"Let's see, we have one Stark's Secret Son, one Avenger Discovers Fountain of Youth, witness interview inside, and my personal favorite, Tony and Loki's Secret Alien Love Child. Of course, the Daily Bugle is going with 'Spiderman Terrorizes Elderly' apparently by rescuing the woman's purse from a purse snatcher in an unsuitably startling fashion, but I did get a mention on page 2: Stark's Seclusion Continues. So no mention…oh wait, the reporter speculates babysitting duty. So another 'new son' theory. What is that now…eighteen news sources think I'm my own kid, three somehow got hold of the mysterious witness who apparently saw me turn into a child, and the usual number that suggest I'm having affairs with Loki, Captain America, Natasha, or the entire Avenger's team."

"If you didn't want people thinking you had a kid, you shouldn't have run off and gotten yourself arrested by trying to drive a car," Pepper pointed out, sounding just the slightest bit harassed. Considering it was her who was having to deal with the press, not to mention the board, and really not to mention how she was handling her past relationship with a current minor, she probably had reason to be.

"Excuse you, but I think you'll find 'succeeding at driving' is what I was doing," Tony answered. "It's not my fault the cops took exception to seeing a car go by where they couldn't see the driver."

"So what exactly am I going to tell people at the upcoming press conference?" Pepper demanded, somehow managing to sound professional and not at all like she was having an important business conversation with a child. It helped that she already had years of experience in babysitting Tony; she just had to get used to the new voice and the new height and try not to think too hard on her memories of their more intimate moments and thus far she was holding herself together surprisingly well.

"Well not the son thing. They'll want to know what I did with him when I grow myself up. Just go with the truth," Tony answered, who had also been holding himself together surprisingly well, though that, she suspected, was because he had thus far put all his efforts into 'fixing' it. So far unsuccessfully, but he was convinced that all he needed to do was to find out what his dad did and he could be himself again and pretend the child thing had never happened. Thor's words suggested it wasn't that simple and Pepper really really could not think too hard on the 'boy' part of her 'boyfriend' or she thought she might be sick. Tony had yet to bring up their relationship, but he probably intended to carry on with it just as soon as he was 'adult' enough. Whether that could happen or not, Pepper had to concentrate on what she could deal with, and one of those things was the press.

"The truth?" she asked, trying to sound skeptical rather than like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "That your dad cloned himself and mixed his DNA with an alien to create you and then used alien technology to make you seem human which Loki's magic disrupted?"

"That the god of mischief zapped me and I'm stuck in this kid body," Tony answered. That made sense, especially since it was mostly the truth, except…

"I don't know, Tony. Letting people know that Iron Man is...I mean, that he seems…vulnerable…"

"Iron Man is still in action," Tony said quickly. "And the entire Avengers team is living here."

"Remote piloting isn't really the same thing, and…"

"And people already suspect. If they aren't coming after me for me, next you'll have people after this mysterious 'son' I seem to have acquired. Besides, billionaire, genius, crime fighter…there's always going to be a reason for them to come after me, Pep. They haven't gotten me yet."

Pepper just looked at him, because that wasn't entirely true and they both knew it. Sure, no one had succeeded in the long run, but gotten him they had. And as much as Tony didn't want to admit it, refused to admit it, he was more vulnerable like this. He didn't have an Iron Man suit that fit, or Iron Boy as Clint liked to suggest, and so far the size constraints were making the creation of a mini suit difficult. Besides, most of his great intellect had been turned towards making himself big again, not how to live as a child, because learning how to live as a child meant admitting that was what he was, and Tony was nowhere near ready to do that.

He was also more of a target just for his genetics. At least Steve and Thor and Bruce, all who were similar targets, were also big enough to be intimidating, big enough to fight off would be kidnappers. Tony's smaller body would be so easy to kidnap; he could be picked up, tossed around, stuffed into a box and carried, disappeared.

The look Tony was giving her now was way too old for his young face, far too knowing. That was one of the greatest oddities about dealing with Tony the child: as an adult he had always come off as extremely immature; the exact same behavior from a child made him seem far too mature.

"I will fix this, Pep," Tony insisted, his eyes almost pleading with her to agree. "I won't be a kid forever."

"No, you won't," Pepper answered. Of course he wouldn't, though not in the way he meant. Children do grow up in the end. She just wasn't sure she'd still be alive then. And there was another aspect of the entire situation she tried not to think about.

The rest of the team were dealing with fun-sized Tony with various amounts of success. In some ways, Thor was the most successful, in that he best understood from personal experience what it was like being a forty year old Aesir. He was used to children who looked barely out of toddlerhood who could hold an intelligent conversation that included sarcasm or abstract reasoning, but who still needed a hand navigating social situations and needed the same boundaries as any human child to rein in their impulse control issues and emotional immaturity.

"I'm sorry, friend Tony," he had a way of saying that never sounded condescending, "But I must intrude upon your work. A meal has been prepared for us above."

"I'm not finished!" Tony generally answered in a tone that in his four year old voice suggested he was seconds away from a screaming melt down. This was usually followed by a look that just dared Thor to treat him like a child and insist Tony stop and come to dinner.

"Our friend Bruce has labored long and hard upon this meal," Thor would answer instead. "I believe we should honor his efforts with our presence." That had a fifty-fifty chance of working, both because guilt was a surprisingly strong lever when it came to Tony and because Tony genuinely liked Bruce's cooking. Plus, by this point in the conversation Tony had usually paused long enough to suddenly realize he was truly hungry.

On the other hand, Thor wasn't used to a child who had, up to this point, considered himself an adult, and a middle aged adult at that. Nor was he used to a child who was raised in a human culture. And while Aesir children were smart for their size, that was due to their greater experience than human children, not to greater intelligence. Tony was still a genius.

When Tony was seriously not ready to stop working and wasn't going to allow Thor to persuade him (particularly likely if it was Clint's turn to cook), he didn't dissolve into the threatened meltdown as an Aesir child might. Nor did appealing to his honor shame him in the same way it might an Aesir child. Tony did as he had done when he still looked like an adult; he'd repeat that he couldn't stop yet, possibly babble a bunch of science at the person by way of explanation, and then he'd ignore whoever was intruding. Thor always seemed a bit at a loss what to do when a child wasn't obeying but also wasn't exactly misbehaving.

Steve had no problem seeing Tony as a misbehaving little punk, considering that's pretty much how he saw him when he was an adult, but he had a harder time remembering that Tony was also older than he looked.

"And you can sit there for four minutes," Steve said in exactly the same sort of tone he got when Tony used to misbehave in the field. Tony stared up at him in disbelief from the chair Steve had plopped him down in.

"Seriously?" he asked, and he tried to hide the smidgeon of relief he had felt when he realized that what Steve meant by 'face the consequences' wasn't an actual spanking. Considering the time period Steve came from, it had been a legitimate worry to cross Tony's mind. Forget a few embarrassing swats on his bottom, Tony had been mentally preparing for Steve to pull out a belt.

"No talking," Steve answered sternly.

"Yeah…no," Tony said. "Like this is going to happen."

With patience that would have made Super Nanny proud, Steve faced off with Tony for a solid three hours, returning him to his chair every time Tony removed himself from it. At one point, Tony literally waited until the timer was down to two seconds before deliberately standing back up just before it rang.

The face-off finally ended when Clint came in, saw them at it, and asked if he could play what was obviously some mix of tag and hide and seek too.

"This isn't a game!" Steve answered. "Tony is being very naughty and he needs to sit his time in time out."

Tony, who had started off feeling a mixture of outrage and mortification, had by this point actually been having fun. He'd wait for Steve to get far enough away, then bolt and try to find a new unreachable place to hide from Steve. Sometimes he'd be grabbed too quickly to make it. Sometimes Steve would have to spend several minutes trying to find him. So far, Tony's record for keeping out of Steve's reach was fourteen minutes and twenty-six seconds. It would have been more but Tony had made up his own rules in his head, such as that he wouldn't leave the common rooms of the tower, he couldn't hide someplace Steve physically couldn't reach, and he couldn't use the same spot twice.

"Tag!" Tony shouted, slapping Clint's leg. "You're it!"

"And why was Tony in time out?" Clint asked after he had made an impressive leap over the sofa and now had Tony dangling from his ankles. Tony made an effort to behave in a dignified manner and not to giggle like an actual four year old at being upside down.

"I told him to pick up his tools. They were all over the living room where anyone could step on them! And he used rude language."

"That's because Capcycle's a condescending little sh…" Tony started to explain his side when Clint flipped him right side up in the air and he left off in what could only be described as an excited shriek of pure happiness.

"Well come on, rapscallion, and pick up your toys before Bruce steps on one and finishes them off. And Steve, if you are going to do time outs, be fair. Assign us all time outs when we're out of line, not just Tony."

Clint, surprisingly, was rather good at dealing with Tony. Most of the time, Tony got the impression that Clint was using Tony's new age as an excuse to play himself. All sorts of toys showed up around the tower, some an obvious joke, like when the set of toddler diapers appeared with the Avengers theme, but some Clint definitely wanted for himself, like the nerf guns. And some Tony actually used. Like the various building toys. And maybe the racecars. Secretly. Because he didn't need toys.

Clint being good with kids didn't mean that Tony was going to put up with him, though.

"I'm not done using them!" Tony answered, ignoring that he had just spent the better part of three hours not using his tools.

"Fine," Clint answered. "And when the Hulk comes out, you can just spend your 'time out' with him. Being cuddled. It's up to you."

Which was completely unfair and underhanded tactics, not least because that was totally true. Tony did not want to spend another hour being cuddled by an overprotective rage monster who was convinced baby Tony had no self-preservation skills whatsoever. It wasn't fair. Bruce, his science bro who generally treated Tony more or less like he always had, catches him just one time on the top of a precarious tower he'd cobbled together to reach a high shelf, and suddenly the Hulk felt the need to appear and spend his time out protectively cuddling Tony for a good hour.

In the end, Tony did clear up his tools, because he was a mature sort of person who does that and not because he was told to by Steve. Then he pretended it was his choice to eat because he was hungry and not because Natasha came and told him it was time. Just like he pretended that he wasn't constantly being watched by someone, even if it was just to casually stick their head in his lab from time to time, because he wasn't really four.

They had actually tried to use JARVIS as a babysitter to begin with. As if JARVIS wasn't Tony's through and through. Using JARVIS as a baby monitor lasted about two hours before Pepper learned about it and told them all off for lapse of sanity.

Tony didn't need a babysitter anyway. He wasn't four. He was thirty-eight, or forty-three, or anyway, he was too old for time outs and too old for enforced meal times and bedtimes and he was too old for constant supervision.

And he was so close to figure out what his dad did so he could change himself back. Then everything could be the way it was before, no matter what Thor said. Until then, he'd just have to put up with everything. Just a little while more.