Chapter 4Summary:In which Shield panics, Clint has a very bad morning and a better afternoon, Daisy struggles to sort out her feelings, and several people go jogging.
Notes:Sorry this took ages to get out, I've had a long week. Also, self-isolation sucks, it's only been a day and I'm already getting cabin fever :-(
My house mates are being super supportive though, and I'd way rather suck it up than potentially pass it on if I do have covid, so I just have to deal with it! Anyway, if anyone else out there is self-isolating, I feel your pain and I hope this provides some entertainment :-)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter TextTony woke up at 9am on Tuesday after a full six hours of nightmare-free sleep feeling well-rested and surprisingly peaceful. It did not last.
He arrived in the kitchen to find Bruce leaving, a look on his face that indicated he intended to find the quietest, most trigger free location he could find and lock himself in. Which really didn't bode well.
Given Pepper had been fine last night and would have woken him if something major had gone wrong this morning, and given Clint and Nat had caught an overnight train late last night to be at St Agnes first thing, that left Steve as the most likely cause, which probably meant Tony was about to hear a new chapter in the Daisy drama that none of them could do anything about. Not that Steve wasn't trying. After 'The Voicemail' as they were dubbing the message Daisy had left Steve yesterday, he'd started sketching Daisy from memory in hope that they could use that for facial recognition instead of getting a photo. Natasha and Clint, on their way to check in with Shield before catching the train across the country when Steve had started sketching, agreed it was his best bet.
Tony wasn't sure when exactly he'd accepted that they were getting involved in some random teenager's problems, but at this point it was too late not to. The kid rang too many warning bells for Tony to just leave it alone now. No kid should have to be in an abusive situation, and they especially shouldn't have to feel like that situation was ok because their abuser was occasionally kind and they'd gotten the wrong end of the stick from Steve. Who, aware the misunderstanding wasn't his fault or not, was miserable about it.
When Tony entered the kitchen though, he found that 'miserable' wasn't quite the word he would use to describe Steve. 'Panicked' would be more accurate. Or 'stressed out of his mind' or 'attempting to tear his hair out'. Upon investigation, Daisy had not only not turned up at their jogging spot (not entirely unexpected given the kid had only been seen there twice, several days apart) but had also sent Steve a text reading 'Is ten years too long an age-gap if, romance aside, two people have pretty similar life experience?'
Which did explain why Steve looked like he was about to have a breakdown because Tony was pretty sure he'd said the kid was around 15 or 16 and ten years was a pretty giant age gap for a (at best) 16 year old!!!! What neither Tony or Steve knew was whether this relationship was a potential one or an already existing one. And there was no way to ask because the text, like the phone call and voicemail, had come from a blocked number.
Either the kid didn't know the number she was using was blocked, or she was seriously distracted, neither of which were going to reduce Steve's stress levels. Or Tony's to be honest.
So much for his peaceful start to the morning. Tony inhaled a mug of coffee and asked for Steve's sketch. Steve passed him his pad of paper (he really needed to introduce grandpa to the concept of drawing apps) and Tony grabbed another mug of coffee and headed down to his lab where he scanned it in and then set Jarvis to working on facial recognition alongside compiling and tracking down the 12 different models of vans that contained the type of engine Skyenet's van had. So far Jarvis had found sales (unfortunately not names because that would involve illegal hacking and Tony wasn't quite that desperate yet, mostly because he might have to explain it to Maria Hill later) of the vans in 29 different countries across 3 different continents. It was a needle in a haystack. A very small needle that almost certainly came with a false name in a very large haystack he couldn't even legally get access to.
"I will notify you when I have a match." Jarvis said, breaking him out of his thoughts "You have an email from Skyenet, she has set up a secure website for us all to communicate on."
Oh good, Nat's gamble paid off. Not that he'd doubted it would or anything; if Natasha ever asked he'd been absolutely certain it would pay off. "We have an email address for Skyenet?"
"Technically sir, yes."
"Technically?"
"I traced the email and found it was created less than five minutes before she emailed us, it is possible it was destroyed afterwards."
Well, at least there was the website. Tony logged onto it while Jarvis worked and had a look around. Aside from some truly impressive firewalls that he was definitely not taking notes on, it seemed to be a pretty basic chat system with five accounts, one each for him, Jarvis, Hack, Natasha, and Skyenet. Jarvis and Hack already had chat open that had several thousand messages and had clearly been going for a while. They were currently discussing the merits of large archives versus hacking abilities with a level of flattery that was so sweet Tony might get tooth decay just reading it, so he didn't.
Instead he opened the other, distinctly smaller, chat which Natasha had started, feeling his eyebrows climb higher as he read.
7:23am
N: How did you get my email address?
N: Please don't tell me you hacked into Shield to get it.
7:47am
N: Are you ignoring me?
N: You promised us a way to reliably contact you!
7: 53am
N: Skyenet!
8:15am
Skyenet has sent an attachment
S: Thanks for being nice last night. This should help with that mission you were pulled from when Loki attacked. The password is the scientific name of the meds you recommended yesterday.
S: Just read your messages. In order:
S: How'd you think? I won't tell you then. No. And, I was working! I didn't promise you instantaneous contact! Seriously, I thought spies were supposed to be patient!
8:17am
N: How do you know about that mission?
S: You do remember who you're talking to right?
N: Get out of Shield's systems.
S: …
S: A thank you might be nice.
N: Thank you for the intel. Stop hacking us.
S: I'll think about it ;-)
N: If you want to help us we'd be very happy to give you a job.
S: Yeah, I don't think that would work out so well for me.
N: Why not?
S: Because I'm not an idiot and I know what happens when big secretive government agencies get their hands on people who find out their secrets.
N: We're not going to lock you up unless we have to. Which is another good reason to stop hacking us.
S: *eye roll*
S: I've got work to do. Bye.
N: I'm serious Skyenet.
That was interesting. Tony glanced at Steve, who was watching Jarvis cycle through faces on several screens trying to find a match to his sketches and didn't look like he wanted to be bothered. He left him to it and pulled out his phone to text Nat.
'What did Skyenet send you?'
It took a few minutes to get a reply, so he started tinkering while he waited. Finally, his phone buzzed and he picked it up to find a message from Natasha 'Intel to help with an active mission. Half of it is useless but the other half is at the very least promising. I tried to spin it to Maria that at least Skyenet's helping but she's still having kittens about it.'
'I thought Skyenet had already been in Shield's systems?'
'There is a massive difference between getting into our systems and getting into a level 6 classified mission file on an active mission. There wasn't even an alarm raised, until S sent that file to me, we had no idea the file had even been accessed. I pity the cyber security department, apparently Fury is going down there personally.'
Ah. That wasn't good. Tony wondered what happened to Skyenet if she kept doing things like this and realised it couldn't be anything good. He changed the subject.'How come Skyenet's sending you thank you presents? I was the one that fixed her van.'
'Beats me. I've got to go, we're hitching a lift back to NY with some other agents and I need to drive to the airport.'
Huh, Tony thought Clint usually drove. He'd heard the two bickering about it. Something to do with Natasha originally learning to drive on the job, which had been alarming enough for him to decide he didn't want to know. 'Can't Clint drive?'
'No. We'll fill you in later.'
Great, that wasn't ominous at all. Tony would probably have spent the next several hours stressing out about it (only because an injured Avenger was bad for world security, it wouldn't affect Tony personally obviously) but he was distracted seconds later by Skyenet sending him a message too. Several messages actually, each with sections of his own coding and a little explanation pointing out the problem with it. It took several seconds for the significance of it to sink in and then Tony collapsed into a chair gaping at the screen, looking so stunned Steve actually peeled himself away from Jarvis's search to ask him if he was ok. Tony waved him away impatiently, too preoccupied by the fact that Skyenet had pointed out the holes in his firewalls.
S: These are the holes I've been using to get in.
S: Thanks for helping with my van.
Tony looked guiltily over at another screen where Jarvis had created charts of where most of the possible vans had been bought and sold. He hadn't exactly had ulterior motives for helping, but he wasn't ignoring what he now knew about Skyenet's van either. To buy time before he needed to reply he had a closer look at the sections of his coding Skyenet had listed, and spluttered at the screen.
T: Some of those holes are tiny! How did you even get through those!
S: I made them temporarily bigger obviously.
T: Come work for me. Forget Shield, come work for Stark Industries, I'll pay you better.
S: I'll do anonymous consulting for a fee :-)
T: Is that your day job?
S: Do you really think I'm careless enough to accidentally tell you my day job?
Tony, unaware that, across the city, Skyenet was mentally kicking herself and desperately trying to do damage control, sighed in disappointment.
T: No. Seriously though, you already passed the only job interview you need when you hacked in, what do you say?
S: Your personnel recruitment strategy worries me.
T: Haha.
T: Actually, Pepper said something similar, but she came round eventually.
S: I can't believe you managed to convince Pepper Potts to hire hackers. She's like the most sensible functional adult there is.
T: Did you just use the phrase 'functional adult'?? How old are you?
S: Old enough to be aware that I am not a functional adult.
S: Anyway, as amusing as this conversation is, I've got work to do. Go hire some non-criminals.
T: :-P
S: Mature.
S: Bye.
Tony allowed himself another moment to grin at the banter before he got to work on dealing with the holes in his programming. They weren't significant holes, and he wasn't hugely worried about them, but it was still best to close them before someone less friendly than Skyenet found them. Wait, did he just refer to Skyenet as friendly? Since when was he friends with the hacker he was actively trying to hunt down? He had precisely two friends and a girlfriend, three if you included Bruce, which Tony was starting to think he did. He was getting really dangerously attached to a woman who, if she wanted to (or misjudged where something sat on the scale of corrupt polluting corporation to World Security Council tried to nuke New York) could start the kind of mass panic that would bring down governments.
There was also the problem that he wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen to Skyenet if they successfully tracked down Quake and Quake could lead them to Skyenet. He wasn't naïve enough to think that Shield were just going to knock on her door and invite her to sign up and just leave her alone if she said no. The woman could hack into classified files without even tripping an alarm. Skyenet would end up working for them under some serious supervision or she would end up in some secret prison somewhere where nobody would ever hear of her again. Call Tony biased, but he really hoped it was the former. He felt slightly guilty about the fact that he was helping Shield find her with the knowledge that it could easily end up being the latter.
Shortly before twelve, and well before Tony has worked out how to close half the holes Skyenet has pointed out in his firewalls, Clint and Nat get back. Jarvis alerts him that they've arrived and retreated to Natasha's rooms. Tony wasn't exactly keen on leaving Mr 1940s in his high-tech lab unsupervised but Steve is watching Jarvis's work too intently for Tony to have much hope of kicking him out, and he wanted to know how Nat and Clint's investigation had gone, so he told Steve not to touch anything and left him to it.
He knew as soon as he entered Natasha's rooms that something was seriously wrong. There was a feeling in the air, like the ugly stillness after a fight. He saw Natasha first, her shoulders tight and an almost imperceptible frown on her face. What worried him wasn't that she was frowning, she did that all the time to communicate displeasure, what worried him was that she was trying, and failing, to hide it. Then he saw Clint and felt his heart drop into his stomach.
Clint looked like he had after Loki. He had the same hollow eyes and feral body language and traumatised expression as he had when they'd been eating shwama and the adrenaline had faded and the trauma of being mind-controlled had closed in. Like he didn't want to be awake, didn't want to be aware, didn't want to think. Like he'd been violated and hollowed out and there was nothing left but ashes and regret.
"What happened?" Tony demanded, trying not to think about Loki or nukes or cold dark space and the certain knowledge of death. Trying not to think what could have just happened, what might be about to happen.
Clint made a sound like a dying animal, his muscles flexing as he seemed to curl into himself at the end of Natasha's sofa, his body language screaming defeat.
Natasha's hands twitched like they wanted to curl into fists "Marian was declared dead 18 months ago."
Tony sucked in a sharp, shocked breath. Marian. Clint's sister. Clint's sister had been dead for over a year and he hadn't even known.
"Declared." Clint said, his voice rough and angry "There's no proof she's dead."
Natasha opened her mouth, hesitated, and then closed it again, mutely going to sit next to Clint, who shifted towards her like a moth to flame, desperate. She slipped a hand into Clint's and squeezed tightly. Clint allowed it for a moment and then surged off the sofa, pacing around the room like a caged tiger.
Tony swallowed hard, not sure if he should be here, his own house or not. He was about to start edging towards the door when Clint said "I'm going to find her."
"Clint..." Natasha said, her voice gentle in a way Natasha never was, not when she was herself.
Clint whirled on her "Don't talk to me like I'm made of glass! I'm not going to break Nat!"
"You're allowed to mourn birdbrain." Natasha said, but she moderated her tone of voice, ditching the gentleness.
"I don't need to mourn. Marian's not dead."
Natasha didn't answer, she didn't need to. They all knew Clint didn't believe the words he was saying. It was written all over his face. It was marked in the rage in his body and the shattered look in his eyes. Clint stopped pacing, every muscle in his body tight as he said "I'm going to find who did this." and this time Tony believed him, and he felt his chest go tight with fear.
Because Clint hadn't always been an Avenger or an agent of Shield. Tony didn't know much but he knew Natasha wasn't the only one who'd been offered a second chance in Shield. And he did know it had been Phil Coulson that gave him that second chance, and Phil Coulson was gone. And Clint's sister was dead. It hadn't made sense to Tony before that Clint, with his jokes and teasing and talent at making everything feel lighter had such a dark past, but now he could see it. The man in front of him now....Tony believed he could kill.
"Don't go down that path." Natasha said, her voice low and hard "We'll ask Fury if we can investigate, but it has to be an official mission."
Clint scoffed "Fury won't assign resources to a local killing or a single missing kid, and Maria would assign someone else to it."
"Fury will kick you out of Shield if you go rogue, he won't have a choice." Natasha said, a note of pleading in her voice that Tony had never heard before. It sent chills up his spine.
Clint's jaw went hard "I don't care. I'm finding that man and I'm making him tell me where he took her and..." he trailed off, but Tony didn't need him to finish the sentence. Clint's desire to make this man suffer a slow painful death was written all over his face.
"Clint..." Natasha said again, but he just set his shoulders, and Natasha sighed "I'm coming with you."
Clint shook his head sharply "Marian's my sister, I'm not dragging you into this."
"We're partners, if you think I'm letting you go alone you've got another thing coming." Natasha snapped back, a bite to her voice.
Clint frowned "You won't get another second chance with Shield."
Natasha shrugged "Neither will you. We deal with our problems together now, or did you lie to me in Budapest?'
Clint clenched his jaw and ran a hand through his hair and then huffed out a furious breath "Fine!Come then."
"Uh, I hate to interrupt your, uh, mission plan, but is anyone going to tell me what's going on?" Tony said, because he wasn't entirely sure if Natasha was going to go with Clint to stop him killing someone or to help him hide it, and he didn't want that on his conscience. He knows Clint and Nat come from a rougher world than his, but he's not sure even they will be able to shrug it off if they kill someone in revenge.
Clint and Nat exchanged looks and rapid, tiny gestures, and then Clint retrieves a file from his bag and hands it to him, hands shaking. Tony flipped it open to find a photo of a bored looking pre-teen. He likes her instantly. Her hair is in two neat French-braids, her white shirt spotless, and she looks about two seconds away from rolling her eyes at the camera and making for the nearest patch of mud. It's the only nice thing about the file.
It's a police file, started three and a half years ago and finished eighteen months ago, and it only takes him five minutes to read. The kid was Mary-Sue Poots, missing since her foster parents were murdered in their beds in early 2009. The file contains several photos of the crime scene, which showed one body mangled and another literally cut into pieces, a sketch of a man seen hanging around the property for several days before the murder, reports from the extensive manhunt for 12-year-old Mary-Sue, and precisely zero progress after that. Nothing. All the blood at the crime scene belonged to the foster parents. There was no ransom note, no threat to the police to hurt the kid if they tried to find the killer, nothing. The most likely identity of the man was Cal Johnson, a doctor from across the country who'd vanished into thin air at around the same time. But, despite a two year long search, with initially significant resources, neither Mary-Sue nor Cal were ever found, and the police eventually declared Mary-Sue Poots to be dead.
Tony put the file down, his hands shaking slightly. He couldn't help imagining it was Rhodey, or Happy, or Pepper in that file. Couldn't help wondering what he would do if one of them had gone missing under such circumstances. He wondered if he'd kill in revenge too. "I'm sorry." he said, the words feeling feeble and hollow. He'd put the file down open to the first page, to the photo of an impatient, sassy, living 12 year old girl, and he wished he'd closed it.
"She's not dead." Clint insisted. "I'm going to find her."
Tony swallowed hard. He didn't know official statistics, but he thought he'd read somewhere that the chances of finding a missing child alive halved after 24 hours. Clint's sister had been gone for well over three years. He didn't point that out, because he may be a jerk, but he's not cruel. Clint knew that. He also knew that he had no leads, no idea where to look. If he'd started three and a half years ago, he might have had a chance, but he hadn't, and that had to be destroying him.
Tony remembered being told his parents were dead. He remembered the moments of sheer disbelief before the news had slowly become real, and the way he'd crumpled into himself and then shattered into tiny pieces that taken years to stark resembling a person again. It was remarkable how much it hurt to see the same thing happening to someone else.
It was at that spectacularly inappropriate moment that Steve walked in without knocking, looking agitated and holding his sketchbook. Tony realised too late he was about to start asking about another kid, a living kid, and wondered if this was what it felt like to watch a train wreck in progress and be unable to stop it. "Jarvis says he can't find anyone matching my sketch, but maybe if you widened the parame...." he fell silent, and for a moment Tony thought he'd absorbed the atmosphere of the room until he saw Steve's face light up and his mouth opened and "Why didn't you tell me you found her?"
Utter, complete, silence. You could have heard a pin drop.
Natasha broke it, voice openly lost "What?"
Steve frowned, clearly realising he was missing something but unsure what. "Daisy." he said slowly, gesturing towards Tony. No, not Tony, the table next to him.
Tony looked at Steve, followed his line of sight to the open file on the table, looked back to Steve. Then, slowly, he turned to look at Clint. Tony had once been injured, malnourished, and dying of dehydration in the desert. If someone had walked up to him and offered him an entire bath of clean, cold water, he would probably have looked at them a little like Clint was looking at Steve. Tony felt his heart jump, then freeze. He knew with a sudden painful certainty, that if Mary-Sue Poots and Daisy just happened to look like each other, the team would never recover. The Avengers would be done. Tony hadn't realised how much he cared about the Avengers staying together until he faced the possibility that they imminently wouldn't.
"Steve, are you saying that's Daisy?"
Steve, possibly finally picking up on the atmosphere of the room or possibly realising that Tony had just used his actual name rather than a moniker, crossed the room to study the photo properly. "Yeah." he said after a few seconds "She's younger, tidier, and less tired, but that's definitely her. Why does it say her name's Mary-Sue?"
"Because that's Marian. Clint's little sister. Clint's supposedly dead, missing for three and a half years,little sister."
Clint made a kind of strangled noise, coughed, and started again "You sketched her right? Daisy? Can I see?"
Steve looked between his sketchpad and the photo of 12 year old Mary-Sue, and mutely held the sketchpad out to Clint, "Maybe you should sit down. You don't look so good."
That was the understatement of the year. Clint's body language reminded Tony of a feral cat and he was a truly alarming shade of grey. His hand, when he reached for the sketchpad, shook violently. He took one look at the drawing and then there was a sudden tangle of movement and then Steve was carrying him to the sofa, Natasha hovering next to him. Clint was, slightly surprisingly, conscious, but he'd lost all remaining colour was clutching the sketchpad like a lifeline. Natasha leaned back and tipped her head at a frankly painful looking angle to take a look rather than attempt to prise it off him.
"Unless Marian has a twin, that's her." she concluded. The relief on her face was so strong that Tony could probably shatter her entire 'love-is-for-children' image forever if he took a single photo. Instead he pulled a chair away from the table and sat down hard.
"Why did she say her name was Daisy?" Steve asked, frowning in confusion and worry.
"Why is she even in New York?" Natasha pointed out, the relief rapidly fading from her face as reality started sinking in again. "More than three years with no leads, nothing, and then she's jogging in New York?"
"Tell me about her." Clint said, his voice an open demand "Tell me everything."
Steve shot an anxious look at Tony, and he felt his heart sink at the realisation that Clint didn't know about The Text yet. Clint missed the look, but Natasha didn't, her eyes narrowing. Steve hastily started talking before Natasha could start interrogating him. "She's healthy. She's too good a runner to be anything else. She said her parents are dead, but she didn't tell me who she's living with now. Or where. I offered to take her home the first time we met, because she pushed too hard running, but she said she didn't want to give her address to a stranger, something about 'stranger danger'. Oh, she said she was on the outskirts of the chitauri invasion, but she wasn't hurt!" This last part was added quickly as Clint started to make strangled noises again. "Um, you know she had bruises the second time I saw her, and I told you she runs competitively, although I think that was a lie because Jarvis said he looked at sign-ups for races in the last few years and didn't find her. Anyway, she left because she had tutoring, but that was definitely a lie because nobody has tutoring at 5am on Sundays, and she called me later to..."
Steve trailed off, but they all already knew about the call. The call had triggered stress-baking round 2.0 and they'd all heard about it in great detail. And Clint had already heard The Voicemail. Natasha narrowed her eyes "What else?" she demanded.
Steve, who was the kind of person who couldn't lie to someone he cared about to save his life, looked helplessly at Tony, who took a step back. He wasn't getting between either Natasha and intel or Clint and information on his sister.
"Steve" Natasha said, injecting a truly remarkable amount of threat into a single-syllable word and making Tony very, very glad her focus was aimed at Steve. He cracked in less than a second.
"She sent me a text."
Natasha mutely held her hand out. Steve equally mutely unlocked his phone and handed it over. Natasha read the text and then, reluctantly, handed it to Clint.
"She sent it from the same blocked number." Tony said, before either agent could ask.
Clints breathed slowly and evenly and in a way that suggested he was only one good push from losing it. What that would entail, Tony didn't know and didn't want to find out. Natasha put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, and then said briskly "I assume you've already tried to unblock the number."
Tony nodded "It's more than a basic number block, I can't access it."
"OK, then we work with what we've got. She's out in public, and relatively healthy, which is good."
"Unless she has Stockholm Syndrome." Clint pointed out gloomily, but he was starting to regain some colour and looked a little more rational and less like he might do something very rash in the next five seconds.
"That's a possibility." Natasha said, with a bluntness that made Tony wince on Clint's behalf but seemed actually comforting to Clint. "But if she does then they clearly trust her enough to let her out, and if she doesn't it means she probably escaped."
"If she escaped why didn't she go to the police?" Tony asked.
"Not wanting to draw attention?" Natasha suggested uncertainly.
"She wouldn't want to go back into the foster system." Clint said more confidently.
"So, potentially, she could have got out a long time ago." Tony said, for once deciding to be the voice of optimism.
Steve frowned "Then who's looking after her?"
Clint gave Steve an incredulous look and Nat shrugged "She's sixteen, she's basically an adult."
Tony, who could remember being sixteen and very much not basically an adult, frowned but held his tongue. Clint and Nat had both grown up young and fast, but given Mary-Sue (Marian, Daisy, whatever) had spent 12 years in the system and then been kidnapped following the violent deaths of her guardians, she probably had too. That didn't however mean that she ought to be on her own. Tony was pretty sure trauma was an additional reason why a 16-year-old should not be left on her own. They were all saved from answering though by Steve's phone, sitting on the sofa next to Natasha, starting to buzz.
It took less than a second for chaos to break loose. Clint lunged across Natasha for the phone, but the red-head was faster, grabbing the device and flinging it to Steve, and then grabbing hold of a wildly struggling Clint. Steve only just caught the phone before it hit the floor, just as it started to ring. Clint, despite Nat's attempt to restrain him, rose from the sofa, only stilling when Natasha urgently hissed "If you spook her she might hang up!"
Clint, very, very reluctantly, sat back down again. Natasha gave him a measuring look and then sat next to him, although Tony could swear the look she sent the phone was longing. Tony, who wasn't patient on a good day, hissed at Steve to answer it already.
Steve hit the answer button and Daisy (Mary-Sue, Marian, whatever her name is) destroyed Nat's work in seconds by blurting out "How do you know if you're old enough to be a mom???"
Tony, for the second time in twenty minutes, felt his heart drop into his stomach. Clint was half-way across the room before Steve was even half-way through his horrified "What?!?!" and then there was a brief messy struggle for the phone and then Clint literally jumped onto the table with it gasping "You're pregnant???"
There was a sudden dead silence on the other end of the call, during which Tony struggled to remember how to breath and Natasha buried her face in her hands and moaned.
"Robin?" Even tinny and through the phone, Marian's (slash Daisy's slash Mary-Sue's) voice sounded shocked and longing and desperate.
"Marian? Please, please tell me you're really Marian."
"I-yeah, of course it's Marian. Wait, why do you have Steve's phone?"
"Why do I have Steve's phone??? That's the issue here?? You're pregnant!!!"
Tony hadn't known Clint's voice could go that high. He'd probably be impressed if his brain wasn't struggling to just keep up with events.
"What? I'm not pregnant!!!"
"You're not??"
"No. I am very definitely not pregnant." The voice on the other end somehow managed to be both flat and sassy at the same time. Tony had the strong feeling he would get on amazingly well with the owner.
Clint took a deep breath and asked, a little more reasonably "Then why do you want to know if you're old enough to be a mom?"
"Oh. Drat. I forgot what I called about for a moment. Not that I'm pregnant! Cus I'm not."
"That doesn't answer the question." Clint pointed out, sounding like he'd been through the wringer and was beginning to, just slightly, lose it.
"Um, well, funny story, uh, see, well, um."
"You're seriously not reducing my blood pressure here Marian."
"The Talk! Ha—uhhh, this kid I babysit, she, uh, she was asking questions, about kissing, and I'm only 16 and I can't give a kid the Talk and, uh, I might have panicked a bit?"
Tony wasn't sure whether to burst out laughing or go and lock himself in his lab for the rest of the decade. Steve was rapidly turning cherry red and Natasha still had her head in her hands but now her shoulders were shaking with what Tony was pretty sure was laughter.
"Right." Clint said, sceptically but distinctly calmer "And you wanted to know about 10 year age gaps earlier because...."
There was a slight pause, and then "In hindsight, I may not have entirely thought that text through."
Not thought that text through??? Did this kid know how much of a heart attack she'd given him and Steve??? And he had a heart condition!!!
"That doesn't explain the question." Clint said tightly.
"Oh, I was asking for a friend."
"A friend?" Clint said, beginning to sound a bit strangled again "And how old is this friend?"
There was a nervous laugh "Ah, funny you should ask that."
It took Tony more self-control than he'd previously been aware he possessed not to climb onto the table with Clint and snatch the phone. He could practically feel his blood pressure rising.
"Please, Marian, please tell me you're not in a relationship with a 26 year old."
"What? I said I was asking for a friend!!!"
"Nobody is ever actually asking for a friend!!!"
Yeah, Clint was definitely losing it. In fairness, he'd had a very, very long day and it was barely lunchtime. Natasha lifted her head from her hands to sign something at Clint, who took a deep breath and let some tension flow out of his body. He signed something back to Natasha who blinked like an owl and then scrambled to grab a computer. Tony frowning went to join her. "What are we doing?" he asked quietly. "Tracing the call." Natasha whispered back, and Tony felt like kicking himself. He should have thought of that earlier. Then again, so should Natasha.
"Right, so your online friend that you've never met and don't know what she's called is starting a relationship with another online friend you've never met or swapped names with? That doesn't sound like you just made it up at all." Clint said, sounding strained. "You know what, never mind, it can wait. Where on earth have you been? I just found out you were declared dead."
There was a horrified silence on the other end and then "Sh--shoot. You weren't supposed to find out."
"Weren't supposed to..." If Tony had thought Clint's voice was high earlier it was nothing to what it was now. Natasha looked worriedly over at Clint but then returned to the trace. Tony would help, but he'd never actually traced a phone call before (funnily enough), and he wasn't certain enough he knew how to do it to take over.
"I'm sorry!!" Mary-Sue said, sounding genuinely deeply upset "I didn't--that must have been horrible."
"Where have you been?" Clint demanded again.
"Around New York for the last six months." Marian said, her voice small "I saw you on TV after the chitauri came. I, um, I know I should have called, I just, it's been a long year."
Clint swallowed audibly and ran a hand through his already messy hair "Where were you before New York?"
There was a very long pause, and then Daisy said "Away." in the flat tone of voice people use to indicate they weren't talking about this anymore. Clint ignored it.
"Away where?"
"Just away."
"Marian--"
"I said I was away! We're not talking about this!"
"You can't just—do you have any idea how terrified I was when Sister Roberta said you were dead?"
"Really? You're gonna play that card?! The last time I heard from you was seven years ago!"
The sheer accusative anger in Mary-Sue's voice punched out from the phone's speaker like a physical blow. It wasn't even directed at Tony but he still felt it cut into him. Natasha flinched. Clint made a noise that didn't even sound entirely human.
"Yeah. So don't act like I'm the one who owes you answers Robin."
Clint made a kind of choked sound, and when he managed to get words out his voice was so rough Tony knew he was next door to tears "I'm so sorry."
"Me too." Marian said, voice small again "I know you probably had your reasons. But I do too."
"I-OK." Clint said "Where are you? I'll come pick you up."
Tony looked at Natasha's computer screen, which was showing a worryingly large chunk of Queens, and kept bouncing around but not zooming in like it did in the movies.
"Why?" Mary-Sue asked.
"Because you're my family!" Clint said, exasperated.
"I don't believe in family anymore." Daisy said, her voice matter-of-fact but so achingly sad Tony wanted to cry. "I-you were the closest thing to real family I ever had Robin, and you're my friend, but I'm not going back into the system for you."
"Don't be ridiculous, you know I wouldn't make you." Clint said, but his voice thick with tears and Tony knew 'I don't believe in family' had hit Clint as hard as it hit him.
"I know, but I'll bet Steve Rogers would. Hang on, my phone keeps making alarm noi---are you tracking me???"
"No! Marian wait..."
The click of Daisy hanging up was depressingly loud and grimly final. Natasha swore at the computer. "I couldn't get a lock. She's in Queens, or possibly Brooklyn, I can't tell you more accurately than that."
Clint groaned "Not for long if I know Marian."
"There's only so far a 16 year old can get alone, and she sounds pretty much like she's alone." Tony pointed out.
"Marian was pretty resourceful even at 8, she'll be gone well before we can track her down in the entirety of Queens and Brooklyn. How did she even know we were tracking her???" Clint said. Somehow, despite the fact that he was still standing on a table and looked frankly ridiculous, he managed to sound completely defeated. Natasha threw a sofa cushion at him "I don't know, but we're the Avengers, I think we can track down one teenager."
"You were wanted on three continents as a teenager and you were almost 20 when I caught you." Clint pointed out gloomily.
"I had training, and help for most of that time." Natasha pointed out "And you didn't have me to help look. We'll start by hitting up popular jogging routes in the early morning. I doubt she'll return to the one Steve met her on, but that doesn't mean she won't be found in another. Now get off my table, you're leaving muddy boot-prints."
Clint glared at Natasha for a moment, but then sighed and climbed off the table. "You know she could leave the city right?"
"She could." Natasha agreed "But she won't. She's been here six months, that's long enough to put down roots it'll take time to pull up. We've got time."
Clint looked for a moment like he was going to argue, but Natasha stared him down with a kind of steady confidence, and, slowly, Clint started looking slightly hopeful again. "I'll get a map of New York." he said finally. And then, as an afterthought "Shall I tell Maria to assign someone else to find Quake?"
Natasha hesitated "She'll ask why."
"I could look for Quake?" Steve offered, clearly eager to help. Natasha and Clint exchanged unreadable looks. Tony sighed.
"I'll help too." he offered. He was already looking for Skyenet, and he'd been sort of involved in looking for Quake already, and if the two were connected then it was practically an extension of looking for Skyenet.
Clint gave him a grateful look, and fetched a thick file for him "This is Marian's system file, I dog-eared the pages about families we were both sent to – that was before Roberta told me Marian was supposedly dead – but nobody stood out as likely to become a vigilante or have connections to developmental weaponry."
"I'll dig into them." Tony promised, grabbing Steve and steering him towards the door. He'd disable the cameras somewhere else to work, he was pretty sure Clint and Nat wanted some privacy right now.
-------------
Talking to Robin, really talking to him, as herself rather than Quake, was like falling eight years into the past and yet feeling every day that had passed since they'd last spoken. Maybe it was the shock of it, she hadn't really been thinking clearly when she'd phoned Steve, and she certainly hadn't expected to hear Clint's voice.
Maybe if she'd been prepared for it, she would have felt less wrong-footed, but she suspected she wouldn't. Hearing Robin's voice was like being eight again and, for the first time in years, having someone to run to she was sure would help her. Back then Clint had been practically everything important in her world. A constant even as she was moved from home to home, handed on like a bad gift nobody wanted. She'd always associated Robin with protection and fun and family, the real kind you make yourself. Talking to Robin brought all of that rushing back, but at the same time it highlighted every way she'd changed since she'd been the little girl he'd taken under his wing.
And with every second the conversation continued that difference felt bigger and bigger and bigger. Clint didn't really know her anymore. It had been seven years since they'd last talked, and it had been a long seven years. She spent most of the brief conversation with Clint reeling, scrambling to come up with answers, that explained questions she reallyshould have thought through before asking, that didn't involve newly sentient AIs.
And then Clint asked where she'd been and said he'd just found out she'd been declared dead and her stomach dropped. She hadn't wanted Robin to find out, had put herself through finding and erasing herself on the internet to make sure he wouldn't, but he'd found out anyway. He must have come across some paper copy of something. Daisy spent so much of her time in the online world she kind of forgot about physical copies of things, but one of them must have come back and bitten her. She tells Clint she's been in New York for six months, even though that's stupid. Stupid to tell him when she'd gotten back, and stupid to tell him where she was. Granted, Steve already knew she was in New York, but that didn't mean they knew she'd been here long, or that she hadn't been planning to leave anytime soon.
But Clint keeps asking, keeps pressing about where she was before, and she's snapping back before she can stop herself. She didn't mean to, she gets falling out of contact, she gets running away from everything, she gets it, but Clint had no right to demand answers on where she'd been when he'd disappeared too. And yes, ok, she was angry that he'd disappeared, because Robin had been her brother back then and Clint cutting off contact had left wounds deeper than any foster family since she was tiny. But she hadn't meant to let it show because she did get the urge to run and run and run until you could somehow leave yourself behind.
But Robin is sorry, she can hear it in his voice when he apologises, can hear the tears he's trying to hide, and he when he offers to come pick her up Daisy almost, almost lets him. The 8-year-old inside her wants to run to Clint and let him take over. She wants to let the guy who taught her to throw a punch and find the best hiding places come and help her deal with the sentient being she somehow created and doesn't know how to guide through the world. She wants to tell the boy who was once her brother about hacking and superpowers and how sometimes it feels like for every bad thing she tries to stop a thousand more happen that she can't do anything about. The 8-year-old in her wants to let Robin sweep in and rescue her again.
But she isn't 8 anymore, and when she tells Clint she doesn't believe in family anymore she means it. And that's the biggest difference between the child Robin had known and who Daisy was now. Not the fact that she was inhuman, or that she'd accidentally become wanted by half the world's governments because she did a few too many high-profile hacks, but that she doesn't believe in family anymore. Not where it relates to her. She tells Clint she won't go back into the foster system, and that's true, but it's not the only reason she won't tell him where she is. It's not because she's Skyenet and Quake and people are looking for her either. It's because the time is long passed when Robin could sweep in and fix everything, but if anyone can make her believe in family again, it's him. And Daisy won't survive the fall when it inevitably breaks.
She hangs up when she gets the alert from Hack that Clint is tracking her phone, even though she's set this number up to be impossible to track. Or at least, she'd tried to set it up to be impossible to track, she wasn't in any way confident that it had worked, so the first thing she does when she hangs up is get back in her van, thank Hack, and then drive to the other side of the city.
She should probably leave the city altogether, but it's a big city and Daisy is good at hiding and she doesn't want to move. It would be suspicious if Quake suddenly left New York and reappeared somewhere else anyway, and Daisy had no intention of giving up being Quake. So she drove clear to the other side of the city and then dove into hacking like she'd done a thousand times in the last six months, losing herself in code and firewalls and anything that isn't thinking about her life.
When she finally emerges from hacking it's dark out, and Hack is nagging at her to eat and sleep since she hasn't done either of those since 2am. Two weeks ago she'd have been tempted to mute her, but Hack is a living being now, so she can't do that. So instead of starting another hack she saved the data she was putting together for her next #NewDawn post and went shopping. An hour later, after what felt like her five thousandth meal of sandwiches and crisps, she pulled on her Quake uniform, promised Hack she'd be careful, and went off to patrol.
The first couple of hours of patrol were uneventful. She gets the usual bike thieves and a few muggings, but Clint and Natasha don't show up, so by her definition it's uneventful. It continues being uneventful right up until she comes across another bank robbery. By the same guys. Well, some of them, three of them were from last time, three of them were new. Apparently she either hadn't knocked the guys out properly, or nobody at either the bank or Shield had thought to send someone to pick them up after she'd knocked them out. Either way, she now has to deal with them again. This time, she's sensible enough to take the camera out first. And then she let loose.
Ten minutes later she's acquired several new bruises to replace the ones that had just healed (luckily not on her face this time) and all the thugs were unconscious. This time she called the police herself, using a mobile she found in one of their pockets, and scarpered before the police could show up and start asking her awkward questions like 'who are you' and 'why are you stopping bank robberies'. It bothered her that some of the thugs were new though. It suggested there were more of the group out there, and she made a mental note to investigate.
When she got back to her van though, Hack managed to nag her into sleeping. Which was ridiculous, because she'd only been up for a little over 24 hours and she didn't need to sleep. But Hack argued that even Tony had gone to sleep (maybe giving her and Jarvis a website to talk on whenever they wanted hadn't been such a good idea) and listed statistics about how productivity goes down with tiredness (which was silly because Daisy wasn't tired) and generally whined and cajoled until Daisy gave in, just this once. She switched off the dim roof light and curled up on her thin roll mat in he back of her van and closed her eyes, and evidently she was just tired enough to slip quickly into sleep.
She was not, unfortunately, tired enough that she didn't wake up panting less than two hours later, soaked in sweat and struggling to breath around the memory of pain and heartbreak and her dad's rage. She wasn't even sure when that particular incident had happened. Maybe it hadn't, maybe her mind just threw familiar scenarios together and knew what happened in those situations. Hack asked if she was ok and it took everything she had not to snarl at her that this was why she didn't sleep. Instead she cleaned off the sweat with wet-wipes, changed out of her Quake uniform, and drove to central park. Running would drive the nightmare out of her mind.
And it does. Central park is pretty much deserted at 6am on a Wednesday and it's easy to let the world fade into the background. By the time she's run a few miles she's mentally relaxed into the rhythm of her feet pounding on the ground, and her muscles have gained the pleasant buzz of exercising rather than the shaky anxious feel of a nightmare. She lets her body take over from her mind, lets her feet carry her away from her nightmare and her past and every broken thing she could never fix and she just enjoys the way the world feels crisp and clean and new at 6am.
Someone pokes her in the arm and she snaps back into situational awareness with a scream and a flailing punch that would have been useless even if it had landed. It didn't land though, and Daisy suddenly found herself on the ground looking up at Robin, who was looking down at her with mild shock.
"Oops, sorry, reflexes. I did call your name a few times." Clint apologised, offering her a hand up. Daisy, warily, took it.
"How did you find me?" she asked, because she was good at hiding and she was reasonably confident no facial recognition software would beat the bug she'd put into the city's traffic camera systems so Clint really shouldn't be able to find her.
"Looked up popular jogging spots and made an educated guess." Clint explained, pulling her up.
Daisy brushed herself down, "And you just happened to pick the right spot at the right time?" she asked sceptically.
"Technically, we've been here since 3am." Natasha said, and Daisy jumped out of her skin again, having been too preoccupied with suddenly finding herself face to face with Robin to have noticed anyone else. Hastily she reached out with her powers, looking for any other human shaped bundles of vibrations she'd have to worry about, but there weren't any. "Natasha Romanoff, I'm Clint's partner." she introduced herself, offering Daisy a hand.
Daisy eyed the Avenger warily. The last (and only) times she'd been within a few metres of Natasha she'd gotten tazed. Natasha didn't know they'd met before though so she shook hands, letting go quickly and backing off. Clint twitched closer, clearly nervous she was going to run, but gave her space.
"Aren't you going to introduce yourself?" Natasha asked, tone teasing but question real.
Daisy shifted nervously. She wasn't sure what to do now. She hadn't expected or planned for Robin coming looking for her, much less actually finding her. "Daisy Johns—." she cut herself off, not having meant to give the last name she'd disowned, but it was too late.
"Johnson? Like Cal Johnson?" Clint asked, tone shocked and sharp.
Daisy looked away, her breath catching in her throat at the sound of her dad's name. Her tone was utterly blank when she answered "He was my dad." Was. Past tense. As if he was dead, rather than left behind with Daisy's childhood hopes and dreams and her mom's body.
"As in your real dad?" Clint asked, horror in his voice, and any tiny hope Daisy had that Clint might not know her dad had murdered two people disappeared.
"Real is a relative term." she said, because she doesn't want to think about how he had been her real dad. How they'd gone for walks around Afterlife and he'd told her stories about when she was a baby and listened to her talk about her childhood. How he'd spent hours every day homeschooling her and how 90% of the time he'd been so patient and gentle and kind. How he'd insisted on tucking her in every night and reading her bedtime stories even though she'd been almost a teenager. How he'd been her dad in a hundred thousand big and small ways that didn't just vanish into thin air because he'd flown into rages and lost control and hit her. She doesn't want to think about how, even now everything was broken, she knew her dad still loved her. How a part of her wanted to pretend he hadn't murdered her mom and just go back and pretend she still believed in family.
Usually she's pretty good at not thinking about it, she's an expert at it in fact, but it's harder when Robin, who used to be family too, is asking questions and looking at her with far too much empathy on his face. "Don't look at me like that!" she snapped "He wasn't like your dad, he didn't knock me around for the sake of it."
She realised a second too late, as Clint's eyes widened and anger lit up his eyes, what she'd just admitted. When Clint didn't say anything Natasha spoke, her voice too gentle and too careful for someone she didn't even know. "But he did knock you around?"
"Why do you care?" Daisy said, deflecting more than answering, because she was never going to be ready to answer that question, never going to be ready to deal with those memories.
Natasha didn't react to her hostile tone "Because you're Clint's sister."
Daisy sighed, suddenly exhausted "That was a long time ago. I'm a different person now."
"I don't care." Clint said, regaining the power of speech "You're still my sister."
Daisy looked away, her eyes stinging. This was why she hadn't told Clint where she was. She didn't want to believe in family anymore, she didn't want to be built up again so she could break apart again. "Come home with us." Natasha said, undoubtedly spotting her vulnerability and pressing the advantage "We'll work something out, you don't have to go back into the system."
Daisy scoffed, because if she didn't she was going to cry. "And what? Play happy families? I don't believe in family, and I'm fine on my own."
"You mean you're surviving on your own." Clint corrected, creeping closer "There's a difference. I've been there and I know it's not a nice place to be and it's really not fine. Nat's been there too, so that's two against one."
Daisy backed up, skittishly maintaining the distance and trying not to cry "Two against one? How old are you??"
Natasha snorted, and Daisy's eyes flickered briefly to her, wondering if the emotion was genuine, and then back to Clint and then away again. There was too much desperation on Clint's face to look at him for too long. "Old enough to have learned that being on your own sucks." Clint said.
"I'm fine." Daisy insisted, but the words came out brittle and even she didn't believe them. She pushed on anyway "I've got a job and my van's home and I don't need anything else."
"You live in a van?"
"Hey! Don't knock my van!" Daisy snapped, indignant. She liked her van! It was a good van! She'd worked hard to buy it and, occasional breakdown aside, it was a great van.
Clint held his hands up in surrender "I'm sure it's a great van Marian, but wouldn't you like to sleep in a real bed?"
The startled laugh Daisy gave at that was genuinely amused because wow Robin missed the mark there. "I'm a programmer; I drink coffee, I don't sleep." she informed him.
Clint groaned "Not you too! Do all computer nerds pretend they're not human and don't need rest or just the three I know of?"
Daisy laughed again, mostly because Clint only actually knew of two computer nerds but also partly because she actually wasn't human. "Why waste time sleeping when you can drink coffee?"
Clint groaned again, muttering something about 'not another Tony' under his breath and then saying more clearly "Come home with us for better food then, you can't possibly have great cooking facilities in your van."
Daisy scowled, having no comeback to that. She had precisely zero cooking facilities in her van and she was sick to death of sandwiches and take-out.
"I thought so. C'mon, I'll make you pancakes." Clint wheedled, referring back to when they'd been in foster homes together and their guardians hadn't always made them food and Daisy's favourite meal had been Clint's pancakes.
It reminded her painfully of better times, and triggered an aching longing that she shoved ruthlessly away, her words coming out harder because of it "I don't need your help Clint, I'm not a kid anymore." and it's true. She doesn't need his help and she's not a kid, but it doesn't mean she doesn't want it. And Daisy can tell Clint's about to point that out, because he's always been able to read her too well, and she can't deal with that. She can't cope with Clint building her up and making her believe in family again. She took another step back, shaking her head, willing herself not to cry "I'm going home Clint. And then I'm leaving the city. Don't-don't keep looking for me."
"No!" Clint snapped, his shoulders set in the same stubborn way they would when he used to face off against one of the nuns "I left you alone before and I'm not doing it again."
Daisy opened her mouth to argue back and then closed it again, realising it was pointless. Instead she turned and ran, dodging Natasha who'd somehow moved exactly where she needed to go, bolting away from Robin and all the things she'd used to believe in until believing it broke her. Both Clint and Natasha gave chase, but this wasn't cluttered streets this time. There were no benches or bins to get in the way and slow her down, and enhanced speed was made for clear paths like these. There were barely even any other joggers to avoid because it was 6am on a Wednesday and even most early-bird joggers weren't out yet. Her feet flew along the narrow tarmac path and Clint and Natasha's pounding footsteps faded behind her as she ran and ran and ran as if she could run away from herself too.
Notes:Sorry for the slightly angsty end! Clint and Daisy got to talk though!!
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