Title: Classic-verse 1.9
Authors: elspethdixon & seanchai
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Gen
Warnings: None
A/N: Set in Classic-verse, which is a modern reboot of the Avengers. See my profile for the other Classic-verse fics. This was originally posted to cap_ironman in July of 2011. I'm, ah, a little behind in uploading fics to ff_net. It was originally conceived of as a Fourth of July fic, but then we realized that that wouldn't fit into the 'verse's timeline, so here's a New Years story instead. And we swear, some day we're going to write more Classic-verse fic that actually has a plot.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations in this story belong to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics. No profit is being made off this fan-written work.

Classicverse 1.9: Auld Lang Syne

The Avengers Mansion's heating system involved an extraordinarily complicated process wherein hot water or steam was conducted through pipes in the floor and walls, and the controls allowed one to regulate the flow of steam or water in a given room finely enough to maintain the ambient temperature within a five-degree range. Apparently, the entire building had had ordinary radiators once, but then Tony had gotten bored and decided to design his own HVAC system. It involved three separate patents, each of which Steve had heard about in detail the day it had finally gotten cold enough to turn the boiler up high enough for the steam component of the system to engage.

The temperature in the Mansion's living room was currently set to 65-70 degrees, so Steve wasn't cold. He knew that – he had checked the temperature setting less than an hour ago.

The knowledge helped, but it didn't erase the nagging feeling that he should be cold. The snow from earlier in the week had melted slightly during the day and then frozen into a hard, ice-glazed mess, leaving the sidewalks and the driveway of the Avengers Mansion covered in three inches of rock-hard grey and white ice that shrugged off Jarvis's best attempts to defeat it with rock salt.

It was nothing at all like France had been, and even less like the North Sea. Especially inside the Mansion, where Tony's pet ductwork made even the floors faintly warm underfoot.

It was supposed to snow more early tomorrow morning, and the temperature was expected to drop into the low twenties. Everyone on the team, including Jarvis, had assured Steve of this, usually while in the process of explaining to him why he didn't want to spend New Years Eve in Times Square.

"Only tourists do it," Jan had told him. "Unless you can pull strings with the Times Square Marriott to get yourself a room with a view of the ball dropping, it's not worth it."

"There are going to be a million people there," Hank had added. "Literally a million. You'll be stuck standing in line trying to leave until three a.m. And then it will start sleeting."

Tony had clapped a hand on Steve's shoulder and announced that he was supposed to make an appearance at at least three parties this evening, and Steve was welcome to come along. "I could even find you a date, if you want. It's short notice, but if I tell her you're Captain America…" he'd trailed off suggestively, and glanced toward his phone, a tiny black device that was capable of everything short of independent thought, raising his eyebrows in invitation.

Steve had thanked him, and declined. Now, alone in the Mansion with the new year less than an hour away, he almost wished he'd accepted Tony's offer. Maybe not the date – the idea of spending an entire evening trying to make polite conversation with a woman he'd never met, who'd agreed to accompany him only because she knew his name from history books, wasn't all that appealing – but at least the rest of it.

He'd halfway anticipated ringing in the New Year with Jarvis, and maybe Thor, since Hank and Jan had dinner reservations and Tony had one party after another, but Jarvis had gone uptown to spend the evening with his mother, and Thor was who knew where. Did Norse gods even celebrate New Years? If they did, it was probably on the winter solstice, and not December 31st.

He had the television on, tuned to the first channel he'd found that was broadcasting the New Years countdown from Times Square, but he'd turned the sound off after the first fifteen minutes worth of listening to the newscasters' time-filling patter.

Times Square looked jarringly bright on the oversized screen, all the posters and billboards Steve remembered replaced with glowing LCD screens that were continually in motion. Some of them still advertised the same things – Coca-Cola, Broadway musicals, department stores – and some of them were admittedly clever examples of graphic design once you got used to the style, but it all added up to something overwhelmingly garish.

Just the way it always had been, really. He'd gotten used to seeing the city lit up at night again months ago, to seeing street lights burning and skyscrapers glittering with light the way they had before the war, had stopped instinctively reaching to pull the blinds down and the curtains closed after dark, but he'd spent too long living with blackout curtains, seen the results of too many bombing runs – been along for the ride on too many of them – to start taking it for granted yet.

Eventually, maybe, but not yet.

There were still thirty-five minutes until the ball dropped. Steve glanced at the historical synthesis of the cold war he'd left open and face down over the arm of his chair, then decided that he could continue discovering exactly how crazy the world had gone while he'd been on ice later. John Gaddis would keep; maybe a break would make him less depressing.

There were probably still leftovers from the Christmas party in the kitchen, provided Thor hadn't eaten them all yet.

The sprig of holly Jan had hung in the kitchen doorway to stand in for mistletoe was already drying out; one of the berries had fallen to the floor, and Steve only just missed mashing it into the rug with his foot. The decorations would have to come down soon, before the pine needles in Jan's carefully hung Victorian-style pine swags starting falling all over everything.

Both the cookies and Jarvis's Christmas pudding were gone, but ziplock bags full of slices of Thor's suckling frost boar were still packed into ever corner of the fridge. There was more of it in the freezer; frost boar was apparently ceremonially hunted and eaten on all major holidays in Asgard, and Thor was determined to show proper celebratory spirit when it came to his mortal friends' celebrations.

He hadn't brought the Asgardian mead back after Thanksgiving, though, which was probably a good thing, no matter how amusing it had been to watch Tony keel over after one glass.

When Steve came back to the living room with his plate of frost boar sandwiches, it was twenty-five minutes to midnight. He thought about picking up his book again, then decided that sitting by himself on New Years Eve reading about everything he had missed was even more pathetic than sitting by himself watching television.

Bucky would have laughed at him. He'd always accused Steve of not knowing how to have fun.

He would have insisted on going to Times Square, twenty-degree weather and hundreds of thousands of tourists or not, and enjoyed every minute of it – he'd never been in a city as large as New York until their first liberty there, had never seen Broadway with all its lights on.

Steve had just turned on the stereo, feeling proud of himself for managing to pull up the right digital music playlist on the first try, when he heard footsteps in the hallway.

Jarvis was planning to spend the night uptown, and it was too soon for Hank and Jan to be home – no one ended a date before midnight on New Years Eve. And Tony could be out until dawn.

Steve turned, automatically tensing in readiness – the mansion's security system was very good, but no security was infallible – to find Tony leaning in the doorframe, his long body draped against it as if it were the only thing holding him up. His bowtie was hanging loose, the collar of his shirt was undone and his hair was thoroughly rumpled. There was a dark, reddish patch on the side of his neck that Steve was certain was a bite mark.

It was only eleven forty-five. Steve had seen people look less debauched after an entire night's worth of drinking and carousing.

"Hi," Tony said brightly. Then he glanced at the television screen and grinned. "Oh, good. I got here in time."

"For what?" Steve asked, trying not to stare too obviously at the bite mark. It was only half visible, most of it still covered by Tony's crumpled tuxedo shirt, but it stood out like a brand, shouting to the world exactly how Tony had spent the past few hours.

Tony's half-lidded eyes made his grin unintentionally suggestive – probably unintentional. Steve couldn't always tell, with Tony. "For midnight," he said, as if it were self evident.

"I thought you had a date." That, or a very friendly dinner partner. Had he made any noise when she'd bitten him, whomever she'd been?

Tony smirked, and this time, the look in his eyes was definitely sexual. "I did."

Steve could almost see it, Tony with his head thrown back and his clever, long-fingered hands all over the woman's body, his eyes closed in ecstasy. Then she'd slide her hands under his shirt, over his stomach and the trail of dark hair that was just visible over the top of his sweatpants when he worked out, unbutton his trousers and—

Did she know about the chest device? You couldn't undress Tony without seeing it, and he'd hidden it, and the extent of the injuries he'd sustained in Afghanistan, from almost everyone he knew. Tony worried that revealing it would make it easier for people to identify him as Iron Man; Steve wasn't quite sure why, given that any reasonable person would assume that a man who suffered from a serious heart condition and depended on a piece of machinery to keep himself alive was less likely to be a superhero.

"How do you do that without women finding out about your, um," he gestured vaguely at Tony, unsure what to call it, but certain that 'robot heart' was not the right term, "that thing in your chest?"

Tony grinned again, all satisfied smugness. "I'm very, very good at what I do." His voice was low and throaty, the sound hitting Steve directly in the gut – and in lower parts of his anatomy.

Technically speaking, he hadn't gotten laid in over seventy years. He obviously needed to remedy that, something that would be a lot easier to do if it weren't for the fact that he still knew almost no one in this time other than his fellow Avengers, Nick Fury and Dugan, and Jarvis. He'd never been good at picking up women he didn't know – he'd never even managed to get past first base with Betsy Ross, though not for want of trying, and he'd known her for almost four years – and he was pretty sure he wasn't going to magically turn out to have an easier time of it with men.

"So why aren't you still with your date, then?" Steve made himself ask, as much to remind himself of said date's existence as anything else. Tony, like most men, liked women. He never meant those suggestive grins or playful double entendres or seductively purred statements that sounded maddeningly like come ons.

If Steve challenged him about it, asked him not to keep teasing when he meant nothing by it, Tony would probably stare blankly at him, then awkwardly explain that he wasn't queer while Steve slowly died of embarrassment.

"I thought you'd appreciate company when the ball drops." Tony straightened from his slouch against the door frame and crossed the room, flinging himself down in Steve's chair, where he sat with his legs sprawled apart and his arms flung wide. "You shouldn't spend your first new years in this time alone," he added. "That would just be sad. I told Happy to drive her home whenever she wanted to go, and bought her another bottle of champagne before I left." One hand waved negligently, the gesture just a little broader than usual.

Tony was at least half on his way to drunk, Steve realized. It was early in the evening for that, but it was new years, after all. "And you got back here how?"

"Happy. I stopped being willing to let me behind the wheel of my Aston Martin two drinks ago. Do you know how long it took me to restore that?"

Steve nearly pointed out that 'because I might damage my car" was the least of the reasons why you didn't drive while drunk, but then considered Tony's relaxed sprawl in the chair and cheerful grin, and bit his tongue. Tony would shrug it off, then retaliate with a lecture about the dangers of riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

He'd recognized that he needed someone else to drive him home – did it really matter why?

"You didn't need to leave the party and come back here just for me," he said instead.

"I wanted to. Those parties get boring after a while. Why do you think I drink so much at them? Speaking of which…" Tony opened his eyes again and sat up, swinging himself out of the chair with only a fraction less than his usual grace. "You can't toast the new year without champagne. Give me just a second."

Tony rummaged around in the cabinet under the sideboard, and produced a green glass bottle with a label printed in flowing cursive script. "It's Italian, not French, so it's not technically champagne. They make it the same way, though. Hank can explain it better."

Without ever actually agreeing that he wanted any, Steve somehow ended up with a champagne flute full of straw-yellow sparkling wine that was dry, smooth, and probably more expensive than he wanted to contemplate. He had made the mistake of asking Jarvis about the wine Tony had served with the Avengers' Thanksgiving dinner, and was now careful to just not ask, because knowing that he was drinking something that was worth a hundred dollars a bottle took half the pleasure out of it. He always felt pressured to appreciate it, and vaguely guilty if he didn't like it.

"Here's to a new year." Tony flourished his glass in Steve's direction. "Let's hope it's better than this. Not that this one was bad," he corrected himself hurriedly. "We found you."

"I spent last New Years in a gun emplacement in the Ardennes, hungry, freezing, and drinking something Nick Fury stole from a German officer. It was so cold that the oil in the trucks congealed." So cold that three men from the Seventh Army had been found frozen to death at their posts the next morning. Steve and Bucky had found one man themselves, after the initial confusion from the German attack had died down. He had been still and bloodlessly white and probably no more than nineteen years old. Barely older than Bucky. "I think this next year's off to a much better start."

On the television, the countdown had reached two minutes. Steve turned the sound back on, and the two of them watched in companionable silence as the clock in the corner of the screen hit 60 seconds, and the giant, glowing ball started to move.

"To bad there's no one here to kiss you," Tony said, clinking glasses with him. "Unless I'd do." He gave Steve a considering look, long eyelashes and slightly inebriated playfulness making it seductive.

You'd definitely do, Steve thought, and then felt himself flush red. "You, um, don't have to do that," he managed. "The champagne is fine." He hid his face behind his champagne glass and drained half of it in one swallow, wishing wistfully that it could actually have an effect on him.

The ball came to a stop on screen, confetti and streamers swirling through the air like snow, and the air was suddenly filled with a long, rolling explosion that jerked Steve out of his embarrassment with one vicious spike of adrenaline.

It sounded nothing like an artillery barrage, but knowing that it had to be fireworks over the East River and the park didn't stop part of his brain from screaming at him to dive for cover, to grab Tony and shove him to the floor.

Tony himself had started so hard that his champagne had sloshed over the edge of the glass; now he transferred the glass to his right hand, shaking droplets of champagne off his fingers. "Fireworks. " He over-pronounced the word slightly. "I used to like them when I was a kid. I made a bunch of them one summer when I was in college."

Another long string of pops and rumbles began, and Steve flinched. "We should go watch them," he said, forcing himself to sound casual. "There's probably a great view of them from the roof. " If he was actually watching the fireworks, then surely the bright colors and the light show would convince his nerves that everything was fine, that it wasn't a German assault starting up.

He kept listening for the high, screaming whine of a dive-bomber, the sharper rattle of gunfire.

"I have a better idea. " Tony set his champagne flute down on sideboard, and picked up a scotch decanter and two glasses. " Let's go down to my lab and watch them through the rooftop security monitor. With the sound off."

An especially large bang made the windows rattle. Steve took a deep breath. "We'll be able to see them better from-"

"All this noise is giving me a headache," Tony interrupted. He was wild-eyed, visibly twitching at each loud roll of sound.

It didn't make any sense; Tony liked explosions, particularly when he caused them.

He hadn't caused these, though. And his guard would be down, with this much alcohol in his system.

Tony flinched again, pulling the scotch decanter to his chest and glancing around the room as if searching for something.

The image of Tony's bare chest flashed into Steve's mind, smooth metal and glowing battery cells embedded within a ragged mess of scar tissue.

Maybe it did make sense. Abruptly, Steve reconsidered his plan to force himself to go watch the fireworks because hiding from them would be stupid. "That sounds like a great idea," he told Tony, smiling.

Tony slung an arm around Steve's shoulders, two empty scotch glasses held casually in his hand. "Great," he said in Steve's ear, breath hot against the side of his neck; he smelled like champagne, and, just faintly, of his erstwhile date's perfume. "They look really cool through the security camera's infrared filter."

Steve let Tony lead him out of the room, Tony's arm heavy over his shoulders, and into the elevator. "I've never seen fireworks in infrared," Steve said as the doors closed behind them, shutting them into sudden, blessed silence.

~End~

*Also we've realized – at no point do we say what Don Blake/Thor was doing for New Years. Because he is a good person, and because he got Thanksgiving off, Don is sucking it up and being on call for New Years Eve.