Who: Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Clint Barton (Hawkeye) (With a cameo from Kate Bishop (Hawkeye)) When: June Where: Clint and Kate’s place What: New tech stuff (Housewarming present) Rating/Warnings: Low/None Status: Complete
Tony knew that Clint could be a bit weird about accepting his help, so instead of offering, Tony simply showed up one evening carrying a bunch of boxes. There were more stacked by the front door. As the door opened he raised both eyebrows and smiled a bright, charming smile. “Surprise! Uncka Tony’s here to set you guys up.”
Of course, Kate was the one who opened the door. She hadn’t been expecting anyone, and was wearing some sweats. Moving fucking sucked, man, and she was exhausted. It was time for a hot bath and/or a foot rub, and possibly some stiff drinks along with a stupid rom-com on the television. But a surprise visit from Tony Stark? Not exactly on her to-do list. She stepped to the side and let him through. “I take it you want to talk to Clint?” She asked, amused. “You need a hand with… what is all this shit?”
“Just odds and ends. Is the little woman at home? Down boy.” Tony said, moving into the apartment carrying the new router, modem, wires, whatever else he needed. He would have patted Lucky on the head, except his hands were full. “I’ll be with you in a second.” Then he turned back to Kate. “Where is Clint?”
“Clint is here,” Clint was fighting a losing battle with boxes, and Clint wasn’t overly thrilled with it, but on the plus side, they had everything moved. “Why are you here? What is all this? You can’t move in, Kate just moved in. There’s no more space.”
Clint was just frowning. Tony showing up randomly was not a big deal, he was Tony, Clint sort of expected it. Hopefully Tony had those brainwaves when food was needed too and not just ‘go visit Clint’ brainwaves, but still.
“Seriously? We don’t need more boxes Tony. Where were you when the couch needed to come up the stairs.” Getting Lucky out from under Tony’s feet, even if it was just sending the dog over to Kate, Clint figured they should probably take some steps to avoid someone getting tripped up.
Everything was moved, or thrown away, or donated, or destroyed. Kate was glad for it. Now they just had to figure out how to fit all her shit in with all Clint’s shit. She was a getting-rid-of-shit machine lately, taking trips to the Goodwill and filling the garbage shoot nearly every day. It would be amazing once they got out from under all that extra stuff that people tend to accumulate.
Closing the door, Kate couldn’t help grin at Uncka Tony and Clint. Their bromance was epic. After pulling the rest of the boxes inside (carefully, since these were from Tony Stark, which meant dollar signs) she turned to the living room and bent down to give Lucky the attention Iron Man refused to give.
Because Iron Man was too busy talking to Hawkeye. He set the boxes down on top of… other boxes. “You really think I want to live here? Barton. Barton. Seriously?” He tsk’d with his tongue and teeth for a moment, glancing around the apartment. “I sure hope Katie’s gonna put a woman’s touch on this place. You don’t mind if I call you Katie, do you?” He asked, glancing over at where the brunette was with the dog. Without waiting for a response, he tapped the top box. “You don’t get to keep the boxes. Just what’s inside them.” Tony didn’t do moving couches. He hired people for that shit. “I’m here to set up your entertainment system. What entertainment system, you might ask? My housewarming present to the pair of you love birds. You’re adorable and disgusting, and deserve presents.”
“Don’t bad mouth my place, Stark. We can’t all run billion dollar empires.” Then again, Tony didn’t exactly run it either, since he forgot what day of the week it was when he got involved in some new shit. Clint just felt another headache coming on -because he definitely got one looking at the boxes labelled ‘clothes’ and ‘shoes’ earlier on (why did women, or people in general, need so many clothes and shoes? He had like five pairs of jeans and a dozen shirts. He was pretty sure he owned a maximum of four pairs of shoes. And one of them was eaten by Lucky.) and now Tony was bringing it all back.
“Why do I need an entertainment system? I have entertainment. It’s rarely on the television.” They had netflix, and hey, one of them could get rid of the subscription since they didn’t need two. More money in the coffee fund! “I’ve lived here for a year without one. Kate has practically lived here for months without one.” Not that Clint wasn’t already poking around the boxes, hey, Tony was a force to be reckoned with, for sure, but Clint wasn’t going to not give him shit for it.
“I’m tempted to make Lucky pee on your shoes for your ridiculous timing. The Iron Man suit would’ve so gotten more of this shit in here faster.”
No. That would be Pepper Clint was thinking of who ran the multi-billion dollar empire. Tony gave credit where credit was due. Pepper had only just come into his life in this world a few months ago, but already she was as irreplaceable here as she was in his Dreams. And Tony wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Actually, he was proud of everything that Pepper was.
“I’ll take an entertainment system,” Kate chimed in carefully, lifting one hand. “Is this a vote? Because I vote entertainment system.” It was freaking Tony Stark. He probably had some way to change channels by blinking or some shit. Kate wasn’t exactly the most up on technology (for a twenty-five year old woman, she had to know about things like SnapChat and Facebook, or whatever) and couldn’t program a TiVo to save her life. (Did they still even make those?) But she was sure that whatever Tony put together would be freaking amazing.
“Listen to your girl, Clint.” Tony said, then moved over to the part of the room where the television was sitting. “I may have to wall mount this--wait.” He motioned to the old, boxy, ridiculous television and then to Clint. “Is this a CRT? I think we need to get you out of the eighties, man.”
Clint just threw a look at Kate, because really Kate? There was no need to encourage the maniac. “Tony.” It was the long suffering whine of a man who dealt with this stuff so regularly he was starting to wonder when he’d ended up with another brother for god sake. “What the hell is all this stuff?”
It was a CRT, it came with the apartment, along with the sofa, and Clint had just decided, hey, one less thing to buy. Lucky and him didn’t need much after all, but with Kate moving her shit in, and she had enough shit to go with his shit that they ended up with cluttered shit they were still working their way through. “You remember I rent, right? And wall mounting things might not actually be a great idea?” Not that Clint had plans to move. With Kate moving in and him and Lucky settled, it wasn’t like he needed to move anywhere for now. They were fine for this right now.
“Is an upgraded coffee maker part of this entertainment system?” Really, Clint knew better than to fight it really, Tony had made up his mind after all. He brought the stuff here already.
“You can buy your own Keurig,” Tony scoffed, shaking his head. “And no one’s going to care about a wall mount. Well, unless you tug on it and make a big hole or something. Katie, be a love and bring me those boxes. I’ll just get to work. Pretend like I’m not even here.” He started to gather up what he needed, and then started to remove Clint’s old equipment. With a shudder. Some of these things were so old there was almost a fear that he might catch something from them. What would he catch, though? Bad tech?
Kate simply grinned at Clint, then did as she was told; picking up the boxes carefully and carrying them across the living room to settle on the sofa within arm’s reach of the billionaire. Then she turned to Clint. “Hey, we can go to Bed Bath and Beyond, or something, and get a Keurig. If you want one.” She was about to come into her trust fund, and anyway, they were saving all Kate was paying in rent, too. She could buy a good coffee machine.
“Safer.” Clint was mock whispering at Kate while Lucky started sniffing at the boxes, “anything Tony brought might be sentient and try to kill us.” A joke, sort of, but Clint had some rather vivid memories from not terribly long ago when Tony did create something that tried to kill them all -he had help, sure, and it wasn’t the goal, but the road to hell and good intentions and all that.
“Are you really that bored that you just decided to stop by with a host of stuff we don’t really need and… Play tech support?” It wasn’t like Clint and Kate spent a lot of time at home in front of the tv. They both worked, Kate had her archery classes and self-defence classes so they weren’t really the couch-tv-surfer types. But Tony probably had his reasons.
Kate sure hoped that Clint was teasing about the tech. Because… well, if he did something like that and she had to fight off a monster AI computer thingy? She wasn’t sure she could hack it. Then again, she was pretty kick ass. So anything was possible.
Tony scoffed, but didn’t turn to face the others as he quickly dismantled the entertainment set up. It wasn’t much to move the thing off the platform and start digging through the wires to find where the cable was coming in. “I wouldn’t bring something sentient” Beat. “At least, not with several security measures in place to make sure that something like that wouldn’t happen.” Beat. “Besides, you know the Three Laws of Robotics? Asimov knew what he was doing.” Beat. “You can Google that if you need clarification.”
At Tony’s babbling, Kate gave Clint a look. Is this guy for real? “I’ll just… make a pot of coffee.” She said, wondering who Asimov was, and what the rules of robotics were. On her way into the kitchen, she pulled out her smart phone to Google it, but she had no idea how to spell Asimov. So she simply checked her emails as she padded out of the room.
Once Kate was gone, Tony turned to Clint. He finished connecting a router to the coax cable that supposedly brought television into the house, then dusted his hands on his trousers. “...you’re really certain about… all this?” Meaning Kate, mostly. Clint was going all domestic, and Tony was a little concerned.
Clint wasn’t going to go into detail about all the fun things Tony and Hank used to get up to in the Avengers mansion (really Tony’s mom’s place that he let them live in) or the technology they sometimes had to fight with after Tony’s shit got in the wrong person’s hands. It wasn’t really something they needed to bring up -least of all since Pym was worse.
Most of the time, Clint just let all the technical talk go over his head, if Kate wanted to Google that stuff to break her brain that was fine. Clint was still playing the idiot on that side of things. But coffee sounded good so he just started fiddling with the boxes Tony brought over, frowning just slightly until Tony’s question.
“With Kate?” As if to indicate which Kate, Clint pointed towards the kitchen too, where Kate was making coffee or just escaping from the information overload that was Tony Stark. “Well, yeah.” And sure, the domestic thing was new, but wasn’t that the point in relationships? Working towards something lasting? Clint had dual memories of childhood -one not so great, one fairly okay- but he did remember his parents and how stupidly codependent they seemed. They’d only ever had each other, high school sweethearts and all that. And while Clint had never been the sort of guy to marry the first girl he hooked up with he wasn’t entirely opposed to that ‘someone to come home to’ thing either.
“I dunno man, I guess… It just feels right, y’know?” Maybe Tony did, maybe not. But Clint was pretty certain about ‘all this’ and that.
It wasn’t the kind of thing that Tony was into. Tony was pretty happy with his life as it was--he’d had that somewhat serious (for Tony, anyway) girlfriend a while back, but the engagement and all that had been retconned. Pepper was (back) in his life again, though as a colleague and nothing more. If Tony could help it, that’s how things would stay. He’d seen how dangerous he was in the Dreams, and he knew how dangerous Orange County could be. He didn’t want to drag Pepper into it all over again and watch her die once more. He couldn’t live with himself.
Though, now he knew she didn’t die permanently in his Dreams, the danger was there. It was enough to keep her at arm’s length.
Thankfully, Tony wasn’t watching when Clint pointed to the kitchen. Because of course that Kate. How many other Kates were there? Tony nodded, then reached for the modem and the router. He had to wipe down the entertainment center’s shelf so they wouldn’t be covered in dust, and began setting them up.
“That’s all I needed to hear.” Tony said, and gave Clint a brief, very forced, almost playful smile. Then he set back to work. He trusted that Clint’s instincts were good. And if Clint said it felt right? Tony trusted that.
“Coffee?” Kate called from the kitchen. Mostly to Tony. She knew Clint would probably want a cup (or hell, drink straight from the pitcher. But she didn’t judge. She’d done it, too). “I’m not sure about cream or sugar… since we don’t really drink that stuff. But I’ve got Bailey’s!” She’d brought a bottle with her in the move, and knew exactly which cupboard in which it’d found a home.
The Tony that Clint dealt with, dream wise, was a bit of a ladies man, and Clint had always figured it was just part of Tony’s personality -his attention wandered a lot, and it wasn’t like it was bad in any way at all, but Clint had always sort of looked up to Tony’s dedication to the heroism side of things. Sometimes that didn’t match up with relationships. Both of Clint’s major relationships had been with team mates, and even they hadn’t lasted -he and Natasha splitting for personal reasons and with Bobbi due to death (at least he’d thought so) since that seemed to be how a majority of team-relationships ended.
But hey, if Tony was just being adorable and checking in on how things were that was whatever.
“We’re not spiking his coffee.” Jeez. “Black’s okay, right?” Was there another way to drink coffee? Why did people put stuff in their coffee? What were they doing, ruining it? “Although we should probably try and remember where that is so it doesn’t get forgotten forever and become a gloop of smelly cream.”
It had happened, he was just saying.
“Dude, you remember that this needs to not blow sound at the walls, right?” Clint just nudged at Tony. Although a lot of stuff had audio descriptive and subtitles, he only put those on when his head was getting achy from too much concentration. Migraines were a thing he just got used to dealing with really. “I would like to still be able to hear my TV on occasion when I’m too lazy to lip read.” TV’s were terrible to try and lip read from.
“Well, I don’t know!” Kate called out from the kitchen. “Maybe he wants liquor in his coffee. It’s happy hour somewhere.” She poured coffee into three mugs, and then picked them up to bring them back into the living room. It was lucky that she and Clint shared the opinion that one shouldn’t desecrate coffee by adding crap to it. Well, Bailey’s was okay. Everything else? Sacrilege.
“Black is good!” Tony called out to Kate in the kitchen, though he had absolutely been considering the liquor. He brought out a small power tool to screw the wall mount to the wall. He used another tool to make sure it was centered and level, then moved to grab the television and lift it to the mount. Of course, he was ignoring the comment about blowing sound at the walls. He had a whole sound system ready to go. “How on Earth could it possibly sit around long enough to get smelly?”
“See, he’s using power tools in our home and you want to give him alcohol? You have so much to learn.” But then, Clint had no idea if Tony had the same issues here with alcohol as he did where Clint dreamed, again, not something to bring up at all. By this point, Clint was mostly just standing around watching, occasionally giving Lucky a pet on the head as the dog demanded a little attention since he wasn’t getting to knock over any boxes.
“The drinks of choice in this house are coffee and beer, occasionally water for hangovers, but we usually just go straight for the coffee then too.” If Clint and Kate could just live on coffee, they would. Most of the time it didn’t even need to be good or hot. “Do you know how long it could take us to remember we have the Baileys never mind where we put it? Cream in a bottle for that long? No thank you.” He’d rather not have that issue come up in a year and a half or so when they’d happen across the bottle by accident and someone would need to check just when they’d put it wherever it ended up.
“So why am I getting a home entertainment system again?”
Our home. Kate hadn’t really started to think about it that way. But hearing Clint say it brought the thought to the forefront of her mind. This was their home. Together. Even after moving all her shit in, and getting rid of his old sofa, and going through some of his boxes from like, decades ago… it hadn’t occurred to her that this was for them together. Hopefully neither of the Avengers in the living room would notice a blush on her cheeks. She set a mug down for Tony, then came over to Clint to hand his over, leaning in to kiss his cheek as she did so. Kate was having a moment. A sweet moment.
Tony didn’t really notice. He was too busy plugging in wires under the entertainment center now. The TV was up, and he’d pulled some huge speakers out of boxes, and was connecting all the wires to the modem, the modem to the router. “It’s a housewarming gift. Don’t be ungrateful.” Tony said as he came out from under the center. “I even got you a universal remote. You’re welcome.”
“No one is being ungrateful,” hell, Clint didn’t think he needed it but Tony was being Tony so there was no point in arguing with him at all. “I just … was curious is all.” Wrapping an arm around Kate’s shoulders while sipping on his coffee and just… Letting Tony do what Tony did.
“I just figured you’d be neck deep in some kind of work for the company. Modifying something or building a flying car. I’d take a flying car.” He’d probably crash a flying car, but that wasn’t the point. “Or modified arrows, with the shit around here, Katie and me could use some’a those man.”
Who needed an entertainment system when they could have explosive arrows?
“Hey, I’ll take a Universal Remote,” Kate said, grinning, cuddled up under Clint’s arm. She wouldn’t say no to some amazing tech. Even if it did end up trying to kill them one day. “No no, I’ll take modified arrows, too. I’ll take some of those.”
“Jeez, Kate, you’ll take some of everything, won’t you?” Tony said, giving a grin over at the two of them. Then he gave a sappy smile and cocked his head to the side. “Aww, you guys are so cute. I’ll see what I can do about arrows as soon as I’m back in the lab. Hand me that box, will you?” He added, motioning toward one at the end of the sofa. The last one. The last piece of the pie.
Kate had to put down her coffee mug to pick up the last box. “...is this a game system?” She asked, frowning as she passed the box over to Tony.
“The power cord is the Universal Remote.” Honest to God, Clint didn’t get half this stuff. And it wasn’t because he was dumb or anything, he could strip down automatic rifles in about ten seconds and rebuild a car engine in the middle of the desert with blown apart pieces. But don’t give him a Tivo, because he absolutely would not understand half of the functions.
“The last game console I had was a Super Nintendo, and I was in high school.” And that was shudder inducing, wasn’t it. He didn’t bother rising to Tony’s bait about their ‘cuteness’ or not. “I’m going to have so much stuff I have no idea how to use, aren’t I?” Honestly, he appreciated Tony’s thoughtfulness, but good God he’d rather have the arrows. Since Tony had a habit of tricking him out in the dreams.
“No, that’s the universal off switch,” Kate said, not quite scolding, as she glanced over at Clint. Sometimes she was struck by how different they were when it came to tech stuff. She was a part of a younger generation(?) and though she didn’t always use it--it wasn’t really her style--at least she knew what it was.
Tony had opened his mouth to retort to Clint about the Universal Remote, but Kate got to it first. He closed his lips and smirked a little, letting her explain. When she finished her sentence, though, he jumped in. “This is a PS4. It’ll play games, movies, Netflix, whatever. I’ve added some special functions, so you’ll be able to directly communicate with my lab at the touch of a button. It can also talk to my suit,” he said, pulling the thing from the box. “But that’s for emergencies only.”
Or if Tony got bored. Either or.
Clint just pinched Kate’s side a little, smirking at her wisecracking. “So… If I get into an argument with Kate about what a classic movie is, does that count as an emergency?” Clint doubted that they’d need to communicate with the suit through a PS4, more often than not, if Tony was in the suit, shit was going down (unless he was just tweaking things) and then they’d probably not be at home on a games console anyway. At least he could poke Tony to make sure the idiot genius was eating though.
“Dude, how much does all this shit cost man? Housewarming gifts are like a freakin’ cactus that I might still manage to kill, or a bottle of damn wine.” Not the Clint knew exactly what people gave out for housewarmings, he’d never been to one or had one previously. But he doubted televisions and games consoles were part of it.
“I’ve no doubt you’ll get into many arguments with Kate about which movie is a classic. Hint,” Tony said, turning eyes to Kate temporarily, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High does not count as classic.” Then he turned back to the game system and finished turning that thing on.
Kate opened her mouth as if to retort, but then closed it again and simply scowled. She wasn’t about to suggest that title, but Clint did have a point. Their taste in film wasn’t exactly identical.
“Well, I think that just about does it.” Tony climbed up from the floor, grabbed the Universal Remote, and handed it to Kate. (Clint wouldn’t know what to do with it, anyway.) “Don’t lift a gift horse in the mouth, Hawkeye.” He added, clapping Clint on the shoulder. “I think you’ll find this much more useful than a bottle of wine. Good luck clearing out all the boxes. I’ll see myself out.”
Like a whirlwind, Tony Stark had come into the apartment, done his magic, then fluttered away again. He was on his way out the front door before Kate could think to say thank you. She turned to call it after him, then frowned at the idea of having to clean up even more boxes.