Chapter Text
The Avengers’ Prank War had initially been a way for the group to have fun, to let loose and become closer with one another after the exploits of having to fight aliens on the daily. It had, at the start, been based off the concept of every man for themselves. Tony, as the engineer of the team and also given the fact that he owned the building (which gave him an unfair advantage because he practically lived and breathed the blueprints of the Tower), thrashed them all by far after only a week or so of pranking. Steve and Bucky had subsequently decided to team up in order to get back at him. Unfortunately, it had devolved into different alliances because Tony claimed he needed a partner as well and had roped Peter into the whole thing. Clint, naturally, was by himself.
Most of the time, Steve and Bucky were in a battle against Tony & Peter. But occasionally….well, occasionally they needed the help of the younger boy with his cavalier “gen z” approach to life and fresh ideas to settle disputes between the pair of super soldiers.
Which had been why Steve had called Peter when he was in class one day to determine what Steve and Bucky’s next prank against Clint would be. Steve had thought it would have been a genius idea to add bleach to Clint’s shampoo so then he would emerge from the shower with bleach blond hair and would have looked like some surfer dude, but Bucky had had a different plan.
He’d brought up the idea of filling the vents of the Tower with invisible webbing that Peter had made for his use in battles — Peter had so many different kinds of webbing that it was sort of ridiculous. Then, when Clint inevitably went in the vents (because the man was obsessed with using the vents as a means of transportation — some spy thing, Steve thought, but had never quite been able to comprehend) it would, of course, trap Clint in the vents, stuck and unable to move. They would get FRIDAY to take a picture and it would be perfect blackmail.
“You know the prank war?” Steve had asked Peter. “We were thinking, how best to get back at Clint? Do we fill the vents with those invisible webbing that Spiderman gave us the other day so he gets stuck up there or do add bleach to his shampoo so he comes out with platinum blond hair?”
Steve had given him the two options, proposing Bucky’s first and hoping Peter would forget about it, and then his.
The kid had paused, to consider, and then had said: “Definitely the first one.”
“Damn,” Steve sighed. “That was Bucky’s idea. I should have known you’d agree with him.”
Steve’s best friend and the Spider Kid, after all, did have a fascinating relationship. They always spoke in Russian to each other and often did sparring practise to prepare for missions. Steve had once asked Bucky why he was close to the kid, and Bucky had just shrugged and said he was likeable. Everyone liked Peter.
Steve had then proceeded to have a debate with Peter about the prank war as a whole, and had promptly been told to hang up — the boy had sounded annoyed that Steve had called in class, and Steve mentally vowed not to do it again. Tony would probably go berserk — in one of the briefings they’d had, Tony had specifically told the Avengers not to call Peter whilst he was at school.
He shrugged. Oh well, it was done now. No use worrying about the wrath of Peter’s dad-like mentor. Steve had a plan to enact. He sought out Bucky, who he found in the Common Room alone, watching some kind of TV show that Steve didn’t recognise.
“You won,” Steve grudgingly told the man, and Bucky’s face lit up into a smile.
“I knew the kid would choose mine,” His best friend shoved him lightly, a friendly gesture.
“Yeah, yeah,” Steve rubbed at the back of his neck. He elected not to tell Bucky that Peter had called him ‘the coolest’ because he really didn’t need that kind of hit to his ego when he was already down from losing their contest for which prank to pull.
“So…” Bucky said, switching off the TV with the remote by his side and sending him a meaningful glance. “Shall we?”
“I think we shall,” Steve’s mouth quirked into a smile. “To the equipment room!”
They fetched a couple of canisters each of the supposedly invisible webbing and then paused, staring at the ceiling.
“We can’t put it in all the vents,” Bucky realised. “It will have to be one bit, and the best place… Where does Clint enter the vent, there must be one specific spot…”
“I have never seen him actually get in the vent,” Steve frowned. He knew that the guy went in the vent system a lot, but he’d never seen it happen before his eyes.
It was a dilemma. Neither of them knew where it was best to place the webbing so that Clint would get stuck. Natasha walked past at that moment, completely ignoring what they were doing with the webbing on the way to the shared common room.
“Oh—hey, Nat,” Steve said, and she stopped and glanced at them, not seeming to care that they held webbing canisters in their hands. “Can you give us a hand with something?”
Bucky, who was fluent in Russian, took the reins from there, in case Clint was somewhere listening in — again, you never knew anything with those spies. Steve couldn’t translate completely, but he knew enough words to pick up some bits and made some educated guesses to figure out what Bucky was saying.
“Не могли бы вы сказать нам, где Клинт входит в вентиляционные отверстия на потолке?” Bucky asked.
Steve’s translation of that was: Can you tell us where Clint enters the ceiling vents?
Natasha paused, and Steve thought, for a frightening second, that she might protest against the idea of trapping Clint in the vents, or whatever she thought they were planning on doing. But instead, she shrugged and then replied to Bucky in Russian.
“А, да, он обычно проходит через общую комнату. Легкий доступ.”
Steve had been able to figure out Bucky’s Russian, but Natasha had spoken so quickly that Steve hadn’t even picked up a word of it. He was completely in the dark, but Bucky had understood.
He nodded. “Спасибо, Нат.”
Thanks, Nat. Steve understood that much at least.
Nat stared at them both for a long moment and then turned away back on her initial path, shaking her head at them both, not wanting to know any more than that.
“Uh, English, please, for the person who speaks no Russian?” Steve requested, glancing from Bucky to Nat as she walked away.
“By the common room, that's his entrance,” Bucky muttered, glancing up to the vents. He lowered his voice. “Nat says it’s easy access there.”
“So, what, we put the webbing in the vent closest to the common room?” Steve asked, and then shook his head almost instantly as the words came out. “Wait, no, extended further into the vent, so he doesn’t realise until he’s already stuck up there.”
“Otherwise he could just pull himself out when he realises his hand is stuck,” Bucky agreed, and they went on their way to the Avengers common room to locate the vent.
Steve stopped midway, glancing down at the canisters of webbing and realising a potential flaw in their plan. “FRIDAY, where’s Clint?”
If Clint saw them with the webbing, he’d know instantly that they were up to something, and Steve didn’t want their plan being spoiled. FRIDAY kept a track on all of their locations, so it made the most sense to ask her for Clint’s location.
“Clinton is currently in the training room with Natasha,” FRIDAY clarified for them, and Steve breathed a sigh of relief. There wasn’t going to be any trouble from Clint, then.
Bucky smiled slightly. “She’s keeping him occupied.”
“That’s our girl,” Steve commented, and with that, they’d reached the common room. Neither of them had really ever noticed the vent entrance so close to the common room, but they paused. Both Bucky and Steve stared up at the vent, both realising that it wasn’t quite going to be as easy as they’d initially thought. Steve wondered if Bucky was thinking the same as him — that it would have been a better idea to stick with the other plan and just dye Clint’s hair.
One of them was going to have to wriggle into the vent in order to spread the webbing out. The climbing up there wasn’t the problem, because both of them could do pull ups. It was…well, it was the more pressing issue of fitting in the vent.
“I suppose it will have to be me,” Bucky shot him a smirk after some silent deliberation. “Your shoulders are too broad.”
They weren’t exactly scrawny, either of them, but the super serum had made Steve’s shoulders so broad that he could hardly fit anywhere, and certainly not the vent. It would be more likely that he’d get stuck just from trying to crawl into the vent, and that would just be plain embarrassing.
So Steve reached up to pull the vent cover off, and then Bucky pulled himself up and slid in.
“Okay,” Bucky mumbled, his voice tinny as it was through the metal of the vent. “Pass me a cylinder.”
It didn’t take long. Peter had designed the canisters well enough that the webbing was easy to move (he needed it to be like that, to put in his web canisters), despite how sticky it was and Bucky had brought disposable gloves with him so it was easy to spread. Steve stood and watched, and passed him cylinder after cylinder. They’d decided about five cylinders would be enough to encase Clint in the webbing — probably overkill, but just to be safe.
When Bucky was done, he wriggled out and swung down, putting the vent cover back on as he clung to the ceiling and then fell to the floor. He’d dropped all of the empty canisters back down to Steve, who’d deftly caught them all. Bucky rubbed at his shoulders, wincing from how tight the vent had been, but they both stared at the closed vent, knowing their handiwork was done and the prank was set.
“What now?” Steve asked, shooting a glance at his counterpart.
“Now…” Bucky smiled evilly. “We wait.”
Because god had clearly blessed them, it took effect at the most opportune moment. They were all collected in the common room, Steve in the kitchen cooking a meal for the rest of them, the others doing various activities, he didn’t really know, he was focused on making his chicken casserole. It had only been several hours since they’d laid the trap, which was testament to the fact that Clint could only go so long before he got the urge to go in the vents.
“What the FUCK?” came a yell from the vents, and everyone in the room except Natasha jumped. Steve almost dropped his casserole in shock, but quickly recovered and a small smile worked its way onto his mouth, before he forced it to fall off his face to try and avoid being seen as the culprit. Bucky did the same thing — adjusting back to his poker face with ease.
“Did anyone else hear that?” Bruce asked, blinking slightly. He and Tony had been on a lab binge for most of the afternoon, which was the reason no-one had seen them, but it made the scientist fairly sleep-deprived and clearly he thought he was hallucinating.
“Barton?” Tony called out to the ceiling.
“PETER!” came another angry yell from the vents.
All eyes turned to Peter, who looked up in alarm. The only person whose activity Steve had noted was in fact Peter, because the boy was busy eating out of a tub of ice cream with a spoon, despite the fact they only had half an hour until dinner. Steve didn’t mind, because he knew the kid needed extra calories to live, much like himself, but really. Ice cream? Before dinner?
The teenager cast his gaze to Steve, silently asking the obvious question — had he done the prank that he’d spoken to Peter on the phone about yet? Steve gave an almost imperceptible nod and Peter put his spoon into his ice cream tub decisively.
“What’s the matter, Clinton?” Tony yelled back to him, always ready to protect his kid from harm. The billionaire’s eyes danced between Peter and the ceiling as if unsure of what to do, what to say.
Steve crossed his arms and called out, “FRIDAY, do you have visuals of this…situation?”
They needed their blackmail material after all.
FRIDAY pulled up a camera of inside the vents, which exposed the view of Clint to them. He was covered in the webbing, his hair being pulled at every angle with it, and his hands covered in the stuff. He looked like he’d been put through a vat of glue.
“Someone—put—webbing—in—my—damn—vent!” Clint’s answer was delivered to them in little pieces, as clearly he was struggling to get out of the web trap. Steve covered his mouth briefly to smile slyly behind it. Their prank had gone well, and he sent a secret thumbs up movement to Bucky across the room.
Tony looked actually offended at the idea that Peter had pulled a prank without him. He clearly hadn’t twigged the fact that it had been Steve and Bucky.
“I thought we were a team,” Tony muttered, staring at Peter, his face the epitome of a broken man.
“It wasn’t me!” Peter protested, eyes wide. He wasn’t lying, and Steve could see on Tony’s face that he believed the kid as it shifted from a suspicious expression to an accepting one.
“PETER!” Clint yelled again. “Get—me—out of—here!”
“I didn’t do this!” Peter yelled up to the vent, then went back to his tub of Stark Raving Hazelnuts as though he didn’t really mind whether Clint was left up there. That was fair enough, Steve understood. Clint and Peter had a bitter rivalry in the Prank War, known as subsection C. A while back, Clint had somehow put green slime all over Peter’s room and he’d subsequently had to go to school wearing a suit. The kid had had a truly horrendous day after everyone saw him wearing the Armani, and Peter had never quite gotten over that.
“Votes to leave him up there indefinitely?” Tony asked, immediately putting his own hand up. Peter put his hand up too, focused on getting a chunk out of his ice cream. Steve wasn’t even sure if he was listening to the conversation properly, but hey.
Before the vote could be counted properly, Bruce said something.
“Hold on,” Bruce mumbled, his sleep-deprived eyes clocking a realisation. “If Peter didn’t do this…then who did?”
All of the Avengers (minus the obvious Clint—and Thor, who was busy on a space mission), glanced around at each other, and then Steve coughed. Everyone’s eyes flickered around to Steve, and then to Bucky as they remembered who Steve’s partner in crime always was.
“You look so surprised,” Bucky drawled. “Watch your backs. We’re in business, and we’re only getting started.”
Tony looked downright horrified, but his face was conflicted between being relieved that Peter hadn’t acted without him and also being terrified of the idea of Steve and Bucky pulling semi-decent pranks.
They did get Clint out. Eventually. After, oh…maybe a couple of hours.