the strays
The first stray was Bruce, purple bags under his eyes and a small bag of all his worldly possessions in his hand, meekly asking for a place to crash for a while.
"Just until I get my bearings straight, figure out what to do next," he added quickly, eyeing Tony warily as though he expected him to start screaming.
Tony did want to start screaming, but it wasn't because of anything the doctor had said. It was because he was removing a scarily large piece of metal from his shoulder and it hurt like a bitch.
"Sure thing, pal," he said, bringing the tweezers holding the accursed thing close to his face and squinting to see what it actually was. "Don't, you know, destroy whatever's left of the tower, huh?"
Bruce smiled wearily. "Don't worry," he said. "I think the other guy has had enough fun ravaging Manhattan to last him a good long while."
Tony glanced around the top floor of the tower, from the shattered windows to the indentations on the floor to the broken walls, all evidence of the Hulk's presence in the tower. And Loki's too, Tony could give him that much, but that fucker was gone. Bruce, at least for now, was here to stay.
"Make yourself at home, doc," he said, deciding that life wasn't nearly as fun without some life threatening danger thrown in the mix.
Unfortunately, Pepper didn't share his sentiments concerning the whole life threatening thing, so Tony set about turning the entire fortieth floor into a Hulk-proof containment area. Bruce helped when he could but his knowledge was less based in mechanical engineering as Tony's was. Still, he proved to be good company when Tony would prattle on about one invention or another and find, with some surprise, that Bruce was actually following what he was saying.
"You're smart!" he exclaimed when, at the end of a long rant regarding the design of a new car including an arc reactor and hydraulic lifts, he saw understanding in the doctor's eyes instead of dumbfounded confusion, as he had become accustomed to.
Bruce smiled and shrugged.
"I'm just so used to hanging around complete morons-Pepper!" he said loudly, hoping she hadn't heard what they were discussing, but from the way she hadn't let him anywhere near her body that night, he'd guess that she had.
Bruce was a good housemate, Tony might go ahead and say the perfect housemate. He was there when Tony needed to bounce ideas off of him or watch a game with him, and he wasn't there when Tony wanted to be alone with his thoughts and his robots. Tony liked Bruce.
Steve was the second stray, and Tony didn't know this until he bumped into him in the elevator on his way out one day.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he said when he saw the youth in the elevator in a plain white t-shirt and khakis. "It's Captain America! Watch out, folks, he'll blind you with his wholesome American-ness!"
Steve looked amused. "You've had a lot of caffeine, haven't you?" he asked, ushering toward the massive coffee cup Tony held in his hand.
"Nonsense," Tony said. "It only takes me five of these to get out of bed in the morning."
"Five?" Steve repeated, looking concerned.
"What are you doing here anyway?" Tony asked when the haze of hyperactivity in his mind cleared for a moment. "Here to visit me? Did you miss me, Cap? I can't say I blame you."
Steve raised his eyebrows in surprise. "I live here, Tony."
Tony staggered back to the wall furthest from Steve and narrowed his eyes to scrutinize the super soldier, but he couldn't find a single bit of lie in his blue eyes.
"Son of a bitch! Since when?" he demanded.
"Since last week," was the reply, but it sounded more like a question. "Last, uh, last Saturday, I think."
"Saturday?" Tony struggled to remember but drew up on a drinking binge that lasted the entire night and had him unconscious all through the next twenty four hour period. "Come on, Steve. I was drunk as hell. You don't ask people things like that when they're drunk. This is a whole turning point in our relationship, you living with me. You know what I'm saying?"
He looked a little startled, but nodded and appeared to hunch in on himself, as though he wanted to disappear, despite the fact that with his bulk, anything short of an Invisibility Cloak wouldn't be enough to hide him from sight.
"I'll just... go," he muttered.
Tony pursed his lips. "Okay, fine, you can stay," he said, and Steve's eyes brightened.
But Steve wasn't a good housemate. Well, Tony reasoned, he might be a good one if he actually knew how to do anything on his own. But Steve's 1940's mentality meant that he was ill-equipped to live in a building where artificial intelligence was an integral part of the architecture. Simple things like using the mechanical toothbrush, the automatic sinks, the microwave, the automatic doors, and his cell phone were problems that had him seek Tony out throughout the day for quick tutorials.
"What is this anyway?" Tony asked when he saw Steve's cell phone, a sleek, ultramodern thing that even he, the technical genius, didn't know how to turn on upon first setting eyes on it.
"It's a cellular phone, isn't it?" Steve asked.
"You could've fooled me," Tony muttered. He reached into a drawer in his desk and emerged with the simplest piece of tech he could find. "This is an iPhone. It's a lot easier to use than that slab of metal SHIELD gave you."
Steve accepted the new phone with a reverent look in his eyes. "Thank you," he told Tony sincerely.
"Don't get on your knees, now," he said, but he felt pleased to have helped Steve, the way he felt when he saw the faces of some of the children whose charities he dumped money into.
The third stray was Clint, and he wasted no time making his presence known, or his intentions.
"I'm a freeloader, and this is what freeloaders do," he stated, hands behind his back, looking fresher and more awake than anyone had a right to at this hour.
"So you're moving in," Tony surmised, stroking his chin.
"Glad you could see it my way," Clint said. "They told me you were a reasonable man, but I didn't believe them."
"Well, now you know," Tony told him. "Never let it be said that I don't show hospitality to my teammates."
"I won't," Clint said with a firm nod.
"Can you get out of my room now?"
Clint looked around suddenly, as though he had forgotten that he'd woken up Tony about seven hours before he usually got up and was standing at the foot of his bed while Tony had the edge of his blanket held up to his chin as he eyed Clint warily.
"Right," he said, and he departed. As he turned his back to leave, Tony saw something protruding from his back pocket and realized it was his bow. He promptly told JARVIS to lock his door every night from then on.
But Clint wasn't that bad. He took a lot of pressure off Tony concerning one super soldier in the wrong era, regarding Steve as some sort of pet project, and more often than not Tony would walk into the kitchen and find Clint teaching Steve about Harry Potter, or the Iraq war, or the hottest new model on the cover of Maxim. Late one night as Tony dozed with his head on his desk in the lab, Bruce working diligently across the space, the sounds of something crashing reached them, and Tony and Bruce shot to their feet and ran toward it to find Steve frowning at a vase that lay broken on the floor as he supported Clint's weight with one hand. The latter was completely wasted.
"What happened?" Bruce asked, stepping forth to check Clint's pulse, but Clint just giggled and then threw up all over the imported carpet.
"Well, he, um, Clint, that is, we, uh." Steve fumbled for words until Tony said, "Speak, Goddamn it!"
"Strip club," Clint said, wiping his mouth and leaning against Steve as his eyes began to close. "Showed him the twenty-first century."
Bruce chuckled softly to himself as he muttered something that sounded like, "Kids."
"Okay, Cap, did you have fun?" Tony asked seriously, pointing a finger at him.
Steve blushed all the way to his hairline and mumbled under his breath.
"I'll take that as a yes, then," Tony said. "Could you dump Clint in his room while I try to find an explanation for what happened to this vase and carpet that Pepper chose that doesn't involve strippers?"
Bruce slipped Clint's other arm over his shoulder and the two went off in the general direction of the bedrooms, and Tony looked down at the puke and the shards of glass and pressed his lips together tightly to keep from laughing.
The fourth stray was Thor, and he was the worst, but only because he didn't know how to do anything at all, and he didn't actually live with them, just dropped by the tower like it was a halfway house or some shit.
"I'm back!" he yelled as he entered the kitchen and found them all seated around a table eating dinner.
"You were only gone for an afternoon," Steve said, confused.
"I was gone for a week!" He dropped his hammer on the floor and pulled up a chair. "Time is different between the realms."
"Are table manners different too?" Tony asked pointedly as Thor pulled the plate of chicken toward him and began stuffing his face.
"Pardon me, friend?" Thor asked, giving Tony a toothy grin.
Tony decided not to repeat himself, and they watched Thor like TV for the remainder of dinner.
Thor was good company, Tony thought. Most of the time. The other, more prominent part of the time, he was like a child, always asking questions, always shadowing Tony in the lab, always spilling important chemicals and crushing delicate instruments with his immense power. Tony swallowed sarcastic remarks that he would normally hand out like candy, if only because he knew why Thor was acting like this. If the roles were reversed and he was in Thor's realm, he'd probably be running around in circles touching everything he possibly could.
"Do you think I could go over there maybe?" he asked one day as Thor sat across the table from him, watching eagerly as Tony fixed a loose screw in the head of Iron Man's suit.
"To Asgard?" Thor asked.
"For scientific purposes," Tony said quickly. "I'd think you'd have some form of technology there we haven't explored yet here. That bifrost bridge thing, I mean, that is cool."
"Indeed," Thor said. "I would like to return the hospitality you have shown me here in your home. I am deeply grateful. The helicarrier is not as welcoming as your tower."
"Don't mention it." Tony waved away his thanks with a flick of his wrist, suddenly aware that of all the strays he had allowed in his tower, Thor was the only one who had thanked him.
"What does this do?" Thor reached for the welder and pressed a button, and he set Tony's sleeve on fire.
"Son of a bitch!" he screamed, and all warm thoughts toward Thor flew straight down the shitter.
Natasha was the final stray. He had been expecting her for months until she actually appeared, tired and battle weary, a bandage on her arm that covered something that was still bleeding slightly.
"I was on assignment in North Korea," she explained when he asked her what had taken so long. "I would have come sooner, but the mission took longer than I thought it would."
"Make yourself at home," Tony said. "Everyone else has. This is like Avengers Tower now, a Goddamn beacon of light for all super freak strays looking for a new home."
Natasha raised her eyebrows. "Strays?"
"Strays. Drifters. Waifs. I could keep churning out synonyms all day, so feel free to stop me."
She handed him her bags and looked around what used to be a demolished floor, where Clint and Steve were emerging from the balcony and Thor was walking into the kitchen. He could see Bruce lounging on a chaise reading something with great concentration, and he looked up to see Natasha and gave her a small wave.
"Nat!" Clint relieved Tony of Natasha's bags and steered the redhead toward a side hall. "You look like shit. Let me show you your new room."
Tony stood back and watched his strays, and he thought that the place didn't really look that bad with them in it, that all these people didn't seem so lost and down anymore with a home, a real home, where they could be themselves and not be afraid anymore. And it made him smile because really, this was all because of him. Until he smelled smoke.
Steve came bounding into Tony's line of vision, his eyes wide. Tony braced himself.
"Thor's set the oven on fire!"
"How could he set an oven on fire?" Bruce asked before running into the kitchen and disappearing behind a cloud of black, acrid smoke.
Elsewhere in the house, a horrible crash sounded that made Tony leap in the air and crouch behind a sofa.
"Natasha!" Clint's voice drifted to him urgently. "That was Pepper's favorite vase!"
"Calm down, Bruce, breathe! Breathe!" Steve appeared again, grabbing Tony's shoulders and lifting him effortlessly. "We need to get Bruce calm or he'll hulk out, Tony, help!"
Tony closed his eyes and prayed for patience.
"Son of a bitch!"
fin