After that, Steve and Bucky felt like time flew by. Suddenly, new things with Tony were opening up all the time and this time Tony didn't go against them at every turn. He was still fragile and still prone to getting upset at the tiniest of things they said wrong, but just by being careful Steve could feel that Tony was starting to trust them more and more.

They changed their approach to introducing Tony to the people who would hopefully be his future siblings; instead of the way they had done it before, they changed to introducing them one at a time, starting with Bruce. It turned out that by himself, Tony didn't feel so threatened by the slightly older boy. In fact, after a few tense moments of 'I remember how this went last time', Bruce and Tony actually got along quite well, chattering away about science that Steve was pretty sure he vaguely remembered from years ago when he was at middle school or high school. He had a little bit of an idea about what they were going on about, but no more than that.

Once Tony had met with Bruce a few times, Steve brought Clint and Natasha along, this time without Bucky, because maybe four people at a time were a few too many. Besides, Natasha had a habit of blatantly ignoring everything Bucky said to her for some reason. Neither of them could work out exactly why, but Clint said it was just a joke on her part. Needless to say, Natasha had a strange sense of humour.

This showed when he introduced the pair again to Tony, because Natasha corrected his introduction and said that she was a Soviet assassin. Steve didn't have the heart to remind her that the Soviet Union was dissolved many, many years before she was even born. It was nice to let her have her games.

"No you're not," Tony said, with a rare smile. "The Soviet Union was dissolved in the nineties. That was ages ago." Apparently Tony liked history as well as science. That sort of surprised Steve, actually. Tony didn't seem like that kind of kid.

"Well, yes, but she's a spy," Clint said, joining in on the game as he always did. "Her mother brought her up as loyal to the Soviets and then sent her over here to spy on us." He grinned up at Steve, and Steve just smiled back. Maybe it was true. Natasha's mother had been nowhere to be found by the time he had adopted her with Bucky, but Natasha was definitely Russian, or had at least been raised there. No one quite knew how she'd gotten into America without any record of her existence and without her knowing how to speak English, but it had happened and she was here now. There was no sense in asking questions anymore, that was a past that was dead and buried (probably literally, in the case of Natasha's parents, there was no sign of them).

"Well I'm a spy sent by the Italian Mafia," Tony said, laughing slightly as he spoke it, and Steve honestly couldn't believe what he was seeing. Tony, joking around like this? He hadn't even done this with Bruce, and they got on incredibly well for two people who were remarkably different in their mannerisms. "They've trained me up from birth and now I'm feigning amnesia so no one suspects me." Steve honestly wondered if the feigning amnesia part was true. It was definitely a concern with Tony, because it felt obvious that he was lying about the lack of memory of his past, yet getting him to admit it was probably impossible, so what was even the point of pretending like he could remember it? He wasn't planning on sharing, clearly. So what was the point in pressing on about it?

"We can unite against capitalism," Natasha said with a wicked grin on her face. Steve almost laughed when he caught sight of Sharon's face. She was sitting at the door of the room just in case, because she was meant to make sure Tony was okay in all of these meetings, but apparently Steve hadn't been clear enough when he said that Natasha was a bit of a wildcard. She had a tendency to say things that made many people uneasy, and honestly he loved her for it. She certainly spiced up the conversation when she said things like this, because there were lots of people who just didn't know how to respond.

"Mussolini supported capitalism," Tony said with a short laugh, and Natasha very almost missed a beat because Tony knew what he was talking about and she was surprised. Steve was surprised too, honestly, and he'd be more surprised if he hadn't spent months talking to him.

"No, he supported supercapitalism," Clint chimed in. Clint had been surprisingly quiet today. Normally he liked to follow up most of Natasha's statements with one of his own, but today he'd sort of been sitting back and watching it go by with amusement. Steve didn't blame him, he was doing almost exactly the same thing. "Even though he claimed to be a socialist for a long time." Steve was starting to wonder if Clint and Natasha just spent all of their free time researching history, because it certainly looked like that to him. This was the kind of thing he had never really learned himself in school, so they definitely weren't getting it from there.

"We could unite against America," Natasha suggested, but she was giggling now. "We can contact our weapon dealer connections and assault the White House."

Tony nodded. "Clint can play the dramatic music while we blow things up." He started laughing too, especially when Clint stuck his tongue out at them both.

"I can totally use a gun!" He said. "I have really good aiming!" The thing was, Clint probably could use a gun, though it wasn't the same as the bow and arrows that the boy was so fond of. Steve imagined that some of the theory remained the same, especially for aiming and keeping a steady hand.

The rest of the hour long session went on much like that, with all three of them getting on almost unbelievably well. Steve reported the news back to Bucky with no small amount of glee. Things were really starting to come together.