The Runaways

by: muaaimoi

Summary- Basically a street kid au. There are issues and avengers but they all turn out okay anyway. Also, stony and Thorki, Phlint and Brutasha, because damn it, just because.

1.

They don't talk about the past.

In fact, as far as most of them are concerned, they don't really have one. It's better that way, they're all full of sharp, jagged edges and somehow, it's easier to avoid sore spots when you don't know what they are. Not that it keeps them from going off anyway. For kids like them, too young, too smart, way too independent. Far too alone, if at least not as lonely, not anymore. They're all still far too... broken. Fragile really.

Sometimes it takes nothing at all, and they snap. Raw wounds open for the world to see.

Sometimes Bruce will flip out, break things and shout about monsters and his dad. Sometimes, Clint will fill up the dart boards of their hole of an apartment with everything he can get his hands on, knives, thin strips of wire, broken arrow heads, he'll just throw things, anything, and he'll do it for hours. He'll be quiet for days after, silent, not like their quirky, sarcastic little Clint in the least.

Sometimes Natasha mutters to herself in Russian, kicks the crap out of their overly patched up sand bag. Steve doesn't blame her, he does the same, only sometimes instead he'll haul up in a corner and draw. He won't move for hours, not until he has to or he's finished, the thing is, he's never finished.

Thor does that too, the not moving for hours bit, not the drawing. He has this thing in his wallet, Steve's pretty sure it's a picture. And he'll stare at it, silent. A silent Thor is a heart wrenchingly sad Thor. Tony is the weirdest of them all, and that's because he does the normal things. Tony get's drunk, he goes out finds some one to fuck stupid, or someone to fuck him. Steve doesn't know. All he knows is that sometimes Tony disappears for a few hours and comes back smelling like sex and booze.

No one asks. This thing between them, this feeling of home, of certainty, it's too new to be trusted, too nice. It's best not to mess with it. So no one asks, even when they're dying to know. Especially not when they're dying to know. It's not worth the risk.

Steve doesn't know how they all fell on together. Not exactly.

He was the first though. He's mildly sure of that. Him, and then he'd run into Tony on the subway. They'd started to talk. Or rather Tony had, and then basically never stopped. Steve had waited, nervous, the first few days. Waited for Tony to go, to have somewhere to be, remember he had someone who worried. To ask. But Tony never did. So that happened.

They were the first. Not necessarily together, not really. Just not so apart, not so alone anymore. They didn't have anywhere to call home, they just... had each other, sometimes. They stayed on the same subway lines, took turns sleeping on each other. Helped each other out anyway they could. Tony knew this guy who'd let them shower at a gym, Happy, the guy, even let him use some machines. Steve introduced Tony to Dr. Erskine, he gives them money for moving medical supplies. It keeps them fed.

They run into Clint and Natasha one day at central park. They're performers. Clint spears an apple with an arrow on Natasha's head while she back flips off a tree. It's a pretty cool act. They're close the way he and Tony are. It takes them longer to warm up to each other though. They're weary of each other, of the easy way they click, but theirs a pull to the feeling. For a while, they orbit around each other.

But they come together eventually. They just fit. Edges aligning like puzzle pieces.

Steve learns to trust that Clint will never miss the way Natasha does, so sometimes it's his head an apples speared on. And sometimes it's all three of them, Natasha teaches him martial arts, and their free for all brawls and pretty and scripted. Tony makes him and Clint take off their shirts , Steve's embarrassed at first, but the money Tony collects goes up after that. Then again, Steve's not sure how much of that is seeing two shirtless guys, and how much it's just Tony getting better at getting people to cough up money.

Tony's handsome, and so easily charismatic, basically charming, people just want to give him things, all the time. Steve knows. He's been to flea markets with him, and Tony always walks away with some free stuff. Steve doesn't know how, but he teaches Natasha to do it too. It's a useful skill, but one he's no good at. He sucks at lying, always feels like a hippocrate with false words in his mouth. So instead he learns to be personable, distracting people with a pretty, engaging smile so Clint can rob them blind.

It's called team work. Or at least that's what he tells himself when he begins to feel bad for pulling a con. No matter how Clint and Natasha prefer to call them ops. They're not. But it's not like they have much of a choice. Being a street kid is hard, they're too young to beg for petty cash, if anyone realizes their homeless they're more likely to call child services than help them out. And he doesn't even like to think of the alternatives, falling into a gang, prostituting themselves, compared to that stealing is better, much better. Besides, it's hard to complain about doing anything that helps them stay together.

Natasha's the one who finds Bruce. She just shows up with him one day, their camping out on a play ground because it's oppressively, awfully hot, and they need all the water the water fountain has to offer. Bruce is wearing a sweater. Steve catches the hint of bruises on his arms when he lays down and knows better than to ask. But he's one of them after that, so he watches over him when he falls asleep on a bench in the subway, and he makes sure to keep an eye on him when he goes picking fights. Bruce is a berserk. You wouldn't think of it looking at him, delicate and frail, patched up glasses perched precociously on his face, his huge green hoodie that swamps him. But he never goes down. Steve has watched him take on guys twice his size with something akin to jealousy and he never needs to step in. He wants to, sometimes, but he's pretty sure Bruce needs it, needs it the way Steve needs to lift weights at the gym some times, and the way Clint gets twitchy if he hasn't hit a bulls eye in a few hours, or Natasha when she hasn't sparred with anyone. And Tony, chronically tinkering with a beat up laptop he magically makes work even though Steve hasn't seen him charge it once.

Bruce is also the reason he finds out Tony's smart.

Not that he hadn't known. Tony talks too well, and too fast, he's too quick with ideas, brilliant and stupid ones alike, but he's never not witty and it's impossible not to know that Tony's smart. But listening to him and Bruce talk about particles and science stuff that doesn't even sound like it's in English? That's something else.

Somehow that's how they meet Thor.

Tony and Bruce had dragged him to the library to talk more science stuff and they'd run into Thor, sulking by the door. They had gone for pizza, Thor had treated them. They finished four pies between them.

He'd just never quite left after that. Thor was good for food, he'd leave for a while and come back with arm loads of junk food, pop tarts, little Debbie snacks, even coffee. Great coffee too if the way Tony promised to have his first born was anything to go by. Clint had seconded that. Natasha had simply told him that he'd never had to worry about enemies again. Bruce had sworn his loyal servitude to Thor's kingdom. Steve wasn't that big a fan of coffee, but his friends ran on the stuff so he kept that opinion to himself.

Even if Thor had clearly been read one too many ye old Harlequin romances as a child, with the way he spoke. At least that was Clint's theory, anyway. Steve personally thought Thor was a foreigner who learned English off historical dramas on tv. That had been Tony's theory, and just slightly more reasonable than Clint's. It wasn't like anyone was about to ask Thor. They knew better.

Still, that was a good day, a fond memory.

It was when all of then clicked, One became two, Two became four, five sort of happened and one giant makes six. They were family.

So when Steve turned sixteen, he'd begged Dr. Erskine to sign off as guarantor for a lease. Tony did something complicated with a computer and suddenly he had ID's and stuff proving he was twenty. So did Thor, but he was suppose to be twenty three, fortunately he looked it, even if he was apparently a year younger than Steve, he was still the biggest one of them all. So that had been a shock. Between them they managed a shitty studio in Brooklyn.

It was home. Their little hole in the wall. Steve was never quite as happy as he was late at night, or maybe that was early in the morning, when they all piled up like puppy's on the mattresses strewn on the floor. It's warm and most of the time it drives away thoughts of screaming, the shriek of metal, and the hellish cold of the ice. Most of the time.

When it doesn't Steve get's up and draws. He's careful to never draw his friends. His new family. He doesn't want to jinx it. It's too new, this home of theirs.

Even if it really was a hole in the wall. The combine kitchen and living room were barely the size of a large bedroom. And the one bedroom in the apartment was really the size of a large closet. Still, it was theirs, better than what they had before.

They had filled up a corner full of work out gear. A punching bag, dumb bells mysteriously procured by Natasha, and Dart boards every where for Clint. There was only one bedroom, which Tony and Bruce had accidentally on purpose taken over. It was full of metal things Tony and Bruce were constantly meddling with. But after the first week Tony had produced a flat screen tv that stole their neighbors cable with out their notice and made everything look like it was about to burst out from the screen.

It turned out they could have nice things. Just as long as they kept the fact to themselves. It's a bad neighborhood.

If the building manager noticed that six teenagers lived there instead of two, well Tony had an awesome reputation for being able to fix anything and make it work better than it had before. Steve and Thor were two huge guys and they were friendly, always willing to lend a hand with heavy lifting. Natasha and Clint were ghosts, no one saw them when they didn't want to be seen and they used the window as a point of entrance just as often as the door. Bruce could play doctor with anything, setting sprains and broken bones with an ease of practice that just made Steve angry at everything. But their neighborhood was poor, insurance was hard to come by, it was a lot easier and cheaper to just get Bruce.

Steve was pretty sure the entire building would rebel if they were ever evicted. Of course one thousand five hundred dollars in rent made sure that almost happened once or twice anyway. They are street kids after all. Happy takes his new paperwork and Steve suddenly has a job, a real one that pays for things. But even with all of that he's always missing a hundred or three. They're used to living hand to mouth so saving is hard. So is remembering other things, like bills.

They have six mouths to feed, the kind of appetites that come from growing bodies always in need of sustenance. They try to hold back as much as they can, but it's hard having money burning a hole in your pocket when your hungry. And they know hungry. Living on the street is rough, some days you can't afford to get on the train, let alone something to eat. Starving sucks, it's something all of them are well aware of.

But they try. Each of them, in their own ways. Some things don't change at all. There's still showering at the gym to conserve water. Sneaking into a fancy building at night to do laundry. Sitting on a drying load in his underwear trying desperately not to look at Tony or Thor who never bother with underwear or Clint whose choice in underwear is embarrassingly see through, at least to Steve, whose a sensible boxers kind of guy.

But there are new things too. Pushing a grocery cart while Tony and Bruce pile up cartons and cartons of eggs. Cost effectiveness they assure him. It isn't until they finish sound proofing the room that he finds out that's what they were doing with the cartons. Jogging early in the morning with Natasha. Refilling their water bottles at the park, silent, but comfortable. Cooking with Thor and Clint, Thor would gladly eat anything you put in front of him, but Clint is always picky when he can afford to be. Steve learns to make amazing omlettes, through sheer repetition if nothing else.

Yes sometimes things are bad, or they're rough and it's hard to deal. But there isn't one of them who hasn't been through it before. The good times are rarer. But at least they happen now.

And then, almost impossibly, some times things are really good, Thor's joined Clint and Natasha in the park, and Tony and Bruce do mysterious technical things that pay well, rents put away and moneys even saved up eventually. They pile up on the mattresses in the living room and watch movies, Steve likes the classics, the wizard of Oz, Movies made way back when that withstand the test of time. Clint loves action flicks eyes glued to the screen to catch every inch of violence. Natasha likes documentaries, they rib her, or they try, pocking fun at Natasha feels a lot like skinny dipping in the amazon rivers, like pushing your luck beyond all common sense. And they watch them willingly enough, it's better than the romantic tragedies Thor favors, he bawls straight through them. Tony is unsurprisingly a science fiction fan, constantly running commentary on what he'd love to make, what he definitely would some day and what he could make ten times better.

Bruce's choices is what they all enjoy the most though, even if they won't admit it. He picks foreign films, no subtitles, and they usually spend most of the movie trying to puzzle out the plot, he's pretty sure he's picked up how to say my love in six different languages, but he's not too sure, and he doesn't want to admit that the romance is the only bit he can ever follow. Still, it's nice. Movie night, all together, wrapped up in each other just as much as their wrapped up in the movie. It's nice.

It's probably too nice. That's why it can't last.

He's walking around Cony Island with Tony when he runs into Bucky. That's when everything changes.

XxX

I'm currently on a Tony stark kick which translates into an avengers kick which ended up as this fic. What do you guys think? I don't think I've never seen tony poor in fanfiction, and it's weird writing him that way, so i figured if i could manage it from steves pov it would help ( It did.). Still I'm thinking three shot? Would anyone read the rest? Is this an awful idea, a good one? What parts did you hate, was there anything you liked? Let me know!