The Superheroes' Soulmate

Chapter 27 - Paintball

"You are fucking shitting me." I declared, staring wide eyed at Tony.

"Careful kitten, you keep talking like that and Cap is going to have to punish you for having such a dirty mouth. He doesn't like bad language."

I stuck my middle finger up at Clint as I whipped my head over to Steve, not to be distracted from the information, "You are telling me that your actual birthday is the fourth?"

He grinned as he sipped at his coffee, "Yes, sweetie, I was actually born July 4th, 1918."

I waved the bacon I had in my hand wildly around, "I thought that was just something like PR dreamt up to go along with the whole 'star-spangled man with a plan' stuff. Like of course they would make Captain America have the same birthday as the country."

Steve shook his head, "Nope that was all me. Well, I guess technically it was all my ma."

I bit down on the bacon, shaking my head at this new piece of information in my life. The others had filtered in within minutes of me sitting down to breakfast, even Scott had shown up, red eyed and saying he came for food and then he was heading to his apartment in the tower to crash after having been up for over 24 hours.

"Anyway, as I was saying before potty-mouth McGee over there interrupted—"

I snorted. And Tony ignored me as he continued, "The details are finished and the birthday bash is all set."

Steve gave a long suffering sigh, "Tony please tell me it's just going to be a nice and simple party with just—"

Tony interrupted, "200 of your closest and bestest friends."

Steve groaned as everyone else laughed–Tony didn't know how to do small.

Clint drained his cup and then looked at me and asked, "You ready kitten?"

My mind blanked, "Ready? For what?"

"Our date. Gotta get going or else we are going to be late."

I squinted suspiciously at the look on his face, "What are we going to be doing?"

"Paintball." At the single word nearly everyone else's heads snapped up and I was surrounded by an overlapping conversation.

Apparently, paintball was an activity that the entire team enjoyed because suddenly our date turned into a group activity with everyone but Vision and Bruce declaring they were coming—even Scott, his exhaustion forgotten. Twenty minutes later I was squeezed into the back of a limo with Scott, Clint, Bucky, Sam, Tony, Wanda, Pietro, Peter, Pepper, Nat, and Rhodey. Happy was driving.

Nat had dragged me off to what she referred to as the weapons locker to outfit me with the proper gear. I was wearing an outfit that was some kind of lightweight protective armor specifically designed for this kind of activity. I kept running my palms against the knees of the pants as every chattered excitedly around me while we traveled to a location an hour or so outside the city that Tony bought ages ago to do this kind of thing.

When the limo pulled to a stop, every disgorged out in a heap and Nat grabbed her hand and tugged her along to the low, concrete building that was the entrance to the property and where all the paintball supplies were stored. As Nat started to outfit my clothes with supplies I knew I was right. Their kind of paintball was going to be insanely different than what I vaguely knew about the game. From what I knew there were these rifle looking guns with tanks of paint pellets and some kind of pressurized gas to shoot them out. Here there were a whole variety of different style guns, ammo clips, grenades, and arrows. I puzzled over the arrows wondering why there would be arrows of all things when I suddenly remembered Clint. The archer.