Chapter Text
They'd met in grade school, when Natasha’s family moved from New York to Bangor to try and give their younger daughter a more peaceful environment. They’d chosen Bangor because Dad had been unexpectedly headhunted for a job there. Clint lived next door: when Natasha’s parents found out he had two fathers (and blue-collar ones at that), she was expressly forbidden from speaking to him. For little Natasha, who had never been invited to a birthday party or a sleepover, the temptation was irresistible. She hunted him down the next day at school and demanded he become her best friend. Her family had moved to a bigger house a couple of years later, but Clint and Natasha hadn’t spent more than a week apart since then.
When they were younger Bruce and Clint had been in loads of sports teams together and the three of them had spent every lunch time messing about on the field or sneaking off to get fries from the burger place down the road. Other friends had come and gone, but with the three of them it was different.
The first permanent addition to the gang had been Steve, back in sixth grade. Bruce, Clint and Natasha had been walking to the derby rink across town when they found a gang of big, burly boys in the Worthington High uniform blocking the pedestrian overpass above the motorway. They were shoving a smaller figure back and forth, a boy even shorter than Natasha with a puff of blonde hair and blood trickling from his nose.
Natasha had felt her heart race and a snarl form on her lips as one of the teens hoisted the boy up by his shoulders and tried to set him on the concrete rail of the overpass, thirty feet above a stream of speeding cars and trucks. Natasha heard him yelling, “You like gymnastics so much, Hill? How’s your balance beam? Come on, dance for us!”
Most of the boys started cheering as the smaller kid crouched on top of the railing, trying to get down to safety but pushed back by the wall of muscled bullies. Natasha stepped forward, but it was Bruce who lunged in first – Natasha had never seen him so angry. He was roaring as he shoved the nearest Worthington eighth-grader down. The guy fell hard. Clint and Natasha were close behind, and the older kids were so surprised that they stumbled back until they saw who they were being attacked by.
Clint grabbed the scrawny kid’s hands and helped him down, but the leader of the Worthington thugs launched himself at them with his fists raised. Before he reached them, one of his friends jumped in and grabbed him.
“Hey, bro, forget it,” the intervener soothed. He was a broad-shouldered blond with an ugly rat’s tail down the back of his neck. “They’re just dumb kids. You’ll get suspended, man.”
The leader sneered, but finally brushed his friend’s hands off and turned away. Pulling a few crude gestures and yelling at the younger group, the bullies jogged off. The boy with the rat’s tail paused to glance at their victim, who was wiping his bloody nose with his sleeve, but followed his friends.
“Yeah, you run! You fucking psychopaths!” Clint barked after them.
“Dank you,” the small boy said, holding his nose. “I’m Steve.”
“I’m Natasha, and this is Bruce and Clint,” she shook his hand when he offered it, as Worthington boys were no doubt trained to do. “We’ll take you to your school and find someone. You have to tell them what those jerks were doing!”
“No. I’m alright. Honestly,” Steve mumbled. “My Mom says I should just ignore them. It usually works.”
They’d all gone to the derby together, and started meeting up after school almost every day. Natasha had thought Steve was younger than them, but he turned out to be in their year, and his good sense and cheer balanced out Clint and Natasha’s cynical recklessness well. Most of the time he could even keep up with them on his bike, though he had to stop and use his inhaler quite a lot.
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A few weeks later, they’d gone to the movie theatre and found their way blocked by none other than the brawny boy with the blond rat’s tail. He was shifting from foot to foot with his arm’s crossed, watching them until Natasha went up and punched him on the arm.
“Hey!” he grabbed her wrist as she tried to again. “I came here to talk to Steve! Stop that-” he had to grab the other wrist.
“It’s okay, Nat,” Steve touched her shoulder. “Well?”
The boy cleared his throat, glanced around and folded his arms again. “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” he said at last. He cleared his throat. “For what happened on the overpass. Jim was way out of line.”
“He was way out of line long before he nearly threw Steve off a fucking bridge,” Clint growled.
“I know,” the bigger boy raised his hands. “I made a vow to myself. I’m not going to hang around with them anymore. They’re dickheads.”
Bruce chuckled and raised his eyebrows. “You made a vow?”
“A vow? Like for a wedding?” Clint smirked.
“No! Not like for a wedding!” the boy balled his fists, but then let out a long breath and straightened his back. “Please forgive me, Steve.”
“Already forgiven, Thor,” Steve smiled, patting his elbow, which was the closest place on the taller boy’s body that he could reach. “Hey, wanna come to the movie? You’ve still gotta have someone to hang with and I wouldn’t want you to break your vow.”
“I’d like that,” Thor nodded.
“Thor,” Natasha said dryly. “Really? Your name is Thor?”
“His parents are proper hippies,” Steve explained.
Despite his rough entrance, Thor soon became a vital part of the group as easily as Steve had. His lumbering laugh was infectious, and though he was fun to wind up he never held a grudge. Natasha would have picked him as at least a grade above them, but he was only a year older than Steve, who was the youngest of them all. They were all surprised when he turned out to be adopted, like Natasha and Clint.
“But you’ve got four sibs,” Bruce frowned, as they sat on the lawn outside the public library. “Why’d they adopt you as well? No offense.”
“Oh, my parents tried for years before me,” Thor stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. “Every doctor they spoke to said there was no hope. And then after me, babies began flowing as freely as a river, bam, bam, bam, bam. Dad eventually had to get the snip,” Thor jabbed his thumb at his chest. “I, Bruce, am the greatest fertility aid they know of.”
“Wow, weird,” Steve frowned.
“That’s really not the sound a river makes,” said Natasha.
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By eighth grade, their five had become six: Tony was another Worthington student their age, but was so advanced in his schooling that Steve and Thor had never met him until Bruce did two summer school papers with him at the local college. Though the last on board, very soon it was clear that he was the spearhead of the group. He came up with the best ideas for adventures – to cemeteries, abandoned industrial areas, nature reserves, old military bunkers and Palaeolithic sites. He could talk his way into restricted films and a couple of years later he introduced the crew to his parents’ unlocked liquor cabinet. He was the first to get a girlfriend, the first to pass his driver’s license, the first to attempt a beard (a dismal but admirable failure). At fourteen he was contracted to write software for biotech companies and this year, sophomore year for the rest of the them, he had already graduated high school and was making noise about starting his own business. He had been taking the whiteware at his home apart since he could walk and he wanted to make use of his love of gadgets.
His indulgent parents – soaring in marketing and PR careers they managed over the net – had put their foot down at last. If Tony came to them with a convincing proposal after he turned eighteen, they would think about raising him capital. But that was more than a year away, and the group hadn’t seen much evidence of Tony’s plan of attack yet. Freed of the shackles of school, he spent his days pottering around in the garage under his house that served as his computer lab and workshop.
Sometimes he would turn up at Pym High during lunch to talk computers with Bruce, sometimes to shoot hoops with Clint. Other times he was after Natasha, to mull over something on his mind – more than once they had sat alone on the steps of the library or on the dirt space behind the gym and worried about Bruce’s worsening insomnia, or Steve being bullied, or whether the group should help out when one of Clint’s dads lost his job. Occasionally it turned into complaints about the fact that Clint’s dire work ethic or bitching about Thor’s clueless self-body-worship in front of Steve. But there was an understanding between them that these discussions would never get back to the others.
Sometimes she thought the group was Tony’s pet project, the ultimate machine for him to tinker with and improve. Other times she was sure he just really loved having friends.
Natasha knew what that was like.
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