"Tell us how to reverse this curse, brother!"
"I don't know! I didn't do it!" At the outraged looks his captors were giving him, Loki reluctantly decided to offer more information. "…Okay, literally speaking my enchantment did in fact change him…but it shouldn't have. It is meant to strip a person of their enhancements; if a person had no such enhancements then nothing should have happened. I think the question is, why are you disguising children as warriors and sending them into battle?"
Loki looked truly outraged and put out at this. His captors might have thought this act another one of his tricks, but Thor knew his brother well enough to know his brother's soft spot when it came to children. Besides, the only reason they managed to defeat Loki in the first place was because he had actually frozen in shock at the sight of the small child screaming from inside Iron Man's armor.
They had all frozen for a moment. There's something highly disturbing about a small child screaming in pain, and the fact that the small child then stopped screaming, and moving…
And then Pepper managed to crawl out from under a table, march right past all of Loki's magical defenses and bash him on the head with her shoe. This was followed by Natasha electrocuting him. Then Thor showed up and the battle was basically over.
Still, SHIELD wasn't putting it past Loki to have faked that shock and let himself be captured for some unknown purpose. The fact remained that they had a very small child in the place of Tony Stark, and that kind of de-aging doesn't just happen.
It would have been simpler if it was just a child Tony. A human Tony with no arc reactor and no shrapnel who just needed a babysitter while the other Avengers sorted it out and made him grow up again. This child who looked around four years old, and a young four at that, had pointed ear tips, alien DNA, and an arc reactor that was far too big on his tiny body. It also had shrapnel, shrapnel that had ripped through old scar tissue as said tissue had shrunk around it. It was a miracle he had lived long enough to have surgery, let alone that he survived the surgery itself. There were so many ways it should have gone wrong. The human blood they had on reserve might have been rejected, considering they later discovered the body they were working on wasn't entirely human. The extensive damage to his body, to his lungs, to his heart should have torn him apart from the inside out.
Tony was still in surgery when an analysis of his blood came back with 'not quite human'. The doctors had come to much the same conclusion when they went in to try and fix the pulverized heart. It wasn't so much that Tony had two hearts as that his single heart looked a bit like two that had been welded together. One half was torn through with shrapnel, half crushed beneath where the arc reactor had been before they had removed it. The other half beat strongly. The rest of his organs were…wrong. Not that the doctors were taking the time to examine them, just that they knew what a chest cavity should look like and, damage aside, there was something off. And his body was trying to heal itself. The damaged half of the heart stopped gushing blood even as the doctors scrambled to set up a bypass, as though the body had realized it was a loss and was sealing off the broken bits to save the rest.
While nurses and doctors stared in confusion at the anatomical puzzle before them, the head surgeon looked at the steadily beating muscle, the shriveled remains of its other half, and the way tiny bits of shrapnel broke away to fly up to the magnet still held in place over the chest cavity.
"Cut away the dead heart," she decided, "And we clear out the shrapnel. All of it."
There were a hundred ways Tony should have died. Between the damage and the unfamiliar anatomy, a mistake should have been made somewhere or the damage should have just been too much for his tiny body to handle.
Twenty four hours later, he was still alive. The shrapnel and arc reactor were gone. So were half his heart and a quarter of his lungs. The massive hole in his chest was covered but not fully repaired.
The team was allowed to visit one at a time. No one argued when Pepper went in first.
"Tony," she whispered to the sleeping child. He looked so tiny. Despite the many tubes and machines surrounding him, his face looked almost untouched. If Tony had ever had a son, he might have looked like this child. But this wasn't Tony's son; this was Tony, her Tony. It didn't quite fit into her head, that her Tony and this Tony could be the same person. Her Tony was an adult, an adult who drank alcohol and loved sex and flew around in a metal suit and saved the world. This Tony was far too young for any of that. She felt a bit sick even thinking about sex and this boy in the same thought.
They had to fix this. Pepper had no intentions of being a mother and Tony… Tony would hate this. Hate the limitations, hate the way the world would look down upon him, hate the memories that being a child again would surely conjure up, memories of his cold and distant father, his loving but now dead mother.
"It will be okay," Pepper whispered to him, fingers lightly gliding over a strand of his hair, lightly brushing against his ear.
Then she got up and let the others have their chance to look in on him.
In another room, Fury was looking at a picture of a double, alien heart. He was frowning at it. Then he looked at the picture of Tony's heart.
"Damn, Howard, what did you do?" he demanded of the air. The man had been dead around twenty years and he was still giving Fury problems.
If he had been a completely human child, assuming he hadn't died by that point, he'd probably have continued to be in dire health. Tony Stark was not completely human. His diminished heart continued to pump strongly, his lungs to take in air, and though bone did not regrow, his body easily accepted the titanium substitute and soon the only evidence of major surgery that could be found was a round scar in the exact shape of the arc reactor.
The debriefing of the Avengers on Tony's condition was put off until Natasha tattled on Fury to Coulson. The necessary paperwork to authorize a debriefing was slipped in between two lengthy and tediously dull reports which nonetheless needed the director's approval and signature, without which an obscure rule would be enacted which would cancel all new coffee shipments except for decaf. They also came with a note: 'Avengers avenger, sir.'
Fury signed his approval and called the meeting. His only consolation was that Pepper Potts and her entourage stayed with Tony and Coulson wasn't actually physically available to attend. That still left a defrosted soldier with a kicked puppy expression, a man who could at any moment turn into a giant rage beast, two very capable substitutes for Coulson, and a god who was very likely about to become a diplomatic incident once he learned the extent of the deception. Thor had been the main reason he had been avoiding sharing his findings. That, and SHIELD was naturally paranoid when it came to secrets.
Fury decided to be fashionably late to the meeting. He had the doctor in charge of Tony's case sent instead, in the probably doomed hope that she could distract them by speaking medicalese. It didn't particularly work.
"So Loki turned him into a baby time lord?" Clint asked after the doctor tried to explain about the oddity of Tony's anatomy. They had pictures, including the pulverized heart. That folder had been closed rather quickly when Bruce's eyes had flashed green.
"Nay," Thor said, his voice strangely subdued. "He is like a child of my people."
"Your people are time lords?" Clint asked. Natasha gave him a look. It was her 'I know it's your coping method and I'm allowing it for now, but it's growing annoying and if you keep it up I will stab you' look. Natasha could have very expressive looks when she wanted to. Or maybe that was just him.
"I am of the Aesir," Thor answered, "We do not have the two hearts of that noble warrior, the Doctor. We do, however, have backup heart valves and a regenerative healing factor."
Clint nodded as though he understood and then leaned over to whisper to Steve, "He does know Doctor Who is fictional, right?"
Steve ignored him. But if he hadn't been ignoring him, he'd probably have given him his 'Thor is from a different culture, not an idiot' expression. Steve could be almost as good as Natasha when it came to expressions, especially ones that expressed disappointment.
"As far as we have been able to ascertain," the doctor said, "Tony Stark is part Aesir and part human. More Aesir than human. His DNA matches the records we have for Howard Stark, but there is no match with Maria Stark."
"So…Loki changed Tony's mother to one of Thor's people?" Steve asked.
"Please tell me Loki didn't make himself Tony's mom," Clint added. Around the table, people winced at the very idea.
"No," the doctor answered carefully. "There is a match we found for the…mother, and it is not Loki. Nor is it Thor. Or anyone else in this room, for that matter." Which led to shudders that came from an idea being disproven before they even thought to fear it but now couldn't help but imagine such an outcome.
"You have genetic records of my people?" Thor demanded, frowning.
"I wasn't given the details," the doctor answered defensively, "I only know that we did find a match in our database and that match was Aesir."
"So…" Steve tried to work this out, "Loki somehow made Tony part Aesir by using some DNA that SHIELD keeps on file?"
"No." a new voice answered, "Stark is part Aesir because around forty years ago Hydra was doing cloning experiments involving an alien that had crashed on our planet." Fury, with timing so perfect there was almost no way he hadn't been standing in the hallway waiting, marched in and tossed a file onto the table. "I think, just this once, Loki is mostly innocent."
"Innocent?" three different voices demanded at once, Steve and Clint with outrage and Thor with pleased surprise. Bruce continued his breathing exercise and didn't bother to say anything. Natasha ignored them all in favor of flipping through the folder. She barely glanced at the pictures, some of them nightmare inducing if she had bothered to dwell on them but not particularly relevant to the situation, and skimmed the reports until she came to something that was relevant.
"Howard Stark?" she asked, glancing towards Fury. With a grimace, Fury nodded.
"What?" Steve demanded, "What about Howard?" Fury didn't answer. Clint reached over and glanced at some of the pictures she'd bypassed, his face going pale and his eyes hard. Steve glanced over as well and blanched. Bruce very pointedly did not look at the pictures. Natasha kept reading, her face blank of all emotion. She paused again, looking up.
"Stark was sterile?"
While everyone was still trying to get their heads wrapped around the implications, Fury addressed the room.
"Around forty years ago, Howard and Maria Stark presented Anthony Edward Stark to the world. They told us he was two years old, and they had wanted to keep him away from the press as a baby. This was eight years after Howard Stark helped to close down Hydra's attempts at cloning."
"So…you're trying to say that Howard cloned himself to make Tony?" Steve tried, frowning.
"I'm saying that Howard completed Hydra's project using his own DNA to patch the faulty genetic material," Fury answered. "And then found a way to hide the alien bits and pass the result off as human, until Loki removed it."
The team stared at him.
"Excuse me," Bruce said, his voice eerily calm as he carefully stood and fled the room. Steve's expression was wounded.
"Tony is Aesir," Thor said. "And he's forty?"
"His records say he's thirty eight," the doctor offered.
"Unlikely," Natasha commented, still studying the contents of the folder. "I'd estimate his actual birthday to make him closer to forty three. Stark would have needed time to discover how to turn Tony completely human."
"I have been fighting alongside a forty year old child," Thor said, his hands clinching into fists. "I was not even allowed out of the nursery until I turned one hundred, and he has fought monsters."
"Can we change him back?" Steve asked. "Can we redo whatever Howard did and make him human again?"
Everyone except for Thor turned to look at the doctor. Thor stared at the table.
"I fix bodies," the doctor told them. "This isn't Hogwarts. I don't do curse removal."
It was while they were contemplating this that an unfortunate junior agent was pushed into the room. He looked around at the imposing figures around the table and backed up to hug against the wall.
"Director Fury, sir?" he said, standing stiffly at attention, "I've come to report that Loki has escaped, sir."
"WHAT?! And no one contacted me before because…?"
"All forms of communication seem to be temporarily blocked, sir. So were the alarms."
Five seconds later, alarms went off.
Five seconds after that, so did the sprinklers.
Fury was not having a good day.