No copyright infringement is intended. This is just some indulgence into (over-)entusiastic Tony Stark on my part... Also eager bots. I love the bots.
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Claire patiently sat on a very high chair by her (as she'd started to suspect, insane) boss' work bench, down in the workshop. She smiled to herself at the image of Dumm-E bringing his boss coffee for at least the twentieth time, and simultaneously shook her head. The last thing Tony Stark really needed right now was more coffee.
Everyone seemed to have reacted to Pepper's baby news in different ways. Some of them were surprising, and most of them were certainly not.
Tony Stark had started immediately at designing a joint apartment for Natasha and Pepper, including an office for Pepper (she would likely need it during her last few months of pregnancy, not to mention when breastfeading and thus needing to stay closer to home occasionally) and a kid's room. Not to mention the nursery and all the other things he was designing - Claire had utterly lost count within the hour.
Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers had - somewhat productively, it must be admitted - immediately gotten started on childproofing the Tower, making lists and checking things up in parenting guides, so that it would all be perfect and ready in a few months.
Hawkeye had started to bug everyone about how their weapons needed to be out of reach, prompting Tony to make a few early drafts on good safe storage which children couldn't get into. Everyone had abandoned the question at that point - if he could keep the Hulk contained at will, he could make some guns and a frankly unnecessarily large collection of knives (it belonged almost exclusively to Bucky and Natasha, which surprised nobody) out of the grasp of a toddler.
Bruce Banner had started nutrition research on the subject of pregnant women and small children, as well as sharply telling Tony to childproof the elevators and the lab doors. Jarvis had reminded everyone at that point that he would never open doors for the child to get in anywhere dangerous. No one knew what research or what manner of preparations he was currently doing, but no one doubted that he was getting ready.
Pepper had given up a sigh of relief and started to pick out things she wanted for the baby, parked in the sofa in front of the television with a tub of ice cream and her high heels chucked away in a corner.
Most of these reactions were, Claire admitted silently for herself, rather predictable. Even Dumm-E's excitement, expressed in fuelling Tony's mad inventing streak with lots and lots of coffee, could be guessed at easily. Natasha, however, was making up for all the other non-surprising reactions with one that no one had expected.
She was sitting silently in the kitchen, looking over the pictures Pepper had brought of their (and Tony's) baby girl, over and over again without speaking. Clint, who knew her well, had in a surprising attack of emotional insight shooed the others out of the room, telling them to let her be. If she was crying a tear or two, presented with something she thought she could never have after injuries she suffered in her traumatic past, Jarvis certainly wasn't telling. And if Claire checked on her as she made them all some food (with generous help from Jarvis) she did not tell on her either. She could only too well understand the pain of not belonging and the overwhelming sensation of finally acquiring something you really wished for, but thought was out of your reach, and she sympathised. Maybe, it would all be alright, sometime in the future. For all of them.