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Stephen has been squirrely ever since he joined Tony in the Sanctum sitting room, his duties for the day nominally done. Tony is dying to ask, but while that sometimes works with Stephen, sometimes it just makes him clam up harder. So he makes himself wait.
Eventually, Stephen huffs a quiet breath, firmly sets his book aside, and says, “I know that things said in the middle of sex don’t always mean anything.”
Oh, this is going to be good. Tony closes the program he’d been working on. “Not always,” he agrees. “But sometimes.”
“Right.” Stephen nods firmly. “So if this is one of the times it didn’t mean anything, please just say so. But. Just in case it did mean something, I found a spell.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Tony says. He smirks. “I say a lot of things during sex.” What can he say, he’s a talker.
Stephen snorts a laugh, but leans over to the side table and retrieves a book there. Not the one he was reading before, a different one. He opens it to a marked page and leans across the space between their armchairs to hand it to Tony.
It takes Tony a minute to understand what the spell is getting at. When he does, his breath catches. “Is this a spell to let a man carry a child?”
“Yes.”
Tony stares at the words on the page. It really had just been dirty talk. Tony made peace with being childless a long time ago. But… he’s always wanted kids. He rarely said so, because people tended to respond by commenting on how unsuited he is to parenthood, but he’s wanted them. And now… now Stephen apparently thinks Tony would be a good enough father that he went to special effort to find a way to make it happen even though no one, Tony included, would ever have expected them to produce kids of their own.
Tony blinks hard, a little startled when tears run onto his cheeks. He looks up at Stephen, who looks worried.
“Good tears?” Stephen asked carefully.
“You really want to do this with me?” Tony asks, a little roughly.
Stephen smiles carefully. “I really do.”
Tony laughs and swipes at his eyes. “Then yeah. Very good tears.”