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cap_ironman2013-01-05 09:52 am
muccamukk) wrote in cap_ironman2013-01-05 09:52 am
Entry tags:
A Gift of Fic for Omphaloskepsist!
Title: Where the Lovelight Gleams
Recipient: Omphaloskepsist
Beta:: (Secret)
Universe: MCU
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Strong language. Booze.
A/N: Not strictly adherent to The Gift of the Magi, but I tried to adhere to the morals.
Summary: Christmas comes around and Tony is worryingly stumped over a present for the good Captain.
The radio in Howard's office is from the 1970s. The sound that comes out of it crackles quietly, since the reception is absolutely horrible. Tony tried to fix it up, once. Sort of. By tried he means that he'd tinkered with it while going through all of the man's junk so that he'd had something to listen to. The dial had gotten stuck, and the blasted thing is stuck on some oldies station, which only seems to make things even more crackly. After that he hadn't bothered with it, but he'd come in to rifle some of the codger's old financial records, and he'd found it on, Christmas music drifting out of it. It's a damn good thing Tony doesn't believe in ghosts. It doesn't hurt that one of his mother's photo albums is open on the desk. Howard never in his life would have gone through a photo album if his spirit had happened to be wandering around. He has a long list of more important things to do, a number of which are probably some variation of continuing to make Tony's life miserable, as if it isn't already bad enough seeing as he wakes up just about every damned morning puking.
I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me. Please have snow and mistletoe...
Papers rustle, and Tony glances at the radio, feeling slightly bewildered. Christmas. Every damn year the Avengers shove shoddy gifts at each other. Often they're half-ruined from a fight, or bought in the aftermath of saving the world. Tony indulges them, handing out paltry store-wrapped fifty-dollar watches and the like. He can't remember the last time he actually bought someone a real gift. He grabs Howard's scotch out of a cupboard and picks the papers he needs out of a recordbook, then heads for the library to do some work, and check a calendar if he remembers to.
*
There are five days left until Christmas, and Tony has managed to snag some sort of gift that looks like had some thought put into it for everyone with the exception of one for Captain Rogers. One does not understand how frustrating this is until they realize that Tony even figured out what sort of vodka and pocketknife to get Natasha within about five minutes of searching. He isn't even all that fond of Rogers, frankly, and part of him is tempted to just get him an American Eagle Outfitters gift card and be done with it. It says ‘America’ and ‘Eagle.’ All it's missing is ‘Freedom’ and an actual fashion sense. Not that Captain Spandexpants has any of that. Not that Tony is complaining about said spandex pants. He knows a good thing when he sees one, even if he doesn't particularly like said thing on principle. What principle that is, exactly, he's never been sure, but it had never seemed important either, so for the most part he simply lets it fall to the wayside and be what it is. Rogers hardly seems to mind, either way. The two of them simply clash. It's a fact of life, one which they both accept without fuss.
That is why it is so frustrating when he waltzes into the kitchen the next afternoon only to find Rogers there wrapping something. Of course, he hears Tony's footsteps, whirls around and goes, "Tony!" and then he goes, "I mean, Mister Stark!" and the entire while he's stuffing something into a drawer, looking for all the world like a deer caught in headlights. Tony stares at him, because he's an idiot. Well, he's a genius on the battlefield, but he's an idiot. Not only that, but it's not a very normal occurrence that the great Captain Steven Rogers gets flustered, and Tony is determined to milk this incident for all it's worth. That is, until it clicks in his genius brain that this means Rogers has actually made an effort to buy him something. He goes back into the kitchen later, but the drawer is empty, and the only sign there'd ever been anything there at all is a piece of cheap, gaudy wrapping paper snagged on the inside of the drawer handle.
He really, really tries not to care. It's not his problem if Rogers decides to buy him something nice, it just means that he's an idiot, and that Tony gets to take advantage of his idiocy. Of course, he still doesn't have a present for the guy, either. Well shit.
*
He spends the next day with Happy driving him all over Manhattan. The weather is absolutely miserable, snowy and windy and horrendous, and as the day grows longer, Tony finds himself with a migraine the size of his own ego. Finally he gives up, laying down along the back seat of his car.
"Take me home," he grouses. Happy turns on the car and begins driving home, but the traffic is slow, and the car is overheated and smells of gasoline, so finally Tony steps out of the car and shuffles through the snow to a nearby Shopper's where he buys their most heavy-duty over-the-counter painkillers, swallows a good couple of them down dry and then trudges back out into the snow. Outside the wind is blowing, and cars are honking their horns, and apparently the traffic has moved enough that the car is not anywhere near where he left it, so he's left shuffling through the absurd weather, getting his ninety-dollar pants covered in snow. The only reason he even sees it is because he has to stop and lean on a window for a moment. "It", by the by, is the perfect gift for Cap.
Tony steps into the antique shop, a pair of silver bells jingling as the door swings open. The door clicks shut behind him, and Tony breathes in the smell of dust and time. There's an elderly woman at the cash register. Tony eyes the displays of little trinkets and baubles, then drifts into the store towards his prize. He picks up the old photo album and opens it, leafing through the pages. The first few have various old photographs of streets in various tones of grey and sepia, many of the edges frayed. Some of the photos are sun-bleached and fading, and the spine of the album itself could use some repairing. He closes it and goes over to the woman, placing it on the counter. Then he snags a small bottle of what looks like delightfully ancient whisky, and smiles his most charming smile, slides a credit card across the counter.
"My, my," the old woman says. A nametag on her shirt reads Charlotte in curvy letters. "You're the second handsome young man I've had in here this week," she tells him cheerfully as she tediously presses buttons on the cash register which looks just about as ancient as her. "I don't get many customers your age, you know. There simply aren't any young people interested in quality products anymore." Tony isn't sure he wants to call the photo album he's just bought quality, but he's sure he'll get plenty drunk off the whisky.
"Thanks," he says. Charlotte smiles and waves as he walks out the door. The bells jingle behind him, and Happy has parked the car beside the store. Tony climbs inside, and Happy takes him home.
*
The gift is just as pristinely wrapped as the rest of them, the singular touch from Tony himself being the label on which the To and From are written in his hand. It sits under a gaudy twelve-foot tree that was decorated around a doombot incident and a Starbucks crisis, until the fated day when they all trudge downstairs to the smell of pancakes, and then shuffle into the sitting room despite protests from Captain Tightwad about the table. Natasha says, "Fuck the table," except she says it in Russian, and her exact words elude approximately half of those present, Tony included. The expression on Rogers' face is enough to let him guess, though.
Gift-giving goes with the usual amount of exhausted enthusiasm that it does every year, and when Tony finds several flat packages shoved at him, complete with heinous Christmas bows, he can do little more than remark "Not whisky" before opening the first one.
Inside is a carefully-preserved record with Frank Sinatra on the cover in decorative letters, a list of songs at the bottom of left corner. Tony sets the record aside and peeks at the label this time, then looks up at Steve Rogers as it had said in swirly handwriting on the label.
"I saw that there was an old gramophone in your father's office, and it didn't look as dusty as everything else. I thought you might like them," says Steve Rogers by way of explanation. The amount of thought which has gone into this gift absolutely floors Tony, who isn't sure he's ever had anyone sneak into Howard's office and check the dust amounts before.
There are five records in total, and one of them contains a collection of Christmas songs, so Tony gets up and wanders off, getting the gramophone and bringing it back to the sitting room, only to find Rogers sitting on the floor with his gift in hand, looking almost hesitant to open it. Oh, for heaven's sake. The man will drop f-bombs like nobody's business, but he won't open a damn present without permission.
"We haven't got all day, Captain," he says, and then turns away to put the Christmas record on. Behind him he hears the sound of wrapping paper, and then there is silence other than the music now crackling to life. He turns around to find Rogers leafing through the pages. Eventually, he looks up with those ridiculous baby blues of his, and Tony stares him down as if there's some sort of competition between them over this whole matter of Christmas presents. Rogers stares back down at the photo album, then smiles and closes it.
*
Tony hears and sees nothing of it until two days later, when Rogers snaps an extremely unflattering photo of him stuffing chow mein into his mouth on a particularly miserable Tuesday evening with what looks to be a relatively high-quality camera. They stare each other down again until Tony's eyes start to hurt. He looks down and stuffs another mouthful of chow mein into his mouth, trying not to think about it, nor about the changes that come in the next little while.
Over the course of the next couple of days, Cap comes to life like Pinnochio discovering he's a real boy. He stands straighter (which Tony had not been aware was possible), and there's an odd light to his eyes that Tony swears he would have noticed, had it been there before. It wouldn't bother him if it weren't for the way it suddenly seemed as if Rogers were watching him. It's a Friday, the next time he snaps a photo of Tony. He's hunched over a pile of schematics, his laptop an arm's length away. He's sleep-deprived, and he has a hand in his hair. He's also fighting off one hell of a headache, but work needs to be done, so he abandons a lot of things, including common sense, so that he can finish some of said work. He hears a click, and sees a flash, and squints over in the direction it came from to find Capsicle staring at him wide-eyed.
"Hello," Tony says, if just to stop the staring.
"Hi," Cap says, then looks down at his camera. "I needed a picture of your for my album."
Tony squints at him harder, as if that will somehow make everything more clear, but it just makes his vision sort of bleary, so he stops, holding his head in his hand and grunting vaguely. Cap leaves, and Tony doesn't think about it anymore. For a few days, anyway.
*
It's on New Years Eve that the camera returns, and with it, an absurdly cheery Rogers. He takes photos. This is nothing unusual. Tony's heard the other Avengers complaining constantly about the way Rogers is taking pictures of things and of people. The unusual thing is the smile on his face. It's absolutely no secret that Cap has an issue with learning to live in the present. He is constantly lingering on the past, unable to move past all of the things he missed. As Tony understands it, one of the first things he asked after waking up was Did we win? Which is all well and good (although, Tony thinks, sort of illogical. Had they lost they'd all be speaking German), but after that, the good Captain had completely and absolutely failed to move forward with his life, perpetually trapped in time and people that had long passed.
That's why he stares when the man snaps a picture of him on New Year's Eve, and then smiles. Rogers stares back, as well, then ducks his head, cheeks colouring, and glances down at the photo, checking its quality or some such thing, Tony assumes. It's while watching him that Tony begins to feel absurdly stupid. He had been so absorbed in his own life, so absorbed in meetings, and women, and inventions, and sums and losses, that he hadn't noticed what he himself had done. He had had the audacity to put thought into a gift, to give a damn, and it was paying off. He was moving forward, for the first time in years. For the first time, Steve Rogers was happily moving away from the 1940s. He stares. Rogers looks up, and then he walks over, fiddling with the neck strap of his digital camera.
"You've been playing the records," he says. "I'm glad you like them. I wasn't sure..." He looks down at the camera again, seeming almost bashful. He's a soldier, a rather brutish one at that, especially around other men. It's odd seeing him anything but straightforward with that special military abrasiveness that him and Fury usually wear like a damn badge. "Thank you for the photo album." He looks up when he speaks, because he's polite.
"You're welcome," Tony answers. In the background, he can hear the rest of the team counting down — 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. "The records are nice." They've never quite done nice. Civil, sure. Nice, not so much. They clash in every way imaginable, and they've been grating against each other essentially since they met. Tony's unsure what has changed. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—
There's a hand on the back of his neck, broad with gun calluses. There's a mouth on his, the lips dry and chapped, stupidly plush, and Tony kisses back because he's Tony fucking Stark as the cries of Happy New Year!! erupt from the television and from the team. It's simple. Dry, with no tongue or wandering hands; but it's firm. There's nothing chaste or hesitant about it, and sure as hell nothing lady-like as are the usual kisses that Tony receives. Not that Tony's every strictly prescribed to lady-like.
"I hear that's a thing now," Steve says, when he pulls back. They've just kissed, so Tony figures the least he can do is think of the guy by his first name. He's blushing, but he's smiling, too. This entire affair is really just far too boggling.
"You could at least take me to dinner," Tony finally manages to say, once he's processed the last two minutes. Steve laughs, and, miraculously, the world does not end. Tony counts that as a personal victory.
"Would you like to go to dinner with me tomorrow night?" he asks.
"Only if I get to pick the restaurant. I am not going to wander around Brooklyn again looking for a place that closed in the sixties," Tony answers, unable to contain his snark in the least. For a moment, it looks as if Steve is going to change his mind on the entire affair, then he pokes Tony square in the chest with a finger.
"That was one time," he protests. "One time." Never mind that they've only gone to dinner together once as they can't seem to spend ten minutes alone without arguing, which honestly begs how exactly they think it is that this is going to work, but in wake of the kissing it hardly seems important.
"One time too many, Rogers," is all he says in reply, shrugging.
"Stark." There's a hand on his hip.
"Yes, Captain?" He smiles widely, looking up that extra inch to meet his gaze.
"Shut up." They kiss again, and Tony swears he hears wolf whistles over top of the cheering.
Recipient: Omphaloskepsist
Beta:: (Secret)
Universe: MCU
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Strong language. Booze.
A/N: Not strictly adherent to The Gift of the Magi, but I tried to adhere to the morals.
Summary: Christmas comes around and Tony is worryingly stumped over a present for the good Captain.
The radio in Howard's office is from the 1970s. The sound that comes out of it crackles quietly, since the reception is absolutely horrible. Tony tried to fix it up, once. Sort of. By tried he means that he'd tinkered with it while going through all of the man's junk so that he'd had something to listen to. The dial had gotten stuck, and the blasted thing is stuck on some oldies station, which only seems to make things even more crackly. After that he hadn't bothered with it, but he'd come in to rifle some of the codger's old financial records, and he'd found it on, Christmas music drifting out of it. It's a damn good thing Tony doesn't believe in ghosts. It doesn't hurt that one of his mother's photo albums is open on the desk. Howard never in his life would have gone through a photo album if his spirit had happened to be wandering around. He has a long list of more important things to do, a number of which are probably some variation of continuing to make Tony's life miserable, as if it isn't already bad enough seeing as he wakes up just about every damned morning puking.
I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me. Please have snow and mistletoe...
Papers rustle, and Tony glances at the radio, feeling slightly bewildered. Christmas. Every damn year the Avengers shove shoddy gifts at each other. Often they're half-ruined from a fight, or bought in the aftermath of saving the world. Tony indulges them, handing out paltry store-wrapped fifty-dollar watches and the like. He can't remember the last time he actually bought someone a real gift. He grabs Howard's scotch out of a cupboard and picks the papers he needs out of a recordbook, then heads for the library to do some work, and check a calendar if he remembers to.
*
There are five days left until Christmas, and Tony has managed to snag some sort of gift that looks like had some thought put into it for everyone with the exception of one for Captain Rogers. One does not understand how frustrating this is until they realize that Tony even figured out what sort of vodka and pocketknife to get Natasha within about five minutes of searching. He isn't even all that fond of Rogers, frankly, and part of him is tempted to just get him an American Eagle Outfitters gift card and be done with it. It says ‘America’ and ‘Eagle.’ All it's missing is ‘Freedom’ and an actual fashion sense. Not that Captain Spandexpants has any of that. Not that Tony is complaining about said spandex pants. He knows a good thing when he sees one, even if he doesn't particularly like said thing on principle. What principle that is, exactly, he's never been sure, but it had never seemed important either, so for the most part he simply lets it fall to the wayside and be what it is. Rogers hardly seems to mind, either way. The two of them simply clash. It's a fact of life, one which they both accept without fuss.
That is why it is so frustrating when he waltzes into the kitchen the next afternoon only to find Rogers there wrapping something. Of course, he hears Tony's footsteps, whirls around and goes, "Tony!" and then he goes, "I mean, Mister Stark!" and the entire while he's stuffing something into a drawer, looking for all the world like a deer caught in headlights. Tony stares at him, because he's an idiot. Well, he's a genius on the battlefield, but he's an idiot. Not only that, but it's not a very normal occurrence that the great Captain Steven Rogers gets flustered, and Tony is determined to milk this incident for all it's worth. That is, until it clicks in his genius brain that this means Rogers has actually made an effort to buy him something. He goes back into the kitchen later, but the drawer is empty, and the only sign there'd ever been anything there at all is a piece of cheap, gaudy wrapping paper snagged on the inside of the drawer handle.
He really, really tries not to care. It's not his problem if Rogers decides to buy him something nice, it just means that he's an idiot, and that Tony gets to take advantage of his idiocy. Of course, he still doesn't have a present for the guy, either. Well shit.
*
He spends the next day with Happy driving him all over Manhattan. The weather is absolutely miserable, snowy and windy and horrendous, and as the day grows longer, Tony finds himself with a migraine the size of his own ego. Finally he gives up, laying down along the back seat of his car.
"Take me home," he grouses. Happy turns on the car and begins driving home, but the traffic is slow, and the car is overheated and smells of gasoline, so finally Tony steps out of the car and shuffles through the snow to a nearby Shopper's where he buys their most heavy-duty over-the-counter painkillers, swallows a good couple of them down dry and then trudges back out into the snow. Outside the wind is blowing, and cars are honking their horns, and apparently the traffic has moved enough that the car is not anywhere near where he left it, so he's left shuffling through the absurd weather, getting his ninety-dollar pants covered in snow. The only reason he even sees it is because he has to stop and lean on a window for a moment. "It", by the by, is the perfect gift for Cap.
Tony steps into the antique shop, a pair of silver bells jingling as the door swings open. The door clicks shut behind him, and Tony breathes in the smell of dust and time. There's an elderly woman at the cash register. Tony eyes the displays of little trinkets and baubles, then drifts into the store towards his prize. He picks up the old photo album and opens it, leafing through the pages. The first few have various old photographs of streets in various tones of grey and sepia, many of the edges frayed. Some of the photos are sun-bleached and fading, and the spine of the album itself could use some repairing. He closes it and goes over to the woman, placing it on the counter. Then he snags a small bottle of what looks like delightfully ancient whisky, and smiles his most charming smile, slides a credit card across the counter.
"My, my," the old woman says. A nametag on her shirt reads Charlotte in curvy letters. "You're the second handsome young man I've had in here this week," she tells him cheerfully as she tediously presses buttons on the cash register which looks just about as ancient as her. "I don't get many customers your age, you know. There simply aren't any young people interested in quality products anymore." Tony isn't sure he wants to call the photo album he's just bought quality, but he's sure he'll get plenty drunk off the whisky.
"Thanks," he says. Charlotte smiles and waves as he walks out the door. The bells jingle behind him, and Happy has parked the car beside the store. Tony climbs inside, and Happy takes him home.
*
The gift is just as pristinely wrapped as the rest of them, the singular touch from Tony himself being the label on which the To and From are written in his hand. It sits under a gaudy twelve-foot tree that was decorated around a doombot incident and a Starbucks crisis, until the fated day when they all trudge downstairs to the smell of pancakes, and then shuffle into the sitting room despite protests from Captain Tightwad about the table. Natasha says, "Fuck the table," except she says it in Russian, and her exact words elude approximately half of those present, Tony included. The expression on Rogers' face is enough to let him guess, though.
Gift-giving goes with the usual amount of exhausted enthusiasm that it does every year, and when Tony finds several flat packages shoved at him, complete with heinous Christmas bows, he can do little more than remark "Not whisky" before opening the first one.
Inside is a carefully-preserved record with Frank Sinatra on the cover in decorative letters, a list of songs at the bottom of left corner. Tony sets the record aside and peeks at the label this time, then looks up at Steve Rogers as it had said in swirly handwriting on the label.
"I saw that there was an old gramophone in your father's office, and it didn't look as dusty as everything else. I thought you might like them," says Steve Rogers by way of explanation. The amount of thought which has gone into this gift absolutely floors Tony, who isn't sure he's ever had anyone sneak into Howard's office and check the dust amounts before.
There are five records in total, and one of them contains a collection of Christmas songs, so Tony gets up and wanders off, getting the gramophone and bringing it back to the sitting room, only to find Rogers sitting on the floor with his gift in hand, looking almost hesitant to open it. Oh, for heaven's sake. The man will drop f-bombs like nobody's business, but he won't open a damn present without permission.
"We haven't got all day, Captain," he says, and then turns away to put the Christmas record on. Behind him he hears the sound of wrapping paper, and then there is silence other than the music now crackling to life. He turns around to find Rogers leafing through the pages. Eventually, he looks up with those ridiculous baby blues of his, and Tony stares him down as if there's some sort of competition between them over this whole matter of Christmas presents. Rogers stares back down at the photo album, then smiles and closes it.
*
Tony hears and sees nothing of it until two days later, when Rogers snaps an extremely unflattering photo of him stuffing chow mein into his mouth on a particularly miserable Tuesday evening with what looks to be a relatively high-quality camera. They stare each other down again until Tony's eyes start to hurt. He looks down and stuffs another mouthful of chow mein into his mouth, trying not to think about it, nor about the changes that come in the next little while.
Over the course of the next couple of days, Cap comes to life like Pinnochio discovering he's a real boy. He stands straighter (which Tony had not been aware was possible), and there's an odd light to his eyes that Tony swears he would have noticed, had it been there before. It wouldn't bother him if it weren't for the way it suddenly seemed as if Rogers were watching him. It's a Friday, the next time he snaps a photo of Tony. He's hunched over a pile of schematics, his laptop an arm's length away. He's sleep-deprived, and he has a hand in his hair. He's also fighting off one hell of a headache, but work needs to be done, so he abandons a lot of things, including common sense, so that he can finish some of said work. He hears a click, and sees a flash, and squints over in the direction it came from to find Capsicle staring at him wide-eyed.
"Hello," Tony says, if just to stop the staring.
"Hi," Cap says, then looks down at his camera. "I needed a picture of your for my album."
Tony squints at him harder, as if that will somehow make everything more clear, but it just makes his vision sort of bleary, so he stops, holding his head in his hand and grunting vaguely. Cap leaves, and Tony doesn't think about it anymore. For a few days, anyway.
*
It's on New Years Eve that the camera returns, and with it, an absurdly cheery Rogers. He takes photos. This is nothing unusual. Tony's heard the other Avengers complaining constantly about the way Rogers is taking pictures of things and of people. The unusual thing is the smile on his face. It's absolutely no secret that Cap has an issue with learning to live in the present. He is constantly lingering on the past, unable to move past all of the things he missed. As Tony understands it, one of the first things he asked after waking up was Did we win? Which is all well and good (although, Tony thinks, sort of illogical. Had they lost they'd all be speaking German), but after that, the good Captain had completely and absolutely failed to move forward with his life, perpetually trapped in time and people that had long passed.
That's why he stares when the man snaps a picture of him on New Year's Eve, and then smiles. Rogers stares back, as well, then ducks his head, cheeks colouring, and glances down at the photo, checking its quality or some such thing, Tony assumes. It's while watching him that Tony begins to feel absurdly stupid. He had been so absorbed in his own life, so absorbed in meetings, and women, and inventions, and sums and losses, that he hadn't noticed what he himself had done. He had had the audacity to put thought into a gift, to give a damn, and it was paying off. He was moving forward, for the first time in years. For the first time, Steve Rogers was happily moving away from the 1940s. He stares. Rogers looks up, and then he walks over, fiddling with the neck strap of his digital camera.
"You've been playing the records," he says. "I'm glad you like them. I wasn't sure..." He looks down at the camera again, seeming almost bashful. He's a soldier, a rather brutish one at that, especially around other men. It's odd seeing him anything but straightforward with that special military abrasiveness that him and Fury usually wear like a damn badge. "Thank you for the photo album." He looks up when he speaks, because he's polite.
"You're welcome," Tony answers. In the background, he can hear the rest of the team counting down — 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. "The records are nice." They've never quite done nice. Civil, sure. Nice, not so much. They clash in every way imaginable, and they've been grating against each other essentially since they met. Tony's unsure what has changed. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—
There's a hand on the back of his neck, broad with gun calluses. There's a mouth on his, the lips dry and chapped, stupidly plush, and Tony kisses back because he's Tony fucking Stark as the cries of Happy New Year!! erupt from the television and from the team. It's simple. Dry, with no tongue or wandering hands; but it's firm. There's nothing chaste or hesitant about it, and sure as hell nothing lady-like as are the usual kisses that Tony receives. Not that Tony's every strictly prescribed to lady-like.
"I hear that's a thing now," Steve says, when he pulls back. They've just kissed, so Tony figures the least he can do is think of the guy by his first name. He's blushing, but he's smiling, too. This entire affair is really just far too boggling.
"You could at least take me to dinner," Tony finally manages to say, once he's processed the last two minutes. Steve laughs, and, miraculously, the world does not end. Tony counts that as a personal victory.
"Would you like to go to dinner with me tomorrow night?" he asks.
"Only if I get to pick the restaurant. I am not going to wander around Brooklyn again looking for a place that closed in the sixties," Tony answers, unable to contain his snark in the least. For a moment, it looks as if Steve is going to change his mind on the entire affair, then he pokes Tony square in the chest with a finger.
"That was one time," he protests. "One time." Never mind that they've only gone to dinner together once as they can't seem to spend ten minutes alone without arguing, which honestly begs how exactly they think it is that this is going to work, but in wake of the kissing it hardly seems important.
"One time too many, Rogers," is all he says in reply, shrugging.
"Stark." There's a hand on his hip.
"Yes, Captain?" He smiles widely, looking up that extra inch to meet his gaze.
"Shut up." They kiss again, and Tony swears he hears wolf whistles over top of the cheering.