Thank you so much for the reviews, everyone! I was so scared no one was going to read it because it's just another college AU, so I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised. ^^ Also, I have two votes down for Tony/Clint.

Disclaimer: don't own the characters.

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Artificial Sky

A few days after his first therapy appointment (that he was vehemently against but forced to go to anyway), he was deemed well enough to interact with people other than doctors and his parents. He grabbed at the opportunity immediately and met up with his friends in the diner down the street.

"Hi," he said as he sat down next to Clint, pretending not to see the second of surprise on Natasha's face when he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to fit on his shoulder. Though he'd gained back two pounds since he'd gotten back, that was still a sixteen pound difference from the last time he wore this shirt. "What's up?"

"Talking about the apartment," Clint answered, clicking his phone so the Safari page disappeared. "You know, just got down to doing it now."

It took him a moment to find the date in his head, but after a moment he said, "It's the twenty-fourth, isn't it?"

"Yup."
"And you turned eighteen yesterday."

"Mhm-hm."

Considering that Tony tended forget birthdays (including his own on a few occasions), this shouldn't have been all that unnerving, but it was anyway. He'd completely forgotten about the apartment-rather-than-dorm plan, too, since at fifteen he was too young to legally be in a dorm room at MIT and Clint and Natasha were both going to school in that general area too. Apparently it had also slipped his mind that he made a point to remember his friend's birthday this year since he was the oldest and there had to be someone at least eighteen to actually put a lease down on the place. He was the youngest by about two years and Natasha's birthday wasn't until the end of October. Naturally his two friends happened to be one with a summer birthday and another to barely make the cutoff date.

"Happy birthday," he said.

As Clint answered, "Thanks," Natasha asked, "How're you feeling?"

"What?" Then he realized that even though it'd been a week, he still looked like hell, and probably a little whacked out too. Today was his first day on Buspar and fluoxetine and since they weren't fully kicked in yet, his pupils were enormous. Though he hated being put on medication, he conveniently had a flashback a few hours before his first psychiatry appointment after waking up from a nightmare and the doctor declared the suppressing it as quickly as possible was "imperative" for some reason he didn't get the chance to overhear. "Oh, yeah. I'm okay. I was going to call you earlier, but I had to reconnect my cell phone. It sort of got broken."

He knew he was talking about this way too calmly to be considered normal, but despite the nightmares, flashback, and couple of anxiety attacks, he'd been trying his hardest to compartmentalize, make this less important than anything else until the hypothetical day he would need it (which would be never). It was proving more difficult than he expected.

Before either of his friends could say anything, a waitress he vaguely recognized as being the bad cashier from the Starbucks a few blocks over came over. "Hello, and welcome to The Flame," she said, taking out a notepad from the pocket of her apron. "I'm Laura, I'll be your server today. Do you know what you want to order?"

"Ham and cheese sandwich and a coffee, " Clint answered and Tony remembered with a certain amount of sadness that he wasn't allowed caffeine until the meds kicked it—and even then, there was only a fifty-fifty chance.

"Make that a second coffee," Natasha said, "and and toasted bagel with butter, please."

Feeling inexplicably awkward, he finished, "Another bagel and water."

"Two coffees, two bagels with butter, and ham and cheese sandwich, and water." A universal nod. "Okay, your breakfast will be here shortly."

After she'd collected the menus and left, Clint asked, "Can't eat?"

"Not really," he said, and wished that his friends didn't look so sympathetic. Part of compartmentalizing was allowing himself to not think about it again, which was the only reason why he didn't absolutely refuse the medication, so hopefully he'd be able to just get it all out and by the time September second came by, he'd never have to talk about it outside the inevitable therapy sessions ever again. "Not allowed to drink coffee or Coke or anything for a while either."

"That sucks," Natasha said. "How are you possibly going to survive morning classes now?"

Tony runs his fingers through his hair. "Don't remind me," he said. "And I was hoping on taking twenty-one credits the first semester."

This wasn't followed up by any you're insane comment, which he both appreciated and was irked by at the same time. Despite the situation, he wanted everything to be as normal as he could pull off at the moment, and the two of them poking fun of his slightly "mad" genius fell neatly into category. Though maybe that didn't make sense anymore because in accordance to the way every medical professional was treating him, being declared completely crazy was a step away from actually happening.

Instead, Clint said, exasperated, "Maybe you should take it easy the first semester. I mean, you took thirteen AP tests—don't you count as a second semester sophomore anyway?"

He shrugged. "Yeah. So?"

"You don't need to finish school in like a year, Tony," Natasha said doubtfully. "I thought you couldn't legally invent for Stark Industries until you were eighteen anyway."

He said, "I guess," without much agreement really behind it and thought, I wonder if my parents will let me go abroad next year. And if he'd still want to. To stop her from looking at him so warily, he continued, "I don't know if MIT will let me regardless. I think they only let me in this early is because I'm a Stark."

The relief was a little insulting, but he let it slid. Considering that the two of them were pretty much his only friends he'd ever had that were actual human beings, worry was going to be unavoidable. And when he thought about it logically, he could understand, and that they had right to be, whether they knew it or not. But even if they did know it, he wasn't prepared to tell anyone the shit he went through. Both his parents knew the physical things because medical practices were advanced enough now that they could see evidence everywhere. But hell if he was telling them that the only reason he escaped was because the most idiotically noble man he'd ever met sacrificed himself so a kid with no social skills, familial issues, and horrendously lower chance of survival could keep going, only to inevit—

He cut the thought off there before it could turn into a tangent and Clint said, "And that you can probably talk circles around the professors anyway. I can't wait to get to Suffolk. I'm officially sick of New York."

Laura the Ex-Starbucks Cashier came over, putting their breakfasts in front of them and walked away before any of them could give the mandatory thanks. "Same with Emerson," said Natasha after a short, slightly surprised silence. "I think I would've gone crazy if I'd ended up in a New York school."

"I didn't apply anywhere else."

"Yeah, well, why'd you need a safety school?"

For the first time since waking up in the military base, Tony started to feel his life at least trying to fit back into place. He was talking about college with his friends, there was a bagel in front of him from the only diner he bothered eating at, and he had two connected projects going on at home, one of which he'd hopefully have designed by tomorrow.

"Want to go back to my place?" he said suddenly, not wanting to end this sense of normality so quickly. "Dad's going to be tied up in the lab because of some emergency and mom's actually cooking tonight."

"They won't mind the company?" Natasha asked, and he shook his head. "Well, I'm game then. My mom's decided to make bitsky tonight, and the further away I am from that the better."

"Works for me," Clint said. "You probably can't go far anyway, right?"

He answered, "Unfortunately," and really wished he was allowed to have coffee. Or a soda. "We can try out my new AI to look for apartments, too."

"New AI?"

He nodded. "It's still a prototype, but I want to try installing a personality and everything. Right now it's just a computer command system, though. I've named it JARVIS."

"What does it stand for?" Natasha asked, and finished off her bagel. Tony shrugged. "Oh, naturally. Anyway, we're shooting for Beacon Hill or Cambridge, right?"

Tony smiled and finished his bagel as the subject changed and his friends started arguing about location and thought to himself beyond a doubt for the first time that leaving for college wasn't impossible.

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Around midnight, a few hours after his friends left, his dad entered his lab, knocking on the doorframe to let him know he was there. Tony had a while before he was allowed to shut doors and even longer before he was allowed to lock anything.

"Come in," he said from his place on the floor, fiddling with the ARC reactor control tablet he finished a few hours ago.

As his dad entered, he asked, "Did you fall asleep on the floor again?"

"No," he answered. "Can't sleep. I don't think the drowsiness side effect kicked in yet, so I'm working. Want to see? You have to lie down, though—I can't seem to get it to work from all angles yet."

A moment later his dad was next to him, which surprisingly wasn't as awkward as he'd expected. He put his finger at the bottom of the tablet screen and slid upwards. When went off the top, the ceiling was suddenly filled in with the image of the night sky. Ever since he'd realized his lab looked almost brown when the lights got dim enough, he'd started making an image to fill it up. He'd missed the sky anyway.

"Impressive," his dad said. "What type of batteries are you using? That might account for the angle issue."

Feeling incredibly proud of himself, he said, "I'm not using batteries. I'm designing a new form of energy, called an ARC reactor. Completely clean and doesn't need to be charged. I'm using it to power an AI too. His name is JARVIS."

"Is he confined to the tablet?"

"No, I'm installing him in all the equipment."

He asked, "How close are you to being finished?"

"Pretty close," he answered. "I just installed the ability to form a personality. Watch—JARVIS, raise brightness of Sirius by ten percent."

"Sixteen percent would be more realistic, sir."

"Keep it at ten for now."

As the star brightened, his dad said, "I think he's going to be a worrier."

"Why?"

A shrug. "I don't know," he said. "Just a feeling. You've done this all over the past few days?" Tony nodded. "Promise to correct your MIT professors too much, okay?"

He bit back the temptation to say, "So I can still go?" and instead asked, "Did you used to do that?"

"Oh, yeah," his dad answered. "You remember your grandfather, right?"

"Not really."

"Well, he wasn't like us, Tony. He didn't get it and wasn't around enough to get it." Now that he thought about, he'd never heard his dad talk about his parents. The only memory he had of his grandfather was a scowling old man that looked a little like President McKinley telling his dad off for letting him anywhere near, what he called, all that science stuff. "He thought letting me go off to college at sixteen was going to my head and after he found out I told my physics teacher that he was wrong about quantum mechanics, he said I wasn't as smart as I thought I was and threatened to pull me out of college. But don't worry, I'm not doing that to you. Ever."

In his sophomore year of high school, his Intro to Psych teacher said that a lot of times, a person's parenting style was taken from their own upbringing. Though he'd connected it to his mom, the thought that it worked for his dad too never crossed his mind. After a moment of awkward silence, Tony decided to bite his own pride for once, and said, "Dad, can you help me with the angling problem?"

If given another few hours to himself, he would be able to figure this out on his own. But as he and his dad crunched numbers and theories and lay on the ground with the artificial night sky above them, he wondered if this was what normal families were like.

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I couldn't possibly write an Avengers story without JARVIS.