TOMMY: oh ok miss “conglomerate” and “manifestation” ig we’re really pulling out the 5 dollar words tonight
TOMMY: do you really think damian is going to scare me out of the rathole
TOMMY: he can’t even scare me out of the batcave. his own house
He stared at the last message, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Tommy was staying, of course. For a lot of reasons—until they better understood this whole soul-splitting business, it was probably safer to keep he, Wanda, and Billy relatively close together. And then there was the matter of the FOMO he would have if the whole goddamn team moved into Sokovia and he was still out living in New Jersey; there were enough reasons for him to feel more like a guest spot than a team member without adding all your friends are off having fun adventures without you onto the list.
But answering that now felt like a trap, somehow. An admission of something soft that he didn’t want to admit ever, and certainly not now, to Kate of all people. When the entire world moved around you at a snail’s pace, developing some sense of observation was inevitable—and for as dense and up his own ass as Tommy could often be, there were things he noticed, too, like how Kate had been the first to try to make sure he didn’t feel like a visitor or a guest on the team, how she led without asking for her leadership to be recognized, how her presence was loud and demanded their attention and respect, no matter how much she might not want it to. But that was the thing about Kate: once you knew she was in a room, it was hard to look anywhere else. It was what made her their de facto leader and, surely, the reason she’d gone to Sokovia long before the rest of them had even thought about it.
…But he didn’t want her to know any of that. Not from him.
TOMMY: maybe. we’ll see. you know me
TOMMY: can’t stay in one place for too long
TOMMY: not that im ever more than a 6 sec run away if u need me, toots
Or a few knocks, quick and staccato, against the door he’d determined was hers. “Yo, tell me more about my vision board baby self.”
KATE: Well, I am a 10 dollar woman, Zippy.
KATE: You should not be proud of tempting death so casually.
The thing about Tommy was that the only way their little arrangement worked was when Kate breached the limits of her comfort zone. If it were up to him, nothing would ever happen...other than, y’know, the horizontal––sometimes vertical––tango. It was up to Kate to ask the important questions. Normally, she didn’t have a problem with that. She led the Young Avengers with confidence (after Eli messed up so spectacularly), and she had no problems saying the things that needed to be said. With Tommy...it was different. The game of hot potato they played was less fun the longer it went on and the higher the stakes got. She’d started to care about him like nettle...like poison ivy––like she couldn’t touch it––but the roots went all the way down, and she’d built an ecosystem that’d gotten used to him. So, it wasn’t like she could just cut him out.
There was a rap on her door before she could reply to his latest texts. She rolled off her bed to the ground, hissing as her bare feet touched the dawn-chilled stone floor. Would it kill Batman to install carpet, or at least buy some comfy rugs?
Tommy was talking the moment she opened the door. For as long as she’d known him, he’d never managed to grasp the concept that she couldn’t keep up with him. “I thought that topic was decidedly unsexy,” Kate pranced back to her bed and dropped into the nest of pillows, “and I want to hear about the chaos demon first.”