De-aged Tony (II)
Steve leaned his hip against the counter, tongue scraping at the peanut butter still sticking to the roof of his mouth, and contemplated the boy sitting at the table. He knew it was Tony, had seen with his own eyes Loki cackling as he threw some sort of golden beam at the armored Avenger not even four hours ago. Except, even with Bruce confirming it, he couldn’t quite match the child quietly scribbling on bright construction paper with the charismatic man he had lived with for almost a year.
If Steve had been asked to describe what his teammate would have been like as a child, a question that might have actually been asked by a reporter in the past, it wouldn’t have been a difficult question. The young Tony that Steve would have described would have been either a rambunctious kid that talked his ear off, tugging him place to place in hopes of finding something cool while giving him a heart attack by jumping off jungle gyms, or Tony might have been a studious boy that delighted in explaining the intricacies behind a piece of computer programming while building a robot too complex for people triple his age.
Tony wasn’t supposed to be a small boy that kept to himself, avoiding eye contact if possible while quietly working on a drawing with crayons. A little boy that refused to share anything about himself unless it was pulled out from him with gentle, but continuous prodding; simple things like finding out his favorite color was green took almost fifteen minutes of circular questioning. It just didn’t meet Steve’s expectation of Tony as a child, but then again Tony always did dodge people’s assumptions of him.
“Hey, Tony, what’re you up to?” Steve asked, taking a sip from his glass of milk as he moved closer, carefully not to move too quickly and frighten the boy like earlier in the day when he had grabbed the chair closest to him to sit down in, “Drawing anything interesting?”
The young boy sitting at the kitchen table froze before he looked up at Steve through wavy bangs, averting his gaze as soon as he noticed Steve staring straight at him. His hand curled protectively around the construction paper, crinkling it in his haste, and his fist tightened on the brown crayon in his small hand. “Mom said I’m allowed to draw at the table as long as there isn’t a party…” He said carefully, fidgeting in his chair as Steve approached closer to sit in the chair on the other side of the table, eyeing the half-eaten sandwich next to him as if expecting Steve to lunge and take it away.
“That’s right, your mom is very smart. You shouldn’t draw when there is a party. It’s rude, but I’m one of your friends. I don’t mind if you draw,” Steve fumbled, trying to remember what Maria Stark was like from various articles he had read about Howard when he had entered this century. For some reason all he could remember was a pair of sad, brown eyes in a muted pink pantsuit with a small boy sitting on her lap in a staged photo, Howard looking stern in the background with a heavy hand on both their smaller shoulders. “Can we draw together? That’s what friends do, right?”
A dubious expression settled itself onto Tony’s much younger features, twisting his small mouth into an almost familiar pout. “You’re Captain America. You’re daddy’s friend, sir,” he said, pulling his peanut butter sandwich closer to take a large bite of it, hand still covering what he was drawing. After chewing, and swallowing painfully, he continued thickly around sticky peanut butter, “Mommy said I’m supposed to listen to military people who are here for daddy, sir. If you want to draw, you can, I guess, sir…” He explained slowly, cautiously returning to his drawing after a moment when he nudged his plate away and pushed the remaining crayons over to Steve, keeping only one for himself.
“And what if I want to draw with you?” Steve asked, trying to catch Tony’s eye, “What if I want to be your friend?” He asked, picking out a bright blue crayon, and started to sketch out narrow shoulders and bare feet (they needed to find shoes if they wanted to take Tony outside the tower.). “Tony, hey,” Steve stopped his crayon near the base of sketch-Tony and looked at the little boy who was coloring in something that looked like an amorphous brown blob, ignoring Steve once he sat down next to him, “Can I be your friend? Not as Captain America, but as Steve Rogers?”
Tony stopped his coloring and stared at the table, sucking in air quickly through his open mouth, “Mommy says friends are dangerous. Daddy says friends only want one thing, sir.” he shut his eyes and hunched his shoulders, pulling away from Steve as he scooted onto the further edge of the chair, “I don’t want to be your friend.”
Steve was about to answer, to explain to Tony that he wanted to be his friend because he liked Tony for him, when he was drawn to a deliberate-sounding cough from the doorway. Turning, wondering if it was Bruce returned from the lab with good news, he saw a person he didn’t actually expect to be in the tower for a couple more days due to a mission: Bucky.
“Oh, hey, Steve. I, uh, heard about this from Tasha but I didn’t...Geeze, he’s small,” his friend said, running his flesh hand through his tangled hair, staring at Tony who had stopped his coloring to stare at the man with wide eyes, his mouth dropping open with a little gasp. “Shit, I mean, crap, I mean...shoot. Uh, you look busy, I’m going to go sleep for a couple hours and catch up with you-”
“I know you,” Tony said quietly, now-broken crayon gripped tightly in his small fist, “You’re Bucky. You’re Captain America’s best friend.”
Bucky looked as uncomfortable with the phrasing as he did when it was first uttered by the Howling Commandos over seventy years ago. “Uh, yeah, well, I’m going to get going, Steve, sounds like you’re busy with Stark and-”
“You liked him when Captain America was little!" And even Steve could feel the weird hero-worship, not knowing that Tony ever thought of Bucky that way, even though Bucky had moved into the tower following Steve shortly after the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. Before it could get too awkward, Bucky still didn’t know what to do in crowds and kids avoided him after battles because of how ‘scary’ he looked, the ex-soldier nodded to Steve as a ‘good-bye’ and turned with a little wave to beat a hasty retreat.
“That’s cool!” Steve didn’t know when Tony had jumped from his chair, or how he had moved so quickly, but he was pretty sure Bucky’s gun was not supposed to be in the boy’s hands. “I know this!” Tony said, hands running over the gun with way too much familiarity for a four-year old. Without a moments hesitation the boy sat down on the floor and started disassembling the gun, quickly and efficiently pulling out the magazine and checking the chamber for bullets before moving the plug and recoil spring with his small fingers.
Tony had already removed the slide stop by the time Bucky had crouched down next to the boy, looking at Steve with a flustered expression that asked for help that quickly soured when he saw the super soldier give a helpless look in return. “So, uh, Stark, looks like you know your way around a gun?” Bucky said hesitantly, metal hand reached down to steady his body as he sat down near Tony, who was gently placing pieces down in a systematic manner.
“This is a really, really old 1911!” Tony gushed, and Steve was extremely concerned that Tony was excited about a gun at such a small age, “Daddy makes these! He’s working on a new one right now, something called a Mossy-berg," he said matter-of-factly, jostling the gun so a smaller piece would fall into his hand.
Bucky chuckled, taking the gun from Tony once the boy finished disassembling the gun to field strip levels. “I think you’re talking about the Mossberg.” Tony stared at Bucky in awe as the assassin removed the hammer pin, tilted it to show amazed eyes, and then pulled out the hammer assembly. “So Howard helped in developing that?”
Tony frowned, looked at Steve before inching closer to Bucky who was now putting the gun back together, not wanting to take it apart altogether on the floor of the kitchen, “I don’t know what developing means, but daddy makes a lot of guns and he says that I need to learn it too because I’m going to take over for him, and I need to know how to talk to the military people and make better guns so we can help the troops,” He said quickly, sounding a littler rehearsed, sitting up on his knees to put his hands on Bucky’s shoulder to get a closer look at the gun that was being put together much quicker in a pair of hands twice the size of Tony’s.
“Now listen here, you hooligan, you can’t build guns unless you know their names,” Bucky said as he stood, grinning down at the boy who was standing much slower; one small hand holding the emptied firearm to his chest while the other hand pressed against Bucky’s Kevlar-encased leg to keep balance. “I guess I can help you out with some of the older ones, if you think you can keep up.”
Steve knew what was going to happen only a second before the young boy turned, his eyes alight with something that hearkened to Tony when he was on a twenty-hour binge in the workshop, “Captain America, can I go with Bucky? He said he’s going to teach me weapon stuff,” he enthused, bouncing on the balls of his feet and staring at Bucky with obvious adoration in his eyes. After a moment Bucky grinned and patted Tony on the head with his flesh hand, tangling it in the curls to tilt up the boy’s head.
“Hey, hooligan, what do you say?”
“Oh, sorry, sir, I mean, can I go with Bucky please Captain America, sir?”
And Steve wasn’t jealous of Bucky, who had somehow become Tony’s favorite in the five minutes after he was introduced to the past-Winter Soldier. He was just concerned. Not jealous that Bucky had made Tony smile and talk more than Steve was able to for the last hour. Just worried that Bucky wouldn’t be able to handle a small child, even though he had handled Steve well enough when they were little.
“Sure, Tony. Go have fun with Bucky,” Steve said, slumping in his chair only after the two had left the room, leaving him to clean up the crayons and plates from lunch.