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There was a time, back when the Avengers first came together, that Steve believed all of the unkind rumors he’d heard about Tony Stark. It didn’t last long, because Tony himself started disproving those rumors almost immediately, but it wasn’t until the team started living together that Steve realized that when it came to their billionaire benefactor, he really couldn't take anything at face value.
It wasn't that Tony was particularly secretive or held himself apart from the rest of them, it was that he seemed to have an effortless well of resources and charisma that got him anything and everything he wanted, and yet he remained somehow totally oblivious to that fact.
The third time movie night was interrupted by an hour-long overseas conference call that Tony had to take and Clint had drily asked if Tony owned all of the countries in the eastern hemisphere, the genius had looked genuinely perplexed by the question. “No, it’s only ten...maybe fifteen? Could be twenty. I’m not sure. You should ask Pepper, she likes to keep track of that sort of stuff.”
(At that point, Natasha quietly started an Avengers-only file with details on Tony’s impending, inadvertent world domination. Everyone updated it regularly, except Tony, of course.)
Two months later, when they'd finally started to get used to what must have been a dozen robots constantly coming and going underfoot, Coulson had semi-seriously asked Tony just how many he’d made. “Just enough for each of them to learn a skill and make friends. Not enough for an army or anything,” he’d assured them. “But, just out of curiosity, how many robots does it take to make an army, exactly?”
(Officially, the debate on the ideal size for a robot army was derailed by the arrival a mountain of Chinese food; unofficially, the other Avengers agreed that it really didn’t matter because JARVIS was [probably] an army of one. JARVIS did not disagree with their assessment.)
After a year together, things seemed to kick up another notch when Bruce went down to the workshop to fetch Tony for dinner one evening and found the genius napping with a wolf on his stomach and an impressively large snake twined around his arm. Needless to say, the usually mild-mannered scientist had nearly hulked out, and only DUM-E’s quick thinking with the fire extinguisher and Tony’s hurried, “I thought maybe Loki would be a little less murder-y if he had his kids back. It’s a surprise,” kept him from either turning green or having a heart attack. Maybe both. That, and the way Fenrir had blinked up at him with heavy-lidded, surprisingly adorable eyes before sneezing and going right back to sleep.
(Bruce didn’t mention Tony’s solo rescue mission in the file, but he did put a note on the communal refrigerator about the presence of improbably-large-but-probably-friendly animals in the Tower.)
With all of that, it didn't surprise Steve when it came out that Tony had more satellites in space than NASA, or that JARVIS had more than a dozen siblings “sleeping” inside Tony's servers. When the genius suddenly spoke Japanese or Chinese or French to a random passerby on the street, or admitted to regularly holding babies in orphanages, it didn't even raise eyebrows.
Then they found Bucky, and Tony found James inside Bucky, and he somehow managed to use food, a quasi-book club, and the bots to convince them to get along. Steve would have been jealous, but the funny messages (Bucky) and vaguely inappropriate drawings (James) that the pair left for Tony and each other made it impossible for Steve to be upset for long.
At that point, what with the accidental acquisition of countries and the robot armies and Loki's kids and the Winter Soldier, Steve really should have been ready for anything.
(He was not ready for anything.)
To be honest, Steve was never quite sure how the Avengers ended up at Tony’s remote estate on an unnamed island in the Pacific. As best as he could tell, though, Tony had told Clint one morning at the coffee machine about the “really cool, but kinda weird” mansion he owned and suddenly, Clint had invited himself and the rest of the Avengers on the billionaire’s business trip to one of Tony’s least-known properties, a sprawling home slash private island that their friend had inherited from an old family friend.
The setup is a lot like the Stark mansion, he explained on the way. It even has a workshop, except for toys...well, dolls, really, but that’s kind of rude. Speciest, maybe.
Which made no sense.
Steve could tell by the blank looks on everyone’s faces that he was not the only one who thought he’d misheard (though Natasha was blatantly writing everything down), but then Tony had continued.
I don’t make the dolls...well, I have, but not since I was a kid; it’s a surprisingly delicate procedure, and the bots are enough for me. But I come around every once in awhile to make sure everything’s running smoothly, and to make sure that nobody’s trying to take over...anything, you know.
(They did not know, actually, but at that point, everyone was too confused and/or curious to really think about it. At just that moment, the island came into view, and the rest of the Avengers forgot about the fact that Tony was supposedly, occasionally a toymaker. That was probably for the best.)
The first few days on the estate were amazing. Tony shut himself in the lab for a few hours every morning, but the rest of the time was spent exploring the island and the mansion itself. Thor tried to teach everyone how to fish bare-handed, Bruce found the perfect meditation spot, and Natasha and Clint were engaged in some sort of secret passage-finding competition that Steve didn’t even want to know the rules of. The rooms were large, the furnishings decadent, and the decorations whimsical. Everything about the place seemed magical.
And then Steve fell asleep in the library one night, and woke up at three in the morning with a doll sitting on the sofa next to him. (At this point, Steve absolutely did not scream in alarm and throw the doll away from him.)
It was surely a dream, he decided, because when he walked across the room to check, there was nothing there.
After that first time, Steve started noticing dolls everywhere in the house where he hadn’t before: in the living room, next to the microwave, and even in the tub in his adjoining bathroom. At first, it was easy to blame the two bots that stayed on the premises for the redecorating, especially since the two of them seemed to enjoy “helping” the Avengers at every turn. When asked, Tony’s only comment was, “they like to do that, sometimes; it’s their way of welcoming me home”, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Natasha admitted to almost knifing a doll during her midnight snack run, the super soldier might have put it out of his mind.
Clint started halfway-joking about being stuck on a deserted island with an eccentric billionaire and his killer dolls, but the dolls didn’t actually do anything except show up in odd places at odd times. Thor took it in stride, and he seemed to have no problem chatting with, or even carrying around any doll he encountered. Everyone else was noticeably more cautious, and it only took one furtive ten minute team meeting to decide that this was something that Steve needed to discuss with Tony ASAP.
Unfortunately, Tony had recently locked himself in the lab for an emergency meeting (read: Pepper called), so they couldn’t ask him what was going on. And, frankly, all of them feared Pepper more than possibly sentient, probably not killer dolls, so. It was weird, sure, but none of them were any more willing than Tony to get on Pepper’s bad side.
The next day the team (minus Tony) hiked around the island, and were so exhausted by the evening that none of them made it even halfway through movie night before falling asleep in front of the television.
Steve came awake about an hour later to the hushed sound of Tony’s voice. It carried that same low, soft timbre that their genius liked to use when he chatted with their younger fans, and Steve let it wash over him without opening his eyes.
“Hey, you’re making friends! I know they look sort of scary, but I told you they’d be nice.” There was a pause, and then, softer: “Yeah, I like Steve best, too.”
It was so easy, laying next to his teammates listening to Tony talk about anything that Steve almost let himself be lulled back to sleep when his brain vaguely registered two things: Tony was the only one speaking, and there was a strange weight on his lap.
“What?” he heard Tony say. “No. We’ve talked about this, remember? No opening portals to other galaxies. You never know what could come through. It’s not—Oh, well, I appreciate that, but I don’t really need a planet, or a...solar system. I mean, what would I do with it? I didn’t even want control of SI.
Steve’s eyes popped open. Tony was sitting in one of the armchairs next to the sofa, but the super soldier couldn’t make out who he was speaking to.
“Really? That sounds—nope, no portals, no space demons, no bribery with fancy alien metals, okay? We’re going to do this the long way. You know what almost happened the last time.”
Steve must have made some kind of noise, because Tony turned his way with a smile and a cheerful little wave and that’s when he realized there was a doll sitting on his lap. It was the same one, he noticed, that had been in the library that night.
Steve was not proud of the sound that came out of his mouth, or the way he threw himself off of the sofa like it was on fire. Worse, his reaction startled the rest of the team awake, who came to the quick realization that there were more dolls than Avengers in the room. There was yelling and shouting and maybe a couple of drawn daggers, but quick as a blink, the dolls moved from their various spots around the room to the chair now behind Tony, while the genius himself threw up his hands in a placating gesture.
Once he had everyone’s attention, Tony actually turned back to the dolls. “Okay, I know you guys were looking forward to movie night, but I think we may need to reschedule. I have a couple of new prototypes in the lab, if anyone’s curious, and I set up that new super-powered telescope, so someone can go calibrate that for me, if you want something to do. Let me talk to them, and then we’ll try it again, all right? Don’t be scared. I promise I won’t let them hurt you.”
Steve couldn’t hear a response, but they must have found Tony’s suggestion acceptable because they quickly vanished, leaving behind stunned and startled Avengers.
“Tony?”
“So, here’s the thing…”
Tony launched into an explanation of how the dolls were really like little Iron Man armors for a kind of sentient alien goo and that they’d been trying to get home for decades while also trying to dodge some sort of demons. When Steve glanced around the room to see how the rest of them were taking it, Bruce looked worried, Clint looked increasingly like his eyes were going to pop out of his head, Natasha was determinedly writing everything down, and Thor was nodding along like he knew exactly what Tony was talking about.
“...they’re just lonely, you know, because they can’t go outside, and they could use more friends besides the bots and I,” Tony finished, a little breathlessly.
It was probably inappropriate to stand there thinking about how attractive Tony was right then, but Steve always loved it when Tony got passionate about things.
“So, what I’m hearing,” Clint said, “is that you don’t need an army of robots because you’re already Mommy to an army of dolls made of space goo and you’re trying to organize some play dates so they don’t get bored and conquer a planet for you.”
“Um—”
“Okay, I’m in, but if they watch me in the shower, we’re going to have a problem.”
Tony seemed perplexed and relieved by turns when everyone seemed okay with the idea, and thrilled when Steve suggested another movie night the next evening.
It was more than a little disconcerting when Steve walked into the living room the next night to find more than a dozen dolls already occupying the space, but the way Tony curled up next to him on the sofa and fell asleep on his shoulder made it all worth it.