Chapter Text
God, he always hated it when his baby cried. It was always just as heart breaking as the very first time. You would think one could build up immunity to that sort of thing but apparently not. Pepper said he was going soft, and while she was right, Tony would drink one of Dum-E’s motor oil and banana smoothies before he told her that.
It also sucked when he had to buy a whole new batch of light bulbs… but that was no one’s fault and no one was in trouble for it. It was just annoying and meant the cleaning crew had to be extra thorough to get up all the glass. The teary eyes were the thing that really got to Tony.
“Bambino, please don’t cry. I’ll be gone for three days, and then I’ll be back. We can go to the zoo again when I am. How ‘bout that?” there was a pop followed by the tinkle of glass, that meant there were now three bulbs to replace, “We’ll get ice cream and feed the deer! I know how much you love the deer. I think one of them just had a baby, maybe they’ll let you pet it.”
He was one hundred percent trying to bribe an eight year old to stop crying, but at least he hadn’t promised to buy the zoo or anything… this time. Rhodey had been there that day to stop him, and thank fuck for that because Tony did not have the time to or interest in running a zoo, anything more than throwing money at it once in a while was too much work for him. They did however have year round passes to all the major ones in the Malibu area and Harry was on a first name basis with almost all the animals and half of the zoo keepers.
“Please Harry,” he was going to be late for his plane; Pepper was not going to be impressed. Actually a quick look at the clock told him he was already way late for the plane… great.
“I don’t want you to go. Daddy, don’t go!” The warble in his voice almost had Tony caving to the demand but he had a presentation to give in Afghanistan in twenty six hours, and while he would love to blow it off and spend the time with Harry instead, Obi had specifically asked him to go. He never did that. Apparently he had something important to do in New York but the weapon demo in Afghanistan was equally important.
“I know you don’t want me to go, Munchkin. I don’t want to go either. Being an adult is not fun, but everybody becomes one eventually. I held out as long as I could but Zia Pepper did me in, in the end,” That wasn’t quite true. It was really a tiny brunet with great big emerald eyes that finally forced him to act his age… for the most part. He still missed most of his meetings at the office and never did his paperwork unless Pepper was quite literally breathing down his neck, but he ate three square meals a day and went to bed on a regular schedule, so that was something. And if it was for Harry's benefit, well most things these days were.
Instead of calming down, Harry just got more upset and, yup, there go the rest of the lights. At least it was only the lights. All the electronics in the house were hardened but the actual light bulbs were not something he could keep from shattering, occasionally he lost a picture frame too. The military hardware was essential at home after that first time a month after Harry had arrived and Tony had to replace everything in a sixty foot radius from Harry.
He was so lucky that his lab was already shielded with sixteen inches of lead and that Jarvis was housed at a private server farm at an undisclosed location in western Texas. He should make a backup farm somewhere else. Maybe in Asia somewhere, just in case.
He was still working on exactly what was happening when Harry somehow blew out every electronic thing that wasn’t hardened against EMPs and shattered every piece of glass. He had sensors up, and there were no EMPs per say; it both was and wasn’t electromagnetic radiation, he truthfully didn’t know what it actually was. As near as Tony and Jarvis could tell it was a completely unlabeled and unstudied form of radioactivity, relatively low on the spectrum somewhere below visible light and hard to pin down due to how fast it decayed.
It warranted more testing but he was finding it difficult to test for; especially considering he didn’t want to perform tests on his son. If he got data from what Harry was doing, that was one thing. Making his son so upset he cried and somehow ruined the electronics in the room; that was unthinkable. And in fact he had more important things to deal with right now that a bit of broken light bulb.
“Harry, Tesoro, don’t you want to have your sleep over with Zia Pepper?” Harry wasn’t usually this clingy, sure he was never very happy when Tony had to go on a trip without him, but he loved sleepovers with Pepper. She acted like it was the only time Harry had any structure in his life, like Tony didn’t know they stayed up until eleven at night watching movies and eating sugar.
“No, I want you!” Harry was just about hyperventilating with how upset he had become. His hair was moving in ways that were unjustifiable considering they were in their living room and there was no wind, unless one of the windows had shattered and Tony had missed it. But no, the windows were intact and made of his very own super strong polycarbonate polymer mixture that Harry had yet to successfully break; it was the best on the market hands down and already slated for military use. He did notice various objects around them were sort of hovering though. Well that was new. Jarvis would scan and record everything to the best of his ability and Tony would look it over on the plane ride.
“Sweetheart, hey I want you to breathe with me. Can you do that?” Tony gave a deep breath while rubbing circles onto Harry's back. Harry shuddered his way through a few breaths before he actually started calming down.
“I want you to come back, Daddy. Please come back,” his breath hitched again before he got it back on track.
“Of course I’m coming back. I’ll always come back to you. There’s nothing more important to me than you. Understand? Nothing is more important than you, Harry.” Tony told him hugging his bambino close.
“I love you, Daddy,” was mumbled into his chest.
“Love you too, Topolino. Love you too,” it would be a long three days, “I’ll call you when I land to say goodnight.”
It wasn’t easy but he detached himself from his spawn without the help of a crowbar once they got outside and handed him off to Happy, who would take him to Pepper. Tony got into his own car because if he dropped Harry off himself it would be just that much harder to actually drop him off, as everyone was already aware.
A call came in from Rhodey; a million bucks said he was complaining about Tony not being there yet, “Platypus! What are you up to?” wait for it.
“I have been waiting for two hours. Where are you?” And there it is, his ever punctual Honey Bear was sitting on the plane with his panties in a twist.
“I’m on my way.”
“Are you? Are you really?”
“Would I lie to you? I’m leaving my driveway right now. I’ll be like an hour tops, it’s all fine.”
“An hour! Tony, we were supposed to be wheels up almost two hours ago! We have a schedule to keep.”
“Sour patch, it’s my plane. I would think they’d wait for me. Point proven, you haven’t taken off yet. So I think I’ve got the time. We’ll have an hour and a half after we land before I’m due to give the presentation.”
“It is a two hour ride from the airbase we’re landing at to the test zone, Tony!” and yeah Rhodey had him there.
“It’s called being fashionably late Rhodey. Definitely my style.”
“Harry wouldn’t let you leave, would he?” and he was smirking, the jerk.
“Had to physically pry him off of my body,” he wasn’t too proud to admit that, and Rhodey definitely knew how it went already.
The actual flight wasn’t noteworthy. He spent most of it reading through the data Jarvis had gathered from the newest phenomena around Harry. Over the last two and a half years Tony had come to accept that Lily had been on the level about all this magic stuff. She had even said there were magical communities in America, all over the world in fact. If he could find one it would be so much easier to actually study magic.
The only thing he actually had to study was the baby picture of Harry and Lily but he didn’t want to damage it somehow. Sure he had made digital copies, both still frames and the full ten second gif, but he still liked the real one best. The mystery of it was part of the appeal; add into it that he had seen Harry stare at it for hours, watching his mother smile and laugh at him and it would just about kill Tony if he were the one who took that away from him.
So he learned everything he could from Harry's accidents after they happened and tried his hardest to find these apparent magical communities. The problem was they were hiding, always had been; but if anyone was going to find them, it was going to be Tony Stark. If he could isolate the wavelength of Harry's… well he really hated to call anything magic, it irked him on a base level, but magic was the only word and there was a strong chance it was just that because trying to explain it in a scientific way was a huge pain in the ass. He just had to get a good read on Harry's magic then he was pretty sure Jarvis would be able to scan for more instances of it; both with their own scanners and ones that he may or may not have to illegally hack for the occasion.
They were getting close, and really they should be, he’d been working on this on and off for two years. They would find the magical community and then Tony could finally get some solid answers. He was sure there were magical people who would be just a willing as regular people to sign up to be a science experiment for the right price. And there had to be reading material on the subject, understanding it from a magical perspective might help him grasp it from a scientific one; and he was determined to understand.
He was also hoping to have something to show to Pepper, Happy, and Rhodey; if he came to them with what he had now they would accuse him of trying to pull some kind of weird and very elaborate prank on them. Security footage of Harry levitating objects and shorting out electronics could be doctored; and as the foremost expert at the front of the cutting edge in all things tech, if anyone could make a paper thin screen that looked like a Polaroid and would make it specifically to play a .gif of his infant son then it was Tony Stark. Actually he should look into that, it would be a hot seller if it was even scientifically possible.
With Harry's latest showing to add to their data points Jarvis started running scans under the new parameters, by the time he was back stateside they might have found something. One can hope at least.