Nanny, Pappy, Mammy
By Rey

The construction workers find a mysterious package when reconstructing Tony's penthouse post-Battle of New York. Nobody wishes to claim "ownership" of the package for the right reason, not even its supposed "owner," so Tony is forced to do it himself. And then, the real "owner" comes along, and they become… a pre-made family?

Chapter 1: The Mysterious Package

The lab is practically unchanged, three days past the alien invasion that racked New York in the space of hours. Tony revels in it, in the safe familiarity that he usually tried to change: His bots are puttering in the background, JARVIS is assisting him in his existing projects, and evidence of such projects are strewn on every surface imaginable.

Well, there are some changes. One of his workbenches, for example, is filled to the brim with completed body detectors, one of his new creations, for the purpose of digging living and dead people out of collapsed buildings. But he chooses not to dwell on this topic or even look at the things once they are finished, and someone from SI's R&D is going to come for them soon, so changes like this are more or less negligible.

And, for once in many years, Tony is not at all curious of what else have been changed.

He hasn't slept a wink these past three days for this very reason, just like he has never pondered on what-ifs, the purposes of his new gadgets, and where his supposed teammates are.

For once, he wants it safe, and he will do everything to get it.

The evening is warm, and busy as ever in such a sleepless city, even three days past a disaster. Tony huffs, as he – still in his dingy, smelly, comfy lab clothes – is towed along by an exasperated and concerned Pepper across an outdoor eating area. It belongs to one of the restaurants, cafés, shops and bakeries that populate Stark Tower's first and second floors, and Pepper has chosen it as the place where he is going to get his sustenance at last.

His attention skips everywhere: from the few people out and about here on the ground zero of the disaster, to the empty places where the paving is cracked or scorched or spilt on by something dark, to the air of shock and trauma and numb disbelief that still taints everything. He doesn't know what Pepper orders for him. He just eats, and drinks, and grunts an affirmation or shakes his head to whatever she says or asks.

And then someone comes up and addresses the awkward table, just as awkwardly: "Erh, sorry, boss, I mean, Mister Stark, Miss Potts, Erh, a package, we found a package, a box really, me and my buddies, in the penthouse, in the big hole there. There's no address. Erh, no way to open it, too – but we didn't try to open it I swear! There's just… nothing. It's pretty cold, though, and pretty heavy, like a freezer inside-out really, that cold, erh, sorry, so can I please put it on the table? Please?"

Tony looks blankly at the newcomer for a long, long while. The said newcomer – blessedly – doesn't say anything else, just fidgeting in place in his grubby khaki coverall, smelling of dust and sweat and construction-related chemical agents. And then the info about "a box in the big hole in the penthouse" filters in, and, nearly at the same time, Tony notices the big wooden thing held with much reluctance in the arms of the… construction worker?

"Huh," he mutters. Because the box doesn't look cold at all, even in his exhausted, sleep-deprived perception, although it does look heavy… and luxurious. It is made up of smooth, high-quality panels of dark wood hemmed with bands of gold inlit with little gems, polished so much that they reflect the lights, shadows, sillhouettes and even images nearby, like unconvensional mirrors. There are a pair of strong-but-slim wrought-iron handles set at either side of the box, polished just as glowingly, clutched in the gloved hands of the nervous whoever-he-is.

And indeed, from visual observation alone, Tony can't find any opening on it. It is like the replica of a treasure chest, like Pepper is commenting to the construction worker while waving the latter to put the box on the table.

But it also looks like the small version of a luxurious coffin, nailed shut and neatly. `Like Mom's and Dad's coffins.`

Tony has to swallow bile on that thought. The remaining food on his side of the table – whatever it is – feels even more unappetising than before, now.

The nausea doesn't abate when he – at long last – sets his bare hands on the surface of the not-coffin. It increases, instead, as he does feel the freezing chill emanating from inside, as if the box were some shaped and coloured piece of solid, unmelting ice, not something that was once part of a tree. `Where does the condensation go? Has there even been any condensation to begin with? There's no condensation mark on the wood. Mom certainly harped about it enough times when I didn't use a coaster for my drinks on her precious wooden furniture. The weather's warm enough. There should be lots of condensation by now. But if there's no condensation….`

The scraping of his chair on the pavement bricks sounds like thunder in his ears, competing with his suddenly loud, loud heartbeats. `If there's no condensation, it means some mumbo-jumbo is in play here. And if some mumbo-jumbo is in play, it means aliens have invaded my home again.`

Tony doesn't know when he moved, or if he moved at all on his own. But here he is, standing in his half-renovated penthouse, staring at the big patch of wet concrete cement that has replaced the crater Hulk made with Loki's body three days ago.

There is nothing special on the new concrete stuffing the crater. There is nothing special either in the whole open-plan floor, he finds, when he at last tears his gaze away from the former crater. A half-confused, half-frustrated noise vibrates his throat.

"J?" he croaks out at length, after re-scrutinising the still-half-wrecked surroundings – the only sign in the whole tower, bar the roof from which Loki launched the Tessaract-powered portal, that the alien invasion has ever happened.

"J?" he repeats, his mind scrambled and scrambling. – He so hates being here: near the window where Loki launched him out, no doubt with the intention to pancake him far down below, and near the roof where the portal almost shut his – briefly dead – body out in the-middle-of-nowhere space.

But JARVIS doesn't answer, and panic begins to set in in earnest. "J? Don't play coy with me! Where are you?!"

A pair of arms close round him from behind. But they don't belong to any of the Iron Man suits he stored in a corner of his lab space, piloted by his currently mute AI. No, they belong to a woman, and his ears get the confirmation a second after.

"Tony, please, calm down. There's nothing to be afraid of, here and now. You're safe. We're all safe, thanks to you."

Pepper. Soft-voiced. As if Tony could be blown away or broken into pieces if she spoke louder, harsher, more insistently.

But he can't blame her; no, he can't, he realises, as he is gradually aware of his own body traitorously trembling against her soft curves.

The ruse is up.

He has been avoiding sleep to avoid the nightmares, but the nightmares have caught up to him instead in the waking world, and now somebody else knows that he is broken, in all the senses that he can think of. `I told her I'm all right. I told them I'm all right. What's she gonna tell them, now? What's she gonna do 'for my own good' now? Shrink-time? Madhouse-time? Off-SI-forever-time? What's gonna happen with the bots, then? Will I still have ownership of my own chest's arc reactor,even? Will they take that away too, since I'm 'mentally unsound'?`

His breath hitches. His chest burns with phantom fire, with phantom chill.

And there is something else chilly, recently….

"The box?"

Pepper shakes her head. Her hair brushes against the nape of his neck, as she manoeuvres her way to stand in front of him at the same time, without letting go of her hold on him. "It's safe, too," she says. I've asked Mister Barton to call SHIELD to take it away. It's with Harry now, and Mister Rogers. We decided to just let it be where Mister Brennan left it. Bringing it into the tower proper didn't seem prudent, especially after you had such a reaction to it. We've evacuated the area, just in case. It'll be swept through once more after the box is gone, to make sure things are really fine."

Her words wash past Tony comfortingly. And yet, something seems to niggle at his mind and his heart, leaving a rising curiosity and desire in its wake.

"No," he manages to say, after a few false starts ending with gulps of air. "Don't. Not yet. I… I want to study it. In my lab. Please send it to my lab."

"Are you sure, Tony?" Pepper squeezes him gently in a familiar hug.

The chuckle that answers her is brittle, bitter and hollow, but genuine. No more pretending. No more avoiding. "No, I'm not," he admits. "But I'm sure I'll regret it if I don't grab the chance."

Tony didn't expect that his lab would be empty of humans while the box got deposited there. But, for once, luck – or maybe Pepper's understanding and anticipation of his desires, left from PA-dom – leaves him alone with it, discounting the ever-present bots.

Well, and discounting the ever-present JARVIS, too, who turns out to have been silent because he didn't know what to say in the face of conflicting thoughts, calculations, emotions and data.

And now, the AI, like a schoolboy eager to correct his mistakes in a redo of math test, attentively displays lots of data across the screens. Data from the scans he had conducted on his own volition before Tony arrived in the lab.

Data which shows that, inside the airtight, below-zero-degree-Celsius wooden box, lies a living, breathing, unconscious/sleeping alien infant-sized being. And this zombi, frozen-treat "infant" has been deposited hours ago on the crater, when it was still a crater with the skeleton of the patch just laid in, through a burst of alien energy radiation that came out of nowhere.

Tony's hair stands on end. `It's so easy for aliens to invade my place. I doubt even Fort nox has a workable defence against it. But earth isn't their playground! And what about sending this little thing to me? If they meant it to harm me, why hasn't it woken up and attacked yet? Is it trying to lure me into a false sense of security? But I'm not on guard now and we're not even talking about it aloud! How long can it stay in there without air, anyway? Is it some kind of suspended animation? How if it's a real baby, not a pint-sized adult? Is somebody abandoning a child here? What for? I'm not a nanny! Not a social worker either, or a foster dad, or even a dad, fullstop. How can I take care of a child? Where can I get somebody to take care of an alien child? And… SHIELD…!`

"Dont allow anybody from shield to enter the tower. Lock all access to this floor including the vents until I tell you to open," he types on his customary – but rarely used – keyboard, hurriedly. "Find a way to open the box. I want to know if its a kid or not."

Pneumatic and hydraulic hisses answer him, soon followed by busily ringing phones. Then words scroll across the screen that is positioned right before him, reading, "I have found no way to open the box without damaging it and possibly the being inside, Sir. The being has not shown any sign of stirring, waking up or weakening, so we may have time to try other methods in this regard. However, SHIELD's containment unit is here presently, and I believe both Ms. Potts and Mr. Banner are trying to contact you through your private channel and the lab's. Shall I answer them for you? If so, what should I say, Sir?"

Tony purses his lips, frowns, types a word or three before deleting them just as quickly, and then decides to go with his gut instinct, anyway, just like in other situations where science stumps him. "Tell them im changing my mind and investigating this alone for now. Tell peps not to worry. Im safe. Im better than before in fact. Tell her ill tell her later. Tell bruce thank you." His heart beats seemingly throughout his whole body, all the while, making it thrum with adrenaline as if he were on too much strong coffee. But indeed, he knows full well that he is without human support from now on, until he decides to get help.

And Anthony Edward Stark rarely asks for help.

While he really, really doesn't know – can't even predict – what may happen in the next moment, the moment when all ties have been cut and he is truly on his own. Whether a Trojan-Horse-style alien attack or an unwanted babysitting duty, he is really, really unprepared for it.

But he also can't risk the intruder being a real baby, even if it is an alien baby, and a shady, heavy-handed spy agency like SHIELD getting a hold on it.

Well, the sooner the better for cases like this, right? Ripping the bandaid in one go, as it were.

He peeks through the corner of his eye at the polished, tasteful-seeming thing sitting nearby to his left. `I was right. Pepper was wrong. That box is more like a coffin than a treasure chest.`

Then, `If it's more like a nailed-shut coffin, maybe the gems are the 'nails'? Some of them? Or all of them? They should be blasted by a tiny, high-calibre laser gun, then? Maybe clockwise one by one? Or anti-clockwise? Or should they be blasted on one go to prevent any secondary defence mechanism setting in?`

He opts for the best, safest option.

He lines up all the bots and gets them to aim all the high-calibre but tiny laser guns he has at each a gem. Then he gets JARVIS to take over the count-down and execution of the shot.

The soft, nearly unnoticeable white glow of the lines of little gems doesn't flare out, shatter or do anything else noticeable as the thin, concentrated laser beams strike them in unison. The gems simply vanish, and the gold bands with them.

And, without the bands, the panels fall apart, clattering onto the metal surface of the workbench, like the unglued elementary-school cardboard model of an elongated cube.

Unlike the model, though, there is no empty air inside, nor the diagonal ribs that would help elementary-school children learn geometry.

There is instead a bunch of unmelting, soft powdery snow, bounded in a tiny tub carved off of a block of solid, deep-freeze ice, with a small, thin but baby-like blue face barely peeking out of it – decorated with a pair of half-open, unfocused, glowing, tiny red eyes beneath a pair of slight ridges in place of eyebrows, an equally tiny nose, a slightly open tiny mouth rimmed in darker blue lips, a pair of barely-there, conically upright ears, and a few tiny lines on the brow and cheeks that seem to be birthmarks instead of scars.

Tony stares at the little face, at the little eyes, transfixed.

Somehow, he doubts that this is an adult with dwarfism syndrome. The youngest-looking recorded of such adult is a three-year-old-look-alike, as far as he knows, and this one is not.

From the length alone, and the face peeking out of the snow, this one looks like a prematurely born baby, like some babies he saw in the NICU in one of his SI CSR visits.

In fact, since this is an alien specimen, the tubful of snow and ice might even serve as its NICU pod.

On that thought, his heart thumps harder, faster, and his chest constricts. `I can barely take care of myself. How can I take care of a premature alien baby? What does this one need? How if I accidentally kill it? Will SHIELD take care of it?`

His hands clench into fists. `No. Not a chance. SHIELD is a damn ruthless spy agency, not a children's hospital. They'll just experiment on it. No, no, no. I'm not a good person, but I'm not that bad. But how can I take care of it? I know nothing about it! I'll be just as bad if I accidentally kill it!` He shudders, but not with the chill emanating from the small tub before him. Images of gruesome endings for the baby parade before his mind, obscuring the real sight of the thin, little face.

The more terrible the imaginings are, the more desperate he is. And then, at the end of his wit, he grumbles, `Is there a manual for this? Or can I hire someone and bind them tight with NDAs to take care of the baby? Preferably with the manual included?` So he types to JARVIS, "Search anybody with babys features. This baby. Search for someone who can take care of them too. Experienced. Good with kids. Discreet. No close friends or family to speak of. No blabbermouth. Ask happy to help you if you cant find them yourself. Need them asap. Find me things I can do to take care of the baby till then. Hopefully the kid doesn't wake up till then."

Shortly, he is engrossed in skimming article after article about how to take care of a baby, a premature baby, even twin babies. JARVIS got him some handbooks about caring for babies in a NICU, also research articles and textbooks about the body and development of a baby. At one point, he even has one of his Iron Helpers move the tubful of alien baby to the side, so that he has more room for his holograms.

Well, that last action is what actually gives him some clue about the identity of the alien baby. JARVIS informs him that there is a piece of sheety something that may be a letter on what was the bottom of the chest, previously tucked under the tub. The scanning done by the Iron Helper who moved the tub shows that there is nothing apparently odd or harmful on the golden thing, so Tony plucks it off the wooden panel it rests on.

The envelope feels oddly tensile and flapped in a vaguely triangular shape at one side, sealed with a line of wax that culminates with a coloured blob on the top of the triangle. Tony has the signet closely photographed before he teases it off.

Some of the edge is broken off and the signet is slightly cracked, but Tony's attention is no longer on the emblem, anyhow.

There is a burst of energy that quickly dissipates, like when the box was techily pried opened, and JARVIS still cannot track where the energy goes. And the letter inside, written on a thick, smooth paper with dark reddish golden ink that glows ever so slightly…

"To whom it may concern,
Please receive this child, whom we call Loki since we added them into our family, into your own for the duration of one hundred years. We hope that, by experiencing life among Midgardians, they will come to know the error of their ways and that we love them sorely. We shall reimburse you richly for the care.
Our gratitude to you, always, until Loki is returned to us and beyond,
Loki's adoptive parents."

…Is a bullshit to the fullest. And the poor baby is apparently named Loki.

Loki, who needs to learn "the error of their ways," forget the "love" part.

The same Loki who wreaked havoc in New York and Stuttgart…?

But that Loki has been sent back to Asgard yesterday!

`I put a forty-eight-hour bender to make that Tessaract devise for nothing?! And now they're sicking the one who hijacked my tower and tried to kick me off from the fucking hundredth floor without a suit on me?!`

Chill that has nothing to do with neither the lab's temperature nor the nearby ice tub suffuses Tony's marrows.

`If it's that Loki…. But if it is? What will I do? What can I do? Damn Asgard! Earth is not a penal planet! And what's with just dumping exiled people here without even some intergalactic agreement or something? We aren't a planet of savages, for the most part! What's with considering 'mortals' weak and uncivilised and to be ruled by them?`

The internal ranting is cut short when the Iron Helper nudges at his back and presents a Starkpad to him, on which interface is simply scrolled, "What would you like to do with the baby, Sir?"

Tony swallows, looks over at the tubful of sleeping probable villain who looks far different, far more innocent from the Loki that he briefly knew for a long, long while, then finally writes, "We build a freezer room for this one," below the question.

Problems immediately crop up on the realisation of that idea, all the same, such as:
• How cold will the freezer be?
• Does the baby need circulated oxygen or other gas(es)? In what measure?
• Does the baby need certain air pressure or gravitation?
• Does the baby always need the freezer? Can a cooling jacket suffice? And
• Can the baby do well, trapped in yet another box with neither company nor socialisation?

Well, but the baby seems fine with earth-style air, pressure and gravitation. With the tub and the snow, too. So, maybe….

`Why am I putting myself out so much for Loki, anyhow?` he scowls, jerking his train of thoughts back to what his logical mind deems fit and proper, namely nothing about Loki. `Better wait what he'll do when he's awake, I'd say. And, on that note, I really can't wait forever till he wakes up. Now where did I store that electric pen? If it could get an ow from Brucey, it can get this lazeabout into the right frame of mind.`

But that little face is so peaceful… and the little thumb sucked by that little mouth is so babyish… and what can a little baby do to a grown-up Anthony Edward Stark backed by a labful of deadly tech?

`Oh. Damn. He wins.`