Tony Stark opened his eyes. Loki was standing over him, staring. A voice that was far too high pitched to be himself shrieked and Tony reflexively threw the closest thing at hand at him. As this turned out to be a pillow it wasn't particularly effective, but somehow between twisting to grab the pillow and twisting back to throw it, Loki had vanished.
Tony sat up in the bed, his heart beating almost painfully hard in his chest, as he tried to make sense of the situation.
This wasn't his bedroom. For one, despite his various health issues, his bedroom wasn't full of medical apparatus. For another, usually by this point JARVIS would be speaking to him, reminding him where he was, and where he wasn't.
Had he been injured? He didn't feel injured, though his limbs were unaccountably heavy, his eyes still blinking away sleep. He didn't feel drugged, either. He felt…off. Like something was very, very wrong.
Pepper was lying in a nearby chair, her limbs slack, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Like someone who was dead.
Alarmed, Tony slid off the bed and toddled unsteadily to her side.
Something was very very wrong. Short jokes aside, he shouldn't have that far to go to reach the ground from the bed. Also, his entire sense of balance and body awareness was off, and the world around him had grown. Shoving the weirdness and wrongness aside for the moment, Tony managed to make it to Pepper's side without falling over and reached an unsteady hand for her pulse.
It took a couple of tries. It was like being drunk and trying to do that test of touching one's nose; his hand wasn't exactly where his brain seemed to think it should be. Pepper's heart was beating. She was breathing. She wasn't dead.
The relief almost made Tony burst into tears. He didn't, of course. He'd trained himself out of crying when his emotions were on overload years and years ago.
And now that he knew Pepper wasn't dead, it was getting harder to ignore the wrongness in his own body.
His hand was so tiny compared to Pepper's wrist. If it had just been Pepper, he'd have been tempted to say she had grown into a giant. It wouldn't be the first time that kind of oddity had happened. But Pepper fit in the giant chair, and there was also the giant bed, and the giant door and the giant machines. There was no reason for a giant Pepper to be put in a modified giant hospital room as a guest while Tony slept. Tony had shrunk.
If only he had just shrunk. Then he might be mocked for a bit by the others until they fixed it but he'd still, ultimately, be himself. His skin was too smooth, too new, too young for it to just be his height.
Not that his skin was unmarked. There were still faint scars, still calluses, but less hair, less muscle, less ravages from time. Tony studied his own hands, and then his bare feet, for a full minute before he gave in, took a deep breath, and lifted his hospital gown to check beneath.
That was very definitely not good. Though it could be worse. At least he still had certain body parts, however undeveloped said parts now were. He hadn't been turned into a girl as well as short. Just…
"I'm a kid," he said out loud, his voice startlingly high pitched. He dropped the gown and moved his hands carefully to his face, his spatial recognition already adapting to his new form and he easily ran his fingers over smooth skin. That was what he was expecting, of course. He'd have looked funny as a child with facial hair, anyway. He most definitely wasn't going to start crying over something like that. Just because he was a kid didn't mean he had to be a baby too.
Loki, he realized, this had to be Loki's fault. They had been battling him, hadn't they? And he had thrown something at Steve, and Tony had moved in the way. Turning the Avengers into defenseless kids seemed to be the sort of thing a god of mischief would do. And Loki had just been in his hospital room, too. To gloat? To cast this spell on an injured Tony? Try as he might, Tony couldn't remember the conclusion to the battle.
So, it must have been Loki, and they'd just need to find a way to turn Tony back and it'd all be fine. Were the other Avengers fine? Were they all children too, or injured, or worse? Loki had been after Steve, after all. He walked unsteadily to the door, determined to find Pepper help and discover what was going on.
And then suddenly alarms were going off. This was followed by the sprinkler.
"Wha… Tony!" Apparently a loud noise coupled with being doused by water was enough to break through whatever enchantment Loki had whammied her with. The door to the room flung open and Happy and Rhodey were there too, everyone's eyes turning to the empty bed first before they fell on Tony.
They were huge. If Pepper sitting in a chair had seemed big, two grown men were true giants. Tony had to crane his head upwards to get a view that wasn't crotch level. The fact that Rhodey's first protective instinct was to snatch Tony off the ground was unfortunate for everyone, considering that Tony's first instinct upon being picked up involved his foot going into a very sensitive location on Rhodey's body and ended with Tony falling, rolling into his landing, and taking out Happy at the knees.
When the alarm and sprinklers abruptly stopped, Pepper had the best view of Rhodey and Happy in a wet tangled heap, groaning in pain, with a tiny child sitting, dazed and befuddled but victorious, on top of them. Despite her shock, worry, and confusion, she still had the presence of mind to snap a photo.
"Tony?" Pepper said after she had taken the picture, her expression warring between amused, relieved, and terrified. It made Tony uncomfortable to look at her.
"Pepper," he said, trying not to wince at his own voice. "Are you hurt? Did Loki do anything to you?"
The noise she made was laughter, but it sounded very close to a sob.
Then the doctors showed up, wet and furious with the havoc the sprinklers and alarm had wrought on their entire ward, and horrified to find their critically ill patient not only awake but out of bed and unattached to the various machines he had been attached to.
"I'm fine," Tony tried to tell them, though he did allow Pepper to carry him back to the bed without inflicting further violence. His self-assessment might have been more convincing if he hadn't reflexively put his hand to his chest, feeling vulnerable as he did in front of all the strangers, and discovered a very vital part of himself to be missing completely. So he may have freaked out, just a tad. He may also have kicked the first doctor who came at him with a needle in the face. Luckily, he lacked shoes, not to mention the proper strength to break cartilage, though the nose bleed was still quite impressive.
The sudden arrival of the entire Avengers team did not help the situation.
In the end, one doctor was allowed to examine Tony with only Pepper present for moral support and Tony was declared miraculously cured. Not completely; there was still permanent damage to his heart and lungs that not even an Aesir could simply walk off, but he was not in need of a hospital bed either.
Tony's own debriefing to his condition felt surreal.
"You're saying my dad built me. In a lab. And then he turned me human. And Loki turned me back into an alien, the kind of alien that ages super slowly so even though I'm almost forty I look like this."
"Actually, we think you might be forty three," Clint offered helpfully. Tony stared at him. Then he looked at the others.
"And no one thinks this might just be another one of Loki's tricks, and he just made us all think it was my dad?"
The looks coming his way this time were far too pitying. Whatever. There was really only one thing Tony wanted to know at this point. "So how do we fix it?" he demanded. "How do we turn me human again?"
The silence of the others was getting uncomfortable now.
"It would be but an illusion," Thor said, breaking the silence, his voice impossibly gentle. "You would still be a child, just with an adult mask."
"I'm not a child!" Tony insisted, "I haven't been a child for decades!"
His point might have been better made if he hadn't stomped his foot at the same time. The others were looking decidedly uncomfortable. Pepper actually looked like she might start crying.
"Kids don't earn billions of dollars, or run companies, or fight villains!" Tony screamed at them. "They don't have sex, or drink, or…or…build robots!" And that last one was pretty flimsy considering how young Tony had been when he had built his first robot, but that wasn't the point. "I have responsibilities! I have a girlfriend! I have forty-three years of experience in life! I AM NOT A CHILD."
And then, taking a deep breath, because he was not going to throw a tantrum, he was not going to burst into tears, he was going to be mature and dignified, Tony announced "I'm going home."
And still barefoot and wearing a hospital gown, luckily not the kind that opened in the back, he calmly walked out of the room and down the hall, leaving a heavy silence in his wake.
"Well," Natasha said into the silence, "At least his personality hasn't changed."
"Shouldn't someone be going with him?" Steve asked. "I mean, I know he's still forty-three but he's also a minor." Everyone looked at each other. Then they all looked at Pepper. With a sigh, she did go to the door and look out, but stopped almost at once. Tony was nowhere in sight.
"Can you not follow the path of a child?" Thor asked the two resident spies. Natasha and Clint made no move to run out the door.
"I don't know," Natasha said, "Children are tiny. I think we will have to report to Fury that we lost his asset. Those scientists will just have to find a different alien clone to play with."
"Wait, what?!" Steve demanded.
"There was a whole debriefing," Clint said, "It was a thing. About how dangerous it could be if Stark fell into the wrong hands. And we were ordered under no circumstances were we to smuggle him out of the building. So, as you can see, here we are, not smuggling Tony out of the building."
"He would dare hold an Aesir child captive?!" Thor boomed.
"And let's not forget, do painful experiments on an Aesir child," Clint agreed. With a growl, Thor stomped off in the general direction of Fury's office. The others watched him go with a mixture of satisfaction and concern. Then they turned their attention once again to the missing child.
"Do you think Stark will actually get out of the building?" Natasha asked.
"Twenty bucks says he gets to the deck and stops," Clint answered. "He can't fit in his suits and he's too short to drive. Anyway, he's two feet tall and dressed like a hospital escapee. How far is he going to get like that?"
Half an hour later, they got a call from a police officer. Apparently, they had pulled over a speeding car to discover the driver was a toddler wearing an oversized black shirt like a dress who had somehow rigged the pedals and thought kneeling in the driver's seat was a good alternative to not being able to see over the wheel.
Pepper won the bet.