Tony's Girls

By: InitialA

Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Marvel universe.

Author's Note: Uh, blame Tumblr for this one. I'll just leave it at that. Keep an open mind on who is speaking for the duration of the chapter, though some are obvious.

At one time in their lives, Tony and Pepper seemed to take turns panicking in a crisis. Sometimes, Pepper would take parts of the Iron Man suit and save Tony's life without thinking twice—often without realizing exactly what she had done until it was over. Other times, Tony would have to be the voice of reason while she succumbed to the pressures and anxieties of managing a Fortune 100 company. This gradually changed as Tony was called up for Iron Man services more, and then as their daughters and adopted nieces and nephews grew older; but this story takes place when they still had their assumed crisis time table.

Unfortunately, when Pepper went into labor (finally, it seemed to her; not long enough, to Tony), both of them promptly forgot that time table, and whose turn it was to panic.

So did everyone else.

There was the get-Pepper-from-the-bedroom-to-the-car-to-the-hosp ital panic. ("MEATHANDS I SWEAR TO YOUR DAD IF YOU DROP HER I WILL USE YOU FOR TARGET PRACTICE." "Tony, that doesn't help!" "Man of Iron, you will keep a civil tongue in your head. For the sake of your lady and unborn sons I will hold mine." "Jesus, Stark, go get her bag, stop being That Expectant Dad." "Fuck you, Anastasia." "Stark, if she doesn't end you I will." "Oh my God, will you all refocus on the fact that I will literally impale someone with my stilettos if you don't all shut up and get me to the hospital so this stops hurting so goddamn much!")

There was the Happy-forgot-how-to-drive-because-Pepper-was-yelli ng panic. ("Hogan, why aren't we moving?" "Boss, it won't go! We just had it tuned up, I don't understand why…" "…Happy, it's in neutral." "Oh." "SERIOUSLY. STILETTO. IN SOMEONE'S SKULL.")

There was the no-really-Tony-doesn't-remember-any-important-pers onal-information panic at the reception desk. ("Okay but you know who I am, and who she is, and all of these people, because I think CNN and Fox and all of those other news channels will go out of business if our faces aren't there at least once every three hours." "Mr. Stark, we just need an insurance number." "I will buy the insurance company, do I need to provide it then?" "Mr. Stark…" "Tony, get the card out of your wallet." "What card?" "The insurance card, moron." "What insurance card?" "You don't have it?" "Don't tell me you don't have insurance." "Are you even carrying a wallet?" "He owns about fifty…" "Tony, what's your social security number?" "…five." "Tony. What's your cell phone number?" "I know that one. There's like, four sevens in it." "Oh my God. How did you function before Pepper?")

Then there was the abandon-Tony-all-alone-with-Pepper-in-the-maternit y-ward panic. ("Wait, stay. She's scary. Please." "Tony, we need to go home and keep the others informed." "There's too many people already." "But…" "You've faced worse." "I still think it's odd he's going to be in there with her…" "Rogers, please go tell Pepper that. With me there to watch." "…shut up, Barton." "I do not understand your confusion, Captain." "We'll explain later, big guy.")

At some point during this confusion, Pepper requested, and got, her epidural. A lot of it. She was fairly unresponsive after that, and that only made Tony panic worse. Apparently that was expected, and they talked at him on how they would fix that and told him the babies would be fine as long as things were resolved in some amount of time that he didn't hear because he was too focused on not fleeing the room in terror. Her head lolling to the side was causing flashbacks to her encounter with Killian. The nurses seemed to get that this wasn't helping him, and made him walk around the halls and drink ginger ale.

When he got back, Pepper was more or less aware of her surroundings. The fact that he could talk to her and she wasn't threatening to use her shoes as weapons anymore helped a lot to calm him down. Tony delighted in seeing what he could get her to say in her drug-induced state. ("Pep, when did you request ducks be brought into the room?" "There aren't any ducks, Tony…" "Yes there are over there." "I don't… Oh my gosh, that's a duck. How did…" "You requested it. Live ducks, really? This bill is going to be enormous." "But ducks… the babies will like them right?" "They'll be too confused to like them. Being born is pretty confusing." "I guess so… I don't remember that… and I remember everything…" "Yes you do." "Do you?" "Do I what?" "Remember…" "Remember what?" "It." "It what?" "Tony…" "What?" "What?")

The time came, almost a full day after it started (and by this point Tony was very glad of his self-imposed sleep deprivation training), and Pepper was ruled incapable of a natural birth. He never got a clear answer as to why—or maybe he did and he just didn't remember because of the no sleep and the panicking. So they prepped for surgery and went down for a C-section. Pepper was very out of it, and asked a lot of very strange questions he couldn't answer; he was too busy trying to ignore the smell coming from the other side of the curtain.

And then came the first wail, snapping him out of his focused staring at Pepper's face. He looked up as there was a lot of business around one screaming baby on the table. His heart wrenched. His kid. And as the second came out screaming as loudly as the first, a nurse came over with the first. "Congratulations, Mr. Stark. Two girls," he said, his eyes squinting a smile over the surgical mask; he tried handing Tony the baby girl.

"I don't like to be handed things," Tony said dumbly, staring at the very small, very noisy bundle.

The nurse blinked. "I… You don't… But this is your daughter…"

Pepper was mumbling next to him. "…love being… handed things…"

"Her hand," Tony said abruptly, his brain sparking on one cylinder and trying very hard to catch up to the chaos around him. "Put her hand on the kid and then bring it close and then…"

The nurse seemed confused, but as a medical professional he'd seen worse than an eccentric billionaire's OCD tendencies. He placed Pepper's hand on the baby's torso, and then Tony was able to take her from him. The nurse shifted his hands and arms around the baby better, and then went back to help with the second.

He wasn't sure what to do. He was afraid to move. They'd barely cleaned her up, for one thing, and she was very vocally protesting this kind of treatment. "Give 'em hell, kid," he told her, for lack of anything else to say, and looked over at her sister, who was still doing the same. "You're a Stark. You're both Starks. We don't take things sitting down."

"Do you have names, Mr. Stark?" Another nurse asked.

"I uh… We hadn't… I mean…"

This nurse had been hovering around for quite a bit of the experience, and was familiar enough with the situation to recognize that there was still a lot of New Dad Confusion going on in his brain. "Why don't you take a rest while we fix up your partner and get your girls all settled? You can give us names when your head's on straight," she said soothingly.

The baby in his arms waved an arm as she wailed and her tiny fist landed on the scar that remained from where the RT had been. He looked down as her cries faded, and she looked up at him with her huge eyes. They were Pepper's eyes, but with his shape, he realized. She had his nose and chin too. "Antonia," he said abruptly. "Antonia Virginia, that's her name."

The nurse wrote that down. His second girl, Antonia's twin, had been wheeled over in a bassinet. Tony looked at her. She was smaller than Antonia; the second-born. Twins. Two. His brain whirled through about four hundred connections before landing on his selective history knowledge. "Cleopatra. Cleopatra Selene."

If the nurses had any comments about the name choices, they kept them to themselves. But they shooed him off to his nap, assuring him that his girls, all of them, would be taken care of.

Of course, this was all nothing compared to the confusion that came when all of Antonia and Cleopatra's newly-minted adoptive aunts and uncles met them when they arrived home.

((Okay, I don't think Tony is THAT incompetent when it comes to remembering personal information, but I'm sure a blind panic doesn't help. This is probably the most fun I've had writing a chapter in ages. Pure, dialogue-fueled insanity. Thanks for reading!))