Written to: Up and Up (Acoustic) - Relient k, crosspost from AO3

"I'm going to high school tomorrow, Steve! Can you believe it?" Tony said with glee as he sat in front of his monitor and talked to Steve. His bedroom windows were open, and a soft late summer breeze was sifting through the windows, making the white curtains billow out towards Tony and tickle his bare ankles with their silky touch. Just this year, Tony had managed to sit in his swivel chair, all the way back, with his feet touching the floor. He'd made Maria measure him against the wall where she'd marked his height every year with a light little pencil, and this year both of them had been vastly surprised to find that he'd hit five feet without anyone noticing. He was growing all the time, shooting up all straight and skinny like a string bean, all elbows and knees, and Maria smiled at the too-short hems on his jeans and the too-small shoes discarded in his closet, and told him that he would have to decide on a final height so they could buy school clothes for him.

He'd been accepted to the United Nations International School in Queens. Maria had helped him work on the application, staying up late to help proofread his essays, crossing out grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, making small suggestions to where he ought to place his sentences for maximum effect. Howard had approved, but only because a well-rounded high school experience would look good on university applications, and he had more than enough money to cover the $30,000 tuition fee. Howard had been Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1991, where the headline had described him as a benevolent innovator who had made the technology of today possible.

Maria had bought a copy of the magazine to frame, and the instant Howard had seen it hanging on their bedroom wall, he had smashed it on the ground and ripped up the pages.

He wasn't a good man, and he knew it. The Time photographers had concealed the dark purple bags under his eyes with heavy layers of foundation, had covered up the wrinkles that layered his forehead and the corners of his mouth with concealer. Stark Industries was a booming firm, that was definitely true, but if anybody knew what the scientists were really producing in their labs, if anybody knew what the engineers were exploding deep in the middle of uninhabited deserts...well, they might have to reconsider the magazine's cover person. Howard couldn't sleep at night for the visions of mushroom clouds and hydrogen bombs tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, closer than anybody in America realised...

Are you excited? The screen read out, and Tony grinned at it.

"Of course I'm excited, Steve! I got placed in Honours Biology, and guess who's in that class with me?"

Who?

"He's got a fuddy duddy name," Tony said, checking his backpack once, twice, thrice to make sure he had all the necessary school supplies for tomorrow. "It's like James Rupert. But everybody calls him Rhodey. He's my friend!"

Is that right? That's good, you'll have a friend in your class.

"Yeah, I'm really excited. But he's not my best friend."

No? Who's your best friend, then?

Tony scoffed. "Pfft, you are, Steve, obviously. But I don't think I can take you to school with me. Your monitor is too bulky to fit in my bag with my notebooks and pencils and stuff. Sorry."

That's okay. I wasn't very good in school anyway.

"How old are you, anyway, Steve?" Tony wanted to know. His mother was calling him to come and have dinner, and he called back that he would be down in just a minute.

I'm 20.

Tony, who was all of thirteen years old, laughed. "You're super, super old, Steve. Practically ancient. But I have to go now, I'm going to have dinner with Mum and Dad, but I'll be back later, okay? And I'll tell you all about how tomorrow goes!"

Okay. Bye. Have fun. I'll talk to you tomorrow after school.

Tony waved goodbye to his mother, who stood by the gates of UNIS with a little sad smile on her face. She had insisted on riding with him and Jarvis (Howard was still asleep with a hangover) to school, even though school started promptly at 8 AM (Tony thought this was practically criminal, he didn't like waking up in single digit hours). Once his mother was out of sight, Tony looked down at the campus map he held in his hand and hurried to his first class in biology, hoping to get a seat next to Rhodey.

Once he got in the classroom door, Rhodey smiled at him from the left of the classroom, where he was sitting next to a pretty blonde girl with black glasses and her hair all tied up in a bun. She smiled over at Tony, held out her hand as he walked over to sit on the other side of Rhodey.

"Hello there. I'm Pepper Potts."

Tony wanted to laugh. Pepper Potts was such a silly name. But she was kind of pretty, and Rhodey seemed to think she was okay, so Tony guessed he could let it slide.

He would have said more to Rhodey, but at that moment their professor walked in and harrumphed, signaling the start of lecture. Tony looked over at Rhodey, couldn't catch his eye - his friend was too busy whispering to Pepper - and sighed, opened his notebook, and began to take notes.

Rhodey wanted to sit with Pepper at lunch, too, and they laughed over grapefruit cups and crustless sandwiches, and Tony pouted, wishing Steve was there. He was a little cheered up when Rhodey turned back to him and asked him what clubs he was going to join - Tony wanted to join the robotics club, but he was also sort of iffy about joining the classic literature club that Rhodey wanted to join, the club's weekly meetings interfered with robotics programming sessions on Thursday afternoons.

"What can be so interesting about boring old robots?" Pepper asked, laughing. Her tone wasn't malicious at all - she sounded rather clueless and airheaded about the whole thing - but Tony smarted a bit, and wished (not for the first time that day) that Steve could be there.

How was your first day at school? Steve's monitor greeted him the moment he walked through his bedroom door and dropped his backpack on the floor by the desk.

"Not very good," Tony muttered, flopping down on the bed and throwing his arm over his eyes. "There's this girl, her name is Pepper Potts. That's a really silly name, isn't it?" He rolled over onto his stomach to see the monitor feed.

A girl? Do you like her? Steve wasn't one to mince around questions. Tony liked that about him.

"No, definitely not," Tony said. "I think she's annoying. I don't like her one bit. I think Rhodey does, though. Maybe."

The green speckles on the monitor darted around playfully, and Tony could swear Steve was laughing at him. "Don't laugh at me," he pouted.

Sorry. It's just funny. You'll like her someday, probably. Maybe.

Tony wrinkled his nose. "Ew, no. Never. Never, ever ever."

If you say so.