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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Having been dicking around with the toaster (not that it needed rewiring, he was just bored), Tony was forced to do a double take at Steve when he announced that he was ready. His eyes settled on that tie and while it did amazing things for his eyes, they weren’t going to take out a home mortgage or ask for a business loan at a bank. Tony found his eyebrow arching more than he initially wanted it to, betraying his half amused concern.

“We’re not going to sell people vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias door to door at midnight,” Tony said, putting the toaster down to immediately invade Steve’s personal space. He didn’t do that often, Tony was not a touchy-feely sort of guy.

But something had to be done at Steve’s appearance. The clubs Tony used to frequent were upscale with a good drink list and slightly over crowd, but he wasn’t going to take a Mormon out to them. Off came the tie, if Steve let him get that far, and Tony would even unbutton at least one or maybe two buttons by the collar. Sleeves were getting rolled up.

That would be much better.

“If Commissioner Gordon calls us on the Bat Phone it lights the Bat Signal, we’ll come right back. Promise.”

Steve didn't move as Tony stepped right into his personal space and started to untie his tie, but he did frown down at him. This was a nice tie and shirt, he even had a suit jacket to go with it, and he had thought that leaving that off would be informal enough for today.

"You told me to put on something nice with a collar, it defeats the object if you ruin it like this."

Nobody could change Steve Rogers, he was as immovable as a boulder on some subjects, and his Ma had raised him right. If he was wearing a formal shirt, not just an everyday thing, then he wore a tie with it. It was just polite.

"Hey-- stop rolling my sleeves. Tony! Did you want me to wear a shirt or not? Because I can go and get changed."

He had plenty of casual pants and shirts, ones that would meet this sort of inspection and be less constricting, but Tony had definitely said something with a collar.

“Could you attempt to trust me for two minutes,” Tony said, fighting off Steve’s hands. “This is the style. You can press the creases out tomorrow.” He even have Steve a good old thwak on his chest to keep him still while he went about his business.

Honestly, just a little mess somehow made Steve look even better than usual. Nothing would outdo those tight white t-shirts but the club Tony wanted to go to had a strict dress code. Collars. No cut offs. No sweats. No work boots.

For good measure, Tony tussled up the blond’s hair and nodded.

“Okay. No backseat driving. Come on.”

Steve still wasn't particularly happy about it, but he had a feeling that arguing with Tony in this would be as futile as trying to knock down the Statue of Liberty with a feather. It just wasn't going to work, and he'd be ignored. That didn't stop him from flattening down his hair again as he followed Tony out of the compound and to the car.

"Where are we even going?"

Tony knew he didn't like loud, boozy clubs, right? It wasn't his idea of a good time, and it's not like he could even get drunk when everyone else could. He'd rather be sat with friends, somewhere quiet, than yelling to be heard over music.

"Not arguing, just asking."

“To introduce you to late night jazz,” Tony said, which was both an answer and another question. Pepper hated jazz, almost as much as she hated all of Tony’s music. Death metal and 70s rock weren’t her things. The club was going to be loud, but not in the way Steve might be dreaded. There wasn’t dancing, just a lot of dark cloth covered tables and velvet Love seats, waitresses bringing you drinks and food from the bar, and a lot of smoke.

You could outlaw smoke from bars in New York but no one had managed to do it yet for jazz clubs. Especially ones that played on until three AM.

Steve could worry about what Tony meant on the hour it took them to drive into the city at breakneck speed. For flavor, Tony had JARVIS play some of his favorite mellow tunes. It was all about the mood for Tony. And right now he wanted something smooth.

And maybe Brooklyn pizza after. They tended to stay open late for the booze hounds dragging ass after last call.

Of course Steve knows jazz, it's one of the things he actually remembers from before. It had started to come into vogue when he was just a little kid, although it had been widely condemned then as music only for black people, but he had liked it. It had been free in a way a lot of other music wasn't, and he certainly wasn't adverse to hearing it again now.

"I went to a jazz club once, way back in the thirties, they nearly didn't let me in. Think I was the only white face in the crowd back then, but they were all good to me. Didn't kick me out, didn't say anything. Better men than most of the ones on my street, that's for sure."

If Steve hadn’t been the most progressive man of his time, Tony had no idea who that would be. He watched Steve out of the corner of his eye as they drove, mostly encouraging the other man to speak. These were rare tidbits, little pieces of a puzzle that no one had but himself.

By the time that they hit the city, traffic had opened up a little. Tony might have had something to do with that, of course, wiring sensors into his car and writing software to detect him coming to shift the flow of traffic so that he didn’t have a huge amount around him at any given point. The algorithm hadn’t been all that complicated either.

They arrived at a whole in the wall little place before too long and Tony parked like a jerk in a loading zone before he got out of the car like he owned the entire block.

“Mister Stark! Yo! It’s been awhile!” a big bouncer called to him and Tony tossed his keys at the man.

“Distance makes the heart grow fonder, gonna take the usual table?”

“You got it, Mister Stark!” How that large man fit behind the wheel of Tony’s car proved what an amazing engineer Tony was, if nothing else.

Steve has never thought of himself as particularly progressive, he just doesn't like bullies. No matter if they're one guy, a gang of them, or a whole government. Nobody deserved to live their lives in fear, just because of who or what they were, all because some jerks decided that it wasn't right.

He glanced at the club as he got out, ducking his head almost automatically to hide a little of his height and not look anyone in the eyes. It was a defence mechanism designed to stop people recognising him, though Tony seemed to have the opposite desire and want to be seen.

"You come here a lot?" He must do, to have a usual table. "Do you bring Pepper here?"

Pepper. Steve kept bringing her up and while Tony didn’t exactly mind, he also wasn’t too thrilled having to brush it off. “She’s not a jazz fan,” he said, which was a non-commital here nor there.

He could feel himself unwind, however, the moment the background noise rose the moment he stepped through the door and headed towards a higher tier table, two steps above the rest. Corner pocket, right side of the stage. He liked to watch the pianist and that vantage point gave him s good view.

“I used to come here a lot. To relax,” he had to shout at Steve as they sat and a waitress came over. She had Tony’s drink already and crouched next to Steve to get his. They were discrete there, it was why Tony liked it. Sometimes you just didn’t want to get mobbed.

Steve had no idea that Tony might resent the fact that he kept bringing up Pepper when they spoke, he did it because he had liked Ms. Potts the few times they had spoken and because he had always been taught that it was polite to ask about someone else's loved ones.

The waitress gave Steve a look that he was used to getting, considering and admiring, someone who recognised him. But she didn't call it out, she didn't even acknowledge it to him, she just said "Thank you, Captain Rogers." when he gave his drink order, and left to complete it.

He watched her go, small smile tugging at his lips. "I can see why."

It might be after midnight but they were only between sets here. Another would start in a few minutes, the musicians were all just laughing and drinking at the bar. Tony’s eyes didn’t leave Steve’s face, didn’t follow the woman back to the bar, and didn’t scan the thin, rectangular menu on the table between them, tucked into a space between the drink specials and a single candle.

Steve interested him in this light. He found himself deconstructing each movement of his face, each eyelid twitch or the way his mouth moved. The man wasn’t a machine, though the case might be made that every person was mechanical in some way.

“Hungry? You didn’t eat as much cake as I thought,” he said by means of covering up for the fact that Steve had obviously noticed he was staring. “They don’t have great pizza but their wings aren’t bad.”

It was impossible not to notice the staring, but Steve was used to it by now. He had no idea the real focus behind it, he just assumed that Tony was like that with everyone, slightly too intense and a bit too focused. It was how he pursued his work too, focus to the detriment of everything else.

He certainly didn't believe that Tony liked him more than was appropriate. Hell, he believed that Tony only just maintained courtesy because of the amount of times they'd worked together now, he had made it pretty clear to start with just how little he thought of Steve.

"Sure, I could eat, but I didn't get any cash out. Is there an ATM around here?"

He still wasn't too comfortable paying on card.

Tony might disagree about liking someone more than was appropriate, because who made the cap on liking people and where exactly was it set anyway? He didn’t have to defend himself, luckily, because then things might have gotten uncomfortable for Steve. Tony wasn’t exactly known for being meek.

That wasn’t the focus of the conversation anyway. “Birthday boys don’t pay,,” Tony said with certainty. Unless that birthday boy was Tony Stark, because then he paid for everything. Money wasn’t something he worried about. There was more in his account than he could spend and he tended to spend it on things you couldn’t buy off of Amazon. It would take Stark Industries tanking and all of his real estate crumbling to really feel an impact.

Besides, that’s what people said in movies and on commercials. Friends pay for friends on their birthdays. Simple as that.

“And I already have a tab running.” They just charged him end of the night.

"I'll remember that when it comes around to your birthday, Tony."

He would, too. Steve was the sort of person who meant what he said, and he'd insist on paying for Tony on his birthday too. It didn't matter that the other man was a multi-billionaire, it was just the principle of the matter. Not that he imagined he'd be able to spend Tony's birthday with him, he had too many people that would want that honour and people who had more of a claim to him than Steve did.

He thanked the waitress kindly when she brought him back his drink, as well as an order of the wings, and tipped her generously, before turning his attention back to Tony.

"I wouldn't imagine many people being here this late, but it's packed."

If Steve could figure out his birthday, and not just Google various dates of past parties, he would absolutely let the blond take him out. He’d like to see what Steve thought would be fun for him. Their personalities were so different that it might end up being fairly amusing.

Maybe they’d end up at Chuck E Cheez and Steve would try playing arcade games to win him prizes.

Okay. That was absolutely a thought from a guy who didn’t have a childhood and wanted an older brother or a father figure. It was not the vibe he was going for. Thankfully, Steve changed the subject.

“Wednesday nights are old school. It’s the best time to come out.” Not that most of these people enjoyed a regular 9 to 5. Industry workers rarely did.

Steve didn't need to google anything to find out when Tony's birthday was, he only needed to ask either Pepper or JARVIS, either of which would know for certain. Especially JARVIS, as he'd have to have all of Tony's information on file to do all the work that he did for him.

He relaxed into his chair and started on the wings, somehow managing to eat them without getting sauce all over his face or ruining his clothes.

"You know, when I was little I used to want to play sax after I heard someone play, but I never had enough puff."

That was a kind way of saying that his lungs never would have let him play an instrument that required excellent breath control. Not to mention that instruments and lessons were expensive, his Ma never could have afforded them for him.

Tony couldn’t picture Steve up on stage with a saxophone at all. The idea of smooth jazz pouring through the brass instrument, keyed by those hands, was almost laughable. Obviously, the blond had an artistic spirit but that didn’t really equate into music.

As the band was preparing their final set, checking instruments and placement, Tony leaned over the table.

“You could always start now. You work too hard.” And that was laughable, coming from a man who never stopped working. The difference was that Tony’s tinkering was more or less hobby as well as how he made his living. That made things easier on him.

Steve raised an eyebrow at Tony for that hypocritical remark, of all of them, Tony was the only one that he knew who had to be physically cut off from his work in order to make him sleep or relax. All of the rest of them were workaholics in some way or another, but not like Tony.

"No, I think that time has long gone now. I'm okay without being able to play an instrument, I'm happy enough listening to other people do it."

Besides which, when would he even get the time to practise? Or find a teacher who would be cool with instructing him? Sometimes being a living legend wasn't all it was made out to be.

Something told Tony that Steve might be able to teach himself. YouTube and that eidetic memory of his would work wonders on learning music. He could probably teach himself to read it overnight. That, of course, didn’t matter much if he wouldn’t pick up an instrument.

About to say something else, the lights flickered briefly and the sound rushed forward from the stage. Tony’s attention was immediately diverted and he turned in his chair, picking up the glass to feel the vibration from the glass to his fingers.

It had been so long, he’d actually forgotten how much he had enjoyed this.

The sound hummed in his chest, pushing against the reactor, and the distinct taste of coconut touched his tongue. His lips pulled back and he smiled, leaning back in the chair.

It was unusual that anything could make Tony Stark stop talking, and for a moment Steve was astonished. But then the music washed over him like a wave and he understood, taking during this would be sacrilege just the same as talking during a hymn. Perhaps it wasn’t holy in the way that a hymn was holy, but it spoke to the soul in just the same way. People didn’t come to a club like this to talk or drink, they came to listen to the music.

Steve fell silent as well and fixed his eyes on the stage, eyes laser focused and body language leaning forward like a flower towards the sun, soaking up every last scrap of whatever the music could give him. The little worry lines beside his eyes disappeared and his muscles unwound. He didn’t know if hours or days had passed when the set finished, but he felt wrung out and sagged like a puppet with strings all cut.

“Wow... just, wow.”

Tony hadn’t been expecting much from Steve. He had perhaps believed that Steve would be polite, have his drink and his wings and then bob his head along for a few moments before actively work on not looking bored. It was Pepper’s MO, and so Tony didn’t expect to find a kindred spirit in the blond at all. Most people didn’t appreciate jazz as an experience outside of the music itself.

A glance over during the interlude told him a vastly different story. Commonality between them came mostly in the form of wanting to do the right thing by the most people.

But this?

This was remarkable. Steve’s face had been an object of study before but Tony peeled back the layers now, imagined the cogs and gears that could be working seamlessly under the skin of his face, and tried to figure out how they tied back to the circuitry of his brain.

Tony let the music filter through him as he regarded his guest, a distant, but genuine smile on his face. He wasn’t just staring. He was admiring.

Tony would be lucky for a while, Steve was so absorbed in the music that he never even noticed the way that he was being studied. He sat with his face in profile to Tony, expression guileless and smile at his lips. His face was the only thing that had never changed with the serum, except perhaps to lose the hollowness in his cheeks, and he had been just as honest back then.

He sat in silence until the musicians sat down for another break, only then turning back towards his friend and suddenly noticing the rather intense way that Tony was letting his gaze linger on Steve's face.

"Uh-- do I have wing sauce on my face?"

“You’re just freaking me out,” Tony said with uncharacteristic honesty. “So that’s a first.” The inventor turned his face away, watching the sax player remove the mouthpiece from his instrument as of that could save him a conversation.

He could and would ignore Steve for a little while, no matter what the other man asked him, and spent the time drinking the remains of his glass before standing. He assumed the blond would follow suit, he was his ride after all. Tony just didn’t like the fact that he enjoyed sharing this with the Captain. Being somewhat obsessed (a genetic trait passed on from his father, he was sure) was all right, but being downright lost in Steve for any length of time was just unacceptable.

They had to go. Now.

Steve didn't get it.

The evening had started out so well, with an easy camaraderie and friendly feeling. But somehow, during the music, something had changed. Tony seemed irritated or disappointed, if the way that he ignored Steve and tried to leave so suddenly, but Steve couldn't figure out why. He had enjoyed the music, hadn't disparaged it, and wasn't that what Tony wanted?

Sometimes Tony was confusing enough to make him want to tear his hair out.

He did follow, but only as far as the front entrance, where he caught up with Tony as the man waited for a valet to bring his car around, frown marring his brow.

"What's going on, Tony?"

Wrong? Why was the blond so perceptive sometimes? Most people wrote Tony off for what he was...a guy with manic mood swings who had probably gotten some sort of idea and now just wanted to go and work on it. Or that he was just plain rude. But not Steve. Steve could read something in him and Tony hated that.

“It’s better to leave before the lights come up and everyone sees us. You’re the guy that runs away from selfies and autographs.” That wasn’t all true. Steve was gracious to the people that looked up to him but he still didn’t like to be the center of attention save in official capacities. “Did you want to go somewhere else, or just back to the Compound?”

He wasn’t going to give Steve the creeps tonight. His obsession was his along. The guy was from the distant past, from when all things were clouded in fog and repression. And Tony would keep this to himself.

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i'm leaving in 10 mins for lali hangout night <3

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