Reindeer Games
"All I'm sayin'—little weird," Tony shrugged. He rolled his shoulders and relaxed a little further into the couch, his eyes trained on the television, thumbs deftly shifting the camera angle of the top half of the screen.
Clint was leaning forward beside him, elbows digging into his knees, a look of concentration on his squashed face that Tony imagined could only ever be mirrored by a man in the process of taking the world's most gloriously difficult shit. It was no contest between the two of them at this point, and had been for some time, but he had to give the clueless kid points for trying.
"How's it weird?" the archer asked after a few moments.
Tony's eyes flicked to the bottom half of the screen and rolled in his skull. "It's a small miracle you're still alive," he remarked offhandedly before he fired his shotgun into the side of Clint's character's head.
"What?" he started as his head burst like a grape in slow motion over his half of the screen.
"Whole time. Right behind the mannequin."
"Why the fuck would you just stand there?"
"See if you'd notice," Tony shrugged, the corners of his mouth tugging upward in a brief but gleeful grin as Clint released a loud, frustrated groan.
Nobody could blame him. Tony pulled up the match's count screen as he waited for Clint to respawn, letting out a shameless laugh as he saw that he was up on the archer by almost thirty kills. That was just in the last ten minutes, in Nuketown, after he turned off the bots.
Christ, he's bad at this.
"Christ, you're bad at this."
"Shut up, Tony," Clint grumbled, flexing his hands around the controller as his character popped back up on his side of the map. Probably in an effort to distract himself from his own personal massacre, he asked again, "Seriously, how's it weird?"
"Just think about it for a second," Tony said, hopping into the bus in the center of the map. "A couple months ago you didn't know what to do with yourself. Romanoff spends practically every waking minute trying to get under the guy's unusually thick, pasty skin, and you're shouting like a, pardon me, pansy bitch about how she doesn't pay you any attention anymore like we're on the season finale of Days of our Lives. Then, out of nowhere, somebody waves a magic wand and all of a sudden she's snug as a bug between your freakishly short arms and is completely neglecting Operation Holy Diver back there. Then, in a real twist of fate or whatever that stupid saying is, you get back and now not only is it time to play house with our favorite Norse baby of legend, Princess Anastasia can't take her fat doe eyes off him. It's weird."
Clint, who was very noticeably not crouching in the second story window of the house directly across from the bus Tony'd been sitting in, glanced briefly at his friend and then over his shoulder at the balcony. Natasha and Loki sat on the other side of the glass, each bent almost double over opposite sides of a chessboard, statuesque save for their occasionally twitching lips as they considered the lay of their game. Tony almost felt bad for how difficult it was for Clint to see that there was something he wasn't seeing. Almost.
He switched to his pistol and shot the archer while he wasn't looking.
"Hey!" Clint exclaimed at the sound, turning around to watch his slow motion death for the second time in about as many minutes.
"This is pathetic. I don't wanna play with you anymore," Tony said, rolling his head to the side over the back of the couch, a mock sympathetic tilt to his mouth. "Can you get your girlfriend?" he added.
Clint gave him an annoyed glare but got up off the couch anyway, pausing as he went around it to pointedly state, "You are wrong. Nat's just doing her job."
Tony simply shrugged in response. If the archer wanted to let a couple pretty eyes and prettier legs cloud his vision, that was his prerogative. As far as the billionaire was concerned, something was going on. It was perfectly likely that Romanoff was just up to her old tricks, using her tried and true method of worming her way into a man's head and getting him to come quietly, or loudly as the case may be, and if that was the situation he could think of no complaints. She was good at what she did, that he'd never deny her. After all, it worked on him once.
Still, he would trust her no further than he could throw her, and she was so slippery he couldn't even lift her off the ground.
Tony was able to set up a new match for he and Natasha by the time the two agents and their lapdog returned, switching to a different class more suited to the type of play in which he knew Natasha liked to engage. He leaned his head back, watching his three guests approach upside down, his eyes flickering between each in turn until the party's only female rounded the end of the couch.
"You should know better than this by now, Stark," Natasha told him, sugar dripping from her tongue at both ends.
"Romanoff, I'm hurt," he said playfully as he picked up the black controller on the glass coffee table and tossed it at her. She caught it with one hand and lowered herself onto the couch beside him. "And here I thought you knew I never learned my lessons."
She smirked at him and shook her head, her amused smile lingering as Clint dropped carelessly down next to her. He laid his arm along the back of the couch, his fingertips resting on her shoulder.
When, after a few moments, His Highness failed to seat himself as well, Tony chanced a glance over his shoulder. Loki stood behind Natasha, his shackled wrists hanging loosely in front of him, eyes distrustfully narrowed in the direction of the television screen.
"What's the matter, Mufasa? Too good to take a seat with the rest of us hero types?" Tony asked, looking back to the game as the match loaded.
A long moment passed, and then Loki returned coldly, "I prefer to stand."
"Suit yourself," Tony shrugged nonchalantly.
Definitely weird.
The match began and Tony moved to get into the house he spawned behind. Natasha, meanwhile, started to set up her class. "Spetsnaz. Really, Tony?" she asked flatly, but he could tell that under her nonchalant exterior she wanted to laugh.
"If the shoe fits, right?" he answered, the corners of his mouth curling upward into a dry grin. "Hey, is that hatchet thing true or is that just bullshit you read on the internet?"
"No, it's true."
"So you can do that?"
"You wanna find out?" she returned easily, one eyebrow quirked at him. He chuckled and turned his attention back to the television.
The first kill passed, a bot on the business end of Natasha's knife, and then Loki asked, "What is this?" His voice was low and oddly intense.
Tony almost looked back at him until Natasha passed through the edge of his screen, diverting his attention. It was she who answered the captive god, her tone quite conversational as she told him, "It's a video game, Loki."
"What is a video game?" came his quick response.
"Just a game you play on a screen. It's like a virtual reality thing," she explained. When he failed to respond, she glanced between him and the screen before patiently continuing, "Okay, uh...I guess it's kind of like your illusions. There's a world in the game, and you get to be a guy that you control with this." She lifted the controller briefly. "You interact with people, go on missions until you complete your objective and win."
Loki was silent for another few moments before he inquired, not without some disdain, "And what is the objective of this?"
Tony caught Natasha smirk out of the corner of his eye before she shrugged and answered, "Kill Tony until he quits."
"You're in my house, Romanoff. Be polite," he remarked, tossing a gentle elbow her way. He might have about two whole fucks in his repertoire, but he wasn't stupid enough to play fight the Black Widow.
Not two seconds later a sickening slashing noise erupted from the television and his screen slowed, replaying an image of Natasha knifing him in the back. "I'm sorry. That was terribly rude, wasn't it?" she purred, the corners of her lips curled upward into the kind of slight, satisfied smile of which Tony believed only himself capable.
"You're screen peeking," he was quick to accuse.
"And you're not?" Clint laughed. "You're just mad she's better than you are."
Tony rolled his eyes, but he outright laughed when he heard Loki carefully state, "Is she better than you as well, Agent Barton?"
An odd note underscored the words, some vaguely angry tone folded into the benign curiosity that Tony couldn't quite place. It intrigued him, though, enough that he thought he could drop the old collared dog a bone. "You wouldn't believe. I couldn't take it anymore. It was like watching Old Yeller over and over and over and over," he said until Clint leaned into Natasha and half pushed her into Tony just to smack him on the back of the head.
Loki's shackles rattled audibly behind the couch.
"Clint!" Natasha complained roughly, elbowing both he and Tony in her efforts to carve out some space for herself once again.
"Sorry, sorry," Clint chuckled, dropping his arm around her shoulders as he straightened up. "On your seven!"
"Shut up," she growled before Tony's lucky and opportunistic shot took her out. "Мудак," she mumbled under her breath.
Loki chuckled, and Tony immediately erupted, "No fair! Space Balls understands Commie!"
"What'd you call him?" Clint inquired.
"Asshole is the polite term," Natasha supplied. Tony rolled his eyes.
"What's the impolite term?"
"Shitstick."
Tony couldn't help but laugh himself at this point. He might not like Natasha much now, but there was a reason he used to and a reason he was slowly bringing himself to forgive her. The low chuckle that sounded from behind her, however, as well as the irritated glare Clint shot over his shoulder were much more interesting than whatever creative names she could think to call him.
Tony tired of the game relatively quickly. Playing against Natasha was challenging at first, as he could usually come reasonably close to beating her, but after enough matches it tended to turn into one narrow loss compounded on another. The only reason he allowed the massacre to go on as long as he did was to observe Loki's careful interactions with the two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents at his side. He never said very much and it was difficult for Tony to keep an eye on him, but he didn't miss a single jingle of the chain binding his cuffs, a single backhanded comment in Clint's direction or, more importantly, any of Natasha's impassive answers to his odd, carefully placed questions.
Normally he sat like a bump on a log beside the female agent. Now, he was making conversation, or his funky Elizabethan idea of conversation, and playing games.
Something was definitely weird.
Over an hour passed, the sun just kissing the tops of the Manhattan skyline, before Tony shut off the console. "Time to get Prancer back to the zoo, huh?" he asked as he slid his clear phone from his back pocket, electing not to see his guests out.
"Finally," Clint said freely. He never pretended to get along with Loki, who released a low chuckle at the agent's word.
"Thanks, Stark," Natasha called over her shoulder as they made their way to the door. "Hopefully next time it won't be just the four of us."
"Don't mention it, Romanoff," he answered absently.
Tony waited until he heard the swish of fabric and the light fall of a footstep and then tilted his head back, sneaking a look at the departed trio. Clint was looking at Natasha, a stupid smile on his face as he wrapped his arm around the back of her waist. Natasha looked back at him, those doe eyes in full force as she let him lead her forward.
Her fingertips brushed Loki's forearm, just above the cuff of his shackles. His fingers twitched toward her, just barely, in response.
A few seconds passed before Tony was alone once again, and he was on his feet as soon as the three departing figures vanished behind the elevator doors. "JARVIS," he called to nothing in particular, "do we still have that decryption program we ran on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secure files last year?"
"Indeed we do, sir," answered the cool, mechanical voice.
Tony pressed the emergency contact on his phone and a picture of Pepper blossomed across the screen. "I think it's time to tune it up, take it for another ride around the block."