Author's note: Hi, all. Here's a little one shot for ya. I own nothing and this is rated T. If you like it, please let me know. It's deeply appreciated. Thanks, guys.
When they pulled up outside Tony's place, it was pretty clear that there was no emergency. Which is what Pepper had assured him would be the case when she'd called him up, asking if he or any other Avenger had heard from her partner. They hadn't, and apparently when Pepper had tried to reach him from Stark Tower to deal with something in the final stages of its reconstruction, his phone had been answered by an unfamiliar male voice, who then hung up on her. Steve hadn't been doing anything else at the time, so in spite of Pepper's insistance that in all likelihood nothing was wrong, he offered to swing by and check in with him. It hadn't actually occurred to him that Tony's house might be in entirely different state, but Pepper had gratefully accepted and sent him her Head of Security to drive him to the airstrip where they could catch a private plane to Malibu. So here they were, pulling to a stop on the driveway outside the very noisy building perched on a cliff.
"You want me to go get him?" asked Happy from behind the wheel.
"No," Steve answered, peering out at the contained chaos with a hint of apprehension, "that's alright, thanks. I'll be as quick as I can," he promised, getting out.
"Yeah, I'll bet," grinned Happy, and Steve couldn't tell whether he meant it or was being sarcastic. He got the feeling Stark's Head of Security wasn't too sure about him yet. He'd spent the whole journey trying to size him up in what he clearly thought was a subtle way. Like a ninja wearing day-glo. Subtle or not, Steve wasn't offended. In fact, in his own way he guessed he'd been doing the same to Happy. And his verdict? This was a guy who had Stark's back. Good to know.
He walked up the drive with his hands in his coat pockets. He could already see through the glass doors that the interior was low lit, and the odd figure moved across what he could see of the main room. He spotted the doorbell and moved to push it. From out here, he couldn't hear anything but the thumping rhythm of music and he wasn't sure anyone had heard it until someone came up to the other side of the door and let him in. It was a woman. And she was naked. All she was wearing were tiny triangles of material over her vital areas and an expression of vacant surprise on her face.
He stared at her, alarmed. "What happened?" he asked.
She looked him up and down. "I just fell in love. That's what happened."
"What?" He tracked her wandering gaze with concern. He hurriedly shrugged off his leather jacket and stepped forward to wrap it warmly round her. "Did someone do this to you? Are they still here?"
She pulled his jacket round herself, covering herself up and snuggling into it. "Mm, nice."
"Ma'am?" he leaned down a little, trying to get her attention back, and she gazed up at him intently. "Do you know who did this?"
She looked confused for a moment, then glanced back into the house. She paused. "You mean Tony?"
He straightened up, looking down at her innocent face in disbelief. "Tony did this?"
"Yeah, man, this party is sick!" she cried.
He couldn't believe it, but then as though on cue, a couple of young women passed through the main room wearing much the same as this girl. The men were dressed properly but half the women he could see had been stripped. What kind of party was this? And if she found it so disgusting, why was she going along with it? "W…" he struggled for words, "then why are you still dressed like that?"
Her mouth dropped open like he'd just said something shocking yet utterly wonderful and pushed his arm playfully. "Oh, you're bad; ooh, firm," she murmured, giving his bicep a squeeze. Clearly, she'd been drugged. She didn't seem to be following anything he said and she was way too easily distracted from her predicament.
He took her gently by the shoulders. "Do you want to get out of here?"
She grinned up at him. "Ooh, yes, please."
He nodded. Finally. "Okay. There's a car waiting outside with a driver. Where do you want to go?"
"How about my place?" she suggested.
"Sure. No problem. And don't worry, I'll get this sorted out," he told her, guiding her towards the car.
"Get what sorted out? Wait, where are you going? Aren't you coming with me?"
He turned back to her as she stood there on the driveway looking lost. He felt a pang of remorse for nearly abandoning her when she was obviously feeling vulnerable. "Of course. But I need to talk to Tony first. Go wait in the car. You'll be safe there, I promise."
She giggled and nodded. "Okay. Don't be long."
"I won't," he said, and watched her make her way to the car. Once she'd opened the back door and stepped inside, he went back into the house.
It was like a madness had infected everyone. The weird music was ridiculously loud and further into the other rooms he could see a great mass of people dancing strangely, not in pairs but in one big intermingling group. Everyone else was just hanging around, talking and laughing with drinks in their hands like they were at a bar rather than in someone's house, and, as he saw in the kitchen, some literally were at a bar. Now he was in here, nearly a third of the women were dressed like the girl at the door, but everyone else was dressed normally for this century and no one seemed to think the difference odd, like they didn't notice anything out of place. Even the girls themselves seemed oblivious. And then to his surprise, a man came down the stairs dripping from head to toe, wearing a pair of brightly coloured shorts. He padded barefoot to the bar with a big grin on his face and ordered a long list of drinks.
Steve asked a couple of people where Tony was but they hadn't seen him, so he moved back to the main room where it was quieter. He tentatively approached one of the small transparent panels set on the walls and mumbled to it shyly. "Um, Jarvis?"
"Yes, sir," the voice answered from apparently everywhere, making him stand up straight and address the ceiling.
"Uh, where's Tony?"
"Down in the lab, sir. He says you're free to join him if you've finished exploring."
Steve headed for the stairs quickly, muttering, "I wasn't exploring, I was looking for him."
At the foot of the stairs, the glass doors slid open to admit him and shut behind him, cancelling out some but not all of the noise from above. Tony was at a workbench, tinkering with what looked like an Iron Man foot. Other bits and pieces of the same suit were scattered about all over the place. So as not to open with the words 'what the hell is going on up there?!' he politely enquired, "New suit?"
"Yep." That one syllable managed to sound both buoyant and weary and when he pushed his shaded goggles up onto his head and turned to Steve, the same contradiction was painted on his face. "Nothing gets past you," he added. Steve was getting used to Tony's sense of humour. When he'd first met him, he'd taken his remarks as an expression of disregard but he'd soon come to realise that that was just how he was with everyone, whether he liked them or not. It turned out his actual disregard was far less subtle. "Didn't expect to see you down my neck of the woods. Is my party really that legendary or have the dolphins finally risen up against us?"
Steve blinked. "Dolphins? Tony, if you're purposefully trying to confuse me-"
"Is it the apocalypse? Yes or no?"
"Oh. No. No, it's just Pepper's been trying to get in touch with you over something about the Tower and some stranger answered your phone so I said I'd come by and check everything was alright."
Tony sat back in his wheeled chair. "Well, shucks, Spangles, that's mighty sweet."
Steve quirked an eyebrow. "You know I'm not from the Old West, right? Besides, if I'd known it would take an airplane to get here I might not have bothered," he added with a smile, unconsciously tipping his hand with the word 'might'. They both knew he would've. "What are you doing down here, anyway? Shouldn't you be upstairs?" he asked, wondering why on earth he would want to be.
Tony shrugged it off. "No, I just thought the noise would…" he trailed off vaguely and turned back to his mechanical foot, prodding it so that several tiny mechanisms whirred and shifted.
Steve studied him for a moment. "Right." From overhead, there was the muffled sound of something heavy crashing to the floor and lots of voices cheering. "Um, Tony…"
"That's okay. It can be replaced," Tony dismissed.
"Actually, I was going to say there's some pretty weird stuff going on up there. Did you know people are getting undressed?" he asked, a little afraid of the answer.
"Oh. Yeah," he replied in a bored tone.
That. That was exactly the reaction he'd been afraid of. Apathy. "Why are you just letting it happen?"
Tony gave him a funny look. "Why should I stop them?"
"Because it's your house!" he cried, feeling like he'd just Woken Up. "You control what goes on here and you have a responsibility towards the people under your roof."
Tony was staring at him now. "What are you talking about? Look, people came here for a pool party; if they want to walk around in their bikinis and use the hot tub that's up to them."
Steve fell quiet. 'Pool party.' 'Bikinis.' 'Hot tub.' …What? Start with the first one. "Pool party?"
"Yeah."
He ran over what he'd seen of the house in his mind. "But… you don't have a pool."
"Have you ever heard of that game Chinese Whispers?" asked Tony. Steve shook his head. "You must've. Maybe you call it something different. Anyway, someone decided I probably had a pool and figured they'd come prepared and they told other people, and they told other people, until nearly half the people coming here thought this was a pool party. They'd've been disappointed too, but I've got a pretty big hot tub upstairs so they're just making the best of things with that."
"So… Everyone came dressed like that? Voluntarily?"
"Under their clothes, yeah. What did you think?" he asked.
"Well, this woman answered the door and I thought…" Now he was the one not finishing his sentences. What had he thought? That someone had attacked and stripped that woman without leaving a mark? That there was some kind of enforced nudity going on which everyone seemed magically fine with? "But when I asked her, she said…" He replayed the conversation in his head, baffled. Then it dawned on him. "Oh."
Tony was still giving him a strange look. "Are you having a stroke?"
"No. So are you gonna call Pepper and see what she wants?" he asked, keen to change the subject. And thank God he wasn't given to blushing because his face felt like it was on fire.
"I guess. Or I could just head back to the city with you."
'The city'? That was odd. And Tony was uncharacteristically tense, like he was caught between two evils, trying to decide which was the lesser. "Really? When?"
Tony pretended to think about it and spoke on an exhale. "Now."
Steve's eyebrows rose. "Now? But what about the party?"
"Oh, they'll leave sooner or later. Jarvis will keep them away from anything important."
Steve frowned. "Are you alright?"
Tony looked at him in genuine surprise. "Of course I am. Why?"
"Well… You've thrown this big crazy party which you're spending in your basement, working, and now you're just going to leave them all to destroy your house while you go back to New York, possibly unnecessarily, even though it doesn't really seem like you want to go."
Tony sat there for a few moments, looking up at the Captain. A smile had crept onto his face, but it was kind of sad, like he was silently laughing at his own secret pain. "Cap," he said, "I'm fine. I'm Iron Man. I'm always fine."
"No one's always fine," Steve said honestly. Tony didn't seem to have an answer to that, and suddenly Steve felt kind of special; suspecting that he was the first person on Earth to render Tony Stark speechless, however briefly. Tony really did look tired. "You know what, I think you should come to New York." For the second time, he noticed something at the mention of New York. Something just shy of a flinch. "If you can," he added sensitively. "I think Pepper could really use having you around, after everything that's happened."
Tony seemed slightly amused by his attempt at diplomacy. "Oh you think so, huh?"
Steve wasn't fazed by the tease. "I think you should talk to her," he said earnestly. "Tell her what's going on."
There. Twice in the same five minutes. Had he developed some new power for making Tony stop talking or was Iron Man really that beat? He let the silence have its time, leaving it up to Tony to make his next move. Finally, and abruptly, he stood. "Alright, let's get out of here."
They made their way through the seething inebriation upstairs to get out. Tony barely seemed to notice any of it, and Steve hesitated over whether he ought to point out that one leg of the grand piano had been broken, and the instrument now stood at a piteous 45 degree angle. The most he got out was a quiet "Uh… the, uh…", but Tony was just striding on so he dropped it and kept following him.
Less than a minute later, they both got into the car; Tony in the front passenger seat and Steve in the back, next to a happy drunk woman wearing a bikini and a brown leather jacket. Tony looked at Happy with puzzled surprise and Happy pointed a finger straight at Steve. Tony's surprise went from mild curiosity to 'is that a polar bear in my back yard?!' Then a huge grin spread across his face. "You dog."
"It's not what it looks like," Steve assured, trying to sound cool and confident and doing quite well considering he was dying inside. "There's been a misunderstanding-" He turned to the young woman and repeated himself for her benefit; "There's been a misunderstanding."
"What kind of misunderstanding?" she asked, still smiling.
Steve cringed internally. "A pretty huge one. I'm sorry. We can still take you home if you want but you may just want to stay here."
Her smile had slipped as she tried to think through the alcohol her brain was swimming in. "I don't get it."
"He means if you want to spend the night with someone, you're gonna have to go back and keep fishing," said Tony. And Steve actually found himself grateful that Tony hadn't found a worse way to put it.
She frowned, disappointed. "You mean you're ditching me?" She jerked a thumb at Tony. "For him?"
At the exact same moment Steve said "No!", Tony said "Yes. And no offense but can you blame him? I mean, I am Tony Stark. Tell me you wouldn't do the same thing."
She thought this over. Then sighed, and got out of the car. She took off Steve's jacket and dropped it on the seat before shutting the door and walking away. Tony grinned his Cheshire Cat grin while Steve died in the back seat. "Well," he said, as Happy started the car and they pulled out, "looks like you're not such a gentleman after all. It all goes out the window the second you see a girl in a bikini."
"Tony, that wasn't- You know I didn't- It was an accident."
"Uh huh. You 'accidently' got yourself invited back to her place."
"Stop it."
"Yeah? What if I hadn't decided to come with you? What else would've 'accidently' happened?"
"Tony-"
"Did you bring any 'accident' protection? Or would someone be ringing the doorbell nine months from now?"
"What?"
"Where did I lose you?"
"About five seconds after we first met."
"Tony," muttered Happy, "isn't he from like 1945?"
"Yeah, so?"
"So did they even have 'accident protection' back then?"
Tony turned in his seat to openly gawp at Steve, who felt the strong urge to open the door and leap out of the moving vehicle. He had no idea what they were talking about but he was sure it wasn't good. "You mean no one at SHIELD has given you the 21st century version of The Talk?" Steve really didn't want to answer that, but apparently the look on his face was enough. "Well, I'm not doing it and I doubt- Wait, what about Thor?" he asked suddenly.
Happy shrugged. "He's got a girlfriend, right? I think she probably-"
"Right," agreed Tony. "Well, Steve, you can ask Jarvis."
"Can we talk about something else now?" begged Steve.
"You know, those guys at SHIELD act all tough but you hand them one guy in need of sex ed and they run and hide behind Fury's fear-me-I-am-Morpheus coat like they don't know anything."
"Tony," pleaded Steve.
"I mean, you're a superhero not a monk. If they're gonna ressurect people from history they need to take more responsibility. When you buy a dog, you make sure it's not gonna get the neighbour's bitch pregnant. Not that I'm suggesting the snip-"
"Happy, could you pull over here?" Steve asked.
Happy frowned. "Uh, sure, why?"
"I'm getting out. I'll make my own way home."
"Oh come on," said Tony. "You're so sensitive. You're gonna have to man up if you're gonna live in this century." Steve was opening the door even before the car came to a complete stop and, grabbing his jacket, got out. Tony turned to the other side of his seat to call out, "Do you know how long it's gonna take you to get back to the city from here? You know we're in California, right?"
Steve pushed the door shut, put on his coat, and started walking. The car stayed where it was for a moment, then pulled into the road again and overtook him, gliding away into the falling dark. Steve let out a sigh. "No, it's no trouble, ma'am," he muttered to himself as he walked, "I'd be happy to check up on him." Now how on earth was he going to get back to New York? He'd never taken a commercial flight before. Maybe he should try it by train. He hoped it wouldn't be too complicated; he was still trying to get used to having a credit card.
He heard the car approaching before it became visible around the bend in the road. He came to a stop as it drew up along side him. The passenger window rolled down and Tony regarded him with a deadpan expression. "Are you trying to get me killed?" he asked.
Steve frowned. "What?"
"Death by Pepper?" Tony jabbed a thumb towards the backseat. "Come on, get in. I know you won't call a cab and the thought of all that walking is making me tired." Steve hesitated, wondering if travelling with Tony really would be less effort than tackling public transportation. After a moment, he got in the car. Better the devil you know. "Good boy. You ever had Thai? No, probably not. I know a great place we can swing by on the way to the airstrip. Or maybe you'd prefer Chinese… Less blood and animal feet. Don't worry, we'll break you in easy. Happy, where's that place? You know that place? The Happy Snake place?"
"The Lucky Dragon?"
"Right."
"That's in the other direction."
"Then what are we doing going this way?"
Steve may have just made a tactical error, but he was committed now and at least this option would be over by morning. He sat back and listened to Tony and Happy debate their impending order at great length, settling on what seemed to Steve to be an excessive amount of food for just three people, and tried not to think about the kind of trouble he could have gotten into tonight. Tony and Happy's discussion descended into a string of syllables that definitely weren't English and Steve resigned himself to the strong conviction that the bikini was only going to be the tip of a very large iceberg.
The end.
Author's note: No, that wasn't me confusing Samuel L. Jackson with Lawrence Fishburne, and people who do should be fined.