fossilised | Birthday fun

Birthday fun

It all started with a cake. Not enough stories these days did anymore, especially not in the lives of the Avengers. This wasn't just any cake either. It wasn't store-bought, picked up from the grocery with a hope that the teenager doing the lettering spelled a name correctly. It wasn't from a fancy bakery, though the person who had taken it upon himself to do the baking could have afforded something outlandish. No, this cake came from various boxes and cartons, the contents of which were painstakingly mixed together in more or less the way the recipe card was read off.

There may have been some corners cut, the eggs might not have been carefully folded (mostly because how do you fold eggs when they're goopy), the buttercream might be too runny, but the result was still fairly remarkable.

Even more remarkable was how intact it arrived, in a box in the back of an Audi, to all the usual fanfare Tony himself enjoyed when speeding through the security gates that those working at the Compound feverishly rushes to open for him. One scratch on that car would mean less of a Christmas bonus for everyone.

The cake was transported carefully from the back of the car towards one of the living quarters, a building shared by most of the non-retired Avengers. It did not need to be announced, so the man carrying it didn't bother to knock. Not at the front door and not at the recipient's bedroom. There was no need. No one would be awake anyway.

The time on his watch read 11:58 and so the cake was forced to wait a full two minutes until the day rolled over to be dramatically presented.

Tony Stark burst through the door and JARVIS started the Star-Spangled Banner on his cue, red and blue lights flashing. It was all beautifully patriotic, much like the cake itself, decorated to resemble Captain America's shield. "Happy Birthday, Grandpa!"

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Steve had really tried no to let anyone know when his birthday was. The Smithsonian, which he had visited just out of morbid curiosity what it would say about him, had posited that his recorded birthday of July 4th was a gimmick to help Captain America sell war bonds. And that his real birthdate had been lost to the annals of time.

He preferred to keep it that way.

Not that he hated birthdays, some of his fondest memories were waking up on July 4th with the heat already baking the inside of their little tenement, his Ma having got fresh eggs special for the day to make him pancakes before school. But those days were long gone, and he didn't want his birthday to be a spectacle any more, he just wanted to forget how out of time he was.

Which was why he was really unimpressed when he bolted awake at the sudden intrusion of light and noise, dressed only in some sweatpants and nothing else, hand already on the shield at his bedside before he realised what was going on and sank back down to the edge of the bed with a groan.

"Tony-- it's the middle of the night, what are you doing here?"

Tony made a dramatic frown and looked down at himself, the cake and then back up at Steve. He was pretty sure that this was all very easy to understand. Even a child would know what being presented with a birthday cake meant. Tony’s Nanny used to make him one every year and it made him feel special.

They had to have done birthday cakes in the twenties, right?

Tony shifted his hip and his frown became a smirk. It was a classic emotion-hiding technique he learned very young. When trying to please someone went awry, you just play it off like it had been a big joke.

No big deal.

“I brought you a cake,” he said, half dropping it on the table by Steve’s bed. He’d been careful with it up to the point that it mattered but now it was superfluous. “I didn’t think you slept.”

Steve knew that look pretty intimately, Tony wasn't as subtle as he pretended to be, and so he knew that he'd hurt Tony's feelings. He hadn't meant to, it was just surprise at the sudden ridiculous wake up call. He leaned over to look at the cake and snorted, lips curling up into one of his genuine smiles.

"I just didn't think you knew when my birthday was; heck, I didn't think anyone knew."

He opened the box carefully, even if had been dumped less than carefully, and ran a finger through the buttercream at the side to stick in his mouth like a naughty kid.

"Don't think I've ever had a birthday cake before."

Too poor when he was little, and then his Ma died and the war happened.

“Everyone knows when your birthday is,” Tony immediately shot down, though it was apparent that he was pleased. You didn’t get to be first a lot these days and while Tony had actually been the first at a great many things, this one felt pretty damned good. “Or everyone guesses. It really is July 4th isn’t it?”

Because of course it was. The Man with a Plan would just have that birthday no matter what the annals of history might make you believe.

“Put on a shirt before you make the wallpaper jealous and we’ll have cake. Or will any spec of sugar ruin your twelve pack?” Not that he cared. Steve and he were going to have cake. And Tony was even going to sing to him. If the rest of the Compound happened to wake up and join them, that was fine too. Tony liked to show off.

And it was better than sitting around at home tinkering while Pepper was at her mother’s, angry at him again for forgetting her Birthday last week. Oops.

"Yeah, it really is July 4th, but most people think that was just a lie made up by the propaganda office, what made you believe it?"

He flushed, easily embarrassed and still having never quite got the hang of mastering his expressions, a bad liar right til the end. It was embarrassing to have his physique remarked upon, and Tony always looked at him in a way that lingered just a bit too long, so he did grab a plain white t-shirt and throw it on as soon as he could.

"Come on, we can eat this out in the kitchen so we don't get the crumbs everywhere, you get plates and I'll get a knife."

“And I’ve taken the liberty to brew the coffee, sir,” JARVIS said, easily enough.

It hadn’t been long since Tony started to rebuild the Compound. In fact, he’d taken over his father’s old warehouses the moment they started cleaning up from the Battle of New York, less than a year ago. It had initially been to give Bruce a place to stay (though he had left anyway) and then to try to coax Steve away from SHIELD. He wasn’t sure if he did a good job of that since SHIELD had pretty much moved in, but it better than having the blond down in DC. Tony had gotten used to team work.

He had liked it.

And if everyone else was parting ways, then fuck it. He’d give them a reason to come back. Besides. Avengers Tower wasn’t finished just yet. Turned out that even if you did most of the work yourself, a high rise was harder to put back together again than a base in upstate New York.

From what JARVIS told him on the way over, Rhodey was here too. And maybe Romanoff. She was a hard one to pin down. Even digitally. She didn’t leave any footprints.

Tony liked her. Pepper didn’t like how much.

And she really didn’t like how much Tony liked Steve Rogers.

But that didn’t stop him from doing it.

He had no idea that he stared anyway. It was funny how little self awareness he showed.

So Tony followed Steve to the kitchen (the only person he had or would ever in his life follow) and got the plates. Four. Just in case.

Steve knew that Tony looked at him a little too intensely sometimes, but he had never put together the why or the why of Tony following him (at least sometimes) when he dug his heels in whenever anyone else gave an order. He just assumed it was part of Tony's usual oddities and did his best to not let himself get flustered by it.

His feet were still bare and so his toes curled on the cold floor of the kitchen when he padded off carpet and onto smooth wood, though he liked it. He had always been a tactile person, enjoying sensation just as much as sight, and he tried to transfer that sense of rough or smooth or cold or hot onto his art.

Or... he used to, back when he had last drawn anything.

He got a knife and carefully cut two generous slices of the cake, the point of the knife perfectly in the centre of the decorated shield. He slid one onto Tony's plate and one onto his own, then frowned at the other two plates.

"Nobody else is here at the moment," he missed having people around sometimes. "Clint left earlier tonight and he was the last one, but they'll be back in a couple of days."

“Rhodes was called out too?” Well damn. JARVIS evidently had stale information. That was fine. He didn’t mind a little one on one time with Steve. The blond gave him a hard time almost always, but Tony could give it back as good as he got it and they, oddly enough, appreciated each other for it.

Or Tony thought so. He didn’t always check in with the other party when it came to stuff like this.

Though they had butted heads at the beginning, and usually now and again too, Tony respected the guy his father had obsessed over and helped to create. It was just something about him... Tony didn’t bother to try and put his finger on it. He didn’t care that much for esoteric answers to his emotional conundrums.

As Steve laid out the plates, Tony swiped the Captain’s and pulled it towards himself while fumbling in his pocket for an American flag candle and a lighter. He was excellent with the zippo, a flick of the wrist bringing fire to his fingerprints. “J?” The AI shut off the light above them at his boss’ request and the fire flickered on the candle and in Tony’s dark eyes as he sang Happy Birthday to the younger man.

Pepper would have really been pissed to see this, but Pepper was far from Tony’s mind.

“Happy Birthday to you,” he concluded. Nothing fancy for once, though he did have a really lovely voice.

This is kind of embarrassing, but it's also really sweet. Tony is usually one for huge grand gestures, he likes throwing his money about, but this-- this is understated and it's more heartfelt for it. Steve finds that he's smiling widely when it's done, bending to blow out the silly patriotic candle with one quick puff of air.

"Thanks, Tony, I can't say that you weren't quick off the mark. Pretty sure nobody's ever woken me up at bang on midnight to serenade me, Pepper's a lucky woman."

Since surely he must have done this for her last week, right? Steve had sent flowers, wine, and a heartfelt message in a card. But he was just an acquaintance, her boyfriend must have done something spectacular.

"And this is good cake, you make it yourself?"

He's expecting a no there, and he won't mind if it's commissioned, Tony isn't particularly crafty when it's not bits of machine.

Hmmmm. No. No he was not going to steer any conversation to Pepper. Tony didn’t really understand why she was so mad. She’s been buying herself birthday presents since she first started to work for him and last year, it was fine. Why this year was suddenly different, he honestly didn’t know. Without her around the Tower, he was getting a lot of work done anyway and he imagined that she would be home before too long anyway.

He hadn’t quite started to miss her yet. Not when he had all of this up his sleeve.

Anyway, he’d rather talk about his great achievement in cake making. He was pretty proud of it. “Yeah? I half expected it to taste like motor oil. I cleaned up first,” Tony said, lobbing off a chunk with his fork. “But you know—“

He waited for Steve to have another bite before he grinned and shoved a piece in his mouth. He’d had better. A lot better, even, but it did taste like cake.

“There’s not a lot of people around at nine PM before a holiday to make a cake for you. So you got stuck with me.”

Wow, Tony really did make it himself? It was pretty good! Okay, not a patch on some cakes he'd had, especially from this little bakery down the block where they always kept a cream doughnut on hand just for him, but it was good. And all the better for knowing the effort that had gone into it.

"So, what, is this the start of a new business expansion? Stark Industries, now we do baking as well?"

He snorted, and a fleck of buttercream stuck to his nose. He didn't notice.

"You know, I kinda wanted to be a baker when I was a little kid. When I didn't want to be a soldier, I mean, it felt like it was something I could do and enjoy. Make things with my hands, like being an artist but more-- manly, I guess."

“Stark Bakeries, actually,” Tony said, swirling his fork around in a figure right before he stood up to pour himself some coffee. He even brought Steve one over too, cream and sugar in some weird calculated quantity that had stuck with him as a mathematical formula over the last year. He himself just liked his own black. The cake would take care of the need for sugar anyway. To be up and having conversation and birthday cake at ten after twelve in the morning was surreal, yet understandable for their strange occupations. They got their meals where they could, when they could at times. But for Tony to know how Steve took his coffee might be off putting.

He was about to go into his pocket for Steve’s gift and to make some sort of quip about all things manly (of which baking doesn’t really fit the bill), but that frosting on the tip of his nose diverted all of Tony’s attention and fetched an intense stare on his part.

Now. Normally he would just let it go and hope JARVIS was taking photos for later blackmail but something compelled him to reach across the table and try to nab the culprit with a bare finger. “Good thing you went with graphite. You’d make a mess with fondant.”

Steve liked cream and sugar in his coffee, he hadn't ever got to have it when he was a young man, such things were too expensive after the Depression, and it reminded him that he was in a different time. Black coffee, it just took him back to rainy days with Bucky, where their breath fogged up in front of them even inside, and Bucky had pawned his one good pair of boots to get Steve cigarettes for his lungs.

He blinked all of a sudden when Tony's finger came in close and swiped frosting off his nose, going a bit pink and hurrying to fish out a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the rest off and clean himself up.

"I made a mess with graphite too, you should'a seen the amount of times Buck had to scrub me off before sending me on a date with one of the friends of his gals."

“So you tried eating graphite too? That explains the shrimpiness more than anything,” Tony joked. He knew that wasn’t the issue. He had all of Steve’s old documents, the ones that his father could find anyway, the ones that weren’t part of SHIELD’s files or a museum exhibit. The life and times of Captain America, on display, for all to see, as if the guy wasn’t up and walking around again. Tony found that crazy, but admirable. He wanted to build his own Iron Man museum to match.

It was too bad that he wasn’t a pharaoh. He’d have made such a good pharaoh.

Tony cleaned the smear of buttercream from his finger with a napkin and, as if it was no issue for a guy with touch and germ issues, went right back to eating. “I actually can’t picture you going on dates. Not then, not now. I thought you were built like my action figures.”

The grin was cheeky and inappropriate. He knew Steve understood what he was implying.

He did indeed know what Tony was getting at and it made him go red to his ears, however annoyed at himself he was that he couldn't stop that reaction. Sex wasn't a bad thing, he wasn't a prude, it was just-- he had been taught to keep it to the bedroom of a marriage, not to splash it about casually as it was these days. He wasn't as innocent as some people believed, he had been in the army, but still...

He cleared his throat and busied himself cutting another slice of cake, because he had inhaled the first one thanks to his impressive metabolism.

"Oh sure, I dated," he muttered, attempting to pretend that he wasn't at all embarrassed by this. "But they were always making eyes at Buck, and then after-- there was just Peggy."

“There’s more than Peggy,” Tony said, a weird twinge to his voice. If Steve didn’t have super hearing, he might not have even noticed it. It didn’t matter. Tony himself was back to paying more attention to his cake and was dunking a piece held on the end of his fork into the coffee for just a partial second. He had such odd eating habits, when he did remember to eat.

Whatever he meant, he didn’t elaborate on. Tony settled back against the well padded seat and finally went for the red foil wrapped set of papers in the pocket of his suit jacket.

Shaped like a padded legal envelope, papers folded twice into thirds, and wrapped in a gold ribbon, Tony presented Steve’s documents back to him. Well. Most of them. He still kept the patents on Steve’s physical form. That would open one too many can of worms... And he liked owning him in a way. Sick, maybe. “That’s how I knew it was your birthday.”

Birth certificate. Failed and forged Army papers... this was the history no one else had.

People had told him that before, kind people who wanted him to get back out in the world and live in it, not merely live to protect it. They wanted to see him make friends outside the Avengers, find love somewhere, be a real person. But the problem was, he didn't feel like a real person a lot of the time, he felt lost.

Not that he could tell that to anyone. Back in his day, fellas didn't just spout off about their emotions if they were feeling down, and he didn't want to be a burden to anyone, so he bottled it inside and pretended everything was a-okay.

His expression shifted to shock and then to a more muted surprise as he thumbed through the papers that had been given to him, seeing his Ma's signature on his birth certificate and all those forged army papers. It made his throat tight and his eyes glisten, voice rasp a little when he cleared his throat to talk.

"Thanks-- Thanks, Tony. Where did you get all this?"

“Dad was your number one fan,” Tony said simply, mostly because he really didn’t know what to do with the emotion. Steve’s or his own. It felt good to do this, and it also made him feel shitty to have just thought to do this. He could have given Steve these papers over pizza when they were plotting ways to weed out injustice, or after he helped show him how to throw a proper punch, and not the garbage Happy showed him. Steve always knew how to compensate for someone shorter—

Tony both admired that and sometimes let himself get annoyed by it.

That was why he hadn’t tried to get in more practice. Even if it meant seeing Steve in t-shirts like these, soaked in sweat. What? Tony wasn’t married. He could look. And the guy had been his idol until he was five years old and understood that he’d never be as important to his dad as the supposedly dead guy.

“I found them cleaning up some stuff when I was busy trying to discover a new element. Worked out for everyone. It’s a cute story, I’ll tell you sometime.”

Steve sometimes looked a little sad when Tony talked about Howard. It twisted him up to know that Tony resented him for something that wasn't his fault, and he was mad at Howard for clinging so hard to a dead man that he couldn't see what a blessing having kids of his own was. But he couldn't change what had happened, and if Tony needed to hate him in proxy for how his dad had treated him, then-- well, Steve could live with that.

He could live with a lot for the sake of his friends.

His fingers brushed over one of the photographs of him before the serum, looking slightly startled that someone was taking a picture. He remembered that day, the first time he had tried to recruit, he remembered the lung crushing disappointment that came when he was rejected.

"Huh?" He got lost in the past a bit there, and when he looked up he was a mixture of raw grief and touched gratitude. "Oh, sure. Well thanks, it's the best present I've had in decades."

Did he boast that much that he had gotten boring to listen to? Tony didn’t frown or anything, his eyebrows went up in curiosity, but that was really just about it to show a smidge of displeasure at being ignored. He couldn’t blame Steve... there was a lot there in that package, a lot to have to unpack from a past he had forgotten about.

“You’ve been fish sticked for decades,” Tony pointed out, though praise was something he genuinely appreciated receiving.

If asked about the record, he would not say that he hated Steve now. He had for a long time, resentment twisting to hate, but Steve really was a friend to him now. More than just a guy he gave up his solo gig to follow, Steve was a fixture in his life.

Yes, he’d set our trying to capture a different fly in his trap initially but that was all right. He enjoyed what he had now. Poetic justice, really. Howard could suck it.

“But you’re welcome. I don’t want to see any of that on eBay tomorrow.”

He snorted, the wistful expression finally fading from his face, and set the papers down carefully on the seat beside him.

"Pretty sure you don't have to worry about that, I've never sold anything on eBay." Tony had got him set up with an account, as well as one for SnapChat, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and a bunch of other ones that he couldn't remember the names of. But he had looked at them once and then never gone back to those pages, it had all seemed overwhelmingly fake.

Call him an out of touch old man, but he still preferred the personal touch of buying from someone face to face, with solid cash, and reading print books. Sure, the internet was great, he would never deny that, but it lacked a certain... charm.

"I realise that's anathema to you, Tony, I understand if you need to perform some sort of digital exorcism."

“You would literally be rich. If you ever needed a backup to the super heroing, just set up an Etsy shop and frame some watercolors.” Not that Steve was hurting for money. The Army had owed him scads of backpay, he was the sole recipient of Bucky Barnes’ pension from his will and Tony had made sure that Steve has the right accounts available to him at all times.

The blond might be old fashioned but he still needed to eat and he could still use an ATM to get out paper money as he insisted on paying for everything in cash.

So. Annoying.

So inefficient!

“I’ve been having JARVIS digitally exorcise you for a year now,” Tony grinned. “And I bathe myself in radiation after we work together since you refuse to use Skype.” Actually, Tony liked the physical interaction.

He always had. And Steve had such a sharp mind for strategy that it was better if they worked side by side to plot out their battle plans physically instead of in a virtual space.

Steve knew that he was already rich, even with Tony's assistance and the Avengers home. Perhaps not multimillionaire rich, but still enough to be very comfortable for the rest of his life. The army had seen to that, it had been a matter of PR for them to give him the back pay, even though he insisted that he didn't need it, and the stern faced lawyer that Tony had hired to protect his interests had insisted just as fiercely that he had needed it.

In the end, the army and the lawyer won, so now he had a tidy bank account with more zeroes than he ever thought would exist in the world. Let alone for one man.

"I use Skype," he grinned. "Just not with you."

Tony put a hand to his chest as if he had been shot. “Ouch,” he said, looking comically upset. “Who are you cheating on me with?”

Technically, Steve couldn’t cheat if he never used Skype with him anyway, but Tony had never let reality ever get in the way of more or less flirting with pretty people sitting across the table from him in skin tight shirts with a minute of coffee, cake and morning breath wafting across towards him.

He was intensely glad that no one else was home and enjoying the moment with them. Tony, beyond a doubt, was incredibly selfish sometimes. He made up for it with all of his philanthropy, of course.

Steve couldn't agree with that. A man was selfish or he wasn't, and donating money without donating the time for any man that asked it of him was just trying to soothe his conscience, but Tony was a man of contradictions and it was none of his business what he did with his life.

"I found some relatives or Morita, actually. A grandson and some distance cousins, living in France, I set up a Skype chat with them. It was kinda awkward, they didn't know much English and I don't know much French."

Truthfully, it had been awkward because they were hero worshipping him. One of them was even dressed in a faux Captain America costume that he had made, and they were trying to get him to say publicly that he endorsed their stores because of his relationship with Morita.

It had been a little disheartening.

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