Patchwork Road
By Rey
Chapter summary: Tony gets a bright, bright idea.
35. Sprite
The team of misfits, which is slowly but surely enough turning into a strange but tight-knit family, discovers the baby-sitter for Loki's now one-year-old babies entirely by chance… or maybe it's fate, as Darcy cheerfully points out.
Tony was, after all, just idly combing through the final-project proposals of the civil engineering undergraduates at Stark University, while waiting for his fabricators to finish churning out the last batch of outfit and equipment they'll need, when he came upon a unique case…. Or rather, he came across a proposal plus a petition for additional fund loan and permission to bring a little brother along for familial reasons during the undertaking of the final project.
The peculiar proposal was written by a twenty-two-year-old orphan girl majoring in civil engineering and minoring in ancient architecture, one Sarah Anna Williams, who wanted to help unearth and restore a temple somewhere in Java. And she must be very good because even her project advisor vowed that she is a responsible and trustworthy student, devoted to her college course, her work and her brother at the same time.
Other – saner, more likely, more responsible to their jobs – deans or rectors or whatever would've laughed the proposal away or scoffed at it. But Tony has never claimed himself as entirely sane and responsible anyway.
And he thinks that stowing Loki's little ones somewhere SHIELD might not guess at would be a very, very good idea.
With that in mind, the whole gang turns into a more benevalent version of the Spanish Inquisition and smuggles both Williams siblings into the tower.
They are met by a firebrand apparent-sixteen-year-old and an energetic apparent-two-year-old instead of the twenty-two-year-old and seven-year-old they've expected.
`Oh well. It's a unique case, right? These imps are adorable, anyway,` Tony thinks. He might just keep them, even after this temporary job is concluded.