Chapter Text
Natasha planted a fingertip on her straw and steered it around the circumference of her glass. “This place has been open fifty-seven years,” she said. “On and off. It changes its name every couple decades. Whenever the health inspector cracks down too hard. Sell it someone else in the family, renovate a little, rise from the ashes.” She nodded at Sam’s plate. “Those fries might be hot out of the very same grease that sizzled in that very same vat in 1938.”
“That’s how you know it’s good.” Sam, in case that was a dare, ate another fry. “You really know how to take a guy out on the town. I gotta say, though, if I wanted to hear ‘one time I worked in a restaurant and we dumped leftovers back in the pot’ stories while I eat, I’d have gone out with Bucky.”
Natasha sighed fondly. “Isn’t it great how he has a horror story for every occasion?”
“It’s great how he suddenly remembers every job he’s ever had when there’s a horror story to be told.” The fries, swimming in germs almost as old as his boyfriends or not, were crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside, and delicious all over. He ate another.
“I have kind of a funny story, if you’re up for a change of pace.” She speared a piroshok. “This is embarrassing, but all this time I thought your merry crew were snipping these pigeons’s flight feathers or something to make them stay at their new home.”
“What? Jesus, out on the roof alone all day, Nat? Something would eat them. Maybe an undergrad.”
“Well, don’t pigeon racers spend thousands of dollars on birds they can’t even fly, because they’d head home to the loft they were raised in? They’re just breeding stock, right? I thought it was a big deal to move pigeons.” She swiped another fry, but traded him a couple mushroom-heavy piroshki, so he let it pass. “I looked it up, though. Different variety of the species, I get it. Your street pigeons aren’t nuts about moving, but if they wake up somewhere better… Or if they look across the street and some friends beckon…” She met his eyes abruptly, and he realized he’d been tapping his heel nervously. But she grinned and said, “Do I qualify for your club now?”
Sam slumped back against the booth. His shoulders settled into near-grooves in the wood. “You too, huh?”
“I could do a much better normal-person impression than either of them.”
He tipped slowly forward again until he could rest his elbows on the table. “About that,” he said. “Maybe it’s not as much of a concern as I was, uh, hoping. I could invite Scott along to ride on my shoulder ant-sized the whole time, and I don’t think they’d even blink during the introductions.”
Natasha spun the ice in her glass. “So take me, and your boytoys don’t have to know your dirty secret.
Sam laughed. “Would you really want to go? Forget getting one over on Bucky and Steve for a sec. You want to go talk pigeons for an hour?”
“There are a lot of bird-related activities in this city. A lot. You could have found cooler birds. But you chose pigeons.”
Sam set his palms on the table and pressed into the faint sensation of old grease. He spread his fingers like Natasha was going to engage him in a round of the knife game. “You know my dad was a chaplain in the army,” he said, and Natasha nodded. “Gideon swears he heard so many guys call our dad ‘Chaps’ he thought it was his name. And that’s, uh—we grew up on army bases, for a while there. South Korea, Canada, Australia, Germany. It’d always look like an American suburb got dropped there in the seventies. Our parents weren’t nuts about it as a way to raise kids, but they made sure we knew where we came from. We came from D.C. Our grandfather graduated from Howard, our dad graduated from Howard, we were graduating from Howard. We’d spend summers with our grandparents and Grams’d sign us up to help out at a soup kitchen or pick litter out of the river, because you take care of your hometown.”
Natasha pushed her hands toward his on the table, fingers spread just as wide. She inched them between his. “And then you moved to New York.”
“Started a little earlier than that. I dropped out of Howard my first year, joined the Air Force… which was almost as bad as dropping out, not joining the Army. Still not as bad as dropping back out of the Air Force, found out later. I didn’t always get on too well with my dad.” He slid his fingers under hers, then flipped his palms up. Natasha’s fingernails were unpolished, smooth, blank half-circles. He’d seen her pick up and drop the habit of biting them for one role, and grow them to wicked red spikes for another. They were too short now even to feel when she closed her hands on his, hard. “I don’t know where I was going with this,” he said. “Too old to quit volunteering for dirty work, I guess.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Sarah and Gideon are coming up here for Thanksgiving.”
She knocked her heel into his under the table. He’d been jiggling his leg again. “I could look it up later, or you could just tell me…”
Sam snorted. “Yeah, they both graduated from Howard.”
“Not much chance of introducing them to your normal, down-to-earth, socially conscious pigeon club?”
“If I could get Shirley alone,” Sam sighed. “But she’d still be up against dating three Avengers and a year where I was a wanted fugitive. And… New York. So no. It wasn’t a great plan to start with, even if these people hadn’t been… whatever the hell they are.”
Natasha hesitated. “You know we’d move back in a second, all three of us.”
“Yeah. You know, our favorite aunt and uncle—they’re on Mom’s side—live in New Orleans. Just a lot easier to get along with when they’re not on top of you all the time. Gideon and Sarah and I, we’ve had a tough time with each other since Dad died... ” Sam shook his head. “Like you said, I chose pigeons. They don’t like moving too many times.”
She bit her lip, but then she nodded and her lips curved, just shy of a real smile. “Is now a good time to tell you I already have my own invitation to the party?”
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
There was a chaise lounge in the study. Sam didn’t know when or how that had happened, and he decided he didn't want to. “Did anyone else actually bring a guest?” he asked Abed.
Abed, who was snifting his champagne flute of sparkling grape juice—still, he’d been at it for a while—paused. His eyes widened, then narrowed. “Yes,” he said, and audibly cut himself off midsentence.
Troy started crying. Sam had some trouble processing this, but it was definitely happening. Troy went, in seconds, from standing next to him chugging grape juice to standing next to him racked by sobs. “We can’t lie to an Avenger!” he wailed into his own hand. “We could go to prison.” He buried his face in Sam’s left shoulder, and grabbed his right, and slid over. By the end of the maneuver had managed to fling himself into Sam’s arms, albeit slowly.
“It’s not a lie.” Abed extended a finger. “Pierce is bringing a guest.”
“So that we can pretend we’re normal people with other friends!” Troy wept into Sam’s neck. He ran his hands up and down Sam’s back. “You feel so good,” he said, in the same tone he’d used to condemn himself to prison.
“Thanks,” said Sam, and he meant it. Troy smelled really nice. Like grapes and, weirdly, roses. He patted Troy’s back. It wasn’t any stranger than the times Tony did this, he told himself, except in that Troy was sober.
“Oh my, are you starting already?” Shirley said. “Oh, Troy’s just crying. Never mind.” She joined Sam in patting his back. “Troy… did you steal my bodywash again?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Troy wept. “None of us will have bodywash in prison.”
Natasha could, when called upon, make quite an entrance. So what surprised Sam wasn’t that both doors hit the wall when she entered at that opportune moment. What surprised him was that she hadn’t made the entrance. She was an accessory to the entrance. Britta and Annie stormed in, and Natasha was carried in their wake.
“I didn’t ask the Black Widow to threaten my landlord into letting me grow organic weed on the roof!” Britta said through an impressive wad of gum, to which she was adding another stick.
“Jeff!” Annie’s voice was right up against an upper limit in the psychics of audible pitch. “Britta asked the Black Widow to threaten—” She foundered as she found she’d lost shock value. “Well, she did!”
“Honey, I’ve asked you not to set a bad example for Pierce. You know how impressionable he is.” Jeff didn’t look up from his phone.
Annie’s face set. In Sam’s world, an expression that dire between friends often meant someone was about to get shot with an experimental device based on alien technology. “Britta also,” she said, voice trembling with emphasis, “put Hello Kitty stickers on the pen and notebook you gave her for Christmas.”
Judging by Jeff’s expression, she might as well have shot him. “That’s a Montblanc!”
Britta shoved the gum wrapper in her pocket. “It looks unfriendly. Chang didn’t trust me when I was that imposing and professional, I could tell. I have to be accessible to these lost and wounded souls, Jeff. I need to reach their inner—”
Shirley offered her a plate of cookies. “Their inner twelve-year-old girl, or their inner thirty-something woman who still impulse-buys stickers in the checkout line at Target, where she claims not to shop because their clothes are made by impoverished children in India?”
Natasha, who had slipped around this brawl to Sam’s side, locked her arms around his waist from behind, unperturbed by Troy’s presence at his front. She stood on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. “They were like this the whole way over,” she whispered, and continued to stare, rapt. “I love them. I think this is the way Thor feels about us.”
Sam tried not to categorize his current feeling as dread.
“Too low, Shirley!” Britta lifted her chin, proud even in ignominious defeat. Sam sighed. He clearly had a type.
“Really low, Shirley,” Jeff agreed, warmly, and crossed his legs.
“We won’t do it!” Both doors hit the wall again. Pierce burst in with his arm around the shoulders of a man who looked like the curator of a museum. Maybe a museum of the world’s greatest tyrants, but to be fair, Sam might have that sour twist to his mouth too, if he were clamped to Pierce’s side. “You can’t make us, Winger!”
Jeff broke away from his phone with the expression of a condemned man who’d been told he had hope for a stay of execution, but had never put all that much faith in his luck. “Of course you won’t,” he sighed. “Why do I still delude myself into thinking I can depend on you, Pierce? To do anything? If I asked you to breathe you’d drop down dead.”
“We won’t deny our relationship again!” Pierce continued. He was manic and wide-eyed and, overall, he reminded Sam of Jeff on the roof the other day. “We’re not friends!” He shook the man under his arm.
“That’s relatively true today.” Sam would have believed this man had never smiled in his life, except just then his lips cracked upward at the corners like Pierce had said something touching.
“Congratulations,” Jeff snapped. “None of us are actually friends with Pierce.”
“Oh, Jeffrey.” Shirley looked heavenward. “Don’t. You’ll make him fake another heart attack and we’ll have to cry so he knows we love him. I can’t keep crying over the death of a man I know is trying to peep up my skirt from his convulsions on the floor.”
Pierce slowly dropped his hand from his chest. “As I was saying,” he continued, at a less fevered pitch, “Sam. Gilbert is not my friend, and he didn’t come here because he cares about my interests or hobbies—”
“That’s not true,” Gilbert said. “Although I do prefer the sanitary ones.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Pierce hasn’t gone anywhere near an actual bird,” Annie said cheerily.
“Of course he hasn’t! That would be helpful!” Jeff said, more cheerily.
“Gilbert,” Pierce pursued, “is my brother, the inheritor of the Hawthorne family fortune. And he came out of the walls for you bozos tonight, so show a little respect.”
“Of course we’re glad you came. It’s really nice to see you, Gilbert,” Annie said, stricken.
Troy looked up from Sam’s shoulder, wiping his eyes. “I dunno, man, I think it’s weird. I’m just used to you standing over us for hours and breathing. It helps me fall back asleep if I wake up in the night.”
Abed blinked. It took a second. “I think it’s cool to see you now that you’re not trying to kill us.”
Gilbert blinked back. “I don’t stay in the walls all the time,” he said, softly and vaguely in Sam’s direction. “And ‘kill’ is a strong word.”
“You know what, you don’t even have to explain it to me, man,” said Sam, who’d found himself nodding along a little with Troy and thinking of Bucky.
“And after a lifetime of deceit and persecution, we’re done!” Pierce was gesticulating with his free arm and looking crazed again. “I had to drag Gilbert here by threatening to backslide on the progress he’s made toward getting me to turn off the security cameras in my bedroom when I have guests over, damnit, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. We’re brothers and we won’t pretend to be casual acquaintances so you freaks can look like you’re capable of normal relationships!”
Jeff turned toward Sam, spine stiff and elbows locked in place. “That scheme sounds insane when Pierce says it.”
“Yeah?” It occurred to Sam that he still had an arm around Troy, which was maybe undercutting his incredulous tone. He decided it was too late to move his arm or change his tone. “It sounded solid before? Having a scheme sounded solid before? You know lots of people don’t have war room meetings with their whole crew in order to make one extra friend.” He had a feeling he didn’t want the answer to this question, but he posed it anyway. “Why did you need another friend? God damn it, are you trying to get into the supervillain game? Let me tell you right now, I can definitely take you in a fight if this is a kidnapping plot, I don’t care you’re seven feet high.”
“Well.” Jeff cleared his throat. “Put a pin in that, we can come back to how tall and good-looking I am later. The thing is, certain allegations were leveled against us recently. Also less recently. It’s a recurring problem. Insular, codependent, ‘mean girls,’ borderline incestuous…”
“Please stop giving me examples.”
“I can see now that I should never have started. Anyway, we don’t have a great track record with trying to expand our group, either. Because we are, in fact, insular, codependent, and borderline incestuous.” He chewed on something for a second and failed to suppress it. “If anyone’s a mean girl, it’s Shirley! I am an attorney at law.”
“’Mean girl’ was actually just you, huh?”
“But we like you,” Jeff snapped, glaring. It was among the less convincing times anyone had told Sam they liked him. “All of us like you. The odds of that happening aren’t great.”
It was just as well he still had Troy in his arms. He was thinking it was Troy’s turn to return the favor, and Sam’d just give up and collapse onto him. “So just to be real clear, what happened here was you all joined this project and evicted every member you didn’t like, like some kind of parasite taking over a host body.”
“Nooo,” Shirley and Annie said in unison. It was a drawn-out vowel of uncertainty.
“Yes,” Abed said, at the same time.
“Pigeons,” Jeff said desperately, “are a lot like the vegetables on the table at a wholesome family dinner—”
Natasha took pity before Sam lost his dwindling patience. “I’d like to interject,” she said. “Hi, Abed. Thanks for the invitation.”
“Hey.” Abed waved minutely. “Thanks for getting us the Inspector Spacetime-equipped room.”
She slid her hand into the crook of Sam’s elbow. “You decided to add someone to your group in order to prove you could be relatively normal.”
“We should have known better,” Annie fretted.
“Me especially.” Shirley was giving Annie a run for her money in the mournful Disney eyes department. “I’ve tried to make my family match up to some picture of how we’re supposed to look, and I know it doesn’t end well.”
“In our defense, we didn’t think you’d find out because when we do this it founders within days,” Britta said. “I mean, usually we’d have kicked you out weeks ago because you said something mean to Abed, or slept with me and told me something horrible about yourself, or couldn’t take… Pierce.”
Pierce beamed, as if he’d been paid a compliment, and said, “I’ve revised my position on Pinot noir.” He winked at Sam.
“Ignore him!” Jeff spread his arms. “There’s no way you can walk away from Abed and Shirley. And, hear me out… We’re willing to gag Pierce.”
“I do have all the accessories,” Pierce agreed, and then, “Wait, what?”
“I don’t think you need to take any extreme measures.” Natasha squeezed Sam’s arm. “It sounds like you all have something very important in common. Don’t you, Sam?”
Sam groaned and claimed the Victorian excuse for furniture for their party of three. It was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked, especially with Troy virtually in his lap. Which was worth it, but still.
“That’s why you joined.” Abed’s face underwent an entire dawn and sunrise. “That makes sense. It’s exactly as misguided as our motivation, which narratively justifies rewarding our behavior when we win you over.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Shirley said, apparently content that if Abed had worked it out, it was a done deal.
Her logic wasn’t terrible. Abed was especially adorable when he felt he’d solved out a problem. The killer was, Natasha was making almost exactly the same expression.
Sam tipped back into the corner of the couch. Shirley and Annie batted their eyelashes, identically contrite and identically merciless. Troy, fully recovered, patted Sam’s thigh. “Welcome to the group.”
“Yeah…” Sam pulled his phone out. This twisted contraption couldn’t have gotten any comfier with the change in position, but somehow, Sam felt better about it. A lot of his weight was on Troy now. “Who wants to tell Steve and Bucky they might as well come over?”