This House Is A Circus || Jane & Tony
Tony hadn't been back in the tower long--not long enough to sleep anyway. From the very second he'd gotten off the plane from Malibu, he'd immediately rushed to the medical wing to "deprogram" the Winter Soldier, and seeing as that was a long, painful, nerve-wracking process, it had left very little time for resting or, well, generally doing anything but worrying. Not to mention, when the process was over, it left enough screaming in your head to guarantee a few sleepless nights to come. So, twenty-four hours after the procedure and seventy-two since he'd last slept, Tony was still up and working, only taking a break to stumble, half aware of everything, into the kitchen to grab more coffee.
He'd already filled up a mug the size of his head before it occurred to him that he was not, as he'd assumed, alone in the kitchen. Of course, that wasn't anything out of the ordinary; a normal morning in Avenger's Tower meant running into Steve while he was scrambling eggs and making enough toast to feed a middle school, or watching Pop-Tarts disappear before your eyes as Thor had his mid-morning snack, or Bruce brewing tea, or Natasha...well, doing whatever it was that Natasha did (Tony wasn't sure that he'd ever actually seen her eat since their legendary emptying of the Shawarma joint after the battle of New York). Except that the other presence in the kitchen was not one of Tony's high metabolizing team members, but a very pretty woman who Tony might have thought to instinctively flirt with if he'd a.) not been too tired to think, b.) too busy daydreaming about a particular other to bother mustering up the energy to flirt with someone else, and c.) remembered in time from SHIELD'S photographs, that the woman was in fact Jane Foster, Thor's girlfriend--the renowned genius and one of the best scientific minds of their time (not to mention, again, Thor's girlfriend who he was very, very attached to, and who Tony did not want to see angry. Ever. At least not if he was on the other side of that rage anyway).
In theory at least, Tony had a world of respect for the woman; he'd read up on her work, and she was nothing less than an expert, not to mention someone who had supposedly not gotten along with SHIELD (always a plus in Tony's book, except for perhaps Hydra agents). Still, he'd never met her in person, had nothing but her work and Thor's recommendation to judge her by, and Loki was enough of a glaring warning sign against trusting Thor's judgement without question. Yet, even if by some strange twist of fate she turned out to be evil, Tony couldn't exactly pretend that that would change his mind about her entirely; science was science, and intellect always seemed to attract his attention first and then morals later. It was always such a shame fighting a villain with wasted intellectual potential.
He cleared his throat. "Hello, person who doesn't live here," he said, leaning back against the counter and taking a long sip of his coffee. Immediately, he felt the rush of caffeine and sugar, and remembered again why he'd thought it possible to give up sleep entirely. "If you're not Jane, we might have a problem here."
