Written to: El Pico - Ratatat, crosspost from AO3
Áoyè: To burn the midnight oil; to pull an all nighter.
Bruce honestly didn't see why he had to be the one to watch Modi. Technically, Thor had entrusted the baby with Tony, but Tony had run off somewhere, probably to complain to Pepper about how he wasn't just a glorified babysitter. Bruce snorts to himself as he tinkers with his microscope, examines the bacteria trapped underneath the slide. Pepper probably wanted kids for herself, and surely the presence of Modi couldn't have helped much.
He looks over at the tiny snoozing baby in the carseat he had strapped him into hours earlier, with a firm look and a stern warning to "be good." Modi had babbled at him in that nonsense language of his, and Bruce had had to stifle a little grin.
He rubs his aching eyes, takes a sip from a mug of lukewarm black coffee, grimaces at the bitter taste before pushing his chair across the sterile laboratory tiles to fiddle with little screws on a teleportation device he was working on.
He must have been sleepier than he thought, because he kept nodding off, and his fingers seemed far too clumsy to be his own; the screws slipped past the clutch of his thumb and forefinger to drop on the ground with tiny little pings. When he bends down to scoop them up off the floor, he drops the screwdriver onto the tiles, and that makes a loud clatter that has Modi waking up with a start and whimpering in his seat.
"Oh, God," Bruce mutters under his breath, the screwdriver clutched firmly in one hand while the other went up to scrub at his eyes and pinch at the bridge of his nose to stave off an impending migraine. "Don't start crying, please," he says as he walks back over to Modi, who is waving his little hands about in confusion at the whiteness, at the sparse nature of the place.
When Bruce comes into his field of vision, Modi's whimpers start to fade, and he grins toothlessly up at him. Bruce smiles tiredly back at him, as he falls back into his chair.
"Listen here, little man," he says, gesturing to him; Modi seems far more entranced by the metallic device in his hand than him. "It's rather late, you should go back to sleep, okay? If you're going to be big and strong like your...dad, I guess, you need to get lots of rest."
When Modi babbles back at him, Bruce rolls his eyes, as if Modi had said something particularly sarcastic. "I know, you think you're a big boy now, you should get to stay up late with me. Fine by me, if you're tired in the morning, you can tell your mum that I advised you otherwise, alright?"
Bruce follows Modi's gaze to the screwdriver in his hands. "This is a screwdriver," he explains, as if Modi had asked. "See, look, the top goes into these little notches in the screws, like such."
Modi pays attention raptly, and, much to Bruce's surprise, furrows his tiny brows, sticks his tongue out, and the screwdriver jerks itself out of Bruce's hand and fits itself into the notches on the screw before fluttering down to the laboratory bench. Bruce rubs his eyes in disbelief, wondering if he was starting to hallucinate, but when he opens his eyes again, there it is, the screwdriver still fit perfectly into the screws. Modi is looking at him with big blue eyes, questioning.
"That's exactly right, kiddo," Bruce says in disbelief as the screwdriver begins to roll over the table. "That's how you attach things to other things."
When Thor comes charging into the laboratory a few hours later, his cape swirling about him and distress about a misplaced child written in his face, he finds Bruce and Modi sleeping on the laboratory table. Modi is carefully wrapped up in his blanket on the table, one of his little hands clutching tightly to a screwdriver.