Chapter Text
“He’s just so dreamy,” Aphrodite said with a sigh. “A perfect heartbreaker. I absolutely must have a demigod from him.”
Hephaestus peered over the top of his magazine at his wife and puffed some smoke from his pipe. “So, go make one. It’s not like I can stop you.” He hid his smirk at laying down the spark to enflame his wife into a well-trodden rant.
Aphrodite sat in the armchair across from him with a huff. “He won’t let me! I can’t even get close to him!” The way she sat and waved her arms caused the skirt on her slutty parody of a 1950s housewife dress to ride up her leg just high enough to show the entirety of her legs, but nothing more. Meanwhile, her breasts jiggled in a way that made them seem just barely contained within the impractically low neckline of her dress.
Hephaestus raised an eyebrow as he looked at his wife. If she were mortal, or even some of the other goddesses, he might assume that coming so close to revealing herself in such a teasing manner was accidental. However, among her other domains, Aphrodite was the Goddess of Lust and Beauty. Hephaestus was well aware of the fact that he saw exactly how much of her body she intended for him to see and that she had carefully calculated her outfit to seduce.
Instead of rising to the bait, Hephaestus reached for the tin next to him and dropped a few fresh pebbles of coal into his pipe. He puffed it contemplatively before asking, “Why not?”
“Because he’s too much of a heartthrob,” Aphrodite said as she crossed her arms under her breasts, pushing them up slightly. “So many women want to sleep with Tony Stark that he has his secretary screening them. But I can’t be mad at him for it because that’s the whole reason I need him to make a demigod. And I can’t be mad at her because Pepper is madly in love with him, but just doesn’t know how to express it besides the Act of Service in managing his sex life. Regardless of the guise I wear, I look like a gold digger trying to baby trap him. Which I suppose is technically true, but not like that. I just want to…”
Hephaestus tuned out his wife’s rant. He’d heard it enough times to be familiar with the details, but it was fun to see her get all worked up about something. Well, worked up about something new anyway. Aphrodite was also the Goddess of Passion, so she was always worked up about something. It’s just that certain topics she was passionate about got tiresome after several millennia of marriage.
“…but the poor girl is depressingly straight, and I’m afraid a threesome would just break her, so that’s out of the question…”
He looked back down at his magazine, Robotics & Automation. It just so happened that the page he had it open to displayed an advertisement that the Stark Expo was still accepting abstract submissions. If he played this right…
“…but she’s an atheist—which, ugh—so getting her to let a god into her heart for the possession route will be rough. Not the fun kind of rough, but…”
Hephaestus puffed his pipe contemplatively. Yes, it had been a while since he’d presented at a conference. He supposed he was about due for something like that.
Even without bearing his name, Stark Expo functioned as a massive celebration of Hephaestus. As God of the Forge, it was his domain that industrialization fell into. It didn’t hurt that, when modern engineers needed a name for some new device or project, Hephaestus was on the shortlist of names they grabbed.
So, when he limped his way through the front door of the Expo, Hephaestus felt as though he had stepped back in time to a time when the Hellenic Gods were worshipped outright. So thick was the fervor in the air for technology that Hephaestus could taste the worship of the Forge, even without his name falling from every lip.
His presentation was nothing special on a divine scale. Mostly just Hephaestus casually rambling about some of his current projects. He didn’t have the oratory skill of Hermes or Apollo, and he didn’t have the captivating presence of Zeus or Aphrodite. Anyone (mortal or divine) who lacked an interest in his domain would be bored to tears by his presentation.
However, the room did not contain average mortals. The Stark Expo collected the best and brightest engineers from around the world. To those of them lucky enough to stumble into his presentation, his words were a literal divine revelation. Hephaestus had no doubt that every single one of them would go home with some new idea for a design or improvement for an old one. Perhaps a refinement to a manufacturing process or a new application for an existing design.
The Mist would obscure their memories so that they wouldn’t quite recall where they had gotten the idea. At most, they would remember that the idea had come to them while they were at the Stark Expo, something that happened to many of them anyway, even without divine intervention. They wouldn’t remember the scraggly man with a limp who inspired the idea.
It was one of the main ways the gods distributed blessings to mortals in the modern day. The gods might no longer have temples (at least most of them, he still wasn’t sure how Nike had pulled off a Fortune 500 company), but they did have gatherings of specialists within their domains. As much as events like the Stark Expo functioned as a concentration of worship for the gods, that worship was reciprocated with blessings. Apollo had medical conferences and the Grammys, Demeter had farm festivals, Dionysus had the multitude of wine tastings and the Tonys, and Hephaestus had engineering conferences.
It wasn’t uncommon to find a potential parent for a demigod at such an event. After all, it was a gathering of the mortals who best fit that particular domain. But Hephaestus had a particular target in mind. Dionysus could keep his Tonys, Hephaestus had his eye on acquiring one of his own.
There, in the back of the lecture hall, stood a man in a finely tailored suit: Tony Stark himself. “Interesting use of the honeycomb structure,” he said to Hephaestus after the lecture had completed and engineers had started filing out of the room while muttering to themselves.
“I’m glad you liked it,” Hephaestus said. “I found it quite elegant.”
Tony rubbed his goatee. “I’ve seen it used to give a structure a different deflection resistance along different axes, but to vary the honeycomb size…”
“It changes the deflection properties at different sections of the structure,” Hephaestus said.
“You’ve tested it,” Tony said.
“Of course,” Hephaestus said. “I’d never present something that didn’t work.”
“How do you handle the mass variations with the changes in honeycomb density?”
“I vary the honeycomb wall thickness.”
Tony’s eyes grew wide. “That sounds…impractical to manufacture.”
“Oh, it is,” Hephaestus said with a laugh. “I’ve made every prototype by hand. Though, I suppose if you could solve the mass production issues…”
Tony laughed. “You’re talking to the right man for that. Dr. Phaestus, was it? You’ll have to show me how you make a prototype.”
“Of course.” Hephaestus smiled. “Do you have a manufacturing workshop nearby? I could demonstrate this evening if you’d like.”
Tony clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m Tony Stark, I’m never far from a workshop.”
“Then, by all means,” Hephaestus said. “Allow me into your forge.”
The two talked the entire afternoon and soon found themselves in Tony’s forge, working metal together. Pepper took little notice of the two disappearing: She merely made note of the change in Tony’s itinerary, but didn’t look at Hephaestus with the scrutiny that Aphrodite had described. After all, she had no reason to suspect that two engineers working together to create something would be the same kind of threat to her love as a man and a woman working together to create something.
It didn’t take much for Hephaestus to nudge Tony towards the idea of a small scale prothesis as a test case. Tony had extensive experience with robotics, so applying a new metallurgical approach to a familiar style of engineering was a comfortable process for him. This wasn’t the first time he had gone through a similar learning process, and wouldn’t be the last.
The two of them worked in tandem to forge together. They took turns heating the metal and shaping it, heads pressed together as they shared their knowledge of metal. Slowly, the metal took shape. First, a small arm, then a leg, then a torso, and finally, they had built a small humanoid structure. Before them lay a small android built by their own hands.
Tony marveled at the precise articulation of the joints while Hephaestus smiled and tenderly lifted the small form into his arms. He looked down at their creation and inhaled deeply. Then, he exhaled and Breathed life into it.
His breath left his mouth as a cloud of coal-black smoke, illuminated with orange-red sparks scattered throughout. The cloud resembled a pyroclastic flow, fresh from a volcano with small pieces of lava still glowing within. In some ways, that was exactly what it was.
This cloud flowed into the android, seeping between the small gaps in the joints. As it did, the servos spasmed, and the limbs flailed. They kept flailing as the metal took on the appearance of flesh, and the crackle of sparks was replaced by the wail of a child.
Hephaestus looked back up to gaze at Tony, who was standing stock still, his eyes wide with shock. “My blessings upon you, Anthony Stark.”
“What the hell?”
“Not quite,” Hephaestus said as he wrapped a blanket around the small form. It was no longer a small android, but a baby girl. “Would you like to hold your daughter?”
“My…what?”
Hephaestus gently pressed the girl into Tony’s chest and wrapped Tony’s arms around her. “You’re a smart man, you’ll figure it out. Make sure to support her head; she needs to grow into her cervical motors.”
Tony reflexively cradled his daughter and started rocking her. “How much did I drink?”
“Nothing at all,” Hephaestus said. “This was too important to be clouded by unrelated matters.”
“What do I even feed her?” Tony slowly became more animated as he looked around the room in panic. “I can’t be a father!”
“I disagree, you’ll be a wonderful father.” Hephaestus produced a metal business card that read “Delphi Strawberry Service.” He slid the card into the pocket of Tony’s jacket, where it hung over the back of a chair. “If you need assistance with her more…unique needs. Call that number.”
Hephaestus gathered his own jacket and nodded to Tony. “Remember, all children are blessings, but some more than others.” With that, he stepped into the furnace of Tony’s forge and stepped out within his own Forge.
It was a few weeks later when Aphrodite once again started ranting about Tony Stark.
“…and he hasn’t been to any social events for days. It’s like he’s hiding from the public or something. I don’t even need dinner, just one night in his bed. He’s just such perfect stock, it would be a crime to not make a demigod with him.”
Hephaestus didn’t look up from his newspaper as he said, “I agree, that’s why I made one.”
Aphrodite stopped her dramatic gesticulations and stared at him. “You what!?”
“He invited me into his forge, and we made a child together.” Hephaestus turned the page of his newspaper and puffed some smoke from his pipe. “He named her Maria, after his late mother, I believe.”
“When did this happen?” Aphrodite stalked forward until she had pressed herself into his lap. The position was somehow simultaneously sensual and filled with rage in a way that only Aphrodite could manage.
Hephaestus carefully folded his newspaper and removed it from his wife’s enraged path. “Maria is not quite a month old.”
Aphrodite wrapped a hand around the back of Hephaestus’s neck and pulled the two of them together until their mouths were mere centimeters apart. “And you didn’t. Invite. Me?”
“My dear,” Hephaestus said, “the child was made through the pure artistry of metalworking. There was no love or desire necessary for the process.”
The only thing that disappointed Hephaestus about Aphrodite’s indignant squawk of rage was that he didn’t have the cameras running, so he wouldn’t have a recording of it to appreciate later.