Avengers short fic: "Teams Don't Need Matching T-Shirts" (PG)

[hsavinien]

Title: Teams Don't Need Matching T-Shirts

Author: H. Savinien
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Characters are all the property of Marvel Comics, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and their respective actors. I claim nothing and gain only amusement from the creation of this derivative fanwork.
Wordcount: 1,000
Summary: Steve finds appropriate t-shirts for each of his teammates.

***

Secretly, Steve finds t-shirts with mottoes on them hilarious. There are just so many different ones and some places will print drawings and things you make up yourself and there are even shops on the internet that will sell the ones you make up for a percentage of the profits. He ends up setting up his own little store on one of those sites, with Miss Lewis’s help. Miss Lewis says his shop is unironically adorable and buys a light blue shirt with a New York skyline sketched roughly on it, but he swears her to secrecy about its provenance. (Steve forwards the profits to a couple of schools near his old neighborhood, since he doesn’t really need the money.)

One of the things he paid attention to in the SHIELD briefing packets he was given was everyone's birthdays. The Avengers don’t really celebrate birthdays, besides Tony’s (but only because that’s an official Stark Industries function, which isn't the same). Thor takes it upon himself to celebrate something with a huge party at least once a month, so there’s nearly always ice cream and stray sparklers around, but nobody bothers much with presents. Steve wants to let his teammates know that he cares for them though, so he leaves packages outside their rooms on their birthdays, like his mom did for him when she could manage it. They’re just t-shirts, nothing fancy or expensive, but Steve picks out things that he thinks they’ll like.

Natasha comes down to breakfast one morning smirking and wearing a shirt says “Also, I can kill you with my brain” instead of her usual green pajama shirt. Tony laughs and calls for Jarvis to set up the TV to marathon Firefly for the next week’s after-dinner hangout time.

Tony himself layers a gray shirt with an orange and red fireball and the words “Engineering: it’s like math, but louder” on top of one of his beat up black AC/DC shirts. Clint high-fives him and suggests they go work on loud math on the range with some new explosive arrows.

Clint’s shirt doesn’t show up around the Tower until several weeks after his birthday, and he’s removed the sleeves so he can be bare-armed, as usual. The plain gray text – “Be the trouble you want to see in the world” – almost fades into the plain gray shirt as he stretches and twists with Bruce in their evening yoga routine.

Bruce gets a shirt with glow-in-the-dark cat flying through space with a jetpack and “Science is a verb now” and it makes him smile every time he looks down at the glow-in the dark stars peeking out at the collar of his button-up. The first time he sees it, Thor demands an explanation for the dearth of jetpack-wearing felines associated with SHIELD and the afternoon is full of increasingly ridiculous attempts to convince him that there aren’t actually any on Earth, as far as they know.

Thor’s shirt says “This person accepts high fives from strangers” because he does, under the impression (probably fostered by Miss Lewis) that it's a sort of warrior's salute. The shirt even has a little lightning bolt on it, which Steve thinks is perfect. Thor shows it off proudly to everyone they meet, accepts several hundred high fives, and Steve has to persuade him to wash it every three or four wearings to save them all from too much royal Asgardian funk.

Steve gets a shirt for himself too, one with a longer quote. It reads,

It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.

He only wears it when he’s feeling a little down. The extra soft material is comforting and The Lord of the Rings had been one of his favorite things that SHIELD (or at least, an anonymous SHIELD agent) had introduced him to in the early days after he woke up. Tolkien…Steve read up on Tolkien after he finished the book. Tolkien had been there too.

And somehow, everybody else is just there, helping the darkness pass a little more quickly. He and Bruce make some of the team dinners together, with Tony commenting from the peanut gallery, chopping things grumpily, and whining about doing work that he has machines specifically designed to do. Natasha teaches him some judo throws and Thor offers himself as a practice dummy for them, so they spend afternoons with Thor flying into the mats and laughing like crazy about it. Clint joins him on early morning runs around the city, claiming that he's getting old and out of shape. Steve doesn't have to slow down much for him and still gets a good workout. They watch all of Firefly, which Steve likes a lot, even if a couple of the episodes leave him feeling like he's been punched in the gut, then move on to Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Steve looks at his team. Natasha curls in an armchair with Clint draped over the back of it sniggering at the Argument Clinic. Bruce is on the couch next to Tony, messing around with a Rubik's cube, eyes on the screen and a little smile on his face. Tony plays with a tablet computer, but laughs at the jokes anyway. Thor, with his sweetheart Doctor Foster curled half on top of him on the other couch, keeps laughing a couple seconds behind everyone else, but Steve figures that's just the translation time between Asgardian and Earth humor. Steve leans back into his own chair, crosses his legs, and grins, as much at his friends as the bizarre things a bunch of British fellas are doing on the television.