Oh God, that’s right, that fic exists.  For those of you who are new to the party, it’s this, and I haven’t updated it in literal months, for which I am formally sorry.  In unrelated news, yes I am a bastard, and Agony Inc. is my new favorite thing, I will be tagging all upsetting writing as such.

• There’s actually tentative plans for this to be a sister-fic, but since it’ll obviously take me a millennium to write that, here: Superhero Adjunct Drinking Night, facilitated by Natasha Romanoff (who won’t hear argument that she’s a superhero, and therefore part of the problem) and enabled by Pepper Potts’ gold card.  It starts after Natasha comes and gets Claire to help her fish Clint out of a dumpster, and when Natasha turns up not a week later Claire’s first response is to grab her first aid kit.  Instead, Natasha waves her down, hands her a jacket, and steers her out of the apartment and drives to a bar—it feels more like a kidnapping than getting drinks with friends, but Natasha generously pays for drinks all night, and Claire could stand a few more kidnappings like this.  This proceeds to happen about once a week for two months, at which point Claire gets a call from an unknown number on her personal cell, and a polite voice asks, “Would you mind if I accompanied Natasha to your girls’ night tonight?” Pepper proves to be a riotously funny drunk, with enough stories about her time as Tony’s PA to keep them laughing too.  The next time Claire treats Jessica for acute failure to demonstrate the common sense God gave a squirrel (technical terms) and sees Malcolm silently working up a stress ulcer, she invites him out with them—he gets juice rather than liquor, but he’s witty and wry and only a little starstruck, all in all a good addition.  Karen is the next addition, after she spends a full hour shouting at Matt while Claire stitches him up, and it’s lucky that she doesn’t bring Foggy that first week, because there’s a deeply awkward moment where she and Natasha eye each other like feral wolves and greet each other by strange names.  “Vasilisa,” Natasha says, “I thought you were dead.” Karen bares her teeth politely and replies, “Natalia, I thought you were a better spy.”  Pepper looks up at the ceiling like she’s praying for strength and orders an entire bottle of vodka, setting it between the two other redheads like an olive branch.  All is calm, after that, although the two are eerily alike, dark gallows humor flecking their speech.  Foggy comes, the next week, then a woman named Candace who drops into a chair like she belongs there and introduces herself as ‘an ex of an X-Man’ and snickers at their faces, then a dark-haired twenty-something in glasses who complains about Asgardians, then a cranky blind woman who refuses to talk about her roommate…. It snowballs pretty bad, is the point, and it gets to the point where Pepper is comfortably dropping a grand on drinks.  Claire likes it, though, it’s the most normal thing she’s handled lately.
• Also: she’s not sure how anyone finds out about Superhero Adjunct Drinking Night, but apparently it’s sovereign, because through mysterious happenings there’s never once an attack or other disaster on the night in question, even though they’re a perfect target for any enterprising villain in the mood for hostages. “Mysteries of the life,” Claire says dryly.  “Another round of tequila, I think.”

• Claire definitely sees Steve Rogers in her preferred grocery store.  Actually, she sees him in her preferred grocery store a lot, so much that she corners him and interrogates him about who made him follow her.  He looks pretty alarmed—for a six-foot-plus brick house, he does ‘alarmed’ remarkably well—and sheepishly admits that if he gets groceries anywhere closer to the city center and the Tower, he gets accosted.  Hell’s Kitchen is a little out of his way, but apparently it’s worth it for a few minutes of peace.  Claire huffs, grabs the cheap box of cereal he’d tossed into his basket, and informs him that if he’s shopping on seventy years of back pay he can afford to get the name brand stuff that doesn’t taste like paper.  They see each other about every other week, and Claire works really hard not to laugh at his offended tirade about bananas.

• Claire’s pretty much over the shock of having someone knock on her bedroom window, which is inaccessible by human means and on the fourth floor besides, but she’s used to having it happen at night, not three in the afternoon.  But she opens it, lets the person—people—through and starts working up to a lecture about how she gives them a phone number for a reason before she realizes that it’s just Peter, sitting on her floor, apparently uninjured and dressed in civvies and dripping dismally onto the carpet from the downpour.  “You could’ve been seen,” she says automatically, and he slants a look up at her through the floppy locks of wet hair falling into his face—it’s pouring, and has been for hours, so it’s unlikely anyone was exactly paying enough attention to see a kid crawl down a building.  “Mind if I hang out here for a couple hours?” he asks, and when she doesn’t answer immediately he flicks his hair out of his face, looking uncomfortable, and adds, “Um, it’s the anniversary of my uncle’s death and my aunt’s not home and I…didn’t really want to stay there alone.”  Claire sighs and throws a towel at his face, and walks out into her kitchen, calling back to grab some dry clothes out of her closet before he gets her couch wet.  She’s no great shakes in the kitchen, but she can make tea, so she does, the chamomile blend Abuela gives her in vast quantities as a remedy for stress.  Peter sits on her couch in sweats that are about four sizes too big—most of her spare clothes are for people who aren’t nineteen—and drinks the tea in silence and watches a Harry Potter marathon on TV while Claire lays out her first aid kit and sorts through it on the floor.  When she joins him on the couch, he leans his head onto her shoulder and falls asleep, face twisted into a frown and his hair drying into cowlicks.  She sighs, the deep, from-the-soles-of-her-feet, why-does-this-happen-to-me sigh she perfected after the second time Matt called her, and shifts them so that Peter’s head is in her lap and her hand is in his hair. It eases the frown, so maybe it’s okay that this specific thing is happening to her.

• This is how Claire Temple meets Frank Castle, AKA the Punisher, AKA a dead guy: she gets a date.  She goes on the date.  She brings the date back to her place.  She finds a tall and menacing guy standing outside the door of her apartment building, dressed in a long coat and a shoulder holster and a black eye under his military buzz cut.  He stops her date with a look like steel and offers Claire a file without a word, and she takes it, because that’s what her life is turning into these days.  The file is either a threat (unlikely, because Buzz Cut Man is armed and hasn’t directly threatened her yet) or something that someone thinks will help her (more likely, because Buzz Cut Man is glaring at her date like he’s pissed him off personally rather than standing there and looking pale and scared), so she opens it because either way, it is what it is. It turns out that the file is a terrifyingly complete background check on her date, all the way back to grade school and annotated by three people, and includes his marriage certificate, with a post-it note in Karen’s tidy handwriting that says ‘no divorce in the works.’  Claire sighs—the guy seemed like a pretty bad lay anyway, too narcissistic—and closes the file.  “You,” she tells her date, “go home to your wife and ask for a fucking divorce if you’re going to sleep around anyway.  You,” she tells Buzz Cut Man, “can come inside and I’ll give you some ice to put on that eye.  And tell Karen and Natasha that I can vet my own dates.”  He mutters something, and stands to attention when she arches an eyebrow at him. “You can tell them,” he repeats, and she snorts.

• And a sneak peek of the next chapter, if I ever have time to write the damn thing: Claire has a lot of friends in the medical field, and even though she hasn’t spoken much to this particular friend since undergrad, the Organic Chemistry bond is real, so when her friend calls, Claire answers.  Her friend helps run a women’s health clinic that offers abortions and has been facing increasingly aggressive harassment, not to mention their financial problems, and she’s been calling around looking for anyone, anyone at all, who’s willing to help protect the women trying to get into the clinic.  Claire’s response is “Well, I’ll see what I can do, and I’ll come up on my next day off.” And then she calls Jessica, because Jessica knows everyone, and explains, and Jessica’s whole response is “Leave it to me.”  So when Claire goes up to help out on her next day off, she’s more than a little surprised to find Captain America, Luke Cage, and Colossus all standing in front of the doors and looking solemn.  Not nearly as surprised as her old friend, though, who’s talking to Natasha and Kitty and a blonde woman—is that Trish Walker, Claire wonders, making a mental note to invite her to the Drinking Nights—and looks about a second from fainting.  
  
• “Claire, who the fuck are these people?” her friend hisses when the protesters start turning up and Steve, Forties charm in full swing, offers his arm to the first girl he sees, shooting a venomous look over her head at the closest sign-bearing man.
• “Uh,” Claire says blankly as she catches a familiar pair of figures on a nearby roof—one horned, one sleek and bright red and blue.  “My…friends?”