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“I don’t care, Maria—no, he can’t—I’ve already tried—the damn school is closed—”
Tony came home early from his boarding school yesterday; it’s a four-day weekend. He’d known Jarvis and Ana would be gone on vacation for the first time in ages, but he’d thought maybe he’d get to spend some of the weekend in the lab with his dad or do something with his mom. She liked to have him practice the piano with her when he came home on long weekends.
Instead, his dad’s been having some sort of an emergency at work and his mom accidentally double-booked a charity event in Paris. Tony spent yesterday re-reading an old King Arthur anthology, and tinkering with old toys in his bedroom. One of the maids had still made him dinner, but he’d eaten alone, and it wasn’t as good as Ana’s cooking was. He’d pushed the peas around on his plate until he’d decided to go to sleep.
At about eleven in the evening, he’d been woken up by his dad banging on his door, frazzled and on the phone as he said, “Get up, Tony, I’m sending you to the airport—I have to leave, business emergency.”
Heart in his throat, Tony had grabbed his suitcase and his backpack and pulled on a jacket over his pajamas. He hadn’t even bothered to unpack yet, Jarvis and Ana not there to help him with it.
Dragging his suitcase down the stairs, loud clunk, clunk, clunk on every step, Tony felt miserable. He hated his stupid boarding school, and he’d wanted—
He hasn’t been home in two months.
But then his dad had cursed at the phone, and he’s been yelling in it for the ten minutes Tony’s been waiting in the living room, because apparently Tony’s school is completely closed for the weekend, which means his dad can’t send him back whether he wants to or not. Jarvis and Ana are gone, his mom is gone, apparently Aunt Peggy is dealing with the same work crisis his dad is—it must be a pretty big crisis if even Aunt Peggy is being hassled by it—and his dad said, point blank when Tony asked, “No, I can’t bring you with me.”
All in all, his dad doesn’t know what to do with him.
Tony sits down on his suitcase and yawns, and then puts his head on his knees.
This sucks.
Finally, what feels like ages later, and Tony is half-asleep where he’s sitting, his dad touches his shoulder and says, “Up, Tony, come on. We’ve got to get going.”
“Where am I going?” Tony asks, and follows his dad—leaving the suitcase behind, on his dad’s orders. He’s not going back to the boarding school, at least.
“You’ll be staying at a colleague’s house—Dr. Pym. He’s needed at work with me, but he has a daughter around your age and her nanny has agreed to watch over you as well for the night.”
“Oh.”
Not that Tony thinks he needs a nanny—he’s nine, not a little kid—but his dad would never let him stay at home by himself, too worried somebody would try and kidnap him (again), or more likely, that Tony would sneak into the lab and get into trouble. His dad is kind of paranoid, sometimes. It drives Tony’s mom crazy.
Although, the concern about Tony sneaking into the lab might be from… that having actually happened.
More than once.
Tony falls asleep in the backseat and wakes up what feels like just a few minutes later but must have been long enough to end up in an entirely different neighborhood. His dad practically yanks him out of the car he’s in such a hurry, and then half-carries him up to the front door of an older-looking house with lots of designs and really big hedges blocking in a big garden. It’s too dark to see much though.
Tony yawns again but is a little more awake by the time a woman with curling blonde hair and big red lips opens the door. She seems in just as much of a hurry as Tony’s dad but she leans down and says, “Well, you must be Anthony. It’s nice to meet you.”
Tony, suddenly a little shy, ducks slightly behind his father.
His dad lets out a chuckle and says, “This is Janet Van Dyne, Tony. Say hello. You’ll be staying here with her daughter while we deal with... work.”
“Hope is just upstairs,” Mrs. Van Dyne says, smiling softly, “if you’d like to go up and meet her. She’s excited to have a friend stay over.”
Tony takes a few steps forward, and with a nod from his father, starts to head up the stairs that Mrs. Van Dyne had gestured at. He’s halfway up the stairs when a man hurries past him, and Tony turns to watch as the man—Dr. Pym, presumably—and Mrs. Van Dyne and his father all hurry out the door. The lock clicks, and then everything is quiet.
He gets to the top of the stairs, and a lady who’s yawning comes out of a room. She sees Tony and smiles half-heartedly, saying, “You must be the young man Mrs. Van Dyne said would be staying the night. I’m Mrs. Allen, the nanny. Why don’t you go in and meet Hope while I get the guest bedroom all set up for you?”
Tony nods, and she disappears into a door a few doors down from the room she’d just come out of—Hope’s room, apparently. Tony, cautiously, pokes his head through the doorway.
Everything is very… pink, or otherwise colorful, and there are dolls and toy horses on the ground. A little girl with long brown hair is sitting at the end of her bed, a bear in her arms, and she’s frowning when she looks up at him—but then her expression shifts, and she smiles and jumps off the bed.
“Mom said a boy was going to come stay over!” she says, and before Tony can blink, she’s grabbed his hand and pulled him further into her room. “Hi,” she adds, after a second. “I’m Hope. You’re Anthony, right?”
“Just Tony,” Tony says, quickly, because he doesn’t want to be called Anthony for the whole weekend.
She grins, and then says, “It’s nearly bedtime, but do you want to play until Mrs. Allen makes us go to sleep?”
Tony nods, slowly, but then he grins too. Even if it’s just dolls, he’s never really... gotten to play like this, before, with another kid his age.
He sits down on the floor, crossing his legs, and she hands him a large brown horse. “This is Chestnut,” she says. “He’s very fast and good at chasing down bank robbers.” There’s a Wonder Woman doll on the floor too, and Hope picks it up, adding, “Diana rides him sometimes, because he’s really fast.”
“I thought she had an invisible jet?”
Hope frowns, “Yeah, but I don’t have one of those.”
“Maybe we could make one,” Tony suggests, and Hope’s face lights up as she beams at him before she says, “That’d be so cool! You like Wonder Woman?”
“Yeah,” Tony says, because he’s read plenty of the comic books, but then adds, “but I’m more of a Captain America fan.” After all, Captain America was real. Tony’s dad had actually known him and will sit and tell stories about him for so long that he forgets to send Tony to bed.
Hope just says, “Of course you do, he’s a boy.”
Tony vaguely thinks he should be offended by that, but before he can complain, Mrs. Allen knocks on the doorframe. They both look up at her and she smiles as she says, “It’s time for bed, Miss Hope. Anthony, you’re just next door.”
Tony heaves himself up, and gives Hope an awkward wave when she says, “Goodnight, Tony!”
The room next door is small, compared to his at home, but it has a big bed with a thick comforter, and he’s already in his pajamas so it’s easy to just climb in and curl up. He’s not all that tired anymore, though, and he ends up looking around the room for a while instead of staying in bed.
There’s the sound of a door creaking in the hallway, and curiosity peaked, Tony opens his own door to look. Hope is scuttling down the stairs on soft tippy toes, but she spins around when he opens the door, eyes wide. Then she breathes out a sigh of relief and says, “I was just going to get a snack. Want to come with me? We have to be quiet though—Mrs. Allen sleeps in that room there.”
She points at a closed door two down from Tony’s.
Stomach growling suddenly at the reminder that Tony had mostly pushed around his dinner food instead of eating, Tony nods and follows Hope down the stairs. The kitchen is—okay, well. It doesn’t look like Jarvis and Ana’s kitchen at all. It’s—it’s a mess. There’s stuff cluttered everywhere. The kitchen table and counters are completely covered in junk. If Tony’s kitchen looked like this, his mom would have a fit.
He grins at it, and then at Hope when she manages to get the refrigerator door open and pull out a carton of milk. She points at a box of cookies that Tony hadn’t seen and says, “Grab those!”
They sit on the floor behind the counter, backs pressed to the wall, and take turns dipping the cookies into the milk using nothing but their fingers. It’s a mess and Tony would get in so much trouble if Jarvis or his parents caught him, but he thinks Ana might have laughed and joined in.
“You’re nice,” Hope says, in-between cookies. “I’ve never had a friend visit my house before.”
Tony swallows around the cookie in his mouth and says, “Me neither. Or stayed at somebody’s house.”
He very carefully doesn’t mention that he doesn’t really have any friends his own age anyway. Unless maybe Hope counts, now. That would be—that would be nice, maybe. He says, “Maybe you could come to my house in the summer, when I’m home from school.”
She grins excitedly and says, “Really? Yeah! You can show me your Captain America comics.”
“We can build your invisible jet.”
“How will we do that anyway?”
Tony thinks about it for a minute, and then says, “We’ll need some supplies. My dad has a lab we could use—”
“Oh, my parents do too! It’s down there!” Hope says, pointing at the door that Tony was assuming led down into a basement.
His eyes widen and he stuffs the last cookie in his mouth, saying, “Can we go look?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, getting up to look at the door.
Hope follows him and says, “Sure. There’s a lock on the door once you get downstairs though.”
They descend the basement stairs together, and Hope slips her hand into Tony’s in the dark. He almost jumps but doesn’t. He’s not afraid of the dark or anything, but—but, well. Maybe Hope is. It’d be mean to pull away, probably. Hope jumps and turns on the light once they get to the floor.
It’s just… a basement. Old and kind of dusty, with brick walls and some shelves filled with boxes of junk. There is a big safe though, and that’s almost enough to distract Tony from the too high-tech keycode on the opposite wall. Probably, it’s meant to be a distraction.
Hope stares at the keycode.
“I’ve tried to get in before, but I don’t know what the code is.”
Tony stares at it for a long minute, and then says, “I think we can figure it out,” and then runs back up the stairs. There’s so much junk in Hope’s kitchen that he finds what he needs really quickly, and Hope catches on almost just as fast, her eyes lighting up. She laughs, delighted with the science of it, and together, they brush for fingerprints using cocoa powder and her mom’s hand lotion and some sort of brush Tony thinks people use to cook with (though why you need a brush to cook with, he has no idea) (Hope says it’s to put butter on biscuits, and that sounds weird).
They stare at the keypad, and at the numbers that are smudged with the brownish-white fingerprints: 2, 3, 5, 6, 9.
They start trying out different combinations, but the door stays stubbornly locked. Hope kicks it at one point, and Tony laughs at her sheepish, “Ouch,” afterward. Then he says, “Maybe if we convert the numbers to letters?”
So they try combinations of all the corresponding letters, which goes about as well as it could—that is to say, the door doesn’t budge. Hope ends up yawning and resting her head on his shoulder as they sit on the ground, staring at the stubborn keypad. Tony doesn’t want to give up, but there’s just so many possible combinations and permutations that it could be, and they probably shouldn’t stay down here all night, just in case Mrs. Allen wakes up and notices they’re not in bed.
And then Hope blinks, and says, “Maybe they pushed the numbers more than once,” and jumps up, and presses a flash of numbers. The keypad blinks green, and just like that, it slides open.
She says, “Yes!” and jumps, and Tony scrambles up after her. “How did you know the code?” he asks, incredulous, and she says, “It was jellybean. That’s what my mom calls me.”
“Oh,” Tony says, and then they both get distracted when they enter the small lab space. There are computer monitors on the walls—two of them, with huge processors taking up the entire left wall. It looks state of the art, but—of course it would, if Hope’s parents work with Tony’s dad. They must be super smart too.
There’s a clear case on the right wall, a bunch of tubes with various colored liquids and identification numbers carefully scribbled underneath. “What do your parents do again?” Tony asks, reaching out to grab a red one. He’s careful with it and puts it back exactly where he found it a minute later.
Hope says, “They’re scientists, I guess. My mom told me she was a secret agent once, but I think she was joking. I mean,” she stops, and looks at Tony, eyes big. “I did. I thought she was joking, but maybe she wasn’t. What’s your dad do again?”
“He runs Stark Industries,” Tony says. “A weapons manufacturing company. We work with the military a lot. I wonder if your parents are military scientists. These could be, like—like super serum trials! For Captain America!”
Hope laughs, and then yawns again, which makes Tony yawn in turn, and they end up closing the lab back up and heading back upstairs, quiet so they don’t wake up Mrs. Allen. They go to sleep in their separate rooms, Tony’s stomach feeling kind of fuzzy from—from finding the lab, and eating all those cookies, and just… sneaking around and having fun with Hope. It’s—nice.
It’s nice, to sort of have… a friend, maybe.
In the morning, they’re both half-asleep in front of their eggs and toast, Mrs. Allen sends them back upstairs afterward, shaking her head. (She’d apparently found the empty container of cookies that neither of them had remembered to throw away the night before.)
Hope pulls out some construction paper and an old shoebox—they work half the morning on cutting it up and designing what an invisible jet for the Wonder Woman action figure might look like. Tony insists they figure out the dimensions, first, and Hope insists they draw out a model on the construction paper before they start cutting, and they argue but they laugh a lot too, and it’s the best time Tony thinks he’s had outside of a real lab in ever, at least—at least until the door opens, just before lunch, and his dad follows Dr. Pym inside, face a shadow.
“Dad?” Tony asks, looking up in confusion when his dad grabs his shoulder and leads him out of Hope’s room, and then Tony’s shoulders tense when, a minute later, he hears the girl start to cry.
Two days later, just before Tony is set to go back to school, his dad knocks on his bedroom door.
“Tony,” he says, and Tony looks up from his comic book. “This, ah. This came for you.”
It’s an envelope with Tony’s name written in bright, pink letters. He scrambles off of his bed to grab it from his dad and rips it open. It’s an invitation to Mrs. Van Dyne’s funeral, and Hope writes, You’re the only one I’m inviting, so please come?
Tony looks up at his dad, who nods solemnly and says, “Of course we’ll go. Hank—” He sighs, running a hand through his hair. He smiles, sort of, at Tony, and repeats, “Even if Jarvis is the one to take you, I’ll see that you get to go, Tony.”
The funeral is sad. Everyone is in black, even Hope and Tony, and Hope's dad can’t stop crying. Tony doesn’t like it when adults cry—or anyone, really, but it’s weird when it’s an adult like Dr. Pym. He doesn’t know what to do, but it doesn’t look like any of the other adults do either, and that's just as weird. Tony holds Hope’s hand, and hugs her when she cries, because she hugs him first. His shirt gets all wet, but he doesn’t mind. It doesn’t seem very important.
They keep in touch after that, writing letters because Tony goes back to school and Hope starts attending an all-girls’ boarding school not that long afterward. He just wants me out of the house so he doesn’t have to deal with me, she writes to Tony, bitter and angry and upset, and he answers, I think that’s why my dad sent me to boarding school too.
Two peas in a pod, Hope writes back, and then, Thanks, a few months later. Thanks for everything.
He answers, You’re my best friend because it’s true, and he’s never had one before, and he wants her to know.
He gets back a drawing of himself in a Captain America costume, and Hope in a Wonder Woman one. There’s a shadowy probably-meant-to-be-invisible jet behind them in the picture. It’s not drawn very well, but then, they’re kids. Tony is in an extracurricular art class so that he can learn how to design blueprints and architectural engineering support systems, but they’ve also been teaching him how to draw things like people and fruit bowls. Still, he likes Hope’s drawing more than anything he’s done in his art class.
Wouldn’t it have been cool if they’d been able to team up? Hope writes, and instead of reminding her that Wonder Woman wasn’t real, Tony says, the coolest. They’d have won the war in no time.
They stop writing as often when they get older, but they stay friends. She’s his first kiss, the summer before he goes to college. It’s weird, and they agree to never, ever, do it again. He writes to her when he meets Rhodey at M.I.T., and tells her, watch out, you’ve got competition, this guy is awesome. It’s an e-mail, though, and she responds five minutes later with a, he wishes he was competition.
She sends him an e-mail that says idiot after his face is caught in the tabloids, drunk and partying. He’s too hungover to respond.
She doesn’t send an e-mail the day after his parents die. Instead, she flies out to meet him, and then she stays for two days and helps him plan the funeral, yelling at Obadiah Stane more than once and dumping all of Howard’s—Tony’s, now—whiskey in the sink. He thinks he only makes it through the funeral because of Hope and Rhodey, both of them dressed in black and standing next to him like sturdy walls he can lean on.
The paparazzi splash THE UNION OF STARK INDUSTRIES AND PYM TECHNOLOGIES all over the papers, which may or may not help the stock prices as Tony takes over as CEO of S.I. Tony wants to spend all his time in the lab, but Hope says, “If I have to spend all night writing my thesis, you have to stay up doing paperwork. Why did we even want to go into science, again?”
“Obviously for fun and to blow things up, not do paperwork.”
She calls him when she’s debating on whether or not to apply for an entry position in one of the research and development labs at Pym Tech—her father’s company. She’s still angry with him, but she wants to work there. She wants to still be part of his legacy—to be his legacy, maybe. (She gets mad at Tony when he suggests this and tells her he’d get her a job at Stark Industries instead, if she wanted it, but then calls him back two days later, telling him she applied and already got the job.)
Work takes over Tony’s life—too much paperwork, and work in the labs filling up all the extra time and space he has. He drinks to forget that he hasn’t slept, and he sleeps with too many people because it seems like a way to have fun for twenty minutes before he goes back to work, and people like sleeping with him anyway.
Tony likes being liked, even if he thinks, maybe, not very many people actually like him at all.
Hope, Rhodey, Obie—sometimes.
He hires a bodyguard who seems to like him, or at least seems to put up with him.
He meets a girl with red-orange hair and freckles on every inch of her face, and she’s clutching a clipboard and saying, “Mr. Stark, there’s a discrepancy in the accounts, I think—I think someone is trying to steal from the company.” She’s smart, and she’s brave enough to bully her way into his office when her initial complaints go ignored by the accounting head manager.
Tony fires him and promotes her. He also nicknames her Pepper, and she rolls her eyes at him and says, “My name is Virginia Potts, Mr. Stark,” and that really sort of seals the deal.
He calls Hope up for the first time in a few months to ask, “So, uh, if there’s a girl—”
“A girl?” Hope interrupts, and she sounds amused. “You mean, a woman?”
“Yeah, okay, a woman,” Tony edits. He leans back in his lab chair, fiddling with a new projection project absentmindedly. “She’s smart and doesn’t put up with bullshit, and she’s just really, you know, put together.”
“Do I hear wedding bells?”
He gives a short laugh—he’s not exactly marriage material. Besides, “I have to figure out how to ask her to dinner first.”
“It’s not hard,” Hope tells him. “You open your mouth and say, ‘Hey, would you like to go to dinner with me?’”
“You are incredibly difficult and unhelpful.”
“The papers have reliably informed me you know how to talk to women, Tony. And you talk to me all the time.”
“Sleeping with them doesn’t count, I don’t even know their names half the time. And you definitely don’t count.”
“I’m about to hang up on you.”
“Probably fair. But before you do, uh—should I—buy her something, or—”
“Do not buy this woman anything expensive until you’ve already gone on at least three dates, Tony.”
“I repeat: unhelpful.”
“Just ask her out.”
He does, and contrary to Hope’s demands, he buys Pepper a lovely glass blown salt and pepper shaker set he sees that reminds him of her, and okay, maybe that was an odd choice, but Pepper laughs, and she says yes to the date (even if she looks as surprised as he does about the fact that she says yes to the date), so there’s that.
He even gets a second date out of it.
And a third.
(And after they sleep together, she stays for breakfast, and they have a fourth, and apparently the dates aren’t going to stop.)
Tony goes to Afghanistan.
He meets a man named Yinsen, who asks him, “Do you have a family?” and Tony says, “I do.” He dreams about Pepper, and Hope, and Rhodey, and Happy, and Obie, and about getting out alive and figuring out where he went wrong and how his company’s weapons landed in the hands of terrorists and men like the Ten Rings.
He dreams about building a miniaturized arc reactor, and the thing about Tony Stark is that when he dreams, he tends to build, and Ten Rings never should have let him get his hands on the tools he needed.
He escapes, obviously. It’s a bit of a mess, and he kind of blows up a mountain, but it works.
Hope and Rhodey find him. Rhodey he expects, jumping from the army helicopter and running for Tony through the sand, and Tony feels the relief run through him as Rhodey’s arms wrap around him. But Hope—dressed in a costume, of some kind, shows up with him, hair pulled up in a ponytail and sweat dripping down her face, her smile practically beaming as she throws herself into the hug.
“Next time, you ride with me,” Rhodey says, and Hope adds, “We were looking for you. About time you blew something up for us to find.”
Tony laughs, at both of them.
On the helicopter, Tony asks Hope what she’s wearing, and she grins.
“My dad built a suit,” she says, “I sort of stole it. The code is still jellybean if you can believe that. He never changed it. Anyway, I was using it to find you.”
Rhodey interrupts, “She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
That about explained Hope, yeah.
Tony looks at her for a minute longer, and then it clicks and he asks, incredulous, “That was you?” For the last two months or so, the Ten Rings hadn’t been subtle or quiet as they complained about a so-called man infiltrating their camps, an insect that destroyed everything it touched. Darázs, they’d said, like a curse. The Wasp.
“That was me," she affirms, voice rough. She looks proud, somehow. Something happened, something big, while Tony was in that cave. If she took that suit from her father, maybe it was something to do with Hank.
It takes a few days, but they go home.
Pepper and Happy are waiting when the plane touches down, and Tony’s heart beats wild in his chest when he sees Pepper’s red-rimmed eyes, and he drags her face down the inch she’s taller than him by and kisses her without a care in the world that photographers and paparazzi might very well be nearby.
Amazingly, she cradles his face in her hands and kisses him back, soft and slow and with a laugh in the middle.
“This is disgusting,” he hears Rhodey complain, and Hope adding, “Oh, please, you aren’t the one who had to talk him down from buying a giant stuffed rabbit for a two-week anniversary present.”
Obie, significantly, isn’t there.
That matters, in the end.
He builds a suit. He shuts down weapons manufacturing, permanently. Hope goes home to deal with her father. Rhodey gives him the silent treatment. He argues with Pepper about putting himself in danger.
He kills Obie when Obie builds a bigger suit and tries to kill him. For the second time, apparently.
Hope calls, and she says, “I never liked him.”
Tony runs a hand down his face and answers, “I know.”
“Call me next time.”
“I don’t know, that seems like it could a recipe for disaster.”
She laughs, but it’s a softer sort of laugh. “You can never just let me be the hero, can you?”
Two years later, he calls her (and Rhodey, for good measure, because he’d given in and created the War Machine armor six months ago) and says, “Suit up, aliens incoming in Manhattan."
It’s not the greatest time for an alien invasion, really, or to meet his not-dead-after-all childhood hero, the super spies who’ve been trying to infiltrate his company, an alien prince who may or may not be a God, Bruce goddamn Banner—okay, yes, it’s a very good time for that, it’s Bruce Banner—or Hope’s new beau, a complete dork by the name of Scott Lang who, apparently, can grow to thirty feet tall (thanks for that, Hank, excellent use of science, really).
Pepper—his lovely, beautiful, CEO of a Fortune 500 Company and wife—calls him mid-battle, breath short and full of panic, and says, “Tony, I think it’s happening, my body is—I can’t handle the stress, and I’m, I’m going into labor, Tony, I will kill you if you’re not here in the next five seconds—”
Happy adds, “Boss, she’s kind of upset—”
He stays on the phone for as long as he can, saying, “I love you, Pepper, you know I love you, you’re doing great, you’re going to do great—” but there’s no connection in space and there’s a nuclear warhead with only one place to go.
The suit wasn’t made for space.
He loses connection. J.A.R.V.I.S. cuts out, and with him, the visuals that show a brightly lit armada of alien vessels.
He falls.
He gasps, the roar of the Hulk in his ear, and Hope kneeling next to him, Captain America standing over her shoulders. “I thought,” Tony says, because it’s the first thing that runs through his head, “we agreed we’d never do that kissing thing again. Better off as friends, right? Did Cap kiss me? Did Hulk?”
“Idiot,” Hope says, and then Natasha patches through, and they have a job to finish.
And Tony has somewhere else to be.
The hospital is too full, with dirty, screaming people. Tony leaves the suit on the roof, and then uses the stairs to get to Pepper’s room. They won’t let him in until he’s forced through a shower, and he’s shoved into a green plastic full-body apron, and pushed into her room just as she screams and, from Happy’s answering scream, breaks Happy’s hand. Happy gladly hands her off to Tony, and she cries when she sees him, but through her tears still says, “I’m going to kill you, you are never, ever, allowed to do that again, do you hear me? Tony—”
She screams through another push, and just like that, they’re parents.
They wash the baby’s face, put her in a pink blanket, and put her in Pepper’s waiting arms. Tony can’t help but put an arm under Pepper’s, just in case. She’s tiny, red-faced and pinching her nose like she’s finding the world distasteful so far.
Not long afterward, the Avengers—fully showered and given new clothes—shovel into the hospital room. Tony’s bewildered, but apparently Rhodey and Hope knew what they were doing, and the others were forced to tag along… somehow. Pepper raises her eyebrows, and Tony shrugs helplessly, holding onto the tiny child in his arms with too much attention to waste any on asking why these people are there.
Between the well wishes and the cooing, Tony sees Scott trip over a wire and barely save himself from face-planting on the hospital floor. He narrows his eyes at Hope and says, “I hope you know I’m judging your taste in men.”
Hope laughs and says, “Shut up, Tony, and let me hold my goddaughter already."
Morgan Hope Stark fusses slightly at the movement, but easily goes from Tony’s arms to Hope’s. Hope smiles gently down at her and Pepper takes the opportunity of the quiet room to say, “Feel like babysitting?”
“You know, Scott has a daughter who’d love a job.”
Scott pipes up, “And I’d help, obviously. She’s not old enough to babysit on her own, probably. But she’d love to.”
Tony huffs and says, directly to Hope, “Scott wouldn’t pass the background check.”
Tony ducks when Hope swats at him. He settles in next to Pepper on the hospital bed—clearly meant for one person, not two, but Tony doesn’t mind sharing, and Pepper, long used to his antics, doesn’t complain but just shuffles slightly to give him more room, leaning into his side and watching Morgan as she’s cooed at by Natasha, still being held by Hope who has told Clint point-blank that she’s not passing her over yet.
“Go ahead, sleep,” Hope says, after a long minute, and Tony blinks at her. Hope smiles, “We’ll watch your kid.” She gestures around, the room filled with… well, superheroes. Maybe not the best superheroes in the world, but, well. Maybe not the worst.
Tony yawns, and says, “Just don’t take her on any midnight lab break-ins, okay?”
Hope smiles and answers, "No promises."