A/N: Written for eyebrowsofjustice in the Darcy/Steve Holiday Exchange, with the prompt "holiday decorating."
It started with the tinsel.
It wasn't their first Christmas as a couple, but it was their first one living together. The previous year, Darcy had been crashing in the spare bedroom on Thor's floor and Steve had still been out in Brooklyn being stubborn. They'd swapped gifts during the the Official Stark Holiday Party the night before she'd flown out to see her parents and she'd returned just in time to kiss Steve at midnight at the Official Stark New Year's Party. Four months ago, she had convinced him that moving into the Tower let them see each other more often. Three months ago, he stopped pretending she hadn't slowly been moving her things onto his floor and completed the process while she was in the labs doing her daily scientist-wrangling.
This meant that it was their space and Darcy was completely within her rights to hang tinsel everywhere.
And he did mean everywhere. Every doorway was framed, every table was ringed, even the bookcase in the corner had some extra sparkle. Darcy was sitting on the couch, painting her toes in her favorite shade of Red Carpet red and humming along to her iPod. She looked up and pulled out an earbud when Steve opened the door. "Hey you."
"Hey." He dropped his bag in its spot by the entry and walked over to the couch. Darcy tilted her head up and he dropped a kiss on her lips. "Where'd the tinsel come from?"
She grinned. "You know how I took Thor as my bodyguard for Black Friday shopping today?"
Steve knew. He had refused to get caught up in the craziness, even though Darcy loved it. Thor on the other hand seemed to thrive on the crazy and the idea of seventy-five percent off Pop-Tarts. "Yeah."
"Well, one of the stores had cheap Christmas decorations and Thor seemed to really like the tinsel." She went back to painting her toes like she hadn't taken the god of thunder out on the busiest shopping day of the year. "He had his Tony-funded AmEx, so we kind of bought all the sparkly things."
He blinked. "And how many yards was it?"
"A lot," she said, waving him off. "I only took what Jane said he absolutely wasn't allowed to bring into their place. She's probably dealing with three times as much."
Steve had a sudden pang of sympathy for Jane.
Since Darcy had started decorating, Steve decided it wouldn't hurt to get a tree. Before the ice, he'd never been able to afford a tree, and there hadn't been a good way to get one up the stairs to his apartment. Now, he had an elevator and a space the perfect size for the beautiful evergreen he'd hauled from a tree lot in New Jersey using Tony's only pick-up truck.
He'd just gotten it into position and even wrapped a cheap tree skirt around the base when Darcy blew through the door. She went straight down the hall to the bathroom, hollering, "Gotta pee!" as she went. Steve rolled his eyes at her over-sharing tendencies and went to adjust some of the branches to make the tree look more full.
When Darcy came out of the bathroom, she was sniffling a little. "You okay?"
"Yeah, just my nose acting up," she said. "When did you get the tree?"
"Bought it today," he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. "Thought we might want to get started actually decorating."
She looked at it a little closer, still sniffling. "Is this thing real?"
"Um, yes," he said, confused. "I've never actually had one before so I thought—"
"Oh god, now I feel even worse," Darcy muttered. "Steve, honey, the tree needs to go."
"What?"
She pointed to her nose and inhaled sharply. He could hear how clogged it was and cringed in sympathy. "I'm allergic to Christmas trees. Haven't been around one since my freshman geometry teacher had one in the classroom during semester exams. She got angry when I had to confiscate the tissue box for myself, but ten minutes after I left, my nose had stopped running."
It seemed bizarre, but Steve remembered how strongly some allergens had affected him before the serum. Besides, she had been fine that morning and now she couldn't go three seconds without sounding like she had to blow her nose.
He nodded and promised to find the tree a different home. She excused herself to get some fresh air and wait for the room to air out again. When the elevator came back, Steve loaded up the tree and took it down a few levels. Natasha had mentioned that she loved the smell of pine trees, so propped it outside her door with a note of explanation, and returned to try and crack a few windows in his apartment.
A few more days passed before any other decorations appeared. Darcy had propped something in a large black trash bag in the corner of the room and left it while she went to work. Steve had been tempted to look inside, but considering some of the other things she'd pulled out of her personal storage wrapped in black trash bags, he left it alone.
It wasn't until that night, just after dinner with the team, that she returned to the bag and pulled out a small tree. It was already decorated and had a base attached to it with a power cord. It barely came up to her waist, but she smiled as she set it in the corner where the real tree had been. Darcy plugged it in, smiling as it lit up and started to turn. It quickly dropped into a frown when the tree froze and began clicking.
"Not supposed to do that," she muttered, unplugging it. She tipped it over gently and looked at the base. When she saw the cover, she went to find a screwdriver so she could access the electrics inside.
"Where'd you get it?" Steve asked.
"Family hand-me-down," she said. "My grandparents were clearing some things out when I moved into my first apartment during college, so ended up with a bunch of mismatched furniture and one of the electric trees." She continued taking it apart, although with the way so was looking at the pieces, she clearly wasn't sure what she was looking for. "It worked last year, I just had to set it on one of my old textbooks to make sure it didn't overheat."
"Maybe you could have Tony look at it?" Steve suggested. "He'd probably be able to fix it in a snap."
"Yeah, you're right," she said, putting the parts back together. "I'll just leave it in the workshop and he'll probably give it repulsors after a few too many glasses of eggnog."
Two days later, Darcy reported that Tony did not give the tree repulsors, but had fixed it so it rotated like it was supposed to and left it at that. However, Dummy had sprayed it with a fire extinguisher, giving it a nice, snow-frosted look. It was too messy to bring back to their floor. Besides, Dummy had kind of adopted the tree, getting defensive when Darcy tried to approach it. She decided to just leave it there. Maybe this time next year, Tony would have turned it into a complete tree-bot.
Christmas was two weeks away and the extent of their personal decorations was still the tinsel explosion. The public areas of the Tower as well as the communal floor had been decorated on the first of the month by professionals that Pepper had hired. Granted, the decorations on the shared floor had been talked about the previous December when Tony wanted to make them all feel at home, but Steve had always enjoyed the actual process of decorating, even when it was just he and Bucky in a fifth floor walk-up with paper thin walls.
That thought in mind, he crawled out of bed early one Saturday morning, causing Darcy to whine in her sleep and curl into the warm spot he'd left. He had plenty of white paper and even some fishing line tucked away somewhere, but he wanted a little extra something for these decorations.
When Darcy finally stumbled out of the bedroom around noon, barefoot and still wearing pajamas, it was to see Captain America sitting on the living room floor and spraying silver glitter onto paper snowflakes.
"Forget it, I'm going back to bed."
"Coffee's on the counter," he said as she turned around.
She kept turning and headed for the kitchen. "Manipulative bastard."
He laughed and shook the can, trying to get more onto the regular paper than the newsprint he'd laid out to cover the floor. When she'd fixed her coffee and tucked herself onto the couch, she seemed a little more awake. "Snowflakes?"
"Snowflakes."
"Why?"
"Bucky and I used to make them out of old newspapers, even when we were in the orphanage. Found some extra string to tie them up and hang them in the window." Steve shrugged. "It wasn't much, but we could afford it."
Darcy nodded and sipped at her coffee. It was quiet, the perfect lazy Saturday, with the cold wind blowing against their fifty-first floor window. Eventually, Darcy set down her empty coffee mug and picked up a sheet of paper. She rummaged around in the craft box she had migrated to Steve's apartment before almost anything else and pulled out a second pair of scissors. He continued spraying his stack of snowflakes with glitter as she folded and cut, then started on his own new set to design. He had gotten through three simple ones when Darcy dropped hers in the middle of his decorating space.
He rolled his eyes when he saw the design, making her snort and giggle. Grudgingly, he spritzed it with glitter while informing her that there was no way in hell he was going to hang it in the apartment. She accepted, saying she had other plans for it anyway.
Steve had mostly forgotten about the snowflake decorated with painstakingly cut out penises until he heard Clint's raucous laughter echoing through the vent system on the shared floor.
Steve had bought the ornaments when he had gotten their first tree. They were simple glass balls in different colors with wire hooks to hang them with. Nothing special, just something that he and Darcy could put up together on their tree.
The tree went, the ornaments stayed, and Darcy had found them.
She had spread them all around the room, piles in separate colors. It looked like the time she had tried to color coordinate some of Jane's notes before she made a presentation, and he felt his nerves ratchet up a notch as he remembered the chaos that had come from that event. Fearing the worst, he asked, "What're you doing?"
"Making molecules."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to use the decorations," she said. "We still don't have a tree, if we can even find a fake one a week before Christmas, so I thought I'd give all these different colors an atom and make some molecules." She held up three ornaments, two greens and a red, held together by their hooks. "Look, it's water!"
He nodded and stepped over a pile of blue balls. "And how were you planning on hanging these?"
She shrugged. "I don't know, bust out that fishing line you used for the snowflakes and float them around the room? I'm in my version of Science! mode right now, which looks like sixth grade craft projects, so I wanted something festive and sciencey. I didn't exactly think everything through."
Steve kissed the top of her head as she worked. "What do you want me to do?"
She put him to work hanging her creations around the room. The more complex ones ended up pinned to the wall to hold their shape, while simple constructions were floated among the snowflakes. It took about two hours for her to run out of steam, and she looked at her remaining ornaments, obviously trying to figure out what to make of them.
Darcy spent a little while flipping through various chemical equations before she found one that made her grin. She got up and plucked a few ornaments off some already hung molecules, claiming that she would sacrifice their decorations because of how perfect this idea was. Steve let her do what she wanted, since it was all her idea. However, before she fastened this particular molecule together, she broke pattern and used a marker to note which element was which.
The next morning, Bruce wandered into the lab to find a green tea molecule made of Christmas ornaments hanging above his kitchen area.
It was December 23rd and Steve was smiling, satisfied. He'd gone to eight different Home Depots in the city before he finally found one that still had an artificial Christmas tree for sale. While he was there, he picked up some lights and some extra ornaments and tinsel, since he had grown attached to their current places as decided by Darcy.
She had spent the day keeping the scientists focused (or as she called it, herding cats) because that evening was the Official Stark Holiday Party. She needed to make sure they got their work done and got out of the labs in time to get cleaned and changed for the festivities. Once they got out, she intended to stick around for another to make sure no one doubled back for "just one more thing," which meant she was going to be short on her own prep time.
Darcy came in, grumbling something about Tony and basic thermodynamics, only to be brought up short by the sight in the living room. "Steve, did you do this?"
"Yeah," he said, shrugging. The tree was seven feet tall, and wrapped in tinsel. The traditional glass ball ornaments adorned the branches, as well as an Avengers themed set he'd chuckled over before tossing them into the basket with the rest. On top, in all its red, white, and blue glory, was a miniaturized version of the shield to take the place of the star. It had come with the set, and if Darcy didn't like it, he'd switch it out for the light-up angel he'd bought as well. "JARVIS, dim the lights please."
The AI did so and Steve squatted down to plug in the tree. He heard Darcy's gasp as, not only the tree, but also the walls where Steve had hung the extra strands, lit up. When he looked at her, she was smiling, eyes wide. "It's beautiful."
He smiled softly back and her and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned up to kiss him, soft and sweet. "Happy holidays, Steve."
"Happy holidays, Darcy."