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The first time Roy's cellphone rang at 3am, he assumed his clock was wrong. It took a long time for it to sink in that, yes, Tony Stark was calling him at ass o'clock.
"Come on," Tony was saying, "Maxwell's demon?"
"Thought experiment," Roy said through a yawn, not sure whether it was just his sleepiness making him confused or if this really was a bizarre conversation. "Second law of thermodynamics."
"And Raizen?"
"Dried grape. Oh, gas phase particles." He was, regrettably, starting to wake up. "Single photon cooling. Atomoscience?"
"Good," Tony said, and then he was off into a lengthy explanation of something involving lots and lots of quantum - dots, wires, entanglement, and, at one point, donkeys, if Roy hadn't misheard him. Frankly, Roy was impressed that he could understand one word in three, even if he couldn't connect them in any way that made sense. "So what do you think?" Tony finished.
Roy suspected that his response - "Um..." - wasn't going to convince Tony of his intelligence but Tony talked right over him anyway.
"You make a good sounding board. You don't interrupt. Night."
Tony was gone, and Roy was left staring at his phone.
The fuck?
It was never predictable - it was Tony, after all - but, two or three times a week, with no regard for the schedules of hard-working non-billionaire students, Tony would call Roy and talk at him. One day it would be ion traps; another it would be back to quantum decoherence, or nuclear magnetic resonance, or, as tonight, the fact that he'd got his thumb trapped in his own armour, and it was hurting and there was nobody to kiss it better.
"Seriously," Roy said, "that's why you call me at three o'clock in the morning? You've got a boo-boo?" He was tempted to mention the fucking arc reactor in Tony's chest that had to have hurt more than a bruised thumb but resisted.
"Shut up," Roy's roommate mumbled, and buried his head under his pillow.
"Have you got somebody there?" Tony demanded. "Tell me about him. Is he hot? Of course he is. What did you get up to?" Roy could hear Tony settling himself down. "Unless you're still going at it, in which case you should carry on. And let me listen."
"I'm not getting up to anything," Roy said. "Mike's my roommate."
"Is he hot?" Tony asked hopefully.
"No."
Mike emerged from under his pillow. "If you're going to talk to your boyfriend, fuck off and do it somewhere else. I have a knife."
"It's a butter knife," Roy pointed out, but he picked up a t-shirt from the floor and pulled it on over his boxers.
"It'll still hurt if I stick it in hard enough," Mike said. It might have been threatening if Mike hadn't been, well, Mike.
"Is your roommate going to stick something in you?" Tony asked, voice low. "Stick it in hard?"
"He was threatening to stab me," Roy pointed out as he shut the door behind him. "Not sexy." The dorm lounge was empty at this time of night, so Roy sprawled out on one of the couches, industrial-strength upholstery scratchy against the back of his thighs.
"You could have lied," Tony said. "Fed me some story of a hot threesome with Russian supermodels."
"Tatyana and Anastasia are both sucking my cock," Roy said, obediently.
"I don't believe you," Tony said, and let out a frustrated groan.
"What?"
"I'm having to jerk off with my left hand. It's not an optimal solution."
"You're jerking off?"
"Of course I'm jerking off. I'm on the phone to you."
It took a moment for Roy to make the connections. "Wait," he said. "Are you saying that all the talk about quantum donk- decoherence and shit was phonesex?"
"Yes," Tony said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "If you weren't getting off on it, you should have said."
Roy laughed, soft in the nighttime silence. "I didn't know I was supposed to be getting off on it."
"Do you want me to tell you about cavity quantum electrodynamics?" Tony asked.
Roy slipped his hand inside his boxers. "I'd rather," he said, "you told me what you're wearing."
"Right now," Tony said, "about half my armour."
"Anything else?"
There was a pause and Roy could practically hear Tony's smirk. "A very alluring smile."