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cap_ironman2011-12-27 04:52 pm
cap_ironman_fe) wrote in cap_ironman2011-12-27 04:52 pm
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anthonysstark
Title: Spin the Screwdriver
Author:tammaiya
Verse: 616
Prompt/summary: The Avengers all get stuck in Tony's workshop after an incident in the lab triggers the alarm. They decided to play spin the bottle to pass the time.
Pairings/characters: Tony/Steve, minor hints of Hank/Jan and Clint/Wanda, minor appearances by Jen.
Notes: Vaguely set pre disassembled, but it is spin the bottle fic, so no real canon knowledge expected or required.
Word count: 3000 ish.
"You can not be serious," Clint said flatly. "What do you mean, we’re stuck in here?"
Tony rolled his eyes. "I mean we’re stuck in here, Einstein," he said. "The lab is in lockdown until the air out there becomes breathable. Full stop."
"You’re Mr Engineering Genius and this is your lab. Don’t tell me you can’t override the lockdown."
"I could," Tony agreed. "But then we’d be back to the bit with the poison gas."
Clint scowled. "I thought Iron Man had air filters."
"Well, it does, but I can’t be one hundred per cent sure they’d work on the harmful elements of this particular gas without testing," Tony said thoughtfully. "I mean, probably they would—but I’m not going to try it, because if I overrode the lockdown, you guys would still be exposed to the gas even if I was fine. So stop frowning at me like that, Steve."
Most people would probably deny they’d been doing anything of the sort. Steve just looked self-righteously satisfied, like he’d won an argument Tony hadn’t even realized they’d been having. "Good," he said firmly. "You heard Tony, Clint. We stay here until the lockdown is over. I’m sure Jen and the others can handle the situation outside perfectly fine without our help."
If anything, that just made Clint look even sulkier.
"Clint isn’t worried that the others can’t handle it," Jan said witheringly, from the other side of the room. "He’s just bored and wants a chance to punch something."
"What, like I’m the only one," Clint muttered.
Hank looked up from where he’d been poking at some tools Tony had left out on the bench, probably thinking about how he could incorporate them into something like his Ant Man helmet. "Actually--"
"Hank, while I’m sure you and Tony would be perfectly happy to entertain yourselves in the lab here, the rest of us are not going to be so impressed unless you’re coming up with a way to get us out of here," Jan interrupted. "Which Tony basically just said is not going to happen. So you’re both going to play nice with the other kiddies. Understand?"
Hank sighed, but apparently decided it wasn’t worth fighting. "Sure," he said ironically. "What are we playing?"
That was a good question. It went without saying that even if Tony had a mini-bar in his lab, which obviously he didn’t, any of the usual drinking games were right out. There were no playing cards or board games in the room, Tony was pretty sure only Steve would be interested in something like charades or twenty questions, and they had all learned from bitter experience not to play truth or dare with Clint in the room.
"Spin the bottle?" Jan suggested wickedly.
Tony stared at her for a moment, wondering if she had really just said that or if he was suffering hallucinations now. However, Clint and Hank looked just as poleaxed as he felt and Steve seemed confused, so he probably did hear that right.
He hesitated for a moment, because the idea was terribly tempting on so many levels, but…
"No," he said firmly, once common sense had a chance to reassert itself. Enjoyable as it might be in the immediate short term to have an excuse to kiss his very attractive team mates, not to mention one team mate in particular, there was no arguing the fact that it would end in so very many tears.
Steve’s brow creased. "Spin the bottle?" he echoed, with a worried glance in Tony’s direction. "That’s not a… I mean, it doesn’t involve…"
"No, of course not," Jan said sharply. "I wouldn’t suggest something like that. It’s a kissing game."
Now Steve looked even more bemused. "Kissing game?" he echoed.
"Party game popular with teenagers," Tony explained. "Or so pop culture likes to think, anyway. You sit in a circle and take turns spinning a bottle around. The person who spins has to kiss the person who the bottle points at, and then the next person in the circle spins, and so on. But we don’t have a bottle, and that doesn’t matter anyway because it’s a terrible, terrible idea."
There, Tony thought, largely relieved with a kernel of disappointment mixed in. Steve wasn’t going to want to play a game like that. He’d adapted pretty well to the modern era, but he still had the occasional old-fashioned hang-up about some things, and Tony was almost certain kissing would be one of them.
"I don’t know, I think it sounds like it might be fun," Steve said, though there was a faint flush in his cheeks. Tony blinked, taken off guard. "Surely you must have something we can use instead of a bottle, Tony?"
"Well, I mean, I guess we could use a screwdriver," Tony stammered slightly, a little lightheaded from shock. "It won’t spin the same way a bottle would, but I guess it’s close enough?"
"Spin the screwdriver, this just gets better and better," Clint said sarcastically. It did actually sound a lot dirtier, Tony reflected, when you put it like that. "How the hell is this even going to work? There’s only one woman and three men, that doesn’t sound like a fun time to me."
"Two women," Jan corrected, and pitched her voice to be heard across the other side of the lab. "You’ll play, right, Wanda?"
Wanda turned from where she’d been examining the sealed lab doors. "I suppose I will," she agreed. "Since there doesn’t appear much else to do."
"What were you doing anyway?" Hank wanted to know, somewhere between scientific curiosity and wariness. Wanda shrugged.
"I thought I might be able to use my hex powers to convert the gas into something inert," she said.
"And can you?" Clint prompted, ignoring the fact that she wouldn’t be agreeing to play spin the bottle if she could.
Or maybe she would. Tony could never completely tell, with Wanda.
"Possibly," she said calmly. "But I’m not certain enough to want to stake all our lives on it when it’s not an emergency."
"Which brings us back to spin the bottle," Jan said.
"Screwdriver," Hank corrected.
"I don’t care what we’re spinning, it’s still a dumb idea," Clint complained. "It’d be a dumb idea anyway, but it’s an even dumber idea when you’ve only got five people. We’d be spending half the time on re-spins."
"Why?" Steve asked. "I thought the rules of the game were that you had to kiss whoever the bottle landed on. Or screwdriver."
"Well, yeah, but what if I spin it and it lands on a guy?" Clint demanded.
"You suck it up," Jan said, unsympathetically. "Which is what Wanda or I will do if one of us lands the other."
Tony snuck a look at Steve, again with that mix of relief mingled with a tiny thread of disappointment. Now Steve knew what would really be involved in this game, surely he wouldn’t—
"That seems fair," Steve said agreeably. Tony stared at him outright, mind a roaring blank. Did he just… but…
"No it’s not!" Clint objected. "There are only two of them! They only have a one in four chance of landing on each other! How is that fair!"
"Honestly, Clint, it’s just a game," Steve said, reproving. "It’s hardly a matter of life or death."
"Fine then, if you’re so enthusiastic about it, you go first," Clint said snidely.
"Alright. Then I suppose we all need to sit in a circle. Tony, can you get us a screwdriver?"
Tony nodded, temporarily and unusually beyond speech, and got up to summon up a plain, humble screwdriver from his work tools. He had lots of more exciting tools lying about the place, but none he’d really want to be spinning on the hard lab floor.
By the time he found what he was looking for and turned back to the others, he found they were already sitting in a circle, as directed by Steve, and the only space left for Tony was right there at Steve’s left hand side. He suppressed a smile as he went to take his place; funny how certain patterns were so ingrained they seeped into their everyday behavior. Even when playing a silly teenage party game, Avengers did what Captain America said, and Tony’s place was next to Steve.
"Here," Tony said finally, handing the screwdriver over to Steve, who set it down in the center of the circle with purpose. "Have at, Cap."
Steve reached over to spin the tool lying on the floor with a flick of his fingers. Tony watched from beside him, stomach twisting into knots. This here, right now, was what he was so afraid of.
There were a lot of reasons spin the bottle – never the best idea in any social setting – would be particularly disastrous in this group. For a start, Hank, Jan and Clint were all in the room. Tony liked to think that this wouldn’t end in one of Hank and Jan’s more memorable spats, but he wasn’t as comfortable as he’d prefer to be with those odds.
But Tony had a much more personal reason to be disturbed and discomposed by this game, because it presented him with an opportunity he thought he would never have – to kiss Steve – in a setting where it would mean absolutely nothing and be awkward at best. Even if chance paired him and Steve together for a round, that would be all it was, just one chaste kiss, and nothing more. Assuming Steve didn’t chicken out of kissing another guy, although Tony didn’t really think he would now that he’d made a point of it to Clint. Still.
Tony wanted, desperately, to have the chance to kiss Steve – which was exactly why he knew he shouldn’t.
So he sat there and watched the screwdriver careen across the floor in wild skittering sweeps as within him warred three contradictory desires: to kiss Steve, to not kiss Steve, and to not have to see Steve kiss anyone else.
"Ow!" Clint exclaimed a second later, when the screwdriver smacked into his knee with some force. "Dammit, Cap! You’re supposed to spin it, not ricochet it across the floor like some kind of projectile weapon!"
"Sorry, I think I used a little too much force," Steve said sheepishly.
"Whatever, it counts," Jan said dismissively. "Pucker up, Barton!"
"What?" Clint said, alarmed. "Wait, what? You have got to be kidding! I am not kissing Steve. Just. No. C’mon, Cap, you’re not serious about this, right? Cap?"
"Stop being so childish, Clint," Steve said, dismissive in the face of Clint’s borderline hysteria, and stretched across the circle to hook his large hand behind Clint’s neck and plant his mouth firmly over Clint’s open lips.
"MMMMRRRRMMRRRRRPH!"
Wanda and Jan were both laughing, and Hank looked pretty smugly amused too, although Tony suspected he’d find it less funny once it happened to him. Tony was stuck somewhere between hilarity at Clint’s flailing and disbelief that he was actually sitting here witnessing Steve kiss another man. Jesus.
"Okay," Steve said normally enough when he let Clint go and settled back into his place in the circle. "Your turn, Tony."
Tony stared at him intelligently. "Huh?"
"I assume we’re going clockwise?"
And… Tony was sitting to Steve’s left. Duh.
"Oh, right," Tony said, and leaned over to spin the screwdriver that had been returned to the center of the circle with considerably less force than Steve had. It spun around not quite in one place about five times before rolling to a stop with its head pointing at Clint.
"This game is rigged!" Clint howled, outraged.
Tony slanted a sideways look at Wanda, who was the only person present so far as he knew with the ability to rig a game of spin the bottle. She smiled back at him blandly.
Too hard to call.
"At least it didn’t hit you this time," he pointed out. "C’mon, let’s get it over with."
"No," Clint said. "Hell no. I am not—stop—"
The noise he made this time when Tony cut him off was kind of like an enraged but muffled growl.
"You bite, huh?" Tony said when it was over, gingerly fingering his swollen lower lip. "Feisty."
Clint scowled. "You won’t even see the arrow coming, Stark."
"Clint!" Steve snapped. "No threats. And no biting."
"It’s cool, I can do rough," Tony said breezily, and then winced, cursing himself seven ways from Sunday when Steve shot him a startled look. "I mean, relax, he didn’t actually bite me that hard considering. And I believe it’s Jan’s turn now. So! Let’s get on with it, shall we?"
The game continued pretty much in that trend, although Clint’s mood lightened considerably once he’d had the opportunity to kiss Wanda a few times. Tony wasn’t judging, although he did continue to wonder if he’d maybe missed some really subtle hexing going on in there. Tony’s stomach clenched with adrenalin every single time he or Steve had a turn, the little chanting voice inside his head begging for a chance to kiss Steve fighting to be heard over its opposite praying to avoid the same fate. And every single time, the turn would end in a lightheaded rush through his system when the screwdriver would persistently land on someone else.
Tony was getting very accustomed to that feeling of disappointed relief, but it was gradually being matched by a growing feeling of irritation when, spin after spin, Tony still did not land Steve and vice versa. Even though he knew kissing Steve in the context of this game would be a catastrophically terrible idea, part of him couldn’t help but cling to it as his one chance to find out what kissing Steve was like, and his mood grew darker and darker as this failed to eventuate.
He and Steve had each spun every single other person in the circle, sometimes as many as three times, and yet they had not spun each other even once. It was ridiculous. Tony knew better than most how probability worked, and that each spin had the same chance of landing on a particular person as any other spin, but it was still ridiculous that after as many turns as they’d both had not once had one of them landed on the other. He wasn’t quite at the point of labeling it a conspiracy or blaming Wanda, but he was starting to get pretty peeved, even so.
"Steve’s turn again," Clint announced, spirits markedly improved after Wanda had kissed him for about the fourth time. Given Clint’s ill luck to begin with, Tony found it pretty amazing that he’d spun Wanda (or Jan, twice) almost every other time. And Hank once. That had been pretty funny.
Steve reached out for the screwdriver to take another spin – he’d gotten better at moderating his strength, although he still had a tendency to put a little more power into it than necessary – and Tony was certain that this time Steve had to spin him. Math and justice compelled it. Even if it was still a terrible idea, Tony had decided he’d be damned if he let this game end without kissing Steve at least once.
The screwdriver spun free of Steve’s fingers, but at a wonky angle, because they were all distracted by the sound of the lab doors opening.
"Oh hey, here you all are," She-Hulk said, then paused. "What are you doing?"
"Party games," Tony said nonchalantly, willing himself not to look down at the final resting place of the screwdriver. Someone would no doubt clue Jen in later that they’d been playing spin the bottle, but it wasn’t going to be him, not when his pride was still feeling a bit battered. "I take it you guys handled the whole poison gas issue?"
Jen shrugged. "A.I.M.," she said, like that was all that was needed. It basically was; it explained both where the gas had come from, and how the reduced Avengers team had managed to clear the situation up relatively quickly and without too much apparent fuss.
"Finally!" Clint said, shooting to his feet. "I’m starved."
"Yes, it will be good to move our legs and hear about what happened outside," Wanda agreed, standing with a languid stretch. "Is everyone coming?"
Hank cast a longing look towards the lab equipment, but Jan tugged his wrist, pulling him toward the door. "Trust me, Hank, you’ve had enough lab time for today," she said firmly. "You can come up to the kitchen and be sociable with everyone else."
Hank acquiesced meekly enough – and if Tony had one thing in particular to be grateful for, it was the continuing amicability between Hank and Jan. In fact, if anything, the kisses they had shared during the game had been a bit more lingering than the general rule. Tony hadn’t decided whether this was a good thing or a bad thing yet, but he didn’t feel like borrowing trouble, so it could wait until later either way.
"Well," he said, after an awkward pause. "I guess we should–"
"Tony," Steve said, stopping him with a single word. "Wait."
Halted in his tracks, Tony turned slowly, cautiously to face Steve. There was an sinking feeling of trepidation there that he had only experienced around Steve a handful of times; he had no clue what Steve was about to say to him. Usually Steve would leap at any excuse to shove Tony out of his labs, and yet here he was, calling him back for some kind of private chat. It was unlikely to be about the battle with A.I.M. What was there to say, really, when they hadn’t even heard the full story yet? Tony knew the lockdown was necessary and there was nothing else any of them could have done, and he was confident Steve agreed. So there was nothing more to say about that, at least not until they had been debriefed by Jen and the others.
Which left… what, precisely? Had Steve noticed him behaving oddly during the game?
"Sure, Steve, what’s up?" he said, fake casual.
Steve took a step closer, and Tony forced himself to hold his ground. Steve was only two inches taller than him – hardly intimidating, barely enough to notice unless they stood side by side – but somehow Tony could really feel the difference with him so near.
Steve took a deep breath.
"I wanted," he started, then stopped. "No."
"Steve?" Tony said, uncertain, but he didn’t get a chance to say another word, because a second later, Steve’s large hands rose to frame either side of his face, the rough texture of his palms hot enough to brand finger prints on Tony’s cheeks. Or maybe that was just the heat of Tony’s own blush.
Without another word between them, Steve leaned forward and sealed Tony’s lips shut with a kiss, light, almost chaste, and yet not the dutiful kind of kiss Tony had expected from the party game. That would be dry, impersonal, lips squeezed closed in a firm line as one set was pressed against the other. This kiss was different, for all its innocence; gentle whispering movements of lips that were still closed, but soft enough to yield a promise for the future. It was… intimate, Tony wanted to say, and yet there was something foreign about applying that word to Steve and himself.
Steve finally released him, taking a half step back to give him some room, and Tony stared dazedly for a moment into Steve’s expectant gaze before glancing down at the floor, searching for an explanation in the angle of the screwdriver still laying where it had rolled to on Steve’s final spin. "You didn’t have to," he said stupidly, mind a total blank. "It would have landed on Wanda. She was almost on the opposite side of the circle from me."
"I know," Steve said patiently. Of course he did; he had perfect recall.
"Then…"
"I got sick of waiting on a game to make my opportunities for me," Steve confessed, and kissed Tony again, slower and more deeply this time.
Tony had changed his mind: spin the bottle was a fantastic idea.
He didn’t think they should play it ever again, though. Once was perfectly sufficient for him, thanks.
Author:
tammaiyaVerse: 616
Prompt/summary: The Avengers all get stuck in Tony's workshop after an incident in the lab triggers the alarm. They decided to play spin the bottle to pass the time.
Pairings/characters: Tony/Steve, minor hints of Hank/Jan and Clint/Wanda, minor appearances by Jen.
Notes: Vaguely set pre disassembled, but it is spin the bottle fic, so no real canon knowledge expected or required.
Word count: 3000 ish.
"You can not be serious," Clint said flatly. "What do you mean, we’re stuck in here?"
Tony rolled his eyes. "I mean we’re stuck in here, Einstein," he said. "The lab is in lockdown until the air out there becomes breathable. Full stop."
"You’re Mr Engineering Genius and this is your lab. Don’t tell me you can’t override the lockdown."
"I could," Tony agreed. "But then we’d be back to the bit with the poison gas."
Clint scowled. "I thought Iron Man had air filters."
"Well, it does, but I can’t be one hundred per cent sure they’d work on the harmful elements of this particular gas without testing," Tony said thoughtfully. "I mean, probably they would—but I’m not going to try it, because if I overrode the lockdown, you guys would still be exposed to the gas even if I was fine. So stop frowning at me like that, Steve."
Most people would probably deny they’d been doing anything of the sort. Steve just looked self-righteously satisfied, like he’d won an argument Tony hadn’t even realized they’d been having. "Good," he said firmly. "You heard Tony, Clint. We stay here until the lockdown is over. I’m sure Jen and the others can handle the situation outside perfectly fine without our help."
If anything, that just made Clint look even sulkier.
"Clint isn’t worried that the others can’t handle it," Jan said witheringly, from the other side of the room. "He’s just bored and wants a chance to punch something."
"What, like I’m the only one," Clint muttered.
Hank looked up from where he’d been poking at some tools Tony had left out on the bench, probably thinking about how he could incorporate them into something like his Ant Man helmet. "Actually--"
"Hank, while I’m sure you and Tony would be perfectly happy to entertain yourselves in the lab here, the rest of us are not going to be so impressed unless you’re coming up with a way to get us out of here," Jan interrupted. "Which Tony basically just said is not going to happen. So you’re both going to play nice with the other kiddies. Understand?"
Hank sighed, but apparently decided it wasn’t worth fighting. "Sure," he said ironically. "What are we playing?"
That was a good question. It went without saying that even if Tony had a mini-bar in his lab, which obviously he didn’t, any of the usual drinking games were right out. There were no playing cards or board games in the room, Tony was pretty sure only Steve would be interested in something like charades or twenty questions, and they had all learned from bitter experience not to play truth or dare with Clint in the room.
"Spin the bottle?" Jan suggested wickedly.
Tony stared at her for a moment, wondering if she had really just said that or if he was suffering hallucinations now. However, Clint and Hank looked just as poleaxed as he felt and Steve seemed confused, so he probably did hear that right.
He hesitated for a moment, because the idea was terribly tempting on so many levels, but…
"No," he said firmly, once common sense had a chance to reassert itself. Enjoyable as it might be in the immediate short term to have an excuse to kiss his very attractive team mates, not to mention one team mate in particular, there was no arguing the fact that it would end in so very many tears.
Steve’s brow creased. "Spin the bottle?" he echoed, with a worried glance in Tony’s direction. "That’s not a… I mean, it doesn’t involve…"
"No, of course not," Jan said sharply. "I wouldn’t suggest something like that. It’s a kissing game."
Now Steve looked even more bemused. "Kissing game?" he echoed.
"Party game popular with teenagers," Tony explained. "Or so pop culture likes to think, anyway. You sit in a circle and take turns spinning a bottle around. The person who spins has to kiss the person who the bottle points at, and then the next person in the circle spins, and so on. But we don’t have a bottle, and that doesn’t matter anyway because it’s a terrible, terrible idea."
There, Tony thought, largely relieved with a kernel of disappointment mixed in. Steve wasn’t going to want to play a game like that. He’d adapted pretty well to the modern era, but he still had the occasional old-fashioned hang-up about some things, and Tony was almost certain kissing would be one of them.
"I don’t know, I think it sounds like it might be fun," Steve said, though there was a faint flush in his cheeks. Tony blinked, taken off guard. "Surely you must have something we can use instead of a bottle, Tony?"
"Well, I mean, I guess we could use a screwdriver," Tony stammered slightly, a little lightheaded from shock. "It won’t spin the same way a bottle would, but I guess it’s close enough?"
"Spin the screwdriver, this just gets better and better," Clint said sarcastically. It did actually sound a lot dirtier, Tony reflected, when you put it like that. "How the hell is this even going to work? There’s only one woman and three men, that doesn’t sound like a fun time to me."
"Two women," Jan corrected, and pitched her voice to be heard across the other side of the lab. "You’ll play, right, Wanda?"
Wanda turned from where she’d been examining the sealed lab doors. "I suppose I will," she agreed. "Since there doesn’t appear much else to do."
"What were you doing anyway?" Hank wanted to know, somewhere between scientific curiosity and wariness. Wanda shrugged.
"I thought I might be able to use my hex powers to convert the gas into something inert," she said.
"And can you?" Clint prompted, ignoring the fact that she wouldn’t be agreeing to play spin the bottle if she could.
Or maybe she would. Tony could never completely tell, with Wanda.
"Possibly," she said calmly. "But I’m not certain enough to want to stake all our lives on it when it’s not an emergency."
"Which brings us back to spin the bottle," Jan said.
"Screwdriver," Hank corrected.
"I don’t care what we’re spinning, it’s still a dumb idea," Clint complained. "It’d be a dumb idea anyway, but it’s an even dumber idea when you’ve only got five people. We’d be spending half the time on re-spins."
"Why?" Steve asked. "I thought the rules of the game were that you had to kiss whoever the bottle landed on. Or screwdriver."
"Well, yeah, but what if I spin it and it lands on a guy?" Clint demanded.
"You suck it up," Jan said, unsympathetically. "Which is what Wanda or I will do if one of us lands the other."
Tony snuck a look at Steve, again with that mix of relief mingled with a tiny thread of disappointment. Now Steve knew what would really be involved in this game, surely he wouldn’t—
"That seems fair," Steve said agreeably. Tony stared at him outright, mind a roaring blank. Did he just… but…
"No it’s not!" Clint objected. "There are only two of them! They only have a one in four chance of landing on each other! How is that fair!"
"Honestly, Clint, it’s just a game," Steve said, reproving. "It’s hardly a matter of life or death."
"Fine then, if you’re so enthusiastic about it, you go first," Clint said snidely.
"Alright. Then I suppose we all need to sit in a circle. Tony, can you get us a screwdriver?"
Tony nodded, temporarily and unusually beyond speech, and got up to summon up a plain, humble screwdriver from his work tools. He had lots of more exciting tools lying about the place, but none he’d really want to be spinning on the hard lab floor.
By the time he found what he was looking for and turned back to the others, he found they were already sitting in a circle, as directed by Steve, and the only space left for Tony was right there at Steve’s left hand side. He suppressed a smile as he went to take his place; funny how certain patterns were so ingrained they seeped into their everyday behavior. Even when playing a silly teenage party game, Avengers did what Captain America said, and Tony’s place was next to Steve.
"Here," Tony said finally, handing the screwdriver over to Steve, who set it down in the center of the circle with purpose. "Have at, Cap."
Steve reached over to spin the tool lying on the floor with a flick of his fingers. Tony watched from beside him, stomach twisting into knots. This here, right now, was what he was so afraid of.
There were a lot of reasons spin the bottle – never the best idea in any social setting – would be particularly disastrous in this group. For a start, Hank, Jan and Clint were all in the room. Tony liked to think that this wouldn’t end in one of Hank and Jan’s more memorable spats, but he wasn’t as comfortable as he’d prefer to be with those odds.
But Tony had a much more personal reason to be disturbed and discomposed by this game, because it presented him with an opportunity he thought he would never have – to kiss Steve – in a setting where it would mean absolutely nothing and be awkward at best. Even if chance paired him and Steve together for a round, that would be all it was, just one chaste kiss, and nothing more. Assuming Steve didn’t chicken out of kissing another guy, although Tony didn’t really think he would now that he’d made a point of it to Clint. Still.
Tony wanted, desperately, to have the chance to kiss Steve – which was exactly why he knew he shouldn’t.
So he sat there and watched the screwdriver careen across the floor in wild skittering sweeps as within him warred three contradictory desires: to kiss Steve, to not kiss Steve, and to not have to see Steve kiss anyone else.
"Ow!" Clint exclaimed a second later, when the screwdriver smacked into his knee with some force. "Dammit, Cap! You’re supposed to spin it, not ricochet it across the floor like some kind of projectile weapon!"
"Sorry, I think I used a little too much force," Steve said sheepishly.
"Whatever, it counts," Jan said dismissively. "Pucker up, Barton!"
"What?" Clint said, alarmed. "Wait, what? You have got to be kidding! I am not kissing Steve. Just. No. C’mon, Cap, you’re not serious about this, right? Cap?"
"Stop being so childish, Clint," Steve said, dismissive in the face of Clint’s borderline hysteria, and stretched across the circle to hook his large hand behind Clint’s neck and plant his mouth firmly over Clint’s open lips.
"MMMMRRRRMMRRRRRPH!"
Wanda and Jan were both laughing, and Hank looked pretty smugly amused too, although Tony suspected he’d find it less funny once it happened to him. Tony was stuck somewhere between hilarity at Clint’s flailing and disbelief that he was actually sitting here witnessing Steve kiss another man. Jesus.
"Okay," Steve said normally enough when he let Clint go and settled back into his place in the circle. "Your turn, Tony."
Tony stared at him intelligently. "Huh?"
"I assume we’re going clockwise?"
And… Tony was sitting to Steve’s left. Duh.
"Oh, right," Tony said, and leaned over to spin the screwdriver that had been returned to the center of the circle with considerably less force than Steve had. It spun around not quite in one place about five times before rolling to a stop with its head pointing at Clint.
"This game is rigged!" Clint howled, outraged.
Tony slanted a sideways look at Wanda, who was the only person present so far as he knew with the ability to rig a game of spin the bottle. She smiled back at him blandly.
Too hard to call.
"At least it didn’t hit you this time," he pointed out. "C’mon, let’s get it over with."
"No," Clint said. "Hell no. I am not—stop—"
The noise he made this time when Tony cut him off was kind of like an enraged but muffled growl.
"You bite, huh?" Tony said when it was over, gingerly fingering his swollen lower lip. "Feisty."
Clint scowled. "You won’t even see the arrow coming, Stark."
"Clint!" Steve snapped. "No threats. And no biting."
"It’s cool, I can do rough," Tony said breezily, and then winced, cursing himself seven ways from Sunday when Steve shot him a startled look. "I mean, relax, he didn’t actually bite me that hard considering. And I believe it’s Jan’s turn now. So! Let’s get on with it, shall we?"
The game continued pretty much in that trend, although Clint’s mood lightened considerably once he’d had the opportunity to kiss Wanda a few times. Tony wasn’t judging, although he did continue to wonder if he’d maybe missed some really subtle hexing going on in there. Tony’s stomach clenched with adrenalin every single time he or Steve had a turn, the little chanting voice inside his head begging for a chance to kiss Steve fighting to be heard over its opposite praying to avoid the same fate. And every single time, the turn would end in a lightheaded rush through his system when the screwdriver would persistently land on someone else.
Tony was getting very accustomed to that feeling of disappointed relief, but it was gradually being matched by a growing feeling of irritation when, spin after spin, Tony still did not land Steve and vice versa. Even though he knew kissing Steve in the context of this game would be a catastrophically terrible idea, part of him couldn’t help but cling to it as his one chance to find out what kissing Steve was like, and his mood grew darker and darker as this failed to eventuate.
He and Steve had each spun every single other person in the circle, sometimes as many as three times, and yet they had not spun each other even once. It was ridiculous. Tony knew better than most how probability worked, and that each spin had the same chance of landing on a particular person as any other spin, but it was still ridiculous that after as many turns as they’d both had not once had one of them landed on the other. He wasn’t quite at the point of labeling it a conspiracy or blaming Wanda, but he was starting to get pretty peeved, even so.
"Steve’s turn again," Clint announced, spirits markedly improved after Wanda had kissed him for about the fourth time. Given Clint’s ill luck to begin with, Tony found it pretty amazing that he’d spun Wanda (or Jan, twice) almost every other time. And Hank once. That had been pretty funny.
Steve reached out for the screwdriver to take another spin – he’d gotten better at moderating his strength, although he still had a tendency to put a little more power into it than necessary – and Tony was certain that this time Steve had to spin him. Math and justice compelled it. Even if it was still a terrible idea, Tony had decided he’d be damned if he let this game end without kissing Steve at least once.
The screwdriver spun free of Steve’s fingers, but at a wonky angle, because they were all distracted by the sound of the lab doors opening.
"Oh hey, here you all are," She-Hulk said, then paused. "What are you doing?"
"Party games," Tony said nonchalantly, willing himself not to look down at the final resting place of the screwdriver. Someone would no doubt clue Jen in later that they’d been playing spin the bottle, but it wasn’t going to be him, not when his pride was still feeling a bit battered. "I take it you guys handled the whole poison gas issue?"
Jen shrugged. "A.I.M.," she said, like that was all that was needed. It basically was; it explained both where the gas had come from, and how the reduced Avengers team had managed to clear the situation up relatively quickly and without too much apparent fuss.
"Finally!" Clint said, shooting to his feet. "I’m starved."
"Yes, it will be good to move our legs and hear about what happened outside," Wanda agreed, standing with a languid stretch. "Is everyone coming?"
Hank cast a longing look towards the lab equipment, but Jan tugged his wrist, pulling him toward the door. "Trust me, Hank, you’ve had enough lab time for today," she said firmly. "You can come up to the kitchen and be sociable with everyone else."
Hank acquiesced meekly enough – and if Tony had one thing in particular to be grateful for, it was the continuing amicability between Hank and Jan. In fact, if anything, the kisses they had shared during the game had been a bit more lingering than the general rule. Tony hadn’t decided whether this was a good thing or a bad thing yet, but he didn’t feel like borrowing trouble, so it could wait until later either way.
"Well," he said, after an awkward pause. "I guess we should–"
"Tony," Steve said, stopping him with a single word. "Wait."
Halted in his tracks, Tony turned slowly, cautiously to face Steve. There was an sinking feeling of trepidation there that he had only experienced around Steve a handful of times; he had no clue what Steve was about to say to him. Usually Steve would leap at any excuse to shove Tony out of his labs, and yet here he was, calling him back for some kind of private chat. It was unlikely to be about the battle with A.I.M. What was there to say, really, when they hadn’t even heard the full story yet? Tony knew the lockdown was necessary and there was nothing else any of them could have done, and he was confident Steve agreed. So there was nothing more to say about that, at least not until they had been debriefed by Jen and the others.
Which left… what, precisely? Had Steve noticed him behaving oddly during the game?
"Sure, Steve, what’s up?" he said, fake casual.
Steve took a step closer, and Tony forced himself to hold his ground. Steve was only two inches taller than him – hardly intimidating, barely enough to notice unless they stood side by side – but somehow Tony could really feel the difference with him so near.
Steve took a deep breath.
"I wanted," he started, then stopped. "No."
"Steve?" Tony said, uncertain, but he didn’t get a chance to say another word, because a second later, Steve’s large hands rose to frame either side of his face, the rough texture of his palms hot enough to brand finger prints on Tony’s cheeks. Or maybe that was just the heat of Tony’s own blush.
Without another word between them, Steve leaned forward and sealed Tony’s lips shut with a kiss, light, almost chaste, and yet not the dutiful kind of kiss Tony had expected from the party game. That would be dry, impersonal, lips squeezed closed in a firm line as one set was pressed against the other. This kiss was different, for all its innocence; gentle whispering movements of lips that were still closed, but soft enough to yield a promise for the future. It was… intimate, Tony wanted to say, and yet there was something foreign about applying that word to Steve and himself.
Steve finally released him, taking a half step back to give him some room, and Tony stared dazedly for a moment into Steve’s expectant gaze before glancing down at the floor, searching for an explanation in the angle of the screwdriver still laying where it had rolled to on Steve’s final spin. "You didn’t have to," he said stupidly, mind a total blank. "It would have landed on Wanda. She was almost on the opposite side of the circle from me."
"I know," Steve said patiently. Of course he did; he had perfect recall.
"Then…"
"I got sick of waiting on a game to make my opportunities for me," Steve confessed, and kissed Tony again, slower and more deeply this time.
Tony had changed his mind: spin the bottle was a fantastic idea.
He didn’t think they should play it ever again, though. Once was perfectly sufficient for him, thanks.
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I'm grinning so wide now it hurts. Lovely touch to *not* have them kiss as part of the game.
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