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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The air was a good thing, but it was a double edged sword. Clearing away the fog improved visibility for both sides, and Killian wasn't down yet. It was clear that he was going down, though, even with whatever madness was going on inside his body that let him grow fingers back and spit fire. He and Tony working in tandem were excellent, and the others were only about ten minutes out if they really needed backup.

Steve threw the shield once more in a tactical arc, making it slam into Killian's left side so that he had to stumble towards the armour. Tony should get the finishing blow on this, after all, it was him that had been kidnapped.

Finishing blows were really just not what they seemed these days. Tony blasted him from both repulsers and the reactor at once and while Killian fell, he still got up again, glowing with bright molten flames as his skin knitted together.

Tony took a step back, the Iron Man armor clunking heavily as he worked with JARVIS to up the amps before he tried again. It took all of the energy in the suit to finally put Killian down and Tony fell to one knee, the weight of the armor without its power grid too heavy for him to manage anything else. The HUD went dark and the glow in the eyes of the mask faded.

“Uh. Little help here?”

Steve preferred not to kill if possible, but he never shied away from it when it was necessary. Some people seemed to find that surprising about him, as if they couldn't imagine Captain America with real blood on his hands, but they didn't understand that all soldiers knew how to kill for their cause.

He glanced over at Killian, just to make sure he definitely wasn't getting back up again, and then stepped to Tony's side to take him under one arm and haul him up. The armour weighed a lot, but no more than a motorcycle with three girls sitting on it, so the only outward sign of strain was his biceps flexing.

"You okay in there? Not hurt?"

He was just trying to figure out if he needed to get Tony out of the suit or not before they left.

Hurt? Yeah. He wasn’t doing great right now, his head ached and he had been electrocuted a few times for funsies. He wasn’t going to tell Steve any of that. Not when he was strutting around with enough testosterone to give a bull elephant a run for its money. “Fine,” he said, the armor keeping him upright when his legs might otherwise lock in place and topple him over.

Killian would be a mess for other people to clean up. Tony needed to find the lab where he had purportedly been doing his experiments first and try to save whatever people were there. It couldn’t be too far.

Tony took on a move or die if you don’t mentality for the moment, something Steve himself might understand. He’d lost... too much. And all from hubris he couldn’t really do much about now.

Somehow Steve didn't believe Tony when he said he was fine. If he had actually been fine then he would have no doubt got some long and inappropriate babble about his muscles and lifting the armour and all sorts of other inane nonsense. But that one word response, that told him that Tony was definitely not fine.

So he reached out and tugged on the faceplate to disconnect it and let it drop off to one side, and started to strip the gauntlets and chest plate piece by piece, more than strong enough to disconnect it even without power.

"Seems to me like you're not," he said, voice soft. "And that's okay, but you should know that you don't gotta lie to me."

“Woah!” He thought Rogers was a man’s man. Didn’t the people of the 40s keep their feelings to themselves and not ask other men for theirs? The way Steve’s hand came for him, bright red in the battle HUD projection, actually made Tony flinch and then grit his teeth before daylight poured into eyes regulated more for darkness.

He lifted his hands as if to ward Steve off, only to have the blond far too expertly dismantle him. How did that happen? He needed to increase the electrical bond between the armor pieces, or maybe add an additional zapping feature if someone tugged off his gauntlet the way Steve did now.

He looked a little like an unfinished action figure, faceplate off and sporadic joints torn open.

“We don’t have time for this. Killian might be gone but he’s been experimenting on people too.”

That was where Romanoff came in, chirping in only Steve’s ear because she wasn’t stupid. “We have casualties, Cap. Keep Stark away.”

Steve listened carefully and then focused back on Tony, keeping his hands on his friend's shoulders to keep him from running off. Not that he could do much running with his bottom half still encased in dead Iron man armour, and that might be a good thing at the moment.

"It's okay, Natasha and Clint are down there and they've already got everything secured, all we have to do is evacuate."

He assessed the armour, trying to work out if it would be more efficient to spend time taking the rest off, or if he should just lift Tony as he is.

"You did good, Nat and Clint can handle the rest, okay? Time to stand down."

“Thanks dad,” Tony said, despite lacking more than just a hint of irony. How often had he wished for someone to do more than blow smoke up his ass when he did do a good job? “But someone mentioned Pepper, a few electrocutions ago.”

It was the first time he’d had a lead on what might have happened to her after the mansion fell into the water in Malibu. He wasn’t taking chances, even if they might have been talking about some other mouthy blonde with nice legs and a small but do-able rack.

Tony put one bare hand on Steve’s chest to get him to move aside, but the armor wouldn’t let him move. That was a problem, but one that could be rectified by Tony simply using the neural implants to recall them.

Sorry, Steve. That pile of armor on the floor wasn’t staying a pile soon.

“Stay out of my way.”

"Nat, is Pepper down there?"

Steve didn't remove his hands from Tony's shoulders, blue eyes imploring him to take a moment and think about what the smart thing to do here was. If Pepper was down there and she was hurt, then Tony barging in would only make things worse, scare the other victims, and maybe stop them getting help as fast as they should.

"Yeah, we've got her. She's hurt, but I don't think it's going to be fatal."

Steve breathed a small sigh of thankfulness through his nose and focused once more on Tony.

"They've already found her, she's going to be fine, we'll meet up with them all at the hospital. Okay? Work with me here, Tony."

“Move.”

Tony wasn’t great at taking orders, not that Steve was giving him any despite what Tony himself seemed to currently believe. He was above to push Steve again when the voice of reason in the form of a Russian without a Russian accent hit his ear inside the cowl. “We’re already moving her. She’ll be on the quinjet. Meet us there.”

At least Tony did decide to ‘work with’ Steve after that.

It would be awhile before Tony showed his face at the compound again. He had to work to stabilize and then shut off the Extremis virus inside of Pepper and then fight with her. A lot. About so many things.

He came careening back to upstate New York in typical Stark fashion, loud car and loud music and more than a little drunkenness behind the wheel. He smelled like a bar when he rolled out towards the still standing buildings. Everyone more or less made way for him and Nat gave Steve a head’s up on Tony’s approach while he was out back clearing rubble.

Steve hated that after these things they all tended to separate until the next atrocity had them fighting at one another's sides again. He didn't work that way. He fought for people, for friends, and it ached to be alone again when all of this was said and done. Tony disappeared to care for Pepper. Natasha came to see him sometimes, but she was busy with her own business, and Steve was left to repairs.

He hid his feelings, though, because he felt kind of silly for having them and he didn't want to force anyone to spend time with him. So he threw his all into shifting rubble and constructing what had been blown up.

He was shirtless when Tony appeared, glistening with sweat from the work he had been doing, and squinting slightly into the sun.

"--are you drunk?"

“Who me?” That seemed like a dumb question so Tony decided it was all right to issue a dumb response. “Who do you think I am?” He already knew what Pepper thought he was, and it wasn’t good. At all. The problem was that she knew him better than himself, and evidently she’s been talking to Natasha on the phone because the redheads had conspired against him.

That was his fault for dating a strawberry blonde instead of a blond-blond. His bad.

Tony had driven onto the lawn, behind where the garage used to be, snow crunched under his tires. He was sitting on the hood of his sports car, engine still running. It was cold, he could see his breath, which might have quickened a bit when Steve showed up. Why Steve was shirtless in the dead of winter, he’d never know, but he could be extremely appreciative. His eyes moved slowly up and down over the sweat glistened skin behind transparent red glasses. Noticeable.

“I’m not not drunk,” he said, tottering off of the hood of the car to open the door and pull out a shoe box lined in waxed paper. “I made cookies. They’re all burnt.”

"You know that there are laws about drinking and driving."

Steve looked utterly unimpressed and folded his arms, not interested in the cookies at the moment. This is one of the things that infuriated him about Tony, the way he seemed to pick and choose which rules should apply to him, and yet hold other people to his standards without leeway.

"You could've really hurt someone, killed them even, and yourself. Give me your keys, I'm not letting you drive again while you're inebriated."

He unfolded his arms long enough to hold one hand out, waiting for the keys to be given to him.

“JARVIS drove,” Tony snorted, opening the box and taking out a black as sin cookie that looked more like a poker chip. He tried to eat it, though his teeth weren’t really cooperating.

As crumbs tumbled down his chin, JARVIS spoke up from the dashboard of the car. “Most of the way, sir, though I did not park you on the grass.”

“Okay, right, but you did cut the ignition—“

“Which is why you aren’t parked half up a tree,” the AI said, somehow sounding judgmental in his neutrality.

Huffing, Tony attacked the cookie again and when Steve still held his hand out, Tony stuck the half chewed cookie into his palm. “I wanted to see you. Maybe not this much if you right this second... I don’t need the keys anyway.”

Steve arched a brow at the cookie and then carefully put it into his pocket, wrapped in a proper cloth handkerchief. Not that he was planning on eating it, but he wasn't about to litter by just throwing it on the ground either.

"Fine. JARVIS, can you please lock the car up and only open it if Tony scores an acceptable level on a breathaliser test?"

"Yes, Captain Rogers."

Steve wasn't sure if the AI would obey him, so it was a pleasant surprise when the car doors all suddenly shut and sealed themselves off.

"Good, thanks. Right-- so, Tony, why did you want to see me?"

“Can’t someone just want to see someone else?” It wasn’t a great answer. No answer Tony could give would be right now. He shouldn’t have said anything but the half bottle of Jack rolling around in his system wasn’t really being polite. He should have gone for the higher end scotch. Shit. “I mean, I actually wanted to check up on everything here. Ready for me yet? Done clearing rubble?”

Tony put his hands in his pockets. It was cold, standing here. He still had cuts and bruises all over his face and despite the three piece suit he was sporting, he looked pretty terrible.

“I need to get some surveys done. I have a few dozen sets of armor needing to be dragged out of the water and drained. Industrial fans aren’t gonna cut it for these ones. Don’t you feel the cold at all? Jesus.” Usually he refrained from taking the Lord’s name in vain so that Steve didn’t give him a look, but there was no look that could stop him right now. “Can you put a shirt on? You’re distracting.”

Steve hadn't known what to do with these sorts of comments in the past, but he had decided that they all fell under the umbrella of Tony making snide remarks about how all of his muscles and things were from the serum. Distracting because he was making Tony look smaller, perhaps? Sometimes he saw how Natasha looked at the pair of them, like Steve was missing something obvious, but he had no idea what it was.

He sighed and started to head back in towards where the building materials were, because that's where he'd left his shirt.

"I don't understand why you come out here so much if you're so sure that you don't want to live out here and be a part of the team." He wanted Tony to reconsider, they had almost been a family that brief time they had managed to live in the Tower together. "Why don't you change your mind?"

“If you had a house like I did in California and a load of baggage living anywhere your dad might consider his roof, you might only come out for sporadic visits too,” Tony replied, following Steve a little like a duckling for the way he was waddling, box of hockey puck baked goods under one arm. He was thinking that a good over night soak in milk might do the trick. Or cause an eruption. Whatever cane first. “Plus, big Tower in the city. I used to like it there too.”

But twelve and a half percent that represented of his girlfriend no longer wanted to live there. The whole thing was supposed to be for... what? A base of operations? As status symbol? The Avengers had chosen the Compound over the Tower. So be it.

“You could see everything. And off of my cool stuff was there. Oh well. House is gone. Pepper’s got the Tower. I’m taking the garage. As soon as it’s done being rebuilt. Do you paint walls? Last set of painters I had in we’re suspect. You can leave your shirt off for that too.”

Steve had got a lot better at following along with Tony's erratic speech patterns, but sometimes he still got left in the dust. Like now. Was Tony saying that he wanted to move into the garage here, or just that he was claiming it for all of his suits and still intended to live elsewhere? What did he mean that Pepper had the Tower? Weren't they living together any more?

He rubbed at his forehead, blue eyes earnestly baffled, and went with the easiest one of those to decode. "I thought my being shirtless was distracting, now it's mandatory?"

Honestly, Tony.

"But I can paint, though I haven't done any flat washes in a long time."

“I’m still confused myself,” Tony muttered, fixated on Steve’s shoulder muscles before the blond turned slightly and he could see the curve of his profile. There went his heart rate again and he hated it. “You are distracting. It’s not mandatory, just appreciated.”

Fuck his damned mouth.

“I have some of the rescue squad bringing my things. JARVIS is piloting them too, even if I’m perfectly capable. He locked me out. I have a few hours until they start parachuting my stuff on the lawn. Any of the warehouses still standing?”

Okay, so that sounded more like he actually intended to move in here with the rest of them, and that made Steve flash him a genuine smile. Though it faded only a second or two later as he took in the implications of that.

"Tony-- has something happened with you and Pepper?"

He could answer questions about the warehouses later, but right now he was concerned about his friend. Maybe this was why he had got so drunk, he always did seem to have self destructive tendencies when he was sad.

Steve was talking to him. It seemed important, Tony could see his lips form ‘Pepper’ and that just made his head blank. At least it still worked, though, and he could shake it slightly. It didn’t appreciate being jostled though. A little smirk curled at the edges of his lips, but there was nothing mirthful about it. The shine of his eyes behind the lenses were dim at best.

Maybe that was just the alcohol though?

When Steve got to his shirt, Tony made a sad little huff and then stopped to sit on a pile of beams or flooring or whatever it used to be.

His breath was becoming almost painful in his throat, but he liked it.

“Can we go inside? I’m not in the Polar Bear Club.”

Steve grabbed his shirt and tugged it over his head, wriggling his shoulders a little to ease the sticky sensation of having put on a shirt over sweaty skin, and rolled his eyes as Tony complained a little more. Especially since he was doing it to keep from answering Steve's question.

"Yeah, we can go inside, but I'm still gonna want to hear about you and Pepper when we're in there."

He's worried, and not just about Tony. Maybe something had gone wrong with Extremis and now Pepper was gravely hurt, or ill, or-- all sorts of bad situations. Any one of which could have sent Tony here in the depths of drink.

“Can you let it go?” Tony knew the answer already. Steve didn’t let things go. His tenacity was literally legendary. He could almost feel, along his palms, the way that shirt might feel, slicking down against wet skin. Pepper’s confrontation, the way she had spelled it out to him, the accusations she leveled at him, had stripped Tony of his look-don’t-touch center of wellness.

There was no current center at all. It had been balled up and thrown in the trash along with his relationship.

Tony led the way inside, managing a more or less straight line through the snow to the main building. At least it was only partially destroyed, and the two back rooms had been closed off to await roof and wall repair. Tony moved right to the conference room and had JARVIS brew him some coffee as Steve followed. If he didn’t shut the door on his own, Tony would tell him to.

“Pepper and I broke up. That’s all. Nothing happened, really. I can’t stop being me. I put her in too much danger. She wants and deserves a lot better.”

It was hard to dismiss the guilty memory of how many times Steve had privately wondered why Pepper had put up with Tony for as long as she did. Because while he could be kind and selfless, he was far more often selfish and thoughtless and rude. She was a very intelligent woman who deserved to be treated well.

Still, it made his heart sink a bit, because he knew that Tony had really loved her, and had tried to do best for her in his own way. So he closed the distance between them and put a hand on his friend's shoulder, squeezing gently.

"I'm sorry, Tony."

And he was. Genuinely.

"We're all here for you, but you can't drink yourself to death over it."

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