I did it again, didn't I? Sorry guys.
I hate to say it, but the way things are going, this is gonna be semi normal... Yikes. Life just keeps shoving itself in the way. Also my laptop broke- half the screen has been reduced to dead pixels, so that was a major setback too. Good thing I have Evernote on my phone. XD
Anyways yeah. I'm gonna try to keep myself to monthly updates at the longest. Rest assured I'm not giving up on this! Never! Although life's only gonna get busier from here. I graduate in two months, and I'm trying to convince a college that accepting me will not be a total waste of funds XD. So just bear with me, okay?
But enough of that! I gotta tell you guys how ecstatic I am!
Almost 130 reviews?! What on Earth? This is insane! I'm so happy! Jumping up and down makes typing very difficult! I'm trying desperately not to squeal like a thing that squeals! I think I'm going to go kiss a puppy! Or burn down a building! Not sure which! Ahh!
On with the story!
Oh! One last note, I added more obvious page breaks since my lines are apparently being hidden. They're in bold. The default is TSE , unless I'm marking a time jump. That's either gonna be a date or what age Hermione will be at that point.
Chapter 4: Double Trouble
Six Years Old
"Wait a second, so they got married? That's all?" Tony resisted the urge to cradle his head in his hands as he saw his daughter's musing expression. Weren't bedtime stories supposed to put kids to sleep?
"Yes, Hermione, they got married. Happily ever after. Good nig-"
"But why?"
Goddamnit. She was making the face.
He knew it well- the same expression he wore in the lab. She was thinking over a problem that absolutely required some resolution before she'd be able to sleep at all tonight.
"What do you mean? They were in love," he said, rolling his eyes. Okay, maybe he could understand her confusion. Snow White was total bullshit.
"But...But they've never even met before. He just kissed her! Without her permission! That's really rude," Minnie observed, crossing her arms.
Tony swore to everyone he would never regret having a kid as smart as Minnie. In fact, any other time he would've been proud that his daughter wasn't obsessed with being a princess. But damn it, it was four in the Morning. Whatever energy she was currently running on was clearly an untapped energy source that he could market for millions of dollars. After she went the f*ck to sleep.
" Yes well, Snow White was sleeping, so the Prince couldn't ask her. You know who else should be sleeping-"
"Well I guess, but that still doesn't mean she had to marry him! They don't even know each other's names!"
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"Snow White is the fairest in the land, everybody knows her name. And Prince can totally be a name." He argued.
This was getting ridiculous.
She leveled him with a look that was thoroughly unimpressed.
"A Prince named Prince? That's just silly Daddy."
With a jaw-popping yawn he stretched across her bed.
"You know what else is silly? That it's tomorrow, and we haven't gone to sleep," he muttered into her comforter, simply deciding he could no longer be bothered. Hermione giggled, and covered her father with the blanket, until they were both snuggled into the bed.
"Goodnight Daddy," she whispered. Tony was snoring.
Today
Tony was almost scared to look. The laughter escaping their hospital room was a sound he knew too well.
His daughter only made that particular sound when she was doing something even he had the presence of mind to know what dangerous.
Snatching off the proverbial band-aid, he opened the door, and steeped inside, only to trip over Gamma, the giant Hulk-bear, who was hovering near the doorway. His stomach flipped nervously when instead of face planting on the floor, he began somersaulting through the air, his eyes narrowing as he spotted the Hermione and Peter, sitting on the ceiling like it was any casual conversation.
Damn it.
"Minnie," he said with a long suffering sigh.
She giggled, knowing full well he wasn't actually angry.
"Yes Daddy?" she asked innocently.
He shook his head, exasperated.
"Okay, you had your fun. Put everything back before somebody sees and we have to call Grandpa," he warned.
With a huff, Minnie crossed her arms, and gravity returned to the room again. The kids landed harmlessly on their beds. Tony landed on the floor, hard. He sat up with a groan, only for Gamma to land on top of his head.
"Okay rule number…"
"47," Hermione offered.
He rolled his eyes.
"Rule number 47, no cancelling the gravity in hospital rooms," he said, only half seriously.
She grinned.
"Yes Daddy."
Nurse Joy rushed into the room, glancing around nervously, obviously expecting something had happened. When she found both of the children perfectly fine, and Tony on the floor, she sighed. Tony snorted; clearly, he wasn't the only one who recognized how much trouble the two could get into in a very short amount of time.
"What happened in here?" She asked, eying the billionaire and various gifts strewn across the floor.
"We were playing Spaceman," Hermione quipped, grin widening when Tony rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, we were floating on the atmosphere of the moon!" Peter added.
Joy smiled good-naturedly, and shook her head, muttering the imaginations of children.
Tony snorted. If only.
"Mr. Stark, why exactly are you on the floor?"
"Playing spaceman, obviously," he said, grinning."
"Well don't let the children get too excited. They still need to be checked over, and as long as they don't over-exert themselves, they could be discharged tomorrow," she told them, which only caused the kids to start chattering like little hyper squirrels. He rolled his eyes again, even if he was relieved.
The kindly nurse exited with a knowing smile, and then Tony remembered part of the reason he'd been so excited to get in here on the first place.
"I'm needed down at the Police station, but I figured I'd stop in and drop off my own little get well present," he said, handing Hermione a duffle bag, which she immediately began rummaging through, shrieking with excitement when she found a McDonald's bag.
"Chicken Nuggets!" She squealed, handing Peter his own bag while her new friend snickered at her enthusiasm.
Tony sighed dramatically
"She only loves me for the nuggets," he told Peter with a wink.
"Thanks Mr. Stark."
He shrugged.
"Don't mention it kid. And seriously, call me Tony," he said, ruffling the boy's hair.
Checking his watch, he sighed, and got up.
"I gotta go. I left a surprise in the bottom of that bag for you. Don't get into too much trouble," he grinned.
Minnie mumbled something he translated to mean "I love you," and he smirked goodnaturedly as he walked out. "You too cupcake."
TSE
Captain Stacy's face was grim when Tony made it to the station, and the billionaire's mouth thinned into a hard line.
"What happened?"
The Policeman gestured for him to follow him further into the building, where they entered his office and locked the door.
Stacy crossed his arms, clearly frustrated.
"Carradine is in a holding cell now. But he's tough. We haven't gotten anything useful out of him so far, but we've got our best man on it."
Tony nodded.
"And the other bastard?"
The cop looked gray in the face.
"Didn't survive the defrosting. Medical examiner says the ice crushed his ribcage."
William Stacy was an intelligent man. He knew that while the current relationship with mutants was tenuous at best, he knew they weren't monsters. But the idea that a little girl could kill a man that way unsettled his stomach.
Tony cursed and pinned him with a fierce look
"I don't care what needs to be done, but you are not going to tell my daughter that she's responsible for that bastard's death," he said under his breath.
Stacy put a hand on his shoulder.
"I know, it was an accident. It's being fed to the media as a heart attack. But now we've lost one of our best leads, and still don't have a clue who did this."
Tony pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Let me call in a favor," he sighed.
TSE
Hey Minnie, what's this?" Petey asked, holding up a silver cylinder that looked a lot like a thermos bottle, with a Stark Industries logo emblazoned on the side.
Hermione's grin told him something dangerous and awesome was coming next.
"Oh man, you're gonna love this," she crowed, her fingers finding a seam in the side of the canister he couldn't see, and popping it open with a click.
All the air escaped his lungs with a small "whoosh" when a holographic interface flickered into existence in front of him.
"Identification please," a very British voice requested.
"Hermione Stark," she replied, her voice clear, and her eyes excited.
"Thank you Miss Stark," the voice now punctuated by a release of pressurized air from within, and suddenly a foot long model of a jumbo jet was hovering above her lap, only half constructed. The remaining pieces were drifting around, half of them too small to make out properly.
Grinning at the question Peter obviously wanted to ask, Hermione explained,
"This is one of the models my Dad makes when he's developing a new project. He makes a perfectly scaled version out of scraps and contains them in one of these. He calls it homework, but I call it Legos," she said, beaming at Peter's awed expression.
"Homework?"
He wondered aloud. She shrugged.
"I'll probably take over Stark Industries someday. So Dad gives me these, and then I have to reverse engineer the pieces, and maybe make some improvements if I can think of anything. This one's a Stark jet. They're faster, and nearly indestructible, but the TSA banned them because they're powered by what is essentially a nuclear reactor, and they decided they weren't worth the risk," she explained, shrugging nonchalantly.
She passed it to him, and he examined the tiny plane intently.
"How do you even do anything with this? It's so tiny..."
She moved her hands in an expanding motion, and holographic versions of the pieces appeared, growing until they were nearly full size. They found themselves sitting inside the cabin of the assembled section of the plane. From this perspective, he could see all the different layers of development- titanium panels and supports; circuitry and screws and wiring. It was terribly impressive, and he twitched a bit at the prospect of getting his hands on it.
"So I could just..." He reached out and grabbed the holographic protection of a turbine, and slid it into place, the corresponding piece moving with his hand.
"That's incredible!" He gushed.
Hermione lit up at that.
"That's not even the coolest stuff! My dad has a whole lab where he designs these things himself!"
Peter decided then and there, while listening to Hermione ramble excitedly about things that to her were everyday amusements, that the last few days- kidnapping and all, had been by far the most exciting days of his life.
TSE
As far as Tony was concerned, the interrogation of Dennis Carradine was the most hilarious thing he'd seen in a while. It was essentially a giant game of chess, where Carradine and Jean Grey both had their own pieces, but the one's given to Dennis were actually on Jean's side, and nobody had told the stupid bastard yet. So the punk that was responsible for the kidnapping of his daughter was sitting back in his chair, perfectly at ease and unconcerned with the woman in front of him, completely unaware of the fact that she could read his mind that a particularly badly written book.
It was always fun watching one of the X-Men do what they did best, although it did weird things to Tony's head to know that crap like this was even possible. Like how Jean could take one look at a guy and know their head well enough to screw with a man in ways that NYPD's best interrogator's could only dream of. Said interrogator was sitting petulantly by the side, arms crossed, but frankly, Tony couldn't bring himself to give a damn.
The red haired woman was going easy on the poor bastard for now. She gave him the opportunity to volunteer the information at first, before she really dug in and scarred the idiot for life.
But he simply scoffed and didn't answer her question, instead making a casual comment about her breasts, which earned him a splitting headache, not that he'd realized she could even do that. Of course, he never would've said it if he knew Scott Summers was standing behind the two way mirror with Tony, primed and ready to fry his face off if necessary, but unfortunately, he didn't know this either.
Pity.
TSE
"Well?"
Pepper asked him as he walked into the hospital room.
The kids were in fresh clothes, and all the presents had been divided evenly and packed up at Hermione's insistence, despite them being mostly hers. They were being discharged this afternoon. The whole ordeal was over, and Hermione and Peter had survived a traumatic experience, not that you'd be able tell from their faces. They'd been in the middle of making up their own language, although it was sounding suspiciously like a combination of Klingon and French.
He didn't know if that said more about how many times Minnie had already been through this, or how rarely she made friends her own age. Either way, Tony was still pissed about it.
He shrugged noncommittally.
"Carradine didn't know anything. Jean searched his brain up and down and found exactly nothing."
Pepper patted him on the shoulder reassuringly.
"It'll be fine, I'm sure. Minnie will be safer when we get back home."
"Daddy, can Petey come visit?" Hermione interjected, her trademark puppy dog eyes at full capacity.
Tony covered his eyes from the force of them, a grin on his face again from her infectious excitement.
"Okay okay! If the Parker's say its okay you can do whatever you want! Just don't look at me like that, Jesus!" He laughed,
The other adults snickered, and the kids high fived their success.
"Talk about dangerous weapons," Ben said under his breath, while waving off the looks the kids directed at him.
"Oh yeah, sure. We'll figure something out," he promised them, ignoring the very unimpressed look Mary was giving him.
"Alright! I'm gonna show you the lab, and the garage, and the missiles-"
"What have we gotten ourselves into?" Tony asked no one in particular, looking at the ceiling.
"We? We all know you'll be just as much trouble as they are!" Pepper reminded him.
So there we go. Personally, I don't think it was my best work, but I really needed to get off my ass and post something. Anyways, that was chapter 5! To avoid confusion, I wanted to tell you that Carradine was definitely hired by a bigger baddy to kidnap Minnie, but he doesn't remember who because his memory was wiped. It's going to be mentioned in a later chapter, but I knew I'd be asked, and that won't be for a while, so I thought I'd let you know now.
There isn't really anything to guess this chapter, unless for some reason you don't know who Scott Summers is. In which case, Shame on you! Haha, yeah. About the Hank vs. Hank thing, the Beast won unanimously. I really shouldn't have been surprised, but yeah. Also, Grandpa is Professor X, lol. One of the reviewers who guessed mentioned Fury, which I hadn't even considered, and I almost considered making it that, cause isn't it hilarious? But he's not due to enter this story for a long while, so I had to restrain myself.
As for Aunt Jennifer that's definitely Jennifer Walters, also known as the She-Hulk, which was hinted by the hulkish green teddy bear, who Minnie named Gamma. Haha, get it? Okay I'm not funny. Sorry.
But yeah. Anyways. One last thing- I kind of posted a second chapter after this as an apology. Hope that's enough for you guys to forgive me about the increasingly longer delays :S.