Happy Holidays, niki_chidon!

[cap_ironman_fe]

Title: Everyone’s a critic.
Author: grand_duc
Rating: G.
Warnings: Nothing that comes to mind, this is pretty much fluff and nothing but fluff.
Beta: valtyr, who practically co-wrote the fic with the amount of questions she answered and the wonder full job she did to make the story legible.
Summary/Prompt: Steve scrap booking with Jan. Everyone's a critic.
Universe: MA
Pairings/Characters: Jan/Hank, Steve/Tony pre-slash.
Word count: 3,900. Give or take.
N/A: This is my first fic in this fandom, after 2 years of lurking.



“Hey Jan, what are you doing?” Steve asked as he approached the couch where Jan had a blank notebook and a dozen or two of photos spread on her crossed legs and next to her. She raised her head from the picture she was looking at.

“Oh, nothing much really. But I was thinking of making a scrapbook at some point.”

“A scrapbook?” Steve turned the word around in his head, trying to see if he could guess its meaning. A book made of scraps, like patchwork? Jan must have seen his confused expression, the expression he had sported when faced with pretty much everything when he had first gotten out of the ice from the toaster to the ipod, because she started rummaging under the couch.

“Scrapbooking is… kinda like a photo album - I had it with me. - Aha!” She pulled a second book, this one bound in hard cover with inscriptions on the front, from under the couch. “It’s a sort of photo album, only it has embellishments, drawings, comments and other stuff on it,” She held the book out to him. “This is an old one from when I was still in high school. It’ll give you a better idea than what I could tell you.”

Steve took it, turning it in his hands before opening it. He saw pictures. Jan with her father, Jan at what Steve guessed had been her school, Jan playing with two boys, probably her brothers, girls who must have been her friends. The shots were all arranged in a striking way that later Steve would admire, chuckling at the star shaped picture showing the soccer team holding a trophy, but what caught his eyes the first time were the people. He turned the pages seeing pictures after pictures, dozens, perhaps even as much as fifty in the whole book. His throat seized a little.

He could see clearly his old living room, the old battered chest that held their plates and cutlery. Four frames had rested on it. One had been his parent’s wedding picture, two had been school pictures, the rare years they could afford to buy them and the last had been a picture of his mother taken by a friend from art school interested in photography. And that had been the grand total of the Rogers family photography, prior to Project Rebirth, after which Steve had been swimming in enough photos, posters and other bits of paraphenalia to fill an Olympic swimming pool. But they didn’t count, they were war propaganda, not… personal, like Jan’s scrapbook.




“You’re going where?” Tony asked. He had raised his head from the piece of circuitry he was working on, looking at Steve from behind his magnifying goggles. His eyes appeared to be at least five time bigger than they actually were. It should not have looked half as endearing as it did.

“To a craft shop with Jan.” Steve repeated patiently, used to Tony’s habit of tuning people out when absorbed by his work.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought I heard. What the hell for?”

“To buy supplies to make a scrapbook.”

“A scrapbook?” Tony pushed his goggles to his forehead, messing his already tangled hair even more. Steve concentrated on the hair. If he didn’t his eyes would linger on the formerly white tank top that showed off Tony’s wiry musculature, or even worse, on the old jeans that made up for their loose fit by their ripped back pocket, and Tony was his best friend. You didn’t ogle your best friend. “Like a glitter and ribbon and sticker scrapbook?”

“I didn’t know there was more than one kind of scrapbook.”

“Did you lose a bet or something? I thought only grandmas did that.”

“It looks like fun,” Steve said defensively, crossing his arms and frowning. “And it’ll make a nice memento.”

“Why would you take a perfectly good picture, print it and then ruin it by sticking stuff on it?” Tony continued, not seeming to have heard Steve at all. “Especially now that they make perfectly good view screens. Hey! You know I could…”

“No.” Steve said firmly with one hand held in a stop gesture, recognising the excited look on Tony’s face as the one heralding that someone was about to be gifted with something either very expensive or very revolutionary or both. If there was one thing that Steve had learned since meeting Tony it was that it was better to nip him in the bud.

“But…”

“I said no,” he repeated in the slow steady voice generally reserved for young children. The last time Tony had gotten that look into his eyes, Steve’s poor vintage Harley had ended up with rocket boosters.

“You’re no fun.” Tony grumbled, going back to his circuit board.




To make a scrapbook you need pictures and like Steve, Jan wanted something more intimate than the Avenger pictures the press snapped anytime one of them set foot outside in costume, so they went to Peter. He blinked owlishly at them from his spot on the kitchen ceiling, his juice box precariously close to dripping. No, that wasn’t right. He blinked owlishly at Steve.

“Scrapbooking?” he said, in that same astonished voice Tony had used. He finally looked at Jan then went back to Steve. Steve was suddenly reminded that although he had worked as a reporter, Peter primary interest was in science. Maybe the science types these days had something against- what was the name again? Ah, yes- hard-copies. But he had a sneaking suspicion it was something else.

“Yes.” Jan said, in a steely voice with her arms crossed over her chest. “Do you have any pictures of us when we’re just hanging out?”

Peter opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it.

“I have some from Thanksgiving and Christmas and maybe a few more from other stuff,” he finally said.

“That would be great.” Jan smiled.

Once he had given them the pictures he had -on a shiny little USB key the size of Steve’s fingernail- he hung next to Steve while Jan marched in direction of her laptop.

“So, hum… How did she rope you into helping her? I would have thought she would have gone for Hank.”

“She did not “rope me”. I asked her if I could help.”

“Ah.”

“What?”

Peter climbed on the wall and stretched to make sure Jan had turned the corner and was out of earshot. Then he started speaking in that slow, hesitant voice that Steve hated. The voice people used when they found themselves explaining a new concept to poor time stranded Captain America.

“Well… you know… I suppose no one told you… scrapbooking is kinda…”

“Girly?”

Peter eyes gave a good try at becoming wide as his mask’s, and his mouth opened and closed like a goldfish’s.

“I can pick up gender cues, Peter,” he said to stop his flailing. “And read. One of the first things Tony did when he got his hands on me was to introduce me to the internet.”

The pink and pastel hues most of the websites had used had been hard to miss, amongst other things.

“Why then?”

“Because it sounded like fun,” he said, crossing his arms and drawing himself to his full height. “Is that so hard to believe?”

Peter cocked his head thinking about it.

“… No, not really.”

“In fact, I think you’d probably like it too,” he said half joking, half serious.

“Oh no,” Peter said, hands making frantic negative motions. “No way, I’m geeky enough as it is. Thank you very much.” And he fled before Steve had the time to add anything else.





So they had pictures, they had a book -a simple tan colored one they would add the Avengers’ logo to-, they had materials, colored papers, stickers, ribbons and who knows what else, funny little scissors that cut in a wave pattern. Now they needed to start putting all of that together. By now the whole mansion knew what they were doing, and they were met with the expected ribbing and teasing.

“What are you girls goin’ to do next? Crocheting? Knittin’ Christmas sweaters for Hank?”

“Why not, Logan? You could teach us, seeing as you were probably there when they invented it.”

Plain incomprehension.

“I see…. That sounds like a very nice idea.”

“Thank you, Storm.”

And the occasional constant occasional art critic.

“You’re putting that article in? But the one from the New York Time was so much better.”

“Funny, Logan thought the Time article should be burned.”

“He’s just mad because the journalist compared him to a German Shepherd once. Hey, you know the page wouldn’t be half bad if you took the article and blended part of it with…”

“Don’t you have a date with MJ?”

Hank was pretty much the only one keeping his mouth shut, for obvious reasons.

They left everything spread on one of the library’s tables, working on it whenever they had free time.

Aliens invaded, well not exactly invaded, arrived on earth en masse, two days after they started and it took the Avengers and the Fantastic Four three weeks to sort everything out.

AIM took out the head of the Statue of Liberty a week after that.
The Wrecking Crew attempted to rob a bank, escaped police custody on the way to Rykers, then proceeded to rob the exact same bank again.

None the less, little by little the scrapbook started to take shape.




“…I’m staaandiing on my oooown, but now I’m not….”

“What is that?” Storm was standing right behind the couch where Steve and Jan were balancing Jan’s laptop, looking at the screen with a puzzled expretion.

They were researching on the internet, for pictures of the Avengers heroing, mostly, but also for anything interesting they could find. And did they find some interesting things.

“Assemble” courtesy of I_Love_The_Avengers.”

“What?!” Wolverine and the Hulk, attracted by the noise, had joined Storm.

On the little window, a Spiderman poster replaced a shot of Giant-girl and the Hulk taking down a giant lizard.

The three of them had a mix of astonishment and horror on their face. As if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing and hearing. Steve would have sympathised save for the fact that that particular video was one of the most harmless thing they had found. At first, he had clicked on any link indiscriminately. Back when he had been fresh out of the ice, Tony had advised him to never Google himself and babbled about Rule 34 of the internet but Steve had never thought to make the link between the two. He needed -to borrow one of Peter’s expressions- brain bleach.

“It’s catchy,” Jan offered.

“Yea, well you put this in your scrapbook and I’m tearin’ the thing apart.”

“….Assembled we are Strooong, forever fight as ooone…”





“Those are cute.” Steve turned his head to see Tony looking over his shoulder.

“Thank you.”

He was hunched over his drawing pad, a box of 50 crayola colored pencils at his elbow. Jan had gotten the idea of adding a picture of each of them as children, but it had quickly became apparent that getting the pictures would be hard for some of the Avengers and downright impossible for others, so Steve was drawing little cartoons of them. He was putting the finishing touches on the one of little Bruce standing on a young Hulk’s shoulders to reach a book on the top of a bookshelf. The drawings had turned out to be a better idea, anyway. It enabled Steve to do things that a simple photograph wouldn’t have, and he really liked the childlike effect of the colored pencils. He put Bruce and Hulk’s picture next to the one of Peter climbing a tree.

Tony wandered off to the bookshelves, hands trailing over the books then choosing one. Steve waited for him to come back to the table to sit next to him as he usually did but he went to a group of armchairs instead, practically on the other side of the large room. Steve reminded himself sternly that he had no reason to feel disappointed. Tony was friend, there was no rule that said they had to stay glued at the hip.

He decided to do him next, wearing a red and gold shirt, maybe with oil stain on it. He heard a deep sigh and raised his head to look at Jan, sitting across from him in proper modern ladylike fashion: crossed-legged on her chair, slouching with her elbows on the table. She was frowning at the semi completed pages they had.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s the pictures we got from the internet.” She turned the book side-way so that they could see it too. “They definitely clash with the rest.”

They did. Steve had hoped that they would add texture, with their simple paper and ink print, but it didn’t. They simply looked ugly. It was not only the paper, it was also the quality of the picture themselves, most of them were grainy and blurry, the printer not enough to render the minute contrasts giving the pictures life. Next to the careful artwork, quotes and other pictures they looked cheap.




“We’re going to have to scrap them,” Jan told Peter - who was emphatically not participating but who liked to know how it was going and give his opinion every once in a while- stabbing her scrambled eggs morosely. “Reorganize everything we had done.”

Steve’s shoulders slumped at the reminder. He really didn’t want to do that. One of them was of the Avengers the first time they had teamed up, during the action itself. They had to include that one. Another was a candid shot of Thor sheepishly straightening a lampshade that had somehow made the World Wide Web but not the tabloids.

Peter winced in sympathy behind his frosted flakes.

“They really don’t look good?” Ororo asked.
“Really.” Steve confirmed.

The toaster popped. Peter used two weblines to bring the toasts to the table, offering one to Ororo after tugging the web off.

“Why do you have to redo them?” Hank asked. He had just come in the kitchen but Jan had obviously told him about it the night before. “Why not just remove the pictures?”

“Because then the composition of the page is not balanced anymore.” Jan said, kissing him on the cheek when he sat next to her. Hank didn’t look as if he understood, but concentrated on acquiring his own breakfast.

“What are the pictures exactly?” Tony raised his head from his coffee cup for the first time since he had staggered to the coffee maker. His eyes had the bleary look that said he probably had gone to bed in the wee hours in the morning and the papers spread in front of him said he probably had a morning meeting. Steve wouldn’t have expected him to contribute to the conversation until his second or even third cup.

“Oh, interesting pictures of us. Some of them we really wanted to put in the scrapbook.”

“If you want to look at them they’re in the server. In the “Project” file under “Scrapbook,” Jan said.

“You’re using the Avenger work server? That’s supposed to be for official purposes not for your hobbies,” Hank said.

She raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “You guys used it to make your fireworks back in June.”

“That’s not the same thing.” Tony said defensively.





“It’s Hulk’s turn! Hulk chooses the movie!”

“No, it’s not. It’s Bruce’s turn.” Ororo said patiently, taking care to stand between Hulk and the DVD shelf.

“That means Hulk!”

“No,” Steve said, getting up from the couch because Storm wouldn’t appreciate it if he left her to handle it alone. “It means Bruce. He’s an Avenger too. He has the right to choose the movie.”

“But Hulk wanted to watch the “Lion King.” Hulk’s shoulder slumped as he went from angry to sad.

“You’ll watch it next time it’s your turn,” Storm said, patting him on the forearm. “ Now how about you let Bruce come back.”

Hulk let out a stubborn growl but his skin paled and he started to shrink.

“So what’s the movie?” Peter asked as soon as Bruce appeared, holding the Hulk’s pants up.

“Be patient, Spidey,” Jan said, stealing a handful of popcorn from Peter’s bowl. “Let him get dressed at least.”

“We’re still missing Tony.” Hank said.

“Na, He’s got a business thing tonight. He can’t make it.” Peter said.

“Then why is he here?”

“Just passing through.” Tony answered, having entered the room from behind Steve. He was dressed for business, in a very nice pinstriped suit that made his eyes seem even bluer than usual and a silk shirt and tie. He was holding a large brown envelope.

“I just wanted to give you this.” He held the envelope out to Steve. “I finished yesterday but I forgot to give it to you.”

Steve took it, puzzled, and opened it. A handful of pictures came tumbling out. Real pictures on glossy paper. The first one showed Thor sheepishly straightening a lampshade.

“It’s our pictures!”

“What?!”

“Look.” He said, handing them to Jan, relief bubbling in his chest making him grin like a fool. “It’s the pictures we had to remove from the scrapbook.”

“I enhanced them so that they’re clearer,” Tony said, weaving one hand to illustrate. “Then I printed them with photo-paper. Did they turn out OK?”

Jan squealed. “They’re great!” she said, jumping into his arms. “Thank you!” She kissed him on the cheek.

“Thank you.” Steve repeated with feeling. The scrapbook had not being doing well. It had almost been as if having to redo what they had already done had sapped their energy for it. To have the pictures back was an unexpected relief.

“Thank you.” That’s all? No kiss? You don’t love me anymore,” Tony pouted with that smirk he always wore when he was teasing Steve. “He won’t reward me for my courtly help,” he mock lamented to Jan.

Let’s see who will have the last laugh. Steve quickly closed the distance between them and kissed him before he had the chance to step back. The goatee scratched his jaw and he got a whiff of Tony’s cologne, subtle and pleasant.

When he pulled back Tony didn’t react the way he had expected. He didn’t jump back, didn’t scrub his cheek with the back of his hand, didn’t do any of those dozen of things men did when they joked around with each other. He just stood there with wide eyes and a small smile on his face. Steve had seemingly managed to shut Tony Stark up.

“Ummm. I… Have to go,” he finally said, with only half his usual ease and he left.

“You know what?” Jan asked Steve once they had put the pictures back into the envelop and they were all sitting down to watch the movie.

“What?”

“To continue with the girly activities,” she pointed a thumb in the direction Tony had gone. “I think he likes likes you.”





“Can I do something for you Captain?” Ms. Potts was looking at Steve curiously, having noticed him staring at her. She was on one of her biweekly trips to the mansion, and she was about to leave. It was now or never.

“Umm…. About Tony…” He stopped, opened his mouth again but nothing came out.

“Yes. Is there something?”

“No, nothing. Just… Do you know where he likes to go?” There. he had said it.

Ms. Potts blinked and put her purse back on the kitchen counter. “Where he likes to go?” she repeated.

“Yes, I’m thinking of maybe taking him somewhere, but I have no idea where.” He smiled, willing her to see his problem. Where did you take a billionaire who had dated half of New York?

“Take him somewhere...” Ms. Potts fixed him with a penetrating look. “Captain,” she said slowly. “Are you planning on asking my boss out on a date?”

Steve felt his cheeks heat up and he knew his face was red as a tomato. Suck it up Rogers. You’re 26, not 12.

“Maybe,” he admitted, forcing himself look her straight in the eyes.

Ms. Potts smiled at him, her eyes twinkling. “Maybe, huh? Well, you’re about to make Tony very happy if you do go through with it.”

“That what Giant-Girl said,” He replied, feeling his blush deepen even more. “So you think he would agree?”

Ms. Potts snorted. Loudly. “I don’t think you have to worry about rejection.”

Steve nodded even though he felt as if he was missing something. This was all very new to him. He had noticed Tony was flirting with him... After a few months. But he hadn’t thought he was actually serious. Tony flirted with everybody.

Ms. Potts took pity on him. “Let’s take a seat.”

They did.

“Did you have any ideas?”

“There’s a metal sculptures exposition at the Met, but I’m not really sure he’d like it. Or something with cars?”

“Cars are always a good bet, as long as you don’t let him race.”

There seemed to be a story behind that.

“By the way, do you want something where you won’t be easily recognized?”

It was Steve’s turn to blink, then it suddenly occurred to him. “He’s not “in the closet”, is he?” That didn’t seem like Tony at all. But although Steve had found a picture of him kissing another man during the infamous internet search -the things you find on the Web- it didn’t seem to be common knowledge. Or at least Steve hadn’t known until two weeks ago.

Ms. Potts snorted again. “God, no. I was just asking because if it gets out that Tony Stark and Captain America are dating things are going to be very hectic and I was wondering if maybe you would prefer to have the media storm later.”

Steve felt a tension he hadn’t noticed was there drain out of him. He nodded. Until he knew whether this was going anywhere he would prefer it if it stayed between them.

“People generally don’t think of him as gay. If you’re wondering,” she said, one hand tracing the dent on the table made by Hulk banging his mug. “Because they also see him dating women a lot.”

“That would make him bisexual.”

“It would,” she agreed “If a lot of people didn’t think it was impossible to like both.”

Steve frowned. He had never heard that before and he could have gladly gone on without hearing it. It seemed like something people would have said in his time. Something he had tried to tell himself. That he liked girls so it didn’t mean anything that he liked looking at men. And in hindsight that may have been the reason it had taken Jan telling him for him to notice Tony had feelings for him. He had been refusing to think of him as anything else but a friend by habit.

“That’s…” he started.

“Stupid. I know. Lets forget about that. I have a few ideas for your date….”





When the scrapbook was finally finished there was a page Steve hadn’t known about containing: One mock tabloid article title. “AFTER MONTHS OF DANCING AROUND EACH OTHER YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHO FINALLY GOT TOGETHER!” A shot of Steve standing awkwardly in front of Tony’s bedroom door trying to explain to him that yes he meant a date date. (Somebody must have planted a camera). And a picture of them smiling in front of the “Jurassic Attack” monster truck.

Tony offered to tear it out, but Logan had been leery of being put in a scrapbook from the start, Jan reluctant to add a picture of her with the antenna headband and the rest of them would probably find offence in something else. Steve was not creating a precedent. Too much time and efforts had gone into the book.