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"You pumped valeric acid vapor into my lab!"
Natasha looked up from the text message she'd been composing to Clint, looking faintly irritated. "There's no need to make a fuss Tony, it's completely harmless at that concentration and it'll all have been flushed out by now."
"But, but, YOU PUMPED VALERIC ACID VAPOR INTO MY LAB! It smells like Clint's socks Natasha, Clint's socks after a really long mission where he's been running around a lot, probably through dirty water, and he probably didn't change them for a week before the mission either."
Pepper glared at him from her station beside the door. "We wouldn't have had to Tony if you'd come out when I called you. Or JARVIS called you. Or we set off the fire alarm."
"I was really busy okay? Really, really busy. Like things could have gone boom if I was interrupted busy." Tony was treated to exasperated glares in stereo. He had a lot of regrets over the whole Ivan Vanko affair, but by far his biggest regret was the way these two had bonded. Sensing defeat he nodded at the door to the uppermost roof terrace.
"They're out there are they?" Two red heads nodded in synchrony.
"And you're sure they're..."
"Tony, this is Jane and Thor we're talking about. They're out there together, on their own. Statistically speaking, what do you think they're most likely to be doing?"
"And he's created a funnel of dense black cloud ten kilometers high for a bit of privacy? Couldn't he just hang a tie on the doorhandle or something?"
"I don't know. Why you ask him when you go out there and politely ask him to stop?" asked Pepper almost sweetly.
"Why me? I might see something awful Pepper, they might be doing something that would shock me. Please stop laughing like that, it's disturbing. I might see Thor naked. I mean, not that I'd mind seeing Jane naked but.."
"I wouldn't say that anywhere Thor could hear you, things might get a bit CRACK! BOOM! Sizzle!" advised Natasha helpfully. Tony would have preferred that she hadn't emphasized her point with hand gestures.
"No, but why can't one of you go out there?"
"I might have considered that Tony." said Pepper patiently. "If you'd answered the first time I called you instead of leaving me to talk to Reed. I had to talk to that man for twelve minutes, I timed it. I only got him off the line when the Mayor called, who by the way is understandably a little jittery about strange Asgardian phenomena originating from the top of this tower. So I feel it's your turn to do something useful."
"And how about you?" asked Tony turning to Natasha.
She shrugged. "I just like to see you suffer."
"Okay fine, I'll suit up and throw a bucket of cold water them or something."
"You will do no such thing. You will go out there, apologize, and politely explain that creating bizarre cloud formations in an urban area is probably a bad idea."
Tony considered his options. "Fine. I'm calling Rhodey." There was a brief scuffle which ended with Tony on the floor and Natasha clutching his phone. "Darcy?" he managed to gasp between uneven breaths. The pressure on his shoulder increased fractionally.
"Fine. FINE. We are sure it's Thor doing this are we?" he asked, grasping at straws.
Natasha considered for a moment and released him, as Pepper treated him to Exasperated Sigh #4. "I checked with Ororo, she says it's got his signature all over it. Which brings us to our other problem, apparently some of the students overheard her side of the conversation and came away with the idea that Thor was on the roof naked. So we now have three hormone-drenched teenagers out there somewhere who between them have the power of flight, the power of invisibility and several pairs of liberated night-vision goggles. Also one of them can apparently manipulate plant growth, but that's probably not relevant in this situation. Marie's out looking for them now."
Tony played his final card. "It's your tower Pepper."
"I seem to recall it being no more than fifteen percent my tower, at most, and you were the one who invited all these maniacs to live in it. Present company excluded." Natasha nodded graciously.
Recognizing that he had been outmaneuvered, he stood and mustered what remained of his dignity. "My phone please Natasha. Don't look at me like that, it's really dark out there, I need the flashlight . I swear on what little honor I have not to call Rhodey. Thank you." He squared his shoulders and strode through the door, with the air of a condemned man ascending to the scaffold.
It really was extremely dark on the tower roof thought Tony as the beam of light from his phone fell on Jane and Thor. As he had expected they were lying beside each other on a camping mattress, although to his surprise they were both fully dressed and didn't seem to be doing anything more intimate than holding hands. This startled him more than witnessing any of the myriad scenarios his imagination had conjured up would have done, and forced him to walk round them just to be sure that it wasn't some optical trick of the angle he was viewing them from.
"Erm, did you want something Tony?" asked Jane, finally breaking the silence.
"Just, um, wondering what you were doing."
"Not much, talking, watching the stars." Jane gestured expansively upwards.
"That's fine, that's great, no problem, but why do you have to do it in the middle of your own personal tornado?" Tony shone the light on the wall of dense, roiling black cloud encircling the terrace.
"Jane was lamenting the way the city lights obscured the heavens, so I blocked them out." explained Thor.
"You...what? You made this just to block out light pollution? Do you know how many people are freaking out right now about it?"
Thor looked sheepish. "I did not intend to cause alarm."
"It was totally my fault. I've been complaining how much I miss the stars here for ages, and he just wanted to help. Look what a difference it makes."
Tony looked up. The patch of sky framed by the funnel of cloud was frosted with more stars than he'd ever seen on Earth. The only time he'd seen them that clearly before had been in the icy void of space... He looked down hurriedly, feeling slightly ill.
"We're sorry. We didn't really think. We'll stop it." Jane smiled dreamily up at Thor as the clouds dissipated. "It was lovely though. Thank you."
"It was my pleasure Jane, to show you your stars shining as bright and fierce as you do."
Tony shuffled awkwardly. "Yes. Well. Next time you want to look at the stars just get out of the city! And this is a sentence I never thought I'd hear myself say, but you have a magic flying hammer. Use it!"
They nodded meekly at him as he reached out to lay his phone on the parapet. There was a yelp and three startled-looking teenagers materialized, the boy on the end of the row clutching the phone in both hands. "Ah, found you." said Tony nodding as though this had been the plan all along. "What do you think you're doing up here at this time of night?"
"We were listening to what she was saying about astronomy." said the girl with lavender-colored skin.
"The bit with pulsars was really cool, like did you know it's because they shoot out this ray when they spin super fast and you can use you to tell how fast they spin and then use them like landmarks? And they were trying to match them up with the ones he's seen from the other side?" said the smaller girl with hair in adorably cute little puffs, and terrifyingly pointed teeth.
"But that's not why stars flicker, that's because the air is different temperatures. I liked the bit where he changed the temperature to make them flicker." said the boy whose freckles shaded through the spectrum of colors as he spoke.
"You should come and talk about this at our school" said the girl with fangs to Jane, who was looking completely nonplussed.
Tony narrowed his eyes. "And you weren't by any chance here because you have a crush on Thor and you overheard your headmistress and thought you might be able to see him doing something you're too young to even be thinking about?"
"No!" Two voices chorused.
"It's Doctor Foster that I like!" said the purple girl, before her friend squeaked and clapped her hand over her mouth as the three of them vanished. Thor started laughing.
"May I borrow this?" Tony reached for Jane's hand telescope while she was still too stunned to speak and used it to prod along the parapet. He quickly became uncomfortably aware that invisible people could simply walk ahead of him, that Jane and Thor were doubtless aware of this too and that Jane was probably about to say something like "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence." Fortunately before this could happen Tony saw a flash of green and gold streak past out of the corner of his eye. It was quickly followed by a pitiful wail of "But we were studying astronomeeeeeee!"
"Well then, I think we're all sorted out here. Are you coming in?"
"I think we shall remain outside" Thor glanced at Jane, who gave a tiny nod. "It is a pleasant night, though the stars are veiled."
"Okay then, have a good night kids and no more abuse of meteorology!"
He swept back through the door like a conquering hero. "Pepper. Natasha. My work here is done."
Pepper raised an eyebrow. "You seem remarkably calm. Are you sure you didn't call Rhodey to fix it?"
"You wound me Pepper. I just told them to stop, found the kids, no big deal. You can check my phone history if you don't believe I didn't make that call, although I do feel that would say disturbing things about the degree of trust in our relationship." he patted his pockets as he spoke and failed to locate his phone. "Ah. I seem to have left it outside but I can assure you that it will prove my innocence." Pepper and Natasha exchanged weary glances as he swept back out.
Twelve seconds later he was back, wide-eyed with terror, slamming the door shut and barring it with his body.
"Everything okay Tony?" asked Natasha wryly.
"NOW THEY'RE HAVING SEX, DAMMIT!"