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Clint and Tony are about seven years old, and they're a pair of nightmare twins. On their own, Phil thinks they'd be alright. Endearing even. Tony is quiet and smart and eager to please, for the most part, with a mop of dark hair and expressive eyes. Phil has to admit he's cute as hell, even down to his high-voiced sarcasm. Clint is more difficult, hyper and belligerent and insecure and clingy by turns, short blond hair sticking up everywhere, blue eyes solemn or sparking with rebellion. But he's still adorable, albeit in a different way than Tony. Alone, Phil could deal with him, no problem, likely in a similar way that he dealt with grown Barton.
But together, they're chaos. As children, their adult selves' friendly back-and-forth is just competitive kid meanness. Clint calls Tony wuss and a nerd and Tony calls Clint stupid and smelly and laughs at him when he can't follow adult conversation the way Tony can.
Clint, for his part, hits and kicks and pulls hair. Bites, even, when things get out of hand. Coulson's had to separate them twice in the last hour, shutting Clint into a bedroom until he can calm down and putting Tony into time out for instigating.
He's never wanted to taze a child so bad in his life--or, ever, really--as when Clint starts sing-songing stupid-head through the bedroom door and Tony shouts "You're the stupid one, Clinton," without leaving his corner.
Phil puts his face in his hand.
"I don't mind killing them," Natasha offers, with a shy smile. Fifteen, maybe, and weirdly awkward in her body even though she--unlike Tony and Clint and Bruce--is still herself, and knows and remembers everything about being Natasha Romanov. "I don't mind that they're children."
Phil's getting to that point, too, especially when Clint escalates to kicking the bedroom door and hollering at Tony to shut up. At least they're destroying Stark property and not SHIELD property. Phil lets it go until he gets honestly worried that Clint's about to hurt himself then gets up to check.
"Cool it," he tells Clint, yanking open the door.
"No fair!" Tony yells, "Clinton is getting out of time out first? He hit me!"
"Don't call me that, asshole!" Phil's a little horrified by Clint's vocabulary at so young an age. He doesn't seem to even register it as a 'naughty' word. It's on the same level as stupid-head for him.
"Clinton Francis Barton," Tony sings gleefully, technically still in his corner.
Clint throws himself at Phil's legs, trying to get past, clawing and swearing. He's a demon child, and Stark is a frightening puppet master. Phil wants to abandon them and go home and go to bed, except he can't leave them with Natasha and Steve--Steve who seems to be seventeen, good looking and serious, and with that troubled look of a kid with too many responsibilities. Slight. It's weird, when he's used to seeing Steve be so large and muscular.
He looks positively shell-shocked by Clint and Tony's behavior. By the way they seem to hate each other, when their adult selves were such good friends.
"Fuck you, Tony!" Clint shrieks, "I hate you!" He's clawing Phil's legs to shit.
"Neener neener neener," Tony yells, and Phil can't believe how childish it is, even for a seven-year-old Tony, "Clinton Clinton Clinton."
Phil contemplates shutting them into separate closets on separate floors, destroying the keys, and then maybe retiring. He's composing a resignation letter in his head when Thor steps past and just hefts Clint, holding him under one arm like a sack of potatoes. "I have him," he says, his voice young but even, his beard barely coming in. Phil can't tell if he's older or younger than Steve, because he's still as fit in this form as he was as an adult. Broad shouldered, and powerful, but baby-faced. If he was a real teenager, he'd probably be on the football team.
Or he'd be the handsome boy who's too cool for sports. His eyes are as communicative as little Stark, even though he's maybe ten years older, but he doesn't even flinch when Clint hits him with a knee, squirming and grunting and yelling "Let me go, dickface! Let me go!"
The whole thing's been upsetting as hell to Bruce, who's maybe a runty two, and teetering around somewhere under Hill's supervision. Phil's actually glad that Hill, who doesn't want anything to do with the satanic duo, has probably taken the toddler-- more tractable even as a pint-size Hulk than the combination of Clint and Tony--to a different floor.
"Even a rage monster in his terrible twos is preferable to you guys," Phil says, and Clint's face twists.
"Screw you!" He snarls, just as Tony yells, "I don't care if you don't like me. You suck."
"Tony!" Steve says, finally having enough. "Be quiet in time out, or you'll be there forever."
"Clint's out of time out."
"Clint's going to have his mouth washed out with soap," Steve says, calm and firm, and even Tony has no answer to that.
"I don't care," Clint says, quieter now that he's realized he can't get out of Thor's grip.
Thor takes him back into the room and sets him firmly on the end of the bed. Holds up a finger, "Silence or I will let Steve do as he promises. Be still for--"
"Seven minutes," Phil says.
"Seven minutes," Thor repeats firmly.
Clint sniffs derisively. Swings his legs to make thump thump thump noises against the bedframe. "That's weak. I'm not scared of time out."
Phil rolls his eyes at the familiar do your worst tone and leaves Thor to it, heading back out and closing the door behind him to collapse onto the couch to watch Steve watch Tony, who looks disinterested in starting back up now that someone's shut Clint up. Maybe now that someone is paying continuous attention to him.
"Sorry," Natasha whispers, sliding onto the couch next to Phil and tucking her feet up the way his niece does, when she wants to talk. He can't tell if Natasha's body language has regressed along with her body, or if she's doing it on purpose, to look more natural. She makes a face, little-girl pouty. "I'm not good with kids."
She's good with Clint, when they're both adults, keeping him in line, keeping him stable, but this Clint--violent and foul mouthed--had thrown Phil, too. "We'll get you all back to normal," he promises.
They'd better. This day alone has aged him ten years. He regrets every single time he's compared looking after his agents to babysitting. Babysitters have it way worse than he does. He can't imagine having to do this for ever. It's horrifying, from the Banner spit-up to the Clint-and-Tony war of lousy behavior.
"Oh god. What if no one goes back? What if we do have to do this every single day?"
Natasha smiles, "Then you would be a good father," she says, and Phil laughs. Because if nothing's put him off fatherhood until now, this day might have done it.
"Well. Maybe. Can I choose my kids? Because I'd choose you and Steve," he says. And maybe have Thor as a nephew. "Maybe Banner. He's a friendly baby." For the most part. When he's not throwing a green tantrum.
He doesn't really expect Natasha to blush at the compliment, but then, she is fifteen, in a way, and as uncomfortable with praise--any sort, no matter how mild--as grown Natasha, and hides it less well now. Phil would laugh, but it seems like the wrong thing, even if it's what he'd normally do. Laughing would send his niece into a sulk, and there's no reason to risk hurting Natasha's feelings just because he's used to her being poised.
Steve says, "We aren't really children. We just... shrank."
"You shrank," Natasha sniffs, but she's smiling. Then she says, "I look so young," and, "I don't have scars."
Phil says, "Oh," because he doesn't know what else to say to that. He'd hug her, but grown Natasha would find it weird, no matter how young and fragile she looks, and she is still Natasha, even with her hair tangled and her lips chapped and her nails bearing chipped polish the way she never would let happen as an adult.
"I'm not big, but I'm not sick," Steve offers, even though it's not quite the same. He puts a hand to his chest like he's confused by his ability to breathe, then shrugs.
They'd be great kids, Phil thinks. He wishes they could grow up like this for real, unharmed and healthy.
-----
Maria is horrified by Barton. Stark is a brat, and manipulative, but Barton, to her surprise, is a violent fucking bully.
At first Banner tripping over all the time makes sense. His head is a third of his body now, after all, and it's not like she has a whole lot of experience with toddlers to know what the average tip-over rate is, but then she catches Barton shoving him, not even gleefully, just full of angry seven year old spite.
She says, "Barton! Don't be naughty!" And god, that's a weird mouthful. Barton seems to clear off, but later she catches him poking Banner with a Lincoln Log--courtesy of Coulson, whose niece has long outgrown them--until he turns green and howls, and then Barton chortles even though he's effectively being pummeled by an indestructible monster.
Hulk is bigger than baby Banner, but only about as big as a six-year old. Heavier, but not as tall as Barton. Maria can actually grab and lift him by the armpits, and hauls him off before he can do irreparable damage.
Before Hulk can become the third in a Barton-Stark-Banner trifecta of terror.
"I'm taking Banner downstairs," she calls, "to a guest floor. It's too noisy for a baby." And doesn't add, and Agent Barton might need to be medicated. "He's stress-Hulking."
"Stupid baby," Barton whispers at Hulk, but it's not like Hulk understands, so Maria lets it go. Lets him be Coulson's problem.
"You're the stupid baby, stupid!" Stark sings, bouncing on the couch. Referring, mercilessly, to a crying jag Barton had gone on when Steve had shouted at him, before realizing that Barton and Stark hadn't retained their memories as well. Stark's been using it as insult-fodder all day, though not nearly as creatively as his adult self would.
"Tell me if you need anything, Coulson!" Maria calls, even though she has no intention whatsoever of coming back, even if the kids set the place on fire.
"Wait!" Coulson says, and it's close to his being professional voice, but Maria can hear the desperate edge of panic he's trying to hide.
Barton throws a handful of Lincoln Logs at Stark and screams, "Jerk face. I hope you die!" and tries to tip the couch. And thankfully doesn't succeed, because Stark could have been in for a serious head injury otherwise.
"Hill!"
Maria grabs the Hulk and makes for the elevator.
Mini-Hulk is still impervious and destructive and so fucking angry, but being two also means his attention span is shot. He forgets why he's upset, then forgets that he is upset and after that it's a matter of two lullabies--or softly sung, outdated top forty pop songs, really, Maria's repertoire of lullabies being somewhat lacking--and a cookie and then he's Bruce Banner again, chubby cheeked and curly haired and looking, actually, like he could be Stark's baby brother.
"Cookie!" He says, holding it out. It's soggy from baby drool. "Cookie cookie."
"Just eat the damn thing, Banner," Maria says, with a sigh. It's not like he understands cursing and he'll be grown again before her vocabulary can do him any damage. She hopes, anyway. Oh god, does she hope.
"I'm the assistant director of SHIELD," she sighs, "and this was not the gig I thought the promotion would land me."
"Cookie cookie." He's not even eating it anymore. Just mussing the damp thing all over his fingers and clothes.
There's a series of thumps from upstairs and she and Banner look up at the same time. "Normally," Maria says, only somewhat apologetically, "I wouldn't leave a man behind." She does feel bad for abandoning Coulson, but not enough to go un-abandon him. At least he has Rogers and Romanov to help. Or Rogers and Thor. Romanov seems as freaked out by the howling and cussing and diaper changing as Maria is pretending not to be.
The thumps get louder and then something crashes to the floor directly overhead. "Oh god, fucking Clint," Maria says, and even if Barton doesn't remember any of this later, she's putting him on every stink duty she can think of, forever.
Banner takes the opportunity of her distraction to wipe cookie on the rug and when she reaches to stop him, glares and holds his breath.
"If you were mine, every time," Maria tries, holding her hands up where he can see them, trying to prevent a Hulk-out, because even if Hulk calms back to Bruce relatively quickly, the change also tends to result in spit-up and there's only so many clothes Maria has in her emergency overnight bag.
Banner hiccups.
"No, no. No Hulk puke, please."
She is not a mother. She is not a mother for a reason, and part of that reason was half-raising her sister throughout their childhoods. She'd had enough of poop and regurgitation and hysterical tantrum crying by the time she was fourteen.
There's a howl, loud enough to reverberate through the floor, and Banner drops his mess of what used to be a chocolate chip cookie. Stares woefully at it, then, when she scoops it up before he can grab it and shove it back in this mouth, shrieks "No. No no NO NO. It's mine!"
And then he turns green. And then he spits up on Maria's second-to-last clean shirt.
-----
"You're ugly," Tony tells Natasha at breakfast, when she shows up dressed like a normal non de-aged teenager, in jeans and a t-shit that might originally be Hill's, proclaiming NY Liberty, and sporting a wristful of jelly bracelets and lipgloss.
"You're an asshole," Clint tells Tony, getting an early start. Phil feels suddenly exhausted again, despite his eight hours of sleep.
Steve says, "Ignore them, you're really pretty," and without his serum-enhanced mass, his half-smile looks bashful and shy instead of confidently friendly. Natasha spins, like a real teenager showing off her outfit, and smiles.
"I felt weird in my own clothes. They looked too grown up. For the body. And they kind of...didn't fit." Steve realizes she's talking about bust and hip size--this Natasha is athlete-slim and still lacking in curves--at the same time that Phil does. They look away, because now they can't look at anything but.
Steve touches his buttons and seems to be considering his own get-up. He's dressed pretty much the same as always, his shirt too baggy now that he's small and gangly again.
"You look fine," Natasha tells him, smiling.
"You look stupid," Clint puts in and shovels Cheerios angrily into his mouth. Phil can't wait until he's an adult again, just so he can thrash him, but Natasha gives him a fond look and pats his head. Clint doesn't even pause, scowling and crunching like he doesn't notice. Phil can't tell if he's having a jealousy fit, or if he just hates the world, and it happens to include Steve at the moment.
"Girl cooties," Tony hisses, then repeats it until Thor picks up the cereal box and hits him with it. Not hard, but enough to scatter Cheerios all over the place. Tony looks stunned, then grins. Clint scowls.
"You're going to be in so much trouble," he hisses, not gloatingly but like he's honestly warning Thor of impending danger. He shoots a meaningful look at Phil, that Thor's probably supposed to interpret as some kind of caution.
"Just eat your cereal," Steve says. The weary patience is all at odds with Steve's youth, with his un-square jaw and bony frame--more awkward even than in the 'before' photos Phil's seen. He looks like some kind of overtaxed teen father, and it makes Phil feel achingly guilty that he has to be dealing with the monstrous brats at all, even though he knows that Steve is still Captain Steve Rogers underneath that skinny-kid exterior, and there's not a lot that Captain Steve Rogers can't handle.
Natasha sits down next to him and smiles and rests her chin in her palm while she stirs her coffee with her other hand. She looks like she should be heading off to school. Phil knows, to an extent, what her real adolescence had been like and wishes he could send her off to school, with her arms full of books and her schedule full of dance classes and softball and maybe even cheerleading, if the tumbling still appeals to her.
Instead he has to say, "Checkups at SHIELD. As soon as you're ready. Put Stark and Barton in a sack if you have to."
"I have handcuffs," Natasha offers, "But only the one pair."
-----
At seven, Tony is already addicted to caffeine and condescension. Everything goes better if they let him have a few sips of coffee now and then and ignore the bratty way he talks down to everybody, rolling his eyes when no one responds to his observations about--anything really. Science gaps in the cartoons they'd put on in medical's waiting room, stupid equipment in medical, bad bedside manner. He uses adult words, and it's disconcerting as hell, except that unlike grown Tony he uses them to impress instead of annoy, watching Phil's eyes, the nurses' eyes, the doctor's eyes, for signs of approval as he finishes his diatribes.
"Stable and seven," The doctor announces with a shrug. "Same as yesterday. He's bright and way ahead of his age, intellectually anyway, but we knew that."
"I'm a genius," Tony shares, shyly, and beams as he's handed a lollipop for his trouble. Phil's never seen lollipops in SHIELD's medical facility, and it's weird that the staff have them on hand all of a sudden. He doesn't ask.
Clint, at seven, is addicted to sugar but everything goes worse if they let him have any. He's either sensitive to it or to the food dyes, or something, but he's even more aggressive and hyper after Hill lets him have Oreos and a soda while she watches him in the waiting room.
Phil feels like he's about to have a domestic dispute. With Hill. Honey, we agreed healthy snacks only, against, But dear, you gave -Stark- coffee. If he wasn't balding already, this would probably have done it.
Where Tony basked in the attention of medical--more nurses than necessary coming over to 'help' and pat his unruly mop--Clint goes sullen and tells lies. Compulsively. He scowls, but takes the lollipop he's given at the end and Phil would protest, but on top of a roll of Oreos and neon colored soda, he figures what's the difference. They're screwed anyway.
"Don't tell me they have behavioral problems," Phil says as Clint exits and Natasha comes in, "I know they have behavioral problems." He feels weirdly shamed and guilty, like he's a bad father.
"You've had them for three days, Agent," the doctor says with a smile, "You can't have screwed them up already."
"What Clint and Tony need," Natasha says, accepting the paper gown she's handed and waiting for Phil to leave, "Is a good smack a piece."
"That's cultural difference talking," Phil says, a little horrified, "I didn't teach her that."
-----
Taking Romanov shopping is the weirdest girls' day out ever. She looks and moves fifteen, but when Hill forgets she isn't and talks down to her, the Black Widow is suddenly there, half-dressed in the change room of the juniors department and deadly as ever.
Hill tosses her hands up and leaves her to it, and as she steps out of the fitting area, someone asks, "Would your daughter like to try on a different size?"
"My--What? No, I think my niece is fine."
Assistant Director bullshit. If this was a top-security level SHIELD job, then Fury could damn well do it.
-----
"This body would be healthy enough to join the Army," Steve observes, later, "I'm not big, but I'm in as good shape as when I was. I could--I'd never have needed the serum. Everything would have been different."
"You'd be dead by now, for one," Natasha tells him, teenager-blunt. Phil's still not sure whether it's a put on or not. There's moments where even Thor acts strangely adolescent. Phil half expects him to join a death metal band or come home with tattoos or something. He and Steve have formed some sort of teen boy alliance that's nothing like their adult relationship, spending hours not talking but doing strange things like attempting half-hearted tricks on a ratty skateboard that Phil thinks is adult Clint's, but may well be Tony's.
His team is half tantrum-prone, and half sulky teenager. And he doesn't know which is worse, because Steve and Natasha and Thor know that they aren't supposed to be this age, or this size or acting like this.
Natasha traces a ballet move, one arm curved gracefully over her head for a moment as she dips, then smiles, "If I stay like this? Then I'll grow up and become a dancer instead."
Phil feels rotten for wishing them back to normal.
-----
Maria starts to realize that the problem is that Barton has negative amounts of emotional control, and the payoff is too good for Stark, who doesn't care if the attention he gets is negative or positive, so long as it's attention.
It's a combination made in hell.
"You gave Barton the chocolate and the sugar water, you deal with him," Coulson snaps, and she'd pull rank except that the situation is already too weird without making it all SHIELD on top of everything. If orders were at play here, she'd order to Barton to stop pushing Banner over--the resulting Hulk-out is hilarious to him and even to Stark, and the upset-baby-puking met with body-excretion-obsessed squeals of "Sick!" and "Gross!" and laughter.
She's about to snap back, you're the one who shrank the kids, Honey, when Thor and Rogers wade in and grab the little bastards, leaving Hulk to smash blocks and Legos and hiccup upsettingly.
"Stupid Hulk," Barton taunts, and Maria is sure Thor is about to do something they'll all regret, but he just holds Barton with his feet off the ground while Rogers releases the less-violent Stark so he can sit down and baby-talk the Hulk into complacency. He and Thor are like every boy Maria had been in love with at school, rolled into one. Into two. Handsome and patient and good with kids.
"Bart-on, Bart-on, isn't very smart-on," Stark sings, while Barton's incapacitated. Maria expects Barton to have another temper fit--she's glad it's Banner who's the Hulk, tendency to spit-up aside--but he's well on his way to sugar crash and instead of having an outburst, Barton's face just crunches into silent, bitter rage.
Rogers says, "Tony. That isn't nice," at the same time that Coulson says, "I could have been an accountant. I was always good with numbers."
"If you keep picking on Barton, you're going to time-out," Maria warns, in her, this is not a request, Agent voice.
Stark isn't any more fazed by it than when he's his grown self.
"No fair. Clint's picking on BruceHulk!" The way they've intellectualized the man-monster problem is kind of adorable. Maria doesn't let it deter her.
"Barton is in trouble, too."
"He started it!" Barton insists, blatantly lying. She's on to him, the little monster. Even Steve is on to him, face troubled by the realization of how mean one of his teammates is, in pint-size form.
"Bruce is two years old," Steve says, all underage dad, his tone full of Captain America authority but in that higher, younger timbre, "even if he started it--and he didn't--you should know better."
"You. Should. Know. Better," Stark echoes, from across the room, tucked behind furniture and invisible.
Maria thinks of torture. Of all the ways she could and has been put up against pain. Most of them seem pleasant, by comparison to this. Extended solitary confinement, for one, sounds like a damn vacation at the moment.
Coulson must be thinking along the same lines, because he says, "I am going to go into the bathroom and drown myself. In the sink, if I have to. If when you come in, I'm not dead, please finish me off."
"You're not getting out of this that easy," Maria says, "I'm covered in Hulk vomit, so if you're going to haul yourself off the mortal coil, you're going to do it after you've footed my dry cleaning bill."
"Fair enough," Coulson sighs, as Thor sets a quieter Barton back on his feet and the kid wails at being put down.
-----
The terrible two and the one in his terrible twos set each other off again after dinner, and Phil would love to have help--other than Hill's, because she's getting downright pissed about the whole situation--but can't quite make himself call Steve and Natasha back in from where they've retreated to one of the balconies to eat in peace. He can see them out there sharing a pizza box and a blanket. Natasha laughing in a way that she didn't as an adult, face flushed from the cold, the baby-fat left in her cheeks dimpling.
She looks like a kid, and Steve looks like a boy trying to be his father in his too-broad-in-the-shoulder shirts and his age and era inappropriate suspenders. The nerd and the dancer, Phil thinks and smiles. They look like kids playing at being adults, but really it's the other way around--they're adults playing at being young and undamaged and innocent.
Thor nudges him and Phil looks up to see a phone being shoved into his hand. "Take a picture," Thor tells him, "I would show Jane. She has shown me photos of her youth, but she has not seen how I looked when I was six hundred years old."
Phil edits that to sixteen in his mind and says, "This is probably some kind of security breach," but takes the picture anyway. Jane has clearance. Enough to see Thor with a fuzzstache, anyway. "You can't tell her any details."
"I will not," Thor says, and smiles, young and bright. In a band, he'd be a drummer, Phil thinks. Or a folksy guitarist.
-----
Medical calls and gives him the results of the earlier check-ups. Everything is fine, everyone is normal--for the relevant values of 'normal' anyway, which at the moment mean, indifferentiable from any other kid or teenager. There’s no sign, medically, that any of them are anything other than they appear to be.
"That's either a good sign or a bad sign," Phil tells Hill, ignoring the indignant cussing as Thor hauls Clint off Tony again. The stability of the change could be a sign of the chaos being permanent, which might mean they really would have to find a dance school for Natasha and talk to Steve about if he still really wants a military career. It might mean putting Tony and Clint into extensive therapy, and god knew how they would explain all this to Asgard.
"At least it's a no impending threat sign," Hill says, collapsing across the table. Bruce is asleep on the sofa, where they can keep an eye on him and deter any mischief the others might attempt. "I need real food," she groans, "I need coffee. I need adult company. No offense, Agent."
"None taken." He's just glad Steve and Natasha aren't there to hear it, because they are adults, as much as they don't look it. As much as they don't act it, now and again, for brief moments at a time.
There's a soft sound. Natasha laughing. The quiet rise and fall of Steve telling a story. Hill looks up sharply and Phil jerks upright in similar alarm.
It's been days since he's heard a quiet or soft anything.
"I can hear myself think," Hill says.
"Oh god, they're dead," Phil says.
-----
They aren't.
Bruce is still asleep on the sofa, drooling, his whole hand jammed into his mouth, and he knows Natasha and Steve are alright, because he can hear their low voices.
Tony he finds sprawled among Legos, under the kitchen table, sleepy-eyed and quietly building god knew what, but it involved pulleys, the television remote and half a box of tinker toys. It doesn't look dangerous and he's peaceful, so Phil leaves him alone. It's his remote, anyway, technically. He can take it apart if he wants to.
Which leaves Thor and Clint, both of whom he finds with Steve and Natasha, in front of the television. Thor has popcorn in his hair, and lies sprawled on the carpet, snoring, and Clint is curled into a small ball in an armchair, crashed out from too much sugar, Steve's socked feet propped up on the armrest near him.
"Everything okay?" Steve asks, quiet but not a whisper. Phil tries not to notice the way Natasha is snugged against his side, and tries not to glare at them like they're real teenagers who need supervision.
"Unless Hill has a break-down," he says.
"I have darts that can incapacitate a grown man for two hours," Natasha says, and Phil appreciates the offer, but he's not about to needlessly drug children. No matter how tempting. He's about to say so when his phone goes off.
It's medical again.
Clint shifts and mutters at the disturbance and Steve stretches to pat him with a foot until he stills. Phil smiles and picks up.
Listens.
And then he gives himself a minute to think about Natasha and ballet and Steve's healthy youth and even about Clint and Tony and the obvious problems they already have at seven years old. Of Bruce, who might have been able to sidestep a whole mess of horrors. Then he says, "Medical thinks they've found a solution."
They won't get to grow up like this. He hadn't really thought it a possibility.
"It turns out, we won't have an intergalactic diplomacy crisis on our hands after all," he says, and nods at Thor as he snorts in his sleep.