Presents were pretty much over after that, and people moved on to dancing, drinking, and mingling.
Miranda accepted another Iron Man from Tony. He'd been mixing all the drinks, and apparently each of the Avengers had their own. The Iron Man featured pineapple juice, some sort of red liqueur, possibly cherry by the flavour, sprite, and a glowing blue cube that she didn't want to know about. Tony made a disclaimer at the beginning that if anyone ingested the glowing cube, he wasn't responsible for the consequences. Miranda took that to mean that she would be the one stuck with them.
She drank it carefully, certain not to even let the cube into her mouth. She probably should have had Bruce check them over before letting Tony give everyone drinks with them. Heaven forbid they be radioactive.
But the slight buzz of alcohol was enough to make her not want to bother, and Bruce was on the other side of the room, speaking with the woman he'd brought, and the one that Thor called Lady Jane. She didn't want to disturb, not with the level of hand waving that was going on.
Ron was at her side, nursing a Hulk, which involved mint liqueur and some other things she didn't want to know about. The various other people around the room, most of whom she'd met by now, all had their own drinks. Most were Avengers related, but a few of them eschewed Tony's mixing and got their own. Bruce had a soda, and Steve, poor Steve who couldn't get drunk, had a hot chocolate, which was adorable.
Darcy and Clint were whispering furtively by the fireplace, and she feared what they were plotting. Of what she'd heard about them, they were both enormous trouble on their own, and weren't allowed to be together without supervision.
She wasn't sure a team of mostly drunk superheroes that had a history of making poor decisions, and their support staff were the best supervisors.
But hey, Coulson was there, so it couldn't be entirely awful. Right?
While she was debating that, Tony snuck up behind her, as only a drunk Tony Stark could. He brandished a drink at her.
"It's a Miranda!" he declared proudly.
She glanced at him and the drink warily before taking a sip.
"This is... tea," she accused. "Cold tea."
"Iced tea," he corrected.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
He backed away slowly. "Back to the drawing board then," he quipped, slinking off.
Miranda shook her head, but took another sip. It wasn't entirely bad, and she was pretty sure there was some alcohol in it.
She gravitated towards the anxious Fitzsimmons, and she understood why they were referred to like that, as one person. They essentially were a single being. They finished each other's sentences, seemed to know what the other was thinking, and even had the same body language.
She introduced herself, and they seemed to find her accent comforting. They asked how she came to be at SHIELD, and she told them about Sherlock Holmes, about Fury in her flat, and about her eventual slow kidnapping to Tony Stark.
She listened to Fitz ramble on for a good while about Sherlock Holmes, and the number of theories he had about the whole Moriarty situation, before Simmons elbowed him and whispered in his ear. Miranda was thankful for that, because she wasn't sure she could stomach much more of it.
She glanced around at the party, which seemed to be gravitating towards simply drinking and dancing. "Would you like to come to my flat? Well, I share it with my husband, but it would be quieter there, and we could have a cuppa." She glanced down at the drink she was holding. "A proper cuppa."
They both looked relieved. "Oh, yes please," Jemma breathed.
She tapped Ron on the shoulder before she left, and he seemed more than happy to escape from his conversation with Thor, who seemed slightly drunk, and made her suspect that he'd brought mead that he wasn't supposed to.
Back in their flat, she put the kettle on, and they all sat around the kitchen island.
"Tony ruined my tea," Miranda said forlornly. "More than once."
Jemma placed a hand on hers reassuringly. "They don't understand, do they?"
Miranda shook her head. "Tony still thinks it's amusing that I call our floor a flat, and the elevator the lift. He's determined to get me to come around to American speech, but I've threatened to have Jarvis ignore him unless he uses the British terminology."
The woman smiled. "That is brilliant. But can't Mr Stark override it? It is his computer after all."
"Jarvis and I have an... understanding," Miranda said finally, smiling. "Besides, Tony knows who controls the morphine."
Jemma beamed at her.
Miranda glanced up. On the other side of the room, Leo and Ron were engaged in a heated debate about monkeys. She didn't want to know.
She didn't remember too much after that, since she'd had four Mirandas (and two Iron Mans and one Hawkeye before that) but there was no death, no fire alarms, and minimal property damage, so she considered it a success.
The hangover in the morning was brutal, but somehow, worth it. Fitzsimmons were fast asleep on her couch when she finally crawled out of bed, intertwined in each other in a way that hardly seemed possible. But then, she wasn't the expert on physics.
Fitz was awake, and begged her silently with his eyes to not say anything, and after all, how could she protest? She'd seen the look he had before; love for someone who loved you back, but not in the same way.
(She had to look at it everyday.)