There’s a stranger sitting on the couch. Or more accurately, a stranger taking up as much space as physically possible on the couch. They’ve even got their boots on. Jerk.

“Hi, hello? I’m not sure who you are, but leave the premises or get blasted off the premises. Please.” It’s not the nicest tactic, but Tony’s had a hard day. And that couch is $5,000 and that stranger has mud on their boots, oh God.

“It’s fine,” They say, sitting up to get more mud on the couch. “I’m a friend of the Avengers, it’s cool.”

“I’m the Avengers, and you’re a stranger who somehow broke into my tower.” Looks like they chose to get blasted off the premises.

He’s charging up said blast when the new recruits walk in. Apparently neither of them broke a sweat earlier, because they look almost insultingly fresh. And apparently, they know the couch-ruining stranger.

“Hey, Tabs,” Sam doesn’t even seem surprised by this “Tabs” suddenly crashing their communal living space. “What’s up?”

“Hey, Tabby.” Roberto adds from somewhere behind Sam’s shoulder.

“Sup, dudes. I’m gonna live here for a little bit, as of now.”

Sam blinks. “Okay. Why?”

The stranger--Tabs? Tabby?--rolls over and stands up. “Well, Utopia’s like, gone now, and I don’t wanna get caught up in the whole Scott-or-Logan fight, and there’s no way I’m ever having Shatterstar as a roommate again, so. You guys it is! Also, because we’re best friends and all that.”

Tony’s too tired to decipher what he assumes to be X-business, so he turns to Sam and Roberto to turn down the mud-booted Tabby.

“Sure,” Roberto says, “There’s a spare room beside ours. Grab your stuff.”

Goddamnit.

“Uh, hey, as the owner of this house, and you know, founder of this team, I should--”

Roberto waves him off. “I’ll pay her rent, if you want. It’ll be no biggie.”

“Actually, the money wasn’t the problem here, it was the random person just showing up and-”
“Seriously,” Sam says, grabbing a bag that this Tabby had somehow had on the couch with her. “It’ll be fine! We’ll get her settled.”

They grab her stuff and start going. Tony’s still trying to figure out what’s going on. Roberto claps him on the shoulder as he passes.

“After a while we’ll get her to move in with someone else. I’m thinking we’ll call Gambit. Don’t even worry about this.” Then they’ve left to settle Tabby in her new room, leaving Tony with a stained couch and a headache.

---

“Oh, Gladiator? Yeah, he’s not a huge fan of us.” Roberto doesn’t even look up from his well-curated Instagram as he responds to Clint’s question about why the alien king is so pissed. It’s kind of rude, to be honest. Like, we get it, you’re an influencer, whatever.

“You’ve.. met Gladiator before? You guys? Have met the Shi’ar Majestor?” Clint says, incredulous. Nat, buttering a bagel to his left, just rolls her eyes, having already concluded that this is gonna be some weird and elaborate prank.

“Yeah,” Roberto continues, “I mean, he wasn’t Majestor at the time.”

Clint snorts. “Sure, okay. So, why does he hate you?”

“Cause Sam beat him in a fight.”

Clint waits for him to crack up, having reached the end of the line with this prank. But Roberto looks dead serious about this. And he’s never lasted this long without laughing on a prank this outlandish before, so… God.

“Are you serious? Like, really, honest-to-God?”

“Uh, yeah. I never said I was joking?” Roberto finally looks up from his phone, frowning.

“Like, actually, for real, Sam Guthrie--Cannonball--beat Gladiator in a fight and now he hates you guys?” Clint kind of hopes this is just a joke on him now.

“Yep.” It does not appear to be a joke.

“What… the fuck.” Clint’s seen Sam eat toast after dropping it face-down on the floor. And that guy beat the big purple mohawk alien in a one-on-one? He doesn’t know if he’s impressed or just mad that Cannonball does cooler stuff than he does.

---

“Is that him?” Hill asks as the screen freezes on a profile.

“That’s him.” Steve responds. “I can’t believe that Magneto is voluntarily walking into a SHIELD facility. This must be some sort of trick.”

“Magneto’s here?” Roberto says, “I thought he hated you guys.”

“He does,” Hill growls as she stalks off to meet the man in question.

“Weird.” Sam says. “D’you think we should go say hi?” He asks Roberto.

“Why would you go ‘say hi’ to someone who hates you?” Carol asks from her seat in front of the monitor. Roberto and Sam share a look before Roberto answers.

“I said he hated you, not us. He was kind of like, our dad for a little while.”

Steve pauses as he’s securing the comlink with Hill, then looks up at them. “Your dad?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “He ran the Xavier school for a bit. We called him Teach and snuck out behind his back all the time. It was fun.”

Steve and Carol exchange a look. Steve is at first, caught off guard; these well-meaning rookies had Magneto as their headmaster? But then he remembers: the fight with Magneto where a random kid showed up and defended him, then took off with Steve’s shield. She eventually brought it back, but when she did, she returned with more kids. Those kids must’ve been Sam and Roberto’s class. Huh.

“So, you guys were little mutant rebels, then?” Carol seems kind of bemused by this whole thing.

“Nah, not really,” Sam says, “We didn’t openly rebel against the government until Cable was our teacher.”

Now, Steve thinks, that’s concerning. “You guys openly rebelled against the government?”

Roberto grins, and says “Yeah, those were the days, huh. Running around as X-Force, smashing our way into messes and smashing our way back out.” He and Sam share a wistful look.

Hill speaks up over the comlink, asking for Steve to come down to discuss the meeting that just took place. On his way out, he can’t help but question whether Sunspot and Cannonball were actually a great fit for the Avengers, what with their history of refusing to respect authority. Maybe they weren’t, but it’s too late for doubts now.

---

When you’re a thousand-year-old Norse god, there’s some things you just understand. One of those things is that sometimes you need a very large midnight snack. You just need one. So Thor is in the process of quietly making a gallon of soup when he hears a conversation happening in the adjacent room,

Now, Thor has been caught preparing soup at night before, and the following conversation about appropriate roommate habits is not a particularly fun one. So, he tentatively peeks through the doorway into one of the tower’s many living rooms, to see who he’ll have to explain the soup to. What he finds is not a tired and confused teammate frustrated with his soup-making, but rather the two newest Avengers curled on the couch together. If he’s quiet, he can hear what they’re talking about.

“You can’t keep blaming yourself,” Roberto’s saying from his spot on Sam’s chest. “Sam, it isn’t your fault. It never was.”

Sam sighs. “I was the one who brought him to the school. I was the one who made him a target, how isn’t it my fault?”

It’s Roberto’s turn to sigh. “We know whose fault it is. And he’s gone now. Both of them are. It’s time to stop agonizing over this.”

There’s a long pause as Sam runs a hand through Roberto’s hair, before he says, “I know. And I’m trying. It’s just… hard.”

Thor feels very much like he’s intruding on a moment, but he is also saddened by the grief in young Cannonball’s voice. Thor is well acquainted with grief, and wishes that someone so young were not. Though there isn’t much he can do on that front. Except maybe offer them some of his soup.

Offering them soup is not a bad idea. He goes to grab some bowls.

---

Cannonball and Sunspot are… odd. They’re fun, for sure, but there’s also times when they both seem so weighed down by loss they can barely breathe. Having them on the team means having a rotating cast of X-men showing up in your living room or suddenly teleporting everyone to Limbo. They definitely like each other more than they do anyone else on the team, which can get annoying when they feel like spending 15 minutes trying to Lady-and-the-Tramp a bagel. But at the end of the day they want to make the world a better place, and even if the X-men will always be their home, and if they don’t particularly care about being Avengers, they make damn good ones.