Adventures of Astra and Tony

(Takes place right before the as of yet untitled sequel to 'Redemption.' Astra will be two years old in it, so she's walking and talking, although she doesn't talk very well, obviously.)

Bruce and Tony were eating a late breakfast/early lunch (they had been in the lab since six in the morning and it was now eleven) when there was a faint shimmer in the air and a popping noise, signalling the coming appearing of Loki and likely Phoenix. It wouldn't be Phoenix alone, as, no matter how much she practiced, she couldn't seem to get a hang of teleportation (the last time she had tried on her own, she had accidentally appeared in Tony's workshop naked, which had NOT been her intent, thank you), so she just used a door and knocked like a normal person.

Sure enough, Loki and Phoenix appeared before them, although they weren't alone. Loki was carrying a bag and Astra, and Phoenix was carrying...was that a cat?

"Are you really going to be one of those cat ladies, Phoenix? I know you're old as dirt, but you still look WAY too young to take your cat everywhere," Tony said to her over his coffee mug.

"I can't take him everywhere," she retorted, narrowing her eyes at him not unlike a cat. "That's why you're going to watch him, and Astra for a few days."

"Wait, what?" Tony sputtered, choking on the sip of coffee that he had just taken, finally managing to swallow it down. "No...I don't watch kids. Banner, tell her I don't watch kids." He looked to Bruce for moral support.

"As funny as the idea sounds, it's likely not a good idea," Bruce told them. "I'm not sure that Tony can keep houseplants alive, much less a kid and a cat."

"Thankfully my child has a hardier constitution than a Midgardian plant," Loki snapped, handing the large bag of presumably Astra's things to Tony. Actually, dumping it on his lap is more like it. "Although if you harm one hair on her head, I'll cut off your foot and shove it down your throat."

"The same goes for Socks," Phoenix said, dropping a similar bag, likely full of cat stuff, on the floor before handing Bruce the cat in question. Bruce stared at it like it had three heads while Socks seemed content to spin in a circle before curling up in his lap and going to sleep. "This trip is...last minute, so it's not like we could ask for this in advance. Besides, if you have trouble, ask Rogers. He likes children."

"Then have HIM watch her! I have stuff to do!" Tony demanded, pushing the bag off his lap just in time to be handed Astra, who seemed to have been taught to call Tony 'puppy,' by what she was shouting as she looked at him.

"Such is the demanding life of a royal pet," Phoenix said with a sigh. "It'll just be for a few days. Besides, she's a child, not a bomb. Stop looking so afraid of her."

Both Loki and Phoenix bent down to coo at Astra for a few moments, telling her that they loved her and that they'd be back soon before disappearing again.

"Seriously, what the hell do we do now?" Tony asked, staring bewildered at the child in his lap. Really, he had no business in dealing with children. His home was anything but child proof!

"No clue," Bruce said, then grinning. "Is she really calling you 'puppy'?"

"Shut the hell up."

OoOoOoOo

Tony had placed an immediate call to Pepper, who rushed over right away. After looking through the bags, she insisted that Loki and Phoenix had left them with everything that they would need, and no, he was not allowed to give the baby bourbon if she was teething, no matter what his nanny had done when he was young and BOY did that explain a lot about him. When Steve returned from the gym, Tony had all but handed him the child and ran away. Steve was good with kids. Tony was afraid of them.

Of course, the child of two gods wouldn't let something as simple as a locked door keep her away from who she wanted to be around, and that was apparently Tony. While her mother seemed to have serious issues with teleportation, her daughter seemed to have no such hampering, going by the fact that she appeared on Tony's work desk while he was in the middle of working on blueprints for a new project.

"Jesus Christ!" Tony screamed, tumbling off his stool. He had been in such deep concentration that the girl had scared the bejeezus out of him.

Astra giggled, and, as he looked up from the floor, he could see that the girl had appeared with the cat as well. "Hi puppy!" she said, waving at him from the desk.

"OK, first off, I'm Tony, kiddo," he said, pulling himself up off the floor and sitting back down on his stool. "You really can't call me 'puppy,' at least not in front of the others. I'm a person, not a dog."

"Puppy Tony!" Astra squealed, reaching out and petting him on the head.

Tony grumbled. "I think that's actually worse," he said to her. "You must take a lot more after your father, because your mother sucks at teleportation, although I didn't hate the view from the last experiment," he admitted to her.

"JARVIS, where is Steve right now?" Tony asked.

"He's looking for Astra around the kitchen, sir," JARVIS replied. "Shall I turn on the intercom?"

"Please do," Tony said. "Hey, Steve? I've got a really young, raven haired girl in my lap, and I didn't bring her in here. She one of your dates?"

Steve's frantic voice filtered through the intercom. "Tony? Oh thank GOD you have her. I thought I lost her for sure. How did she get in there?"

"Apparently, she can teleport like her dad," Tony explained. "Her and the cat are in here. You wanna come get them? This isn't exactly the safest environments for a toddler and her familiar or pet or whatever the hell this cat is supposed to be."

"Actually, I think she wants to be around you, Tony," Steve told him. "She's been asking for you all day. Well, she's been asking for her puppy and Bruce explained that she apparently calls you puppy."

Tony groaned as he heard a slight laugh coming from Steve. "I'm not going to get ANY work done until they get back, am I?" he asked, more to himself, but Steve decided to answer just the same.

"I kind of doubt it," Steve replied. "It's actually her dinner time, so you need to come out and feed her."

"Damnit," Tony muttered, standing up. "Come on then, kiddo," he said. As soon as he held his hands out to her, she pounced on him, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Well, you're certainly an affectionate kid, aren't you?" She just giggled in response.

OoOoOoOo

"So, explain to me again how this happened?" Pepper asked.

"It seems that Astra has the same 'ice powers' as her father, Ms. Potts," JARVIS responded from above.

"I think that's obvious to everyone," Tony said.

"Tony, you really shouldn't be doing much of anything right now, much less being sarcastic," Bruce said as he looked the billionaire over.

"Why is Tony half covered in a block of ice?" Pepper shouted. "No one's explained that to me yet!"

She was actually having to shout over the two hairdryers that were running at the moment. Bruce and Steve were trying to get Tony out of the block of ice as fast as they could. The top half of him that was free was already shivering like crazy.

"I was feeding her ice cream and she sneezed, and suddenly I'm covered up to my chest in ice!" Tony explained in a huff, his teeth chattering. "Apparently, she doesn't have the same control as Loki does yet."

"I sorry I covered the puppy in ice," Astra said, pouting slightly from her highchair.

"It's not your fault, kiddo," Tony told her reassuringly. "Your dad needs to teach you to control that, though. I'm not sure how many more accidents like this my body can handle."

OoOoOoOo

It took what felt like forever to get Tony out of the ice, and it took even longer for him to feel anything resembling warm. Steve tried to get him to go to the hospital, but Tony insisted that Bruce could look him over and it would be just fine.

After Astra was put to bed, Tony collapsed in his own bed, ready to pass out and go to sleep. He didn't normally go to sleep before midnight, but today had been a trying day and all he wanted to do was sleep.

He had only been sleeping an hour or so when he felt someone tugging on his blanket. Looking down, bleary eyed, he saw that it was Astra, the cat standing at her feet. "Shouldn't you be in bed, kid?"

"Bad dream," she said to him. She was chewing on her thumbnail in a way he had seen her mother do when she was nervous or scared, which actually had only happened once, when she had those dreams about Thanos.

Rubbing his eyes, he then reached down for Astra, sitting her down on the bed in front of him. Right now he was just glad that he had passed out with clothing tonight. "What kind of bad dream? Normal bad or 'something's about to happen' bad?" he asked her.

She shrugged. "Momma says to listen to all my dreams," she told him. "Any of them could mean something."

"Very true," he said to her with a nod. "Then again, it's not like anyone who sees the future ever sees anything good." He ran his fingers through his hair, absently noting that he needed a haircut. It was getting long enough to almost hang in his eyes when it wasn't slicked back. "Tell me about it."

"Witchy woman going after Daddy," Astra told him. "She kept saying that he owed her something."

"What is it with your parents and pissing people off?" Tony asked. "I don't have a way to contact them, because that would be simple and your parents likely didn't think about it, but we'll tell them when they get back, OK?" He thought of something. "This doesn't happen like, tomorrow, does it?" She shook her head. "OK, good. Alright, let's get you back to bed then."

She crawled back up the bed, wrapping his blankets around her tiny little body. "Sleep here tonight," she insisted, and it seemed like the cat agreed, as it jumped on the bed as well.

Tony realized that he should get up and put her to bed, but he was too damn tired to care. "If you're a blanket hog, I'm gonna be mad," he said, flopping back down in the bed.

OoOoOoOo

"This scene would be adorable if I wasn't worried about the state of those sheets." Steve's voice cracked through the sleepy daze that had been Tony's morning. "Please tell me they've been changed since your last night of carousing."

"My sheets get changed every day, thank you," Tony grumbled, grabbing his pillow and hurling it in Steve's general direction, not even looking up as it missed him by a mile. "What the hell do you think I have robots for?"

"What's she doing in here, anyway?" Steve asked, walking over to Astra's side of the bed. When he nudged the little girl, she burrowed deeper into the blanket. "Seems like she's likes the morning as much as you do," he said with a grin.

"She had a bad dream last night and made her way in here," Tony said. If he was really going to be up this early, he was going to need some damn coffee and a donut or two. "I think it might be one of those prophetic things. She wouldn't go back to her own bed."

"Loki and Phoenix didn't leave a way to contact them, did they?" Steve asked. When he tried to rouse the child again, Socks poked his head out of the bundle of covers and yowled at him in a warning tone, causing Steve to back away. "I really think that cat hates me. It plots against me."

"Nah, but I get the feeling that they can see if anything bad happens," Tony said, laughing when the cat told Steve to basically back off. "It's a cat. It can't 'plot against you.'"

"Who knows what that thing really is," Steve said. "Astra talks to it, you know. She talks to it like she talks to you."

"Kitty thinks you smell like hair gel," Astra muttered sleepily from under her blanket.

Tony laughed until he started snorting. "Well, it's not like the cat's wrong."