" - mistaken, Mr. President," his father said, balancing the phone on his shoulder while he reached for a pen. He was tall, smelled of aftershave, starched shirts and alcohol on this hot summer day. As he played nearby his father's feet, his legs were the pillions of a great bridge around which the toy cars drove in a fantastic car chase, leaping over the obstacles in the roadway of collapsed bridges. One of the cars shot a ray gun occasionally to clear the way. Zap, zap, zap.
His father continued speaking on the phone, ignoring his son in favor of the tinny voice on the other side of the line. "A agency is needed to deal with strange events and unusual people, both our own and others. Superpowers exist," he declared, and his son sat up sharply, almost bumping his head on the underside of the desk. He loved hearing those stories. Maybe his father would tell one to the President? "- and to expect a traditional agency to cope with challenges of that kind is too much expect, sir. The bureaucratic environment is hostile to-" the boy lost interest as he lost track of most of the words in the sentence, but remained leaning against his father's legs just in case a story was forthcoming.
Soon the boy was running the toy car up and down his father's legs while he spoke, because why couldn't you make a car that could stick to cliffs and walls and bridges? You could. Maybe one day he would. His father was angry now. He was loud and kept repeating a word the boy didn't know. High-draw, high-draw. Whatever it was, his father didn't like it much. After a particularly sharp exclamation, his father pushed back his chair and leaned down to his son. "Tony, go play somewhere else. You're distracting me." The boy hesitated. "Go on. Shoo," his father said, like he was chasing an annoying cat away.
Tony left his father alone and sulked away to play in the other room, as he'd been ordered to do, but he was feeling petulant. He would rather have been with his mother, but she had gone off with a bunch of cackling ladies that smelled like rotten flowers. Or he could have been out riding his tricycle, but Jarvis wasn't here to make sure he didn't run into anything and he wasn't allowed outside without someone watching him. So he was stuck inside and his father wasn't even talking about anything interesting.
He sat in the library beside his father's study and stared up at the case of keepsakes his father had forbidden him to touch - not that it was necessary, as they were about five feet off the ground and Tony was just barely over two feet. There was a shelf full of mockups of airplane designs that his father had designed that was particularly tempting. Tony wondered if they could fly, if he threw them right.
A chair would take care of one two feet of height, and from there, Tony figured, he could climb up on the shelf below it and pull the closest airplane down. It would be easy. He abandoned his toy cars on the floor with a clatter and pushed the stool over to the shelves. It was tough for him, and he slipped and almost fell a couple of times, but he managed it, climbed up on it and, after leaning back slightly to take in the full length of how far he'd have to reach, he ran his small hands through his unruly brown hair and wrapped his fingers around the shelf and pulled himself up. Success, he was balanced well enough that he could reach out and snag the edge of the plane with his fingers -
Failure. The plane overbalanced and fell past him to the floor, and Tony, flailing to catch it before it hit, fell too, landing on the soft cushion of the chair with still enough force to make him cry out in pain. He heard his father swear and hang up the phone as he held back his tears, sniffing once or twice and glancing down at the plane on the floor. It wasn't a whole plane anymore. More, several parts of a plane.
Bad. Tony was going to be scolded. He'd done something bad, he knew it. The tears welled up again, this time from fear instead of pain, and hovered at the edge of his vision. "Oh no..." his father groaned, and leaned down to pick up the broken plane. "Tony, I told you not to touch those!"
"It was an accident," he mumbled.
His father sighed and placed the plane on a desk out of Tony's view. "You accidentally dragged a chair over to the shelf and accidentally climbed up and accidentally touched it and accidentally knocked it on the ground.."
There were tears leaking out of his eyes now. "... I didn't mean to break it!"
"Well, you did," he snapped back, and Tony started to sob. His father drew back slightly and ran his hand through his formerly immaculately slicked back hair. He opened his mouth, then closed it. "Uh. It's not... I know you didn't mean to." He hitched up his pants slightly and squatted down in front of the crying boy, crossing his arms in front of him. "Don't cry, Tony. Brave boys don't cry. They fess up to what they did, and make it better."
Tony continued sniffling and his father awkwardly held out his arms to the boy for a hug. He felt like stiff cloth and strong after-shave and discomfort, but he still felt like his father, and it was okay as long as his father was there. "Sorry, Dad," he whispered, when his tears finally stopped.
His father patted him on the back. "Feel better?" He leaned back and said briskly, "Now, here's the rule."
"Another rule?" There were a lot of rules. Don't touch the planes, don't take apart dad's fountain pens, brush your teeth before bed, wear shoes outside, don't talk to dad's friends unless they talk to you first. Tony remembered them all, but usually pretended he didn't.
A headshake. "This isn't just another rule. It's the most important rule of them all."
Tony listened attentively, sitting on the chair, for once at eye level with his father.
"You break it; you fix it," his father intoned. It sounded like it was carved in stone somewhere, and he was just reading it to his son. "Just fix what was broken, and everything will be fine." Tony nodded. He wasn't sure how to fix the plane, but he'd figure it out. He always figured things out. "I'll teach you how to fix the plane, and everything will be fine once it's fixed."
They did. That day, Tony learned about wood glue, toothpick struts, sandpaper, and how to use a fine paintbrush. The plane wasn't perfect by the time they were done, but his father was satisfied with it, and proclaimed it fixed. Then they had dinner, and his father talked on the phone for a while, and then his mother came home, and after that, with his father smiling and his mother smiling, and they were both smiling at him, Tony decided his father was right. It was a good rule. You break it, you fix it. And everything will be fine.