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!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

“A lot of the Howling Commandos have relatives. I think some are even in SHIELD. You guys could get together and reinact camp fire scenes together,” Tony said, knowing he was being a little callous. War was nothing like that. War was difficult. And dangerous. And you took moments here and there for camaraderie between the marching and the fighting.

Being captive for as long as he had been taught him that much. He was so flippant about it because it was easier for him to be so. Not talking about it in terms of hardships was just easier for him.

“Or I could just teach you French so you don’t make an idiot of yourself talking to your new best friends.”

"It's okay, I'm pretty sure that we're not gonna be talking again."

He smiled to cover up his disappointment, but it was there in his eyes. He had tried to make a connection, something he rarely did any more, and it had backfired. They just wanted him for the publicity he could bring, a piece of living history, they weren't interested in someone who had known a person they didn't even remember.

"It was probably a dumb idea anyway."

But it hadn't stopped him hoping.

Strange. Tony found the look on Steve’s face far too familiar for comfort. He ended up leaning back again, a frown on his face, openly staring. Tony wasn’t a robot but the way he analyzed people sometimes made it very hard for them not to assume.

“People always disappoint. They’re not what you want them to be. But you’re not what everyone wants you to be either, even if you’re good at giving them that. You don’t have to be more of a total package than you already are,” he said, almost lecturing Steve. “No one’s going to hate you if you aren’t perfect. Except for me, maybe. It’s the only reason I like you,” he teased.

No one should really look this depressed on their birthday. That ended up causing friends to have a fire fight in the living room. Tony had been there and done that already.

“But at least I won’t have to compete with the French anymore. So I can get behind that.”

"You don't have to compete with anyone, Tony."

Steve's voice had a slightly weary amusement to it. How many times had he explained that someone could have more than one friend, as if he were talking to a possessive child? Tony had multiple friends, but apparently all of them should feel like Tony was enough for them.

"I don't like you any less, even if I do make friends among the French. Or any other nation."

He chose to ignore the other part of that. He wasn't trying to be perfect, but he didn't agree that everyone let people down, he had always found the opposite, this was just... an anomaly. Bad luck.

Tony let people down consistently. He was sure of it. And he also really did think that he should be enough for everyone. Steve had pegged him perfectly, though he would absolutely never come right out and say it. Tony knew he had a whole lot of problems when it came to social skills. He could charm the pants off of almost anyone as long as he kept himself at a distance.

Getting to know him revealed all of his flaws. And that’s what drove people away, or so he would have everyone believe if he ever admitted to his own fears.

“With the way America is going, maybe we all should make friends with the French,” Tony teased in an effort to make Steve shy away from all of his horrible insightfulness. “But that’s talk for another, non-patriotic set of birthdays. What do you want to do for yours? Don’t say ‘go to Coney Island’.”

Steve just let his gaze linger on Tony in that steady way he had, that said he saw through what was trying to be avoided and he was going to let it go for now. But that Tony wasn't fooling anyone. He was a grown man, much older than Steve, he should really face these childish issues.

But for now, not wanting to cause an argument with someone who had taken the trouble to come here to wish him a happy birthday, he would let it go.

"We don't need to do anything, this was enough. I'm sure there are things that need to be done today, work doesn't stop because of what day it is."

“You want to work. On your birthday.” Tony just wanted to make sure he heard that right. Now he might like to work on his birthday, but he genuinely enjoyed creating. Steve didn’t really use his fists like that. It wasn’t his job and his hobby.

Truthfully though, Tony had no idea what Steve did on his time off. Draw? Bake? Sample artisan cheeses while antiquing?

“I cleared my schedule. So did most of America that doesn’t work retail.”

Steve didn't do anything outside of work, his way of surviving being thrown into the future was to work. Was to be what they needed him to be. Every time he had tried to do something else, it had ended in embarrassment or regret, his face was too well known now, he couldn't just anonymously join a class and make friends.

Some of that showed on his face, around the tightness of sad blue eyes, even as he maintained his smile for Tony's benefit.

"Well-- I guess I'm just the exception then, huh?"

Tony didn’t like the look on Steve’s face. Steve always looked two shades of sad at all times, even when there was nothing to be sad about. Victories often went uncelebrated by the Captain or he would disappear away from get togethers if people laughed too much.

None of this was right. Steve was alone in the Compound, surrounded by agents that technically worked to assist him and idolize him, but weren’t the people you go out for a drink with.

“You’re not. There is no exception to the rule. Even the bad guys take vacation. I’m sure most of them have hobbies. Even if they’re evil hobbies. Like coin and stamp collecting.” Tony had sort of that ‘come on, let’s play!’ look in his eyes, a little childish, a lot goading. “Don’t tell me you’re tired either. I know you need like three minutes of sleep a night.”

Tony really wasn't going to take no for an answer, was he? Steve sighed, half exasperated and half fond, before throwing up his hands in mock surrender. Never let it be said that he wouldn't back away from a fight (just never a physical one... or one where someone needed protecting... or where rights were on the line... or...).

"Fine, fine. You win. But I still don't know what you want me to say, I haven't really celebrated a birthday in decades, I don't know what the done thing is these days."

He remembers his last one before the serum. Bucky took him out to a dance hall and a little diner, nothing fancy, but it used up all his pay cheque. He missed that man so much; he'd always been an only child, but he always thought that Bucky would be what it would be like to have a sibling.

“People do the things they like to do,” Tony said, stubbornly. He was trying to gauge what that was with Steve. He knew the blond to be decent at video games, unable to get drunk, and a quick learner when it came to design software but none of those were really Steve’s hobbies. Drawing was a one person activity, too, and while Tony was impressed, he couldn’t spend the next three hours watching Steve put down lines on paper. “What’s something you’ve never done and want to do?”

If he heard about the dance hall fiascos and the charming little dinners, Tony would try to one up it. It was only midnight. The night was getting started. He had a fast car and a will to get them back to the city before any of the clubs could make their last call.

Tony was up for pretty much anything that didn’t involving hurting people or animals. He didn’t think that Steve had an affinity for big game hunting or East Asian sex tourism though, so he didn’t feel the need to specify that.

The question stumped him in a way that not many things did. What did he want to do? All the things that he had always wanted to do involved things like joining the army, being able to breathe, setting up a nice home next door to Bucky and having a family. He'd never do any of that now.

"Tony-- I don't know."

He looked a little lost, like he wanted Tony's direction if they really had to make something of this stupid day.

"I never really had many ambitions, just tried to get through each day. That's how life was back then."

This was just so sad. Tony had no other words for it. He watched Steve for a moment before he pushed back from the table and the cake and the coffee and stood up.

“We’re going to the city. You’re going to put on something nice. With a collar. Don’t comb your hair, leave it like that. You’ve got fifteen minutes.” If Tony had to take the lead on this, he would. He could be the master of ceremonies in a pinch, even if those ceremonies were more typical than Tony himself tended to like.

Then again... typical was probably one of those things that Steve never got to experience. He was either sick and poor, or a super soldier at war. There had been no downtime. Minus his little stint with the USO lifting chorus girls and punching Hitler.

Tony turned to look at himself in the chrome hood of the gas range and ran a hand through his hair. It was a good thing he always looked his best.

Although Tony could be wholly inappropriate at a lot of occasions, for some reason Steve never doubted that he'd try and make whatever they did actually fun for him. He wouldn't take him clubbing or drinking or to some kind of mad sex party, though he didn't actually know what they would be doing.

Still, he owed him enough to put himself in Tony's hands. At least for now.

"Okay, okay. But if we get a call that we're needed, then I'm coming back. I'm not gonna let people down just because I'm another year older."

And with that warning, he disappeared back into his room and looked out some nice clothes. When he reappeared again he was wearing smart black trousers and a white button down shirt, buttoned all the way to the top, with a blue silk tie. He looked respectable, although his muscles did occasionally try and burst out of the thin shirt material.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject