You know it is the Avengers when "ninety-year-old war-veteran" in a room filled mostly with thirty-somethings, needs more specifics. Rest assured, I mean the female one.

I do not own Marvel. I would be very loudly claiming it was mine if I owned Marvel.

TapTap

Peggy had a tendency to talk to Tony not so much as if he was a small boy, but nevertheless setting him straight like it, in a way not even Pepper could quite manage. They'd discovered as much after the first time Steve had taken her to the tower to meet Baby Stark, after Claire's mini intervention.

Strangely, Tony - who could be a bit difficult when it came to reason - did not seem to mind her reproaches in the least. To the contrary, he had more than once been found to meekly oblige, without seemingly a care in the world.

Some of his more insightful teammates and pseudo family members thought more than once that this might have been what Tony Stark would have been like… if he had gotten to keep his mother a bit longer. If things had been more fortunate.

It was Peggy Carter - no longer called Carter, of course, but Steve misspoke so many times they'd all given up - who first suggested the name Maria for Maria Stark's granddaughter. Peggy, of course, could recall like none of them, just how much she looked like a young Maria, back when she first met her, when she was not yet called Stark.

Bruce, Peggy, Pepper and Claire, could likely all have told you it was as good as settled, when they saw the way Natasha tilted her head and just pondered the now six weeks old babe, held safely in the ninety-year-old war-veteran's arms, as Peggy sat by the kitchen table cradling her once-friend's grandchild with clear delight.

Pepper was sitting over on a barstool, looking at them knowingly even though she was handling a multiple-million-dollar energy deal over the phone; Bruce, Steve and Bucky were cooking, and Clint and Claire sat next to each other on the table, as if this was completely normal. Granted, with the bizarre lives that they were all living, it didn't seem like that big of a deal.

Natasha was sitting next to Peggy, and the two of them had been discussing everyday baby-matters, Peggy being a wealth of knowledge after so many daughters of her own. Strangely, Clint and Claire both had a lot more reasonable things to say on the matter than most of the room.

Tony Stark, sprawled across a nearby sofa, was merely interested in things which made his baby-precaution inventions more effective, which surprised nobody. Though it did amuse them all just what a fussy dad he was turning out to be. Claire could not say she was surprised.

It had been a week since Tony's in-house interview had lead to the whole internet speculating about whether or not the Avengers kept prisoners in Stark Tower - which in turn had lead to the speculation that Tony Stark might be keeping sex-slaves.

Pepper had caused quite a controversy by coldly telling the press that even all the other reasons that this was nonsense aside, and all the proof that he was in fact a great humanist, why would he ever risk a lawsuit by such behaviour when he clearly had absolutely no problem sleeping with an entire almanac of very willing models? This was not at all a politically correct thing to say, but it was very true.

It had taken over an entire news cycle, and Stark Industries' stock had risen by twenty points. Pepper used this as a school example in her, "Some playboy publicity is good for business," rants for months afterwards. She had even patted Tony on his head and told him he'd been good, afterwards, as if he'd been a dog. He had shook his head but surprisingly had no snarky comment for the occasion. Clint speculated for ages afterwards that he was actually speechless at getting praise from Pepper. He was not wrong.

To ensure that the whole affair truly blew over, a film clip of Claire, introduced to the great bafflement of most of the world as SI's inner R&D director, had been posted on Tony Stark's official Channel.

In the clip, Claire was seen sparring with Steve, Bucky spotting them and stepping in as she lost her balance in the brief segment before she acknowledged the camera and started speaking.

Her words - many of them spoken with her back to the camera, showcasing that same blond head so visible on the first tapes - were partly a simple, straightforward statement about how she was Doctor Banner's research assistant in some medical research meant to help sufferers of a host of illnesses, and a willing participant in their study.

The rest of her words were a soft-spoken, well-worded rant about corporate culture which ended in the later frequently quoted words, "It comes easy for these privileged men of power, who has never been discriminated against by anybody, to accuse Tony Stark of misogyny, when in reality they feel threatened because the glass ceiling is all they stand on, and he, a man reaching to where he's gotten on pure talent, has taken a chainsaw to it in several ways, including chosing females for two out of three senior managing positions in his company."

Stark Industries climbed another fourteen points that day.