WHO:Clint Barton & Caleb Rivers WHEN: This week WHERE: Stark Tower WHAT: Clint meets Caleb -pretty much it. WARNINGS: None STATUS: Complete
It was that time again. Time for Caleb to take another break. Now that he had been at Stark for almost a month the number of breaks he took had decreased, but he still took more than most. Adjusting to working in an office was rough for the former hacker.
Caleb took the elevator down to the lobby. Sometimes on his breaks he would wander the halls. Stark Tower was huge, and he always seemed to discover something new. However today he wanted some fresh air. Stepping out of the elevator he wasn’t exactly looking where he was going when he ran into someone. “Sorry.”
Clint had been checking his phone anyway, shooting back texts to Tony about random nonsense that really didn’t have much to do with anything. He wasn’t sure how long it’d take for Tony to be finished with actually doing his job to run his own company for once -probably not the only time, but Clint still liked to poke fun sometimes.
“Oh,” of course face in phone, shitty hearing, it was unlikely that Clint would actually register people around him. “No worries, my bad.” Luckily the phone hadn’t dropped, go reflexes, so Clint wasn’t too concerned about it.
If the man had dropped his phone it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Upgrading phones was a thing Caleb did. But he could fix them too in a matter of minutes. “Nice phone,” he commented since it was still in the man’s hand and Caleb tended to notice these types of things. “I could upgrade it for you,” he added. Okay so he had technically decided to stop doing that. Now that he had a legitimate job and all, but old habits die hard? And he could always use some extra cash.
Clint frowned a little, before realising hello, Stark Tower, tech genius headquarters, it wouldn’t really be all that odd to have software people around. A glance at it watch and Clint shrugged. “Yeah, sure why not. My lunch date is running late.” Since he was forced to actually go and work.
Getting out of the way of the thrones of people, Clint just raised an eyebrow at the kid first, “You do work here right? Not just loitering around elevators for no reason.” Hey, it happened.
Once they were out of the way of the elevators Caleb nodded to one of the seating areas in the lobby. “Yeah I work here,” he told the man. He couldn’t go into too much detail about it. A lot of what he did was classified. He should have thought of that though. Loitering around Stark back when the whole cellphone pimping thing was his main income. He might have gotten more business that way.
“Who’s your lunch with? I might know them.” Though it was unlikely. Stark had a lot of employees. Caleb only knew about a handful. He took a seat in one of the chairs, setting his backpack down next to him. “Anything specific you want on your phone?”
“Your boss.” There were like a million people around this place almost all the time, and considering the monopoly Stark had on technology and innovation, that wasn’t overly surprising. It made a hell of a lot of sense to Clint why Tony blew off meetings all the time though, because he’d lose his mind too doing that crap. “But it’s cool, he’s late all the time.” Most of the time, sometimes. Well, they were both late a lot actually. The joys of random crap happening.
Handing over the phone, winging it and figuring Tony could fix it if the kid did something ridiculous, Clint just sprawled back to wait. “Surprise me. But try not do anything horrifically illegal.” Although the whole thing was probably stupidly not-legal. “I’m Clint, by the way.” Because names, names were good. He really needed to remember to do that more.
His boss? He had a few of those. There was Gwen, Pepper, Tony. He figured it was probably Pepper or Tony though. He seemed too old to be hanging out with Gwen. Then the other man said he and Caleb knew it had to be Tony. Well if he was friends with Tony, Caleb certainly wasn’t going to charge him for the phone upgrade. He didn’t want it getting back to Tony.
“Tony’s a busy guy,” Caleb commented with a nod. He had once been in the man’s office when he was doing like five different things at once. It was a tad insane. “Got it,” Caleb said with a smirk grabbing his laptop out of his backpack. This whole thing wasn’t exactly legal but he wouldn’t tell the other man either. “Caleb,” he replied fingers flying over the keyboard as he synced up with the phone to do his upgrade. “How do you know Tony?” he asked eyes glued to the laptop screen.
“He made a bet with me when I moved to the area that he was better at making decisions than my dog.” And Clint figured this was a very important story to tell, because the man was a genius who ran a multi-billion dollar company -in two different worlds- and he did juvenile things like that. It was a very, very important story to tell.
“He lost by the way.” That was the kicker too. Especially since his girlfriend-now-fiancee had been the judge of it all. “He’s nuts, but he’s a good guy.” Which would probably be how Clint forever described Tony. There wasn’t the hero worship here that Clint delved into when he’d started dreaming about Iron Man, but he figured it was a different kind of situation. And even in the dreams, he’d learned more about Tony’s flaws and stopped putting him on a pedestal.
“How long you worked here?”
Caleb definitely knew that Tony was a little nuts. The guy had hired him after Caleb had tried to hack into Stark and steal information. But with this dog story, maybe Tony was more nuts than Caleb had originally thought. “What decision did your dog make that was better than Tony’s?” he glanced up from the screen for a minute interested in hearing the rest of this story.
“About a month,” it wasn’t that long to a lot of people but it was a long time for Caleb. The only people he had worked for, for a long period of time were criminals. And that was mostly because one he was in it was difficult to get out. Or he would have stopped years ago instead of when he was twenty.
“He couldn’t decide.” Which really had been the rather evident factor that Tony really was stupidly eccentric, he was probably the weirdest guy Clint knew -and apparently Clint hung out with superheroes in his dreams. “So, my dog is more decisive than Tony Stark, billionaire inventor.” It wasn’t really saying much, but it was something.
Considering Clint had been in one job for all of his adult life, he really couldn’t say much about length of time doing anything. He spent upwards of twenty years in the army, he’d probably still be there if not for injury. “Well, nutty eccentric bosses aside, pretty decent place? At least Pepper can run the joint.”
Tony seemed impulsive to Caleb. What with deciding to hire him without even knowing him. But He could also see Tony not being able to decide on something if he had two or more choices out in front of him. He nodded as Clint finished up the story then his eyes were back on his laptop.
“It’s not the worst place to work.” For the most part he got to come and go as he pleased. At least Tony and Pepper didn’t seem to care as long as his work got done, which of course it did. However, Gwen was always on his ass about taking breaks and filling out paperwork. He mostly just found it amusing.
A few more strokes of the keyboard then he was done. He handed Clint’s phone back to him. “I upgraded your RAM so your phone should be a lot faster now,” Caleb informed him. “Also set it up so that it always has wifi and you can hook other devices up to your phone’s wifi,” without having to pay the data charges. “There are a few new apps on there too.”
“Cool,” turning the phone over in his hand, Clint just accepted that as it was. He didn’t exactly use his phone for anything that used a lot of his data but you never knew when you’d get stranded and just need to play Candy Crush until the help arrived. “Thanks.”
Upgrades were upgrades.
“So what do you do here? And try to use small words, because most of this techno jargon goes right over my head. Tony explained DVR to me and that was just a waste of his breath, so think of my mental state when you start.” Sure, he could probably follow it, but Clint had a tendency to play up the uneducated hick thing.
“No problem,” Caleb just shrugged putting his laptop to sleep and placing it back in his bag. “No DVR skills? Don’t worry you’re not missing much. If miss a show you can always catch it online.” There were so many different ways to watch media now. It wasn’t like back in the day where you had to make sure you were home at a certain time every week or you would miss the show.
“I’m an information risk analyst,” he informed Clint though he was sure the guy had no idea what that meant. “Basically I figure and analyze threats to the online security and fix them.” That was the simplest way to put it. Plus he couldn’t say much more than that anyway.
“Technology is not my strong point. Give me a tank, I’m fine. Ask me to work a computer, you’re on your own.” His skills with these things were majorly limited to the most basic of processes. His laptop was used primarily for minesweeper.
Risk management was likely a lot like keeping hackers out, and Clint was aware enough about the fight fire with fire agenda that maybe the little phone hack had been the start of that. But Tony likely knew what he was doing, so Clint didn’t say a word about it. “Sounds fun.” In the whole ‘here look at this screen and all this code for hours on end’ sort of way. “Considering this place, probably pretty busy.”
“You stick to the tanks and I’ll stick to computers,” he smirked but it did seem like the safest option considering Caleb probably knew less about tanks than Clint knew about computers.
Caleb actually liked staring at code and creating codes for hours. It was what he did. What he didn’t like was all the paperwork that Gwen seemed to want him to do. That was not his thing. But it was a job and he was trying to stay legit, despite the little hack he just did on Clint’s phone. “Yeah it can get crazy here,” he agreed, but Caleb was able to handle it and quickly, with numerous breaks.
“Well I should let you get to your lunch with the boss. My number’s in your phone if you have any problems.”
Another glance at his watch and Clint figured that Tony should be done with whatever it was he’d gotten roped into doing, and Clint could get him out for some food before someone else damaged attention. “Cool, if it becomes sentient and tries to take over the world I know who to tell it to call and give a stern talking to.”
Like Clint would, he’d probably just be impressed. “Well… see ya later kid, and thanks, y’know. Or whatever.” Upgrade on a phone he probably didn’t need upgraded, but ask him if he cared?