Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, and/or their otherwise respective owners.

Author's Notes: Hi, everyone! Sorry about the late update again. Hopefully, the next update will be on Saturday, but I make no promises.

Anyways, the chapter title comes from Sara by Fleetwood Mac. It's like, the perfect vibe this chapter, in case you wanna give it a listen lol.

As always, I hope you enjoy,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~the heavy souls 'verse~

~life in technicolor ii~

~chapter 10: stay with me a while~

Tony woke up that morning with memories dancing behind his eyelids, sunlight in front of them, and a distinctive dryness to his mouth. Letting out a low noise, he ignored the desire to turn around and fall back asleep to open his eyes instead and look at the time on his clock. "What the hell?" he muttered upon the sight. "FRIDAY, it's ten o'clock."

"So I have noted, Boss."

"Why didn't you wake me up?"

"Considering that you were up until four o'clock this morning working on one of the various SI projects you have been behind on, I thought you might need the rest," she commented dryly. Sometimes, his AIs were too casual his sense of humor to be comfortable – and most times, they were too willing to give themselves leeway with their choices. He was really going to need to work on her settings one of these days. "Seven to eight hours of sleep per night has been found to be the ideal amount for someone your age."

"Oh, yeah? Just what is 'my age?' Don't answer that question," he added before she could even think about doing that. Well, technically she didn't think. Semantics. He rubbed at his face, now sitting up and looking out through the windows to the room. It was a nice day outside. "It's Sunday, right? What are the kids doing?"

"Penny and the Bionic Boy are downstairs on the communal floor watching Phineas and Ferb with Pietro and Wanda."

He felt his eyebrows raise. "They're watching cartoons on a Sunday morning?"

That was actually...normal of them. Some might say they were a little old to be doing that, but considering that three of their four had not exactly had normal childhoods, he figured an exception could be made for their catchup.

"Yes. All of the others except for the Vision are in attendance, as he is currently up at the Compound to deal with a meeting with Colonel Rhodes and Ms. Hill. I believe plans have been made for them to have lunch together. Would you like me to let them know you will be heading down there shortly?"

"No," he said with a shake of his head. "Not yet. I...need a minute."

He needed several of them, in fact.

A shower seemed to be a good way to go about spending that time. He went through the motions to do it, until he was standing underneath the spray. His eyes slid back shut as he reached out for his body wash and sponge. He squirted out some of the former onto the latter and lathered himself up. With his eyes closed, he could almost pretend like it wasn't actually him washing himself. As he abandoned the sponge to focus on one particular part of his body, he could almost pretend like it was...

It was over embarrassingly quickly, because he hadn't been in the mood to jerk off for a while. Fuck, he hadn't had a fuckin a while. It'd still been over a year. Never could his thirty-eight-year-old self have imagined this was what his sex life was going to turn out to be like.

The good thing about doing it in the shower, at least, was that the evidence was able to go down the drain with little fanfare and he was able to go back to what he was doing without much difficulty.

When he was done, Tony stepped out of the shower, FRIDAY turning the water off for him. He worked on drying himself off and getting into a change of clothes. He didn't know why, since there wasn't anybody to dress up for and the only person who gave him shit about his clothes was May, but he actually gave somewhat of a damn about what he wanted to wear today: he put on the one Rumours t-shirt he had (compare to his AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Guns N' Roses band shirts, of which he had several) over one of the undershirts he often wore to not disturb the mess of scar tissue on his chest, dark wash jeans, and the old pair of shoes he only wore around the Tower which probably should have been thrown out years ago.

He liked the results. The clothes actually made him feel like a semblance of his old self, and not...whoever the fuck he was now outside of his roles as father and Iron Man.

(Who was Tony Stark, when you took away all the parts that he played? That was something he was still trying to figure out. He didn't know the answer.)

"Somebody slept in," Natasha announced his presence to the room, not that she needed to. Sam and Matt waved and nodded at him, respectively.

"My own AI decided to overrule me on my health, can you believe that?" he asked her, pressing a kiss to her cheek.

She half-laughed, which he decided to count as his win of the day. "Strangely enough, I can."

"Who's winning?" he asked the kids as he sat down next to Harley, Penny on the boy's other side. Sometime between his waking up and coming down here, they'd switched from watching cartoons to playing MarioKart. Another frankly astonishingly normal thing of them to do.

Harley grimaced. "Penny."

...He probably should've figured that, since she'd mentioned before that Daisy was her preferred character. Based off of the others' preferences, Wanda was in eighth place (Peach), Harley in fourth (Yoshi), and Pietro in...third (Luigi). Not a very close third, either.

"I don't understand," Pietro bemoaned. "How is she so good at this?"

"Yes!" Penny threw up her hands as Daisy crossed the finish line. Smugly, she set down her controller. "You're talking to someone who started playing this game when it first came out for the Wii. I might be a little rusty, but I know what I'm doing."

"'Rusty?'" Harley quoted incredulously as he earned his spot in fourth place. "Penny, you just brutalized all of us for four races straight."

"And that is what you get for wondering why I've never wanted to play this with you," she returned giddily. "You learned your lesson, didn't you?"

Harley stole her controller off of the coffee table. "You're not allowed to play for the next round," he decided. He held it up to everyone else. "Who else wants to play?"

Sam held up his hands in surrender. "I'm sure as hell not. I've learned that lesson when it comes to Pietro."

Natasha shrugged. "Eh, why not. I'll give it a whirl."

Harley tossed the controller to her, which she caught with one hand.

Wanda smiled sheepishly as she set down hers. "Does anyone else want to play? I'm not very good at this. Steve?" Predictably, the captain smiled back at her even more abashedly. There were just some things he couldn't catch up to when it came to the modern world. "Tony?"

She set those eyes on him, and they were almost as bad as Penny's, but certainly just as bad as they had been that first summer after Ultron. "Alright," he agreed, knowing his ass was about to get beaten. Relieved, Wanda used her powers to float the controller over to him. "But what are we going to do about lunch?"

"We were thinking about takeout," Natasha said. She selected Birdo for her character, as she always did. He wasn't sure what her affinity with the creature was about, and he wasn't going to question it. "The shawarma place okay?"

"Yeah, sure."

They'd been ordering from the same place ever since the Battle of New York. Discreetly, of course. It wouldn't do for anybody except them and the owners to know just how much of regulars they were – the extra business it would make them just wasn't worth it.

FRIDAY placed their order, and they went about playing their game. Pietro wound up beating them all at it, to no one's surprise. Tony got second place in one of the four races as Mario, but since Natasha and Harley got better places than him overall, they got third and second places. "Thank God," the kid breathed, throwing back his head. "I thought I was losing my touch 'cause of you, Pen."

She hid her laugh and smile with a hand. Not for the first time, Tony noticed it was something that she often did when around the others, and not just him, Harley, May, Matt, and/or Natasha. He didn't even think she knew that she did it. It seemed to be a subconscious thing, the result of what he assumed was self-consciousness concerning her mouth. Her fangs.

Should he talk about that with her? Remind her that she was safe here, and nobody was going to judge her? Or would he just be overstepping as a father?

"You know what I think," Pietro remarked, pulling him away from the thought. He grinned wickedly. "I think the Starks should go up against each other, one vee one."

He was creative, Tony had to give him that. "If she beat you guys that hard, I don't see why you think I'd manage any better than you," he tried to deflect.

"Oh come on, it'll be fun!"

"Fun for you, or fun for me?"

Harley pumped a fist in the air. "Battle of the Starks! Let's do it!"

...These kids were going to be the death of him one day, he swore it.

He huffed. "Fine. You win."

Or, more accurately, Penny won. She absolutely slaughtered him. He thought that was the entire reason why Pietro and Harley had wanted him to play, because they and everyone else wore shit-eating grins at how Penny literally ran laps around him. And they'd been right, she was brutal: even when he and Clint had been going against each other on MarioKart to see who was the better player years ago, they'd never pulled the amount of tricks that she was able to even without the boxes. He'd never stood a chance.

Penny giggled with mortification after their four races were done. "Sorry, Dad."

"It's alright. It was just a game," he said. "What's the ETA on the food, FRI?"

"Still about another twenty minutes, Boss."

Pietro, Harley, Nat, and Sam – who was coaxed into playing after several minutes of begging and pleading on the boys' parts, and spent the entire game muttering obscenities under his breath that made Penny crack up over and over again – got another round in. Since there was still some time after that, the boys tried convincing Matt to play a round, and it went about as well as expected. Their attempt to get him to do it, that is.

"We all know how that would go," he said. "That is not a headache any of us need."

"But your powers – "

"Do not work like that, and you know it, Harley."

The conversation was cut off by the food arriving. As they went about figuring out what box went to whom, Penny went into the kitchen to get her own lunch heated up. When she came out and sat back down next to Harley, they'd already selected something to watch that they could all tolerate, but she didn't mind. She flashed him a close-lipped smile before she took a sip of her drink, and that was that.

Tony wasn't sure of how it happened.

No, that was a lie. He knew how it happened. When the kids were finished, they made excuses about wanting to go back to Pietro and Wanda's floor, and vanished into the elevator after they threw out their trash or, in Penny's case, cleaned out her thermos. Then Sam and Matt left to go and work on paperwork relating to the Avengers in some form or other that he probably should've been up to date on, but wasn't. And that left just him, Natasha, and Steve in the room.

But then Natasha stretched like a cat and stood up. "Someone needs to do the dishes from breakfast that we didn't clean up," she said.

"I can do it," Steve, predictably, went.

She patted him on the shoulder as she walked past him. "At ease, soldier. I've got this."

Her eyes sought out Tony's before she completely turned her back to them. No words needed to be said, as he knew what she was wanting him to do just from that.

He swallowed. Great.

Technically, he didn't have to stay here. Technically, he was free to up and leave right now, because this was a free country, and even if Natasha was like the personification of his conscience at times, she wasn't the boss of him.

And yet...he couldn't bring himself to move from his chair.

Steve had been quiet throughout the MarioKart games and lunch. Too quiet. He hadn't really spoken unless spoken to, sticking to the background as if he'd been a wallflower. Tony didn't exactly like that, like Natasha.

He'd said it before and he would say it again: he didn't really have anything to say to Steve. He didn't really want to talk to him. However, nor did he want the other man to be constantly walking on eggshells around him. He just...he needed them to come to some sort of stability.

(It was not lost on him that was exactly what Steve had wanted to talk about that day in the greenhouse. He wasn't going to think about that, though.)

He cleared his throat as he watched Steve's muscles tense in preparation of him getting up. "Everything alright with you, Cap?"

Steve stilled, torn between his own desire to leave and the shock and curiosity that undoubtedly came with Tony actually speaking to him after so long. A panicked glint filled his eyes, which almost made him laugh at the absurdity of it. Were their positions really being reversed over something so trivial?

"I'm...alright," Steve said, relaxing back into his chair as much as the tension in his body would allow. The features of his face softened. "How are you?"

"Fine. Well. Alive and kicking." Those are all synonyms of each other, you idiot, he chided himself. The voice in his head sounded suspiciously like Natasha's. "You seemed pretty quiet today. I just wanted to make sure..."

What did he want to make sure of?

Whatever it was, Steve appeared to understand. "It wasn't because of what you're thinking," he replied, and Tony was assuming what he thought he was thinking was that he thought his desire not to talk to him meant he couldn't even speak in a larger group setting when he was around – which wasn't and never would be the case. That would just be too cruel, even by his standards. "I just haven't wanted to upset Penny any further."

Ah. So that was it.

"After that day in the gym, you mean?"

"That day when I gave her a panic attack? Yeah."

Tony had the strong urge to throw his head back. He refrained, barely. Leave it to Steve to worry he had done something wrong when he hadn't. "She didn't have a panic attack because of you. She was already having a bad day then."

"But I exacerbated – "

"How? By existing? From how Penny told it to me," and from how it looked in the footage, he silently added. Of course he'd watched the footage himself. That was to be expected, "you didn't do anything wrong. You were not responsible for how she reacted in that situation. If anything, you reacted in the way she usually wants. You let her remove herself from the situation, instead of forcing her to stay there and make things worse."

Steve, the stubborn asshole, wasn't willing to give up that easily. "I look like him," he whispered.

Tony scratched at his neck. "Not really. You both have blonde hair and blue eyes, but that's about it. Penny will be the first person to tell you that." They were getting too far away from the subject. He redirected back to it. "You don't need to tiptoe around her." Or me, to some extent. "She's not going to like that when she figures out what you're doing."

Steve chuckled weakly. "She really is the most amazing kid, isn't she?"

Tony had no qualms about agreeing with him on that. He smiled. "She is."

"I knew she would be, because she's your daughter," Steve continued. "And like I told you, I was following up on her as best as I could when we were on the run. She does such good for this city, even when she doesn't have to...or should probably want to." The pause there allowed them both to reflect on that statement. He was right: if Tony had been in his daughter's shoes, he probably wouldn't have thought of becoming a superhero – hell, he hadn't even thought of becoming a hero until he'd been personally affected by his actions. Penny and the twins, who had also been through so much and yet pushed on anyways, really were the best of them all. "But seeing her in person, watching her...it's something else. She reminds me of you, and not just because she looks so much like you. She has your mannerisms, your heart..."

...And now they were verging on the uncomfortable.

Tony slapped his hands against his knees. "Right. I just wanted to make sure everything was alright with you, and that you don't have to be a stranger with Penny. I mean," he paused long enough to sniff, "if she sets boundaries with you, you should respect them. But as long as you do that, you're gonna be golden in her eyes. She forgives very easily."

He pretended to ignore how Steve became sad and relieved at that, all at once. "Thanks, Tony."

"...Oh, and one more thing," he added as he headed not towards the elevator, but the kitchen. His reasoning for it was twofold, as since it had been a while since he'd eaten with the others properly, he was a little behind on his dish duty. "I am sorry about that day in the greenhouse. I'm not sorry about what I said – " it wasn't fair of him to get Steve's hopes up, although it did make him feel like an utter ass for watching his face light up, only for it to fall " – but I'm sorry for how I said it. You didn't deserve that."

It was an unavoidable truth. Sure, the screaming match had gotten him what he wanted, but that was not a healthy way of going about communication, and the fault rested solely on him for letting it come to that. He needed to be a better person, even if it wasn't for his own sake.

("Wanted.")

"No, I did," Steve mumbled.

He rolled his eyes. "Self-pity I can get, but there's only so much melodramatics this team can take, Cap."

He didn't wait around to hear the possible follow-up.

In the kitchen, he fitted himself into Natasha's routine seamlessly, taking out a cloth towel to dry off the dishes with. "You know, we have a dishwasher," he ribbed.

"You know I like to do this the old-fashioned way," she returned, handing him a plate. "It's calming. Something simple to do without dwelling too much on anything."

They worked in silence for a couple of minutes, until the closing of the elevator doors told them that Steve had finally left. "So, how was that for a conversation?"

The former spy hummed. "It was a start."

"Natasha."

"What? You didn't even talk about yourselves until that apology at the end there, you talked about Penny. If you want me to hold up my end of the deal, you're going to have to work harder than that." She absently patted his harm just like she had Steve's shoulder when he let out a long-suffering moan. "Relax. I just want to see you happy, Tony. But you and I both know you're not going to get that way without healing first."

"You sound like my mother."

"Seeing as how she is one of the women you've looked up to the most over the course of your life, I'll take that as a compliment."

He almost dropped the plate he was holding. "You do that," he told her. "Although, just so you know, you're on that list, too."

She beamed, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. "I know."

Word Count: 3,426

Next Chapter Title: you make my dreams