and get home to the kid."
"Squirrel Girl's babysitting," Luke added.
Natasha leaned over to whisper to Bruce, his hair tickling her cheek. "We should put her on the list."
He blinked at her behind the lenses of his glasses, and the corner of her mouth tugged upward at how very like old times this was, whispering to each other during Avengers meetings. Only of course this was a different bunch of people, and back then the comments were the most awkward attempts at flirtation rather than jokes about babysitters.
"Squirrel Girl?" he whispered back.
"Oh dear God!" Tony exclaimed, and a glance at Coulson revealed him to be looking as though he was regretting the decision to assemble the Avengers-though it had to be noted that he didn't try to reign Stark in, and not just because he knew it would be a futile endeavor. "That nutjob-pun intended-stalked me outside the Tower once. I thought she was one of the cosplayers that was always hanging around, but she wanted me to put her on the Avengers roster. I told her not while she was dressed like a furry."
"Did you say fury?" Thor asked Bruce in a voice that was meant to be low, but still rumbled sonorously.
"Don't ask," Bruce replied, "furry culture is not a path you want to go down, trust me."
"Do you really think Asgardians of all people, are going to be put off by furries?" Natasha asked.
Bruce blinked at her again as he considered this, then tilted his head, conceding the point. Scratching his beard, he murmured, "On the other hand, I'm a little bit put off by wondering whether the Loki we know and don't love has horse, worm, and wolf children."
"And that," Thor said in grim tones, "is not a path you wish to descend."
"For the sake of Luke and Jessica who are currently paying for a babysitter…" Coulson attempted to bring the meeting back to order.
"All in favor of New Year's Eve at the Banner-Romanoff residence in Ithaca say yea," Tony said.
Everyone said yea-except for Bruce and Natasha, of course, and Vision, who asked, "Have Natasha and Dr-Bruce invited us to their residence?"
"The manners he gets from me," Bruce muttered.
"Come on, Vish," Tony said. "Where is the spirit of spontaneity you should have inherited from me?"
"To answer your question, Ms. Jones," Coulson said, "I wouldn't describe this as above SHIELD's level. But I will acknowledge that we're spread thin after the events of the past few years, and we have a nation-wide criminal network to deal with. If I may direct your attention deficit disorder to the projector…"
"That's ableist," Tony stage-whispered, but as soon as the image of a bald man with a blonde mustache in a business suit appeared on the screen behind Coulson, he said, "Hey, I know that guy."
"So do we," Cage said. "Van Lunt's got real estate ads all over Hell's Kitchen."
"Cornelius van Lunt," Coulson said with a nod. "AKA, Taurus."
"As in Ford?" Tony said. "Shitty choice of car-themed alias."
"You'd prefer he went with Tesla?" Bruce quipped.
"As in the Zodiac," Coulson attempted to steer them off the rabbit trail. "Van Lunt's obsessed with astrology-"
"He told me once at a soiree he attributes his business acumen to his astrologer," Tony said. "You got Stephen Strange on this?"
"We're in contact," Coulson replied. He looked at Steve, "Is this how your meetings always went? Interruption after interruption?"
"Pretty much."
"Explains a lot."
Miraculously, maybe taking it as some sort of challenge, Tony kept quiet while Coulson got through his presentation of the Zodiac Cartel, twelve associated but independently operating crime rings spread throughout the US, united under van Lunt. SHIELD didn't have IDs on any of the other members, except that each was born under a different astrological sign.
"Do they have any connection with the Zodiac Virus Romanoff and I recovered back in 2014?" Steve asked the question Natasha had been turning over in her mind.
In fact, SHIELD's history with the virus went farther back than that; Peggy Carter originally took it from another group using the Zodiac name back in the SSR days.
"Not that we're currently aware of," Coulson answered, "although it's not out of the realm of possibility, given the Hydra connections."
"Of course there are," Steve muttered.
"In fact, Hydra and Zodiac are business rivals," Coulson went on. "They both aim for world domination through economic and political control. Both require chaos in order to prosper."
"And this ongoing peace after isn't as good for business as wartime," concluded Steve.
Natasha watched him with interest. Once he hadn't been able to imagine a world without war; now he didn't seem to welcome the fight as much as he used to.
"Zodiac came onto SHIELD's radar when Daniel Ranford, a known Hydra operative, went dark, only for Zodiac to come up with a device we never recovered after Hydra raided the Fridge. Ranford had to have passed him the intel, if not the object itself."
An ankh-shaped object appeared on the screen.
"Looks like the Key of the Nile," Coulson said, "for those of you familiar with Egyptian artefacts…" He caught Natasha's eye; his father had been something of an Indiana Jones, before his death. "We're pretty certain it's not Egyptian. Unless you mean in the sense of aliens built the pyramids. Then yes, it's very Egyptian."
"What does this object do?" Bruce spoke for the first time, although Natasha didn't miss how he'd sat up straighter and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his interest piqued.
"We don't know," Coulson said. "Whatever it does, we don't want it doing it while it's in the hands of Zodiac."
"The symbol suggests it may have originated in the Ankh Dimension," Vision said, "which is said to thrive on conflict between the forces of good and evil, in which neither side entirely or permanently defeats the other."
"Yeah," Coulson said, "we especially don't want it in Zodiac's hands if it comes from there."
The meeting didn't go on very long after that. They made plans to take teams to the cities with known Zodiac activity. Cage and Jones volunteered to take New York, with the Defenders.
"When you pay Squirrel Girl," Coulson said, "you may want to tell her to assemble the Great Lakes Avengers."
He was serious, and unlikely as it seemed, they took him seriously. Tony, on the other hand, had reached his limit.
"I'm sorry, did you just say Great Lakes Avengers?"
Coulson smirked. "Yeah. Barton's been training them."
Bruce looked to Natasha. "First I heard of it," she replied with a shrug. "He did always have a thing for strays."
"Let me guess, they have a big blue mutant ox on the team," said Tony. "Congratulations, Bruce. You're no longer the Avenger with the least cool birthplace. The title has been usurped by Squirrel Girl, who is no doubt from some podunk town outside Flint, Michigan."
"She's from LA," Jessica said in her usual deadpan, though there was a twist to the corner of her mouth that said she enjoyed taking Stark down a peg. Well-who didn't?
"Don't knock the Great Lakes, Stark," said Coulson. "I'm from Wisconsin originally."
Tony scowled. "You would be."
After the meeting, Tony dragged Bruce off to the labs to see the toys, which apparently included Erik Selvig and Jane Foster, who'd come with Thor to visit her old advisor. The whole thing had made Natasha feel strangely nostalgic, but instead of lingering in the conference room to catch up with old friends, she slipped off to wander the halls of Facility. Other than some repair work, not much had changed since she'd been in residence-not even the access to her room, she discovered when she passed her old quarters and, on a whim, palmed the pad and the LED flashed green, granting her entry.
Why hadn't Rogers assigned it to anyone else? Had he believed, all this time, that eventually she'd come back? She hesitated outside the unlocked door, heart inexplicably thumping, feeling somehow that if she went inside she'd be re-entering a past she didn't regret, but had left behind all the same. Was this what Bruce felt at his Aunt Susan's?
With that thought, Natasha turned the handle and pushed the door open.
It was just a room, furnished but empty of anything personal-not that she'd brought much personal when the Avengers relocated upstate-everything top of the line, but a little less luxurious, a little more institutional, than the Tower. She moved through the space, absently opening the closet, the drawers of the dresser and nightstands, the cabinets of the adjoining bathroom, when a someone rapped at the door.
"You don't have to knock, you know," she called as she turned, expecting to see Bruce through the crack where the door stood ajar.
"I think you've got the wrong man," came the slightly hoarse voice of Coulson as he pushed the door further open and ducked his head inside.
"Historically, SHIELD directors don't knock."
"It's just not possible to emulate Fury in every way. Although from personal experience, walking in on your agents isn't the best way to endear yourself."
Natasha nodded, and Coulson stepped all the way inside, glancing around the suite, before his eyes settled on her again.
"So, did the meeting tempt you to move back in and put yourself on the roster?"
She looked down at the desk she was standing by, scuffing her fingers over the glass top which had been cleaned since she moved out. If she was honest, a part of her had felt the call to action-but not the compulsion for atonement which had always been her strongest drive before.
"That circus?" she quipped, meeting Coulson's eye again. "It reaffirmed my decision to retire."
"Can't blame you. It even made me consider it. Audrey would be thrilled."
"Speaking of domestic bliss…" Natasha found herself saying.
They hadn't planned to announce their news today, but if anyone deserved to know why they were sitting this one out, it was Coulson. That, and Bruce had spontaneously told Aunt Susan, and damn it, she wanted to tell someone, too. So she told him, briefly, how even though they'd stopped Avenging, they wanted to keep fighting in a new way.
"That's really wonderful." Coulson reached out for her, and as he hugged her added, "One of those days you'll look at these kids and you'll be so amazed at how far they've come. And so proud and grateful that you got to watch it."
Natasha blinked back tears, years of missions and being under his supervision at SHIELD, right up until they were on the helicarrier before the Chitauri Invasion, flashing through her memory.
"Our home study is next week," she said when he released her.
"Hence no New Year's Eve invite?"
"And probably not exactly the best support for a stable home environment if we tell them we moonlight hunting down members of a nation-wide cartel."
"It's not long-term employment anyway."
"I hope we're not letting you down," she said.
"Not at all. Those kids are the most innocent victims of the chaos Hydra and Zodiac want to create. They still need heroes. If you ask me, you and Banner are taking on the more difficult mission. But one which you're uniquely qualified for."
At his reference to innocent victims in need of heroes, her smile faltered, and she turned back to the desk. She pictured the shy, sad-eyed little boy she'd seen in Susan Banner's photo albums, in frames on the walls of her cluttered house, curled up under blankets reading the old Captain America comics that had gotten his aunts and even his father through the chaos and horror of their home.
"Natasha?"
"You know as much about Bruce's unique qualifications as I do, then."
"What do you mean?"
Natasha pressed her lips against the words she wanted to blurt out to her old mentor. She couldn't unburden herself at the expense of Bruce's privacy, could she? Then again, she was starting to get the idea his reticence wasn't really about being private at all.
"I mean the Big Guy isn't his biggest monster," she released the words with her breath, "but he's never once looked me in the eye and told me he watched his own father kill his mother in a fit of rage."
"And you think that's something he needs to do?"
The rolling track of the desk drawer as she opened it seemed loud in the quiet of the room. "I didn't used to. I thought it was like how I didn't need to talk about what I did for the Red Room, because I dumped it all on the internet. The difference is, I dealt with that. Or I am dealing with it. And Bruce…I feel like I'm going into this mission without a thorough briefing."
Coulson gave her a small, sympathetic smile. "Too many relationships fall apart because someone won't talk. I watched it happen to May and Andrew. It almost happened to Audrey and me. Before I died."
He contemplated his clasped hands for a moment. The prosthetic fingers were nearly indistinguishable from the real ones, but Natasha noticed how his right thumb-the real one-unconsciously rubbed the left.
"I was on Project TAHITI," he went on. The one that resurrected him. That was… "Ironic, I know," he said, reading her mind. "What I saw made me withdraw, and not just because it was classified. Or rather I tried to withdraw, but Audrey wouldn't let me go. Not without a fight. And I did fight her on it, lest you think I'm insinuating it'll all be neat and tidy."
"You and I have both worked for SHIELD too long to think anything could be neat and tidy," Natasha replied. "Thanks, Phil."
He wished her good luck, then left. Natasha started to follow, only to glimpse out the corner of her eye that she'd left the desk drawer open. As she moved to shut it, she noticed for the first time it wasn't empty. Opening it further, she saw a bundle of envelopes shoved to the very back.
They were addressed to Bruce.
And sent by Brian Banner.