AN:/ This is a WIP response to a prompt on avengerkink, found here: avengerkink . livejournal 5102. html? thread= 5061102# t5061102

The prompt was:

The Avengers manage to get themselves de-aged while Loki is their prisoner and he ends up taking care of them. Which he's really good at. He's getting them fed and to bed on time and reading them stories and generally being an awesome mommy while Fury is just going WTF?!

I hope you enjoy. Title subject to change.

A Little Light in the Dark

Tony tells people who ask – who are cleared by SHIELD to know – that he doesn't really remember much from the month or so he was ten for the second time. It's not really a lie. He doesn't remember it in order, after all, and who knows what might have slipped between the cracks?

First Day Post-Incident (he thinks)

Tony wasn't exactly crying – he was nearly ten and nearly ten-year-olds didn't cry – but he wasn't exactly happy, either, after falling down the last two steps of the staircase. Ever since he'd overheard Director Fury (and one day, he would make something and call it that, something that went boom) talking about the prisoner kept locked up tight in the Helicarrier (the coolest thing he'd ever seen, or would be if they'd let him see it), he'd wanted to go look.

"Cry if you wish. It won't make a difference," the strange man told him. "You'll still have to get up again."

"Yeah, I know that thanks," Tony replied sarcastically. "I'm not gonna sit here forever."

"Show me," he was told abruptly.

"Huh?" he said, intelligent as ever.

The man sighed in the way Tony had learned meant 'stupid'. It didn't feel good.

"Show me your leg," he elaborated, his tone a little kinder.

Tony raised his eyebrow, then shrugged and pulled up his trouser leg. There was a scrape along the shin that was bleeding sluggishly, and when he poked it, it hurt. That was the extent of his medical knowledge – poke it, if it hurt tell someone.

"It hurts," he said.

"That is unsurprising. Can you walk?"

"Umm," Tony hesitated, then got up and stomped his foot a few times to check his leg. "Yeah, should be fine. I'll go tell Agent Hill, she'll do something. Maybe a Band-aid."

"I see," the man said with the slow intonation of someone who doesn't see, actually, but he'll take your word for it. Tony appreciated that.

"I'm Tony, Tony Stark. I'd say it like Stark, Tony Stark, like James Bond does, but I like double-Tony more than double-Stark. The world needs more Tony," he babbled as a belated introduction.

"I am Loki," the man replied. "And I know who you are."

"Most people do," Tony admitted, "or they know my dad."

"I also know how that feels," Loki (and, yeah, his parents were on the special juice when they named him) told him, quieter this time. "You should go and get your injury dealt with by your carers."

"Right, sorry," Tony said, not very sorry at all actually but happy enough to lie. He thought for a moment, and realized that this? Happened to be the most interesting part of the last two days. Apart from the whole 'waking up in the future' thing. "I'll visit again, okay?"

"Don't feel obliged to," Loki replied dryly. Tony took it as just one of those things adults say instead of 'yes', because a 'no, don't, stay away' would have been pretty boring.

Agent Hill hadn't been impressed that he'd wandered off around sensitive equipment, but when Steve got annoyed with her for telling him off she admitted that she wasn't surprised and let the seventeen-year-old take the younger boy to the medical bay. For helping, Tony resolved to take him to meet the weirdo in the cage the next day.