(no subject)
Title: Nothing Important Happened Today
Pairing: Steve/Tony
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 16,905
Summary/Notes: From the cap_ironman Halloween prompt table, (9. Tony tries alternate methods of pumpkin carving). Not exactly limited to that, though, since nearly 17,000 words of carving a pumpkin would be a little odd at best - an Avengers Halloween turns into Groundhog Day. Late because of the word count!
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October 31st that year was nothing to write home about, or wouldn't have been had Steve actually been away from home for it. Tony once had been, a couple of years prior; Steve had gotten transatlantic text messages all night long about how the British really hadn't quite embraced the Halloween ethic, that trick-or-treating was at best a drab affair in the British Isles and he'd seen more convincing costumes on second-graders than the men and women at the party he'd been invited to attend on his business trip. Steve had snickered on the couch in front of the Halloween movie marathon Peter had set up, refraining from informing Tony (whose Bela Lugosi vampire outfit was unlikely to win him any prizes itself, judging from the picture messages) that Halloween had come a long way since he'd been young - he definitely couldn't recall bucketfuls of candy or five-year-olds dressed as the living dead, and as usual he said nothing about the rampant commercialisation of any and all vaguely meaningful holidays, or the steady Americanisation of British culture that he was pleased hadn't extended to the people at that party spending hundreds of dollars on latex, modelling themselves into perfect zombies or werewolves, Freddy Krueger or convention-level Klingons.
Peter hadn't appreciated him interrupting Friday the 13th with his snickering and the unfortunately loud keypad tones of his cellphone that no one could figure out how to turn off - honestly, though, it was no more annoying than the way Logan insisted on crunching his popcorn, or the phone that kept ringing in the other room with MJ's friends calling to congratulate her on landing the part in the play she'd just auditioned for. Then a gang of overzealous, overfunded and thankfully underplanned self-styled supervillains had attempted to rob a bank (only to wind up holding an upmarket restaurant hostage in a more than usual display of villainous ineptitude), someone blew up a subway station and a helicopter crash-landed in Central Park; come to think of it, after that he'd never found out how the movie ended. They were kept reasonably busy for the rest of the night, spread all over the city in costumes that had nothing to do with Halloween. When he got back, he had fourteen unread texts on his phone, all from Tony and none of them acknowledging the fact that Steve hadn't replied for the last four and a half hours, probably because Tony hadn't noticed. He was amused but not terribly surprised.
Looking back, that had been the single most eventful Halloween they'd had in years. That year, however, was nothing special at all. Except perhaps for the fact that it started roughly three months too early.
It all started with drawings.
Drawings at least he could understand because that was what he did; a lot of the time he was the vaguely creepy blonde guy stationed at that spare bench at the back of Tony's workshop, playing with a box of art supplies roughly the size and weight of Kentucky while Tony... did whatever it was that people called what Tony did. It was too frenetic for tinkering, too definite for experimentation, that strange kind of otherworldly genius in his creations that Steve knew he shouldn't have felt so comfortable around if only because he'd never felt quite so at ease with Bruce or Reed or the myriad geniuses of his acquaintance. But he'd sit there in Tony's workshop for hours on end, set up an easel in there once and Tony had barely batted a lash in his direction while Steve played with his new oil paints and made just about as much mess in his own way as Tony usually did. He never asked what exactly had compelled Tony to make that space for him there. He figured friends didn't question friends' motives.
Steve knew drawing. Of course, Steve's drawings didn't usually find their way out onto every flat surface (and a few not so flat ones, too, if the leftover Chinese food sitting there on the workbench leaking grease into a couple of them was the yardstick they were measuring by) the way that Tony's had. Suddenly one doodle had spawned twenty full-sized sketches, all from that initial two minutes' work on the back of a business card that really hadn't been big enough for doodling in the first place, especially not with that overly flashy fountain pen of Tony's since all it did was bleed blue-black ink into the heavy stock and make the little picture look extremely sad indeed. Tony had pinned the card up on his bulletin board and stared at it that afternoon while Steve pretended he wasn't staring at Tony staring at it. Then the drawing had started in earnest. Suddenly there were pumpkin faces everywhere.
Steve knew drawing, knew the creative process; he knew that Tony's engineering was at least as much about aesthetics as it was the mechanical because otherwise the suit, the Suit, would never have looked the way it did. He hadn't been forced to make it in red and gold, after all, and no one could tell Steve that the principles of aerodynamics had been drawn upon heavily in the styling of that faceplate. Of course, Tony had never been designing pumpkins before, like this was a perfectly normal facet of their everyday life and not just another of his eccentricities where they'd come in from a mission or MJ's new play and find Tony had emailed out a poll to every last Avenger to help him decide which of his current favourites was the best. This was a novelty, especially for the middle of a wonderfully warm August - a mercifully quiet August, too, quiet to the point where Peter had started suggesting that all the bad guys who weren't currently deceased or in maximum security were probably off sunbathing on a private Caribbean island. Steve had been stuck with that image in his head for the rest of the day no matter what he did to dislodge it, so it was really only fitting that he scar poor Peter for life with a quick cartoon planted in his jacket pocket: Dr. Doom sipping piña coladas on a sun terrace with a worryingly tiny Speedo on over the armour, flanked by Bullseye and a sunburned Doc Ock.
Still, Steve hadn't quite been able to see why Tony was contemplating chilly October nights of encroaching ground frost and the over-average chance of rain, or a night that would probably bring out the villains en masse. Perhaps not the big ones - Victor Von Doom did have a well-documented flair for the dramatic, that much was true, but Steve had a feeling that wheeling out the Doombots on All Hallows Eve wasn't quite his style. He tended to prefer to ruin Christmas, they'd found, presumably something to do with his parents not giving Poor Little Victor that private robot army he'd been hinting at all year, or maybe it was just one holiday too far after Halloween and Thanksgiving in rapid succession; still, it was a little difficult to imagine him giving thanks for anything at all, especially not in monarchist Latveria, and the idea of Dr. Doom enjoying Halloween was a little too far-fetched even for Steve's vivid imagination.
This was probably why Peter found himself with a growing collection of Steven Rogers originals, Doom maliciously incinerating a turkey, Doom trick-or-treating with the Green Goblin and Magneto. Pete told him he might want to quit drawing all the cute little Victor Von Dooms if he didn't want everyone in the building to assume he had some kind of secret crush, but Steve thought the really worrying part was the pumpkin bombs showering candy over Manhattan like little burst piñatas. It all probably had something to do with the fact that by that point they were well into September and there were so many pictures everywhere he went that it was eerily like a million pumpkin eyes were following his every move. Obviously he was cracking up. Tony's pet project was stealing his sanity.
And then came the pumpkins.
At first it was just a couple of small ones, two tiny little things sitting there on the kitchen counter when Steve went to make coffee one morning. It was early October by then, at least, not the middle of summer and with all the drawings around he supposed he'd seen it coming; the odd part was that post-coffee he went for a run in the park and when he got back perhaps an hour later, all the drawings were gone. And there were the pumpkins sitting on the counter right where they had been, only now there were creepy little faces drawn on them oh-so-precisely in permanent black marker.
A couple more turned up each day after that and Jarvis started to cook more pumpkin dishes than Steve had ever dreamed possible - a couple of weeks and Steve and Pete and Logan were secretly conspiring to smuggle in pizza or burgers or even the vaguely toxic-smelling hotdogs that may have had a passing acquaintance with actual meat from the dodgy-looking vendor down the block, anything that wasn't orange or seemed a little like eating the remains of Tony's little science projects. Maybe it was a little strange that no one had really questioned what exactly Tony was doing in all that time but really, it was far from the strangest thing he'd ever done and when they saw him he seemed normal enough, or as normal as Tony ever got. He even ditched the sushi Pepper brought in sometimes and joined the rest of them in their mountains of greasy, cheesy pizza, and whenever Steve was in the workshop, it always seemed like Tony was working on something mechanical rather than doodling a progression of disturbing little faces on large orange gourds. Steve started to wonder if schizophrenia wasn't just around the corner, for one of them or the other. Perhaps both.
Then, at last, the day came. Tony stayed home from the office and after Steve's morning jog they had breakfast together while the others wandered in and out of the room, grabbing coffee or pastries or cereal or fruit on their way to wherever they were going, even if it was just back to their rooms to snooze or play with their Halloween costumes. Tony reminded them all there was a party scheduled for that evening, which explained why Pepper was perhaps more firmly glued to her PDA and her Blackberry than usual and was maybe a little wired on Tony's favourite espresso, and that costumes were most definitely required. Preferably ones that had as little to do with their other costumes as humanly possible. Steve just sat back through it all, sipping his coffee with a smile as he watched Tony play the perfect lord of the manor; once everyone else had shuffled on out, Steve read the newspaper at the kitchen table and got newsprint all over his fingers while Tony sat there and gazed off distractedly at the window rather than out of it - the Extremis probably had him tuned into three different newspapers online while he checked his email and played poker with a banker in Belgium, knowing him. All things considered, it was a pretty good sort of a morning.
The day went on. Steve's schedule wasn't exactly bulging at the seams so he worked out for a while then took a long, leisurely shower, replied to some email and played a little Solitaire, insisted on helping Jarvis out in the kitchen and narrowly avoided Hurricane Pepper and her attendant flurry of caterers as he headed to the workshop bearing coffee and sandwiches; no doubt Tony had long since lapsed into Tony-space, the place where both time and hunger apparently ceased to exist until someone came in bearing caffeine and something edible, preferably with a large proportion of meat. Something exploded as he approached the door, with a moderate bang and a wet kind of popping sound, and he supposed had he not known that at any time there was likely to be any number of odd or worrying sounds coming from Tony's workshop he might have been wearing a large, burning coffee stain all down his otherwise perfectly white t-shirt, jumping at the shock. He caught himself in time, however, and when he got through the door, Tony was scraping pumpkin off his forehead while quite a lot more of it dripped down his shirt. Pepper, who'd managed to sneak up on him, took one look inside the room and turned right back the other way. Steve honestly couldn't say he blamed her. He put down the plate and cups on the nearest flat surface that wasn't spattered with pumpkin goo and raised his brows at Tony.
"Was it evil?" he asked, gesturing at the remains of the pumpkin shell that was sitting on the desktop, though honestly the majority of it was layered all over Tony in stringy lengths mixed with bits of seeds. "Did it have to die?"
Tony pulled off his goggles and glared at Steve. Unfortunately for Tony, the fact that he was dripping pumpkin onto the floor off his tanktop and sweats did nothing at all for Steve taking him seriously. Tony shook his head; pumpkin slid out of his hair and hit the floor at his feet with a wet, solid splat. Steve wandered over to the cabinet across the room and tossed him a towel, though that was mostly just to hide his smile for a moment, however brief it may have been.
"I guess now I know not to use a laser cutter on a fruit," Tony muttered, attempting to rid his hair of the orange goop. He really succeeded only in rubbing it in further and Steve watched him as he leaned back against the nearest unsplattered wall, trying not to plan another cartoon for Peter's collection, thankfully this time omitting Dr. Doom. Unfortunately for all concerned, his imagination got the better of him and soon he headed over to his bench at the far side of the room, grabbed a pencil as he sat and started a quick sketch. Tony followed him over like a rat half-drowned in orange soda, dripping an unfortunate trail of pumpkin innards all over the floor that Jarvis was not going to find amusing in the least. Steve had a feeling he'd end up cleaning it up himself instead, just to keep Jarvis from despair and Pepper's head from exploding much like he imagined the pumpkin had, only without the aid of Tony's ill-conceived laser cutter carving method. For a genius, sometimes his logic left a lot to be desired.
"You know, traditionally you're meant to take out the insides first," Steve told him, with a smile he didn't try to conceal, glancing up from his drawing board to where Tony was standing, currently yanking off his pumpkin-smeared shirt. It sounded horribly wet as it hit the floor by his feet and Steve found himself making the exact same face that Peter had when he'd found that first cartoon. It wasn't pretty at all.
"Oh, so that's where I went wrong," Tony said, in his favourite tone of well-honed sarcasm, though he seemed to be having a tough time keeping a wry smile from his face. "I never would have thought of that. Thank you, Cap, High King of the Pumpkin Carvers."
"You can mock me all you like, Tony. I'm not the one who's covered in orange goo."
Tony sighed dramatically and sat himself down on a stool nearby, still attempting to towel himself off. It wasn't working at all, just seemed to be making him progressively stickier and stickier though the array of pumpkin debris at his feet seemed to grow and grow with an intermittent sort of slimy slapping sound in accompaniment. Steve watched him out of the corner of his eye as he drew; he could almost see the wheels turning in Tony's head, going over every little thing he'd done wrong (though Steve would have had to say ‘using hi-tech electrical equipment on a foodstuff' was the only point that mattered), replanning the carving of the pumpkin it had taken him nearly three months to design until Steve took pity on him and abandoned the drawing only half coloured on the desk. With a hefty sigh he left the bench and the two of them spent the rest of the caffeine-fuelled afternoon carving Tony's precious pumpkin. This time without the laser cutter, though somehow they both ended up thoroughly covered anyway - Steve strongly suspected that was mostly Tony's doing.
The party that night went off without a hitch, all of the Avengers and a not inconsiderable number of their friends and acquaintances all dressed up and chatting over overly expensive party nibbles when really all most of them wanted was a paper plate of cocktail sausages and cheese on sticks. It seemed the open bar went down a treat, on the other hand, and Steve couldn't say he was terribly surprised. Logan, with a little more hair than was normal even for him, was propping up said bar dressed as a rather convincing werewolf, making less convincing small talk with a couple of visiting X-Men; Pete and MJ had retreated to a corner with Peter's aunt May, the three of them dressed like something out of the 1920s; Jan and Hank seemed to be the king and queen of the party dressed as Antony and Cleopatra; and Tony... well, Tony had apparently decided against vampirism that particular year and had gone instead for dressing himself up as a Jedi. Steve was convinced that if he hadn't put so much time and effort into designing the admittedly rather unsettling pumpkin that was currently sitting on the counter in the kitchen, the candle inside it having gone out twice already and started to scorch what was left of the poor pumpkin's flesh inside, he probably could've built himself a fully-functional lightsaber to go with the rest of his costume. Instead, he was whipping out what was apparently a genuine Star Wars movie prop at every opportunity and got into a plastic swordfight with Reed Richards, who it seemed had decided to come as D'Artagnan. Steve was just glad Tony hadn't convinced Pepper to turn up as Princess Leia, though Steve himself made a rather dashing Han Solo. It all went surprisingly well, especially considering some of their past parties.
In fact, the only problem was when the caterers ran out of the odd little hors d'oeuvres that Tony liked, that and Johnny Storm and his little accident with the vodka; fortunately his sister had managed to put out the resulting fire rather quickly, but Tony would still be buying a new rug if the scorch mark and lingering smell of burned wool in the air was anything to go by. Slowly, everyone started to leave or retire to their rooms, leaving just a handful of them sitting around in the lounge sipping beers or coffees as the late night wore on into the early morning. Tony's Jedi cloak was missing in action and MJ's little black bobbed chorus girl wig was abandoned somewhere behind a couch - Jan kept insisting that the poor girl's red hair clashed terribly with her outfit and once Peter had dropped his aunt off at home, he managed to get into a giggle fit that lasted on and off for over an hour over something Steve said that really wasn't funny, so he was the one interrupting the movie that year. Even if it was just something quite genuinely appalling that Tony had dredged out of a secret collection of bad 70s horror.
Steve finally ambled off to bed one and a half movies later, somewhere about 3am, muttering something about never needing to see Plan 9 From Outer Space again in his life as Pete and MJ fell asleep on the couch and Tony started playing twenty questions with Logan - Steve didn't think it was exactly a fair match, considering Tony was probably the ultimate in quiz show cheating bearing in mind the fact he could Google in his head; Logan didn't seem to mind, however, as he lounged there peeling off sections of fake werewolf hair with one hand, cradling a beer in the other. Steve closed the door behind him, folded his costume and set it down on a chair, brushed his teeth and sank into bed.
It had been a long, long day, and relatively uneventful by their standards. Of course, by that point they'd moved on into the next day and the next month; it was technically November 1st. And that, not Halloween, was when it happened.
The clock stopped at two minutes to four. He knew this because he was watching it, the clock's luminous green face and its steady ticking just about as soothing as counting sheep and usually more effective at sending him off to sleep. At 03:58:04, the clock stopped ticking. The second hand stopped moving, didn't even quiver. Steve stared at it for a moment, wondering if the batteries had died or maybe it was the clock itself - it wouldn't have been the first time, since the clock had a nasty habit of giving up just at the wrong moment. Tony had nagged him more than once to just go on and get a digital one instead, but he preferred the old style display, found something comforting about it in a bizarre sort of way. Until it did this, of course.
He changed the batteries with the spares he had in the drawer by his bed; still nothing. He shook it - a fascinating facet of modern technology was that apparently there was a fair to good chance that it would work if you shook it, hit it, kicked it or otherwise abused it, or just turned it off and on again. That didn't work, however, and he resolved to go out the next day and buy himself a digital alarm clock that wouldn't have that horrible habit of dying miserably in the middle of the night, though he supposed he knew he'd never do it. He lay back down, sighed, pulled up the covers and stared up at the ceiling, settling into silence. Which was when he knew that something was wrong.
The walls there were supposed to be soundproof, that was true. The windows, too, they were apparently designed specifically to keep out the noise that would otherwise have filtered in from outside, all those usual city sounds like the sirens and the car horns, the kind of noises that blended together after a while into a sort of inimitable New York buzz that lurked there in the background through every moment of the day and night, the same backdrop to the day no matter the season, varying only in volume with the time of day. The walls and the windows were supposed to keep it out but all the same there was usually something there that Steve could hear, and he guessed if he could hear it then it was probably just about enough to drive Logan mad, or madder at least. But right then, he couldn't hear it. He couldn't hear Peter snoring softly on the couch the way he usually did or Tony's bright laughter, Logan grumbling under his breath in that way Steve supposed should have seemed vaguely threatening at some point but never really had. There was nothing, not even the white noise of the city. There was silence.
He left the bed. Quite honestly he wasn't entirely sure what exactly the problem was; as far as he knew Tony hadn't fixed the soundproofing and he hadn't eaten anything that the others hadn't, drunk anything they hadn't, so unless they were all also suffering a bizarre kind of vague hearing loss, vague because he could still hear himself and when he dropped the damn alarm clock on the floor he could hear that too, then he guessed there was something a little odd going on. Likely more than a little odd because when he crossed to the window, shivering as he went and that was odd in itself considering the heating there was usually very good, nothing was moving outside. Nothing. It wasn't just that the road was deserted, which was perhaps strange even for 4am, but there was an eerie kind of stillness out there, like nothing was moving, like the air was still right down to the atom, like Steve Rogers was the only living thing with any motion in the whole damn city. Perhaps he was, and that thought disturbed him, so much he turned and bolted for the bedroom door, reached for the handle and woke in bed to his 6am alarm.
It didn't feel like a dream, not at all, the sudden influx of sound around him jarring once he'd woken to the persistent beep of the alarm clock that a couple of minutes earlier hadn't been working at all. He could hear the cars outside, the hum of motors was faint but present, the coffee maker burbling into life in the kitchen and the shower running, probably Peter though that seemed odd for a Saturday morning, definitely not Tony or Logan. He got out of bed, frowned at the blue pajama pants he didn't remember putting on but guessed he must have, pulled on a t-shirt and headed for the kitchen.
There should have been glasses everywhere, plates and napkins, some sign that a party had occurred there quite recently and the high-class caterers had turned out to be somewhat less than inclined to assist in tidying the mess they'd helped to make. There was nothing, except for a copy of his favourite newspaper sitting at his usual place at the kitchen table, the coffeemaker making its oddly comforting low rumbling sound on the counter, filling the room with the glorious smell of espresso.
"Morning, Cap," Peter greeted him as he wandered into the room, hair still damp from the shower. Steve blinked at him dumbly for a moment, feeling horrendously out of sync though not entirely sure what that meant, but Peter was far too absorbed in the daily Avengers ritual of coffee-worship to notice that Steve seemed out of sorts. Or that it was shortly after 6am and he wasn't outside somewhere in the rapidly cooling streets, jogging like he usually did. Tony still ribbed him about that on occasion, something about there being treadmills in the gym and that way he wouldn't have to be dodging angry dogs or rollerbladers all the time, the blonde girl with the crush on him who he seemed to see every morning without fail. Steve liked to jog, though, and treadmills took a lot out of it, gave him one less reason to get out and actually feel like a normal human being for a few minutes of the day. There was something about being Captain America that had always set him apart from everyone else in a way; however much he understood it was a necessity, that didn't make it easy to swallow all the time. He needed connection - there were just times when Tony didn't seem to understand that the two of them fighting over the remote didn't actually count as that connection. It was something, yes, maybe something valuable, but Tony Stark was hardly representative of the United States as a whole.
Peter handed him a mug of coffee; Steve accepted it gratefully and took a seat at the table. He picked up the paper. The date on it was the 31st.
"Peter, have you seen today's newspaper?" Steve asked, catching him as he was evidently heading back to the room he was sharing with MJ, bearing two cups of coffee and a slice of buttered toast.
Peter turned back to him with a shrug. "I thought that was today's."
"It's the 31st's," Steve told him, holding it up to show him the front page, the same article about corruption in the DA's office that he'd read the previous morning.
"And that's wrong... because?"
Steve frowned. "Because that was yesterday, Pete."
"Uh, okay." Peter frowned right back at him. "I think you're imagining things, Cap. I mean, just wait till Tony gets up, I bet the first thing he does is remind you to wear a costume tonight that doesn't come with a shield or too many stars." He paused and took a sip of his coffee, lounging there against the doorframe like Steve wasn't staring at him oddly. "What are you wearing, anyway? MJ got us these great suits from the play she's in. I don't look a lot like Al Capone but maybe I can pull off Generic 30s Gangster even if I'd probably make a better Eliot Ness."
Steve was understandably more concerned with what it was that Peter was saying underneath all the idle costume banter than reminding him he'd actually been alive at the time of Prohibition.
"You're telling me it's Halloween?" he said.
Peter nodded. "I'm telling you it's Halloween."
"And I'm telling you that was yesterday." Steve sighed, rubbed at his eyes with one hand. "I remember it. Tony blew up a pumpkin and Johnny Storm set the rug on fire, the one Tony brought back from Nepal."
"The one that looks like Picasso painting a tiger eating a monkey?"
Steve nodded. Peter, however, just looked at him quite like one or both of them had lost their mind but wasn't sure which. Steve was quietly starting to believe that one of them had, and it was probably himself, when MJ came in, in search of her coffee and toast.
"MJ, what day is it?"
She frowned as she snagged the toast from Peter and took a big bite. "It's Halloween," she said. "Why?"
Steve winced. "I think we'd better wake Tony."
Peter nodded. "Stay right there," he told him, and MJ took a seat at the table as she eyed the both suspiciously. "MJ, stay with Cap. I'll be right back."
He retreated from the room muttering something about being an extra in a Bill Murray flick. Steve got the sinking feeling that he wasn't far wrong.
"That's not possible," Tony said, the first and second days.
"That's not possible!" Steve said, the third, fourth and fifth days, doing his very best impression of Tony. Tony didn't look anything close to amused, though everyone else in the room did, quite a lot. Then again, Tony was the only one who knew that had been exactly what he'd been about to say.
Tony scanned the building; Bruce scanned Steve. Neither of them came up with anything out of the ordinary, or at least out of the ordinary for the Avengers' HQ and Captain America. Steve was definitely Steve and it was definitely Halloween and yet Steve could tell them all exactly what was going to happen; Tony had to admit that yes, he'd been thinking of using his laser cutter to carve his blessed pumpkin and when MJ got home she'd gotten the part, not to mention the fact that while the party went ahead because hell if anyone could find anything wrong aside from the obvious fact that Steve was reliving a day, Steve was on hand ready with the fire extinguisher when, with the aid of Tony's best vodka, Johnny Storm set the rug on fire. They all sat around in the lounge afterwards, debating the feasibility of a time loop versus Steve suddenly being precognizant or deciding that April Fools' Day now somehow fell in late October. Steve wasn't sure he could've planned all this if he'd tried.
He watched the clock. At 3:58am, the clock stopped. Everything stopped - there was no talking, though Tony had been on his usual technobabble roll on the phone to Reed Richards, no movement; when Steve leaned over and pressed his fingertips to the space just under Tony's jaw, where his pulse should have been pumping hard just underneath the surface, there was nothing. He was cold, his skin retaining the shape of the tips of Steve's fingers like some kind of human clay when he moved away. He didn't want this. He felt sick. This was almost panic. It was happening again.
He woke with his alarm at 6am. Then they did it all again. And again. And again.
He'd seen Groundhog Day enough times before then, ironically, and that one episode of Stargate: SG-1, the Mystery Spot ep of the show that MJ liked so much though they pretty much all suspected that was just because she had a crush on Jared Padalecki. Unfortunately, each movie or show had a different take on the mechanics of what was happening within it - SG-1 had it down as some kind of alien mechanism and while Steve wasn't exactly a charter member of the fan club for Skrulls, he had a feeling they weren't in the business of tinkering with time or persecuting him in particular. Supernatural blamed it on a maybe-demon called Loki - Thor assured him, had assured him numerous times on numerous iterations of that godforsaken Halloween since oddly it seemed he was always the first to believe him, that it just couldn't be their Loki that was doing this. There was a long, complicated explanation as to why, steeped in mythology that Steve found himself curiously understanding less and less as the days went by, but when Thor sounded so very definite it was extremely tough not to believe him. At least that was one possibility that he could set aside.
He supposed in the end, in his philosophical moments that started to come with more and more alarming a frequency as the days or day went by, much like the movies and the shows in which it happened the trick was to find the definition that fit his universe. Unfortunately for Steve, he lived in a universe where gods and monsters, aliens and bizarre new technologies all existed, not to mention magic and that indefinable something that could, admittedly infrequently but even so, just mean the whole goshdarn universe was out to get you. It was difficult to know what to do, especially when it seemed that his friends just couldn't help even with all their combined effort. Maybe if they'd had more time, he thought, more than 6am one day to not quite 4am the next, not even 24 hours and even less when factoring in how he had to sit them down and convince them day after day that this really was what was happening, the serum in his blood hadn't finally driven him out of his mind, he wasn't secretly a Skrull and no one had him under mind control. He could remember the day that hadn't yet happened but for him had happened twenty, thirty times by then. Even sleeping through that time made not one tiny iota of difference. He just wished he knew why it was happening.
After the first forty-three days, he just stopped trying to convince anyone. He took a day off and ate ice cream in bed while watching MJ's DVDs of Grey's Anatomy, then went to the party and got good and hammered on an epic run on tequila slammers with Logan and Carol and someone's cousin who actually didn't quite look old enough to drink. Tony kept eyeing him oddly from across the room and Steve felt progressively guiltier and guiltier as the night wore on; Tony extricated him from Logan's hard-drinking clutches around midnight and took him to his room. Throwing up three pints of chocolate ice cream and a most of a bottle of tequila while Tony, dressed as a Jedi, rubbed his back in an oddly comforting manner, had never been high on his to-do list. Right then he knew exactly why.
He passed out in bed, fully clothed and clinging sickly to an oddly accommodating Tony sometime around 3am. When his alarm woke him at six, he had no trace of a hangover. Tony was gone. It was Halloween again, and he felt like he'd wasted a day. He told himself that wasn't something he'd be doing again.
Perhaps that was why he started it all again. He wasn't trying to convince anyone, he was past that point, had it down to a fine art stored up in the back of his head so that if, by some miracle, he happened to come across a solution before he lost his mind entirely, he'd be able to sit them down and run up the flag of Universal Explanation to enlist their help with relative speed. But, for a start, that wasn't what he did; if movies had taught him anything it was if at first nothing big leapt out to be corrected he should examine each and every last facet of his day to make sure there wasn't some infinitesimally minute detail that he'd overlooked, someone he was supposed to help, somewhere he was supposed to be, something he was supposed to do that was keeping him from moving on past four hours into November. It might have seemed a daunting task if he hadn't been facing multiple Halloweens stretching on and on into infinity. At the very least, it gave him a purpose that wasn't connected with ice cream and liquor and Tony Stark fetching him bottles of expensive imported mineral water to ward off the hangover that was never going to come.
Fourteen days later, he knew just about everything there was to know about everyone who ever entered or left the building on a regular basis, his fellow Avengers and visitors and staff. Twenty after that he'd been on first name terms (albeit briefly) with the parents and siblings and co-workers and high school sweethearts of just about everyone who'd come in for the party that night, including the catering staff and every taxi driver who'd been involved in dropping off or collecting their guests. There was nothing, aside from a few people he'd probably be calling on should this day ever end, alcoholics and a girl whose long-lost sister he'd somehow managed to track down. He was drawing a blank.
After that, he moved further afield. Slowly, he met everyone he could, sat strangers down for coffee, prevented every crime one by one that he could recall from the thousands reported to the city police that day, then quite a few besides that hadn't been. Nothing changed at all, not with anything he did, all the people that he saved, all the effort he exerted; each and every morning it was October 31st again and Steve could just have screamed. In the end, he did. He went ahead and broke things after some brief and not-so-careful consideration, starting with his alarm clock, only for them to reappear as if by magic the next morning, that morning, the same morning every single day. There was that same odd stillness there at two minutes to four, exactly four minutes and fifty-three seconds of it if his count was correct, and then suddenly it was 6am again.
Something needed to change. So then he just stopped trying, at least for a little while.
Days got more interesting after that, somehow. He spent an hour in the grocery store buying all the different kinds of fruits he could find and tried them all at lunch while Tony and Pepper both looked at him like he'd turned into an ape or told them he was giving up the shield and going into NASCAR. He spent a fortnight perfecting his chess game, crewed a catamaran and dyed his hair black. He got a tattoo one day, decided he hated it and was actually vaguely thankful for the first time in as long as he could remember that in the morning the day was just going to start over, no harm no foul and without the presence of a rather unfortunate-looking Japanese symbol there on his bicep. He'd always thought they were a faintly bad idea, especially when most of the people that had them didn't actually speak Japanese, but as a learning experience it served him quite well. He wouldn't be doing it again, after all, and wouldn't have to wonder if he'd been missing out all those years.
So then he learned Japanese. CDs from the local bookstore only went so far but he had Logan to help out, Logan who thankfully wouldn't be remembering the six weeks of free conversation classes he gave between beers and griping and protestations that if he wanted to learn Japanese he should just suck it up and go to Japan. The tattoo had been mistranslated mumbo-jumbo, as it turned out. He couldn't say he was exactly surprised. Given the overall cleanliness of the parlour he'd been to, he considered it a miracle he hadn't dropped dead of some kind of poisoning fifteen minutes after leaving.
He kissed Carol, which ultimately wasn't worth the broken rib she gave him just on reflex, even if it went ahead and healed miraculously by the next morning. He spent two days straight playing some kind of ultra-violent video game, finding it curiously satisfying to massacre zombies with a shotgun even if the controls for it had been completely incomprehensible for the first six or seven hours; after that it just clicked into place and by the time Logan wandered in to sit himself down in front of a sports channel until the party was ready to go, Steve was wholly unwilling to give up the TV for sports news or possibly horror movies. His thumbs may have ached like he was over eighty in body as well as technical age, but if he ever needed to defeat villainy via the medium of Resident Evil, he was all set.
Ordinarily, in any one week he'd spend maybe an few hours with a sketchpad and a box of pencils, lounging on the couch while Logan grumbled over hockey scores and Peter worked on lesson plans at the table. Since the start of Halloween he was sort of surprised and conversely sort of not to find that he'd been almost actively avoiding spending any time sketching at all - it wasn't that he felt he had to have something to show for every time he sat down to draw, but still the prospect of drawing something and finding he was really proud of the finished result only to have it vanish into the ether was vaguely galling. The only problem with that was that by that point he was heading past a hundred days or more at least and that was a long time to be without his favourite pastime. He went down to the park, bundled up in his jacket and scarf and one glove, wishing faintly that he could draw with gloves on both hands. He sat by the kitchen window and sketched the view from it idly as he hummed along with the bad Halloween radio show that he'd heard fifty times before by that point. Then he went down to Tony's workshop and sketched Tony with the laser cutter, knowing full well that in a few minutes it was going to blow up a poor, unsuspecting pumpkin all over him.
Right on cue, it did exactly that. Steve hadn't actually seen the look on Tony's face at the moment it happened before, he'd always been outside the room, and he had a feeling it was going to be a couple of years of that day before he forgot one tiny detail of it. Tony cursed rather colourfully, shook his head and splattered pumpkin parts all over the floor like a dog shaking off water and managed to catch Pepper's new shoes as she peeked through the door. Wisely, and just as usual, she turned around and went the other way while Tony pulled off his goggles and looked over at Steve as if daring him to say something. He refrained. He had a feeling he knew what Tony's reaction would have been if he'd said anything and potentially amusing as that might have been, he decided against it.
He went back to his drawing, adding in the pumpkin, catching it mid-explosion and amending the look on sketch-Tony's face to something approaching what it had been in real life, perfect comic horror that made Steve smile even when he knew Tony was peering over his shoulder. Of course, one of the main ways he knew that Tony was peering over his shoulder was that a wet, stringy strand of pumpkin hit his shoulder and managed to slither its way under the neck of his t-shirt. It oozed right down his back and thankfully caught at the waist of his jeans. He supposed it served him right.
"I guess you found that amusing," Tony said, pulling off his shirt. He dropped it to the ground by Steve's desk, wincing at the rather horrific sound it made weighed down with all that wet, pumpkin-smelling mess.
Steve smiled rather broadly, despite the fact he was wiping pumpkin from the small of his back with a tissue from the desktop. "Actually, I did," he said. "I guess now you know not to use a laser cutter on a fruit."
Tony looked at him oddly; Steve knew exactly why, considering he was repeating exactly what Tony had told him that very first day of pumpkin-explosion. Fortunately he seemed to shrug it off and started his traditional attempt at towelling unfortunate-smelling orange goo off his skin while Steve watched him do it for at least the twentieth time. The pumpkin clung to the same places each time, he thought, part of a seed lodged in Tony's hair by his ear, bits collecting at the waist of his sweats until he tried to rub it away with the towel and succeeded only in pushing it down under them a little, a fact he acknowledged every time with an unhappy sort of sound and a look on his face almost as amusing as the one Steve had down on the page.
Then he put down his pencil and leaned over. He licked lightly at Tony's exposed abdomen, an almost horizontal line just above the waistband of his sweats - it just seemed like the thing to do at the time, even if the angle strained Steve's neck a little, even if he tasted of raw pumpkin and that was hardly the most tempting taste in the world. Even if he hurt himself, he only had to make it to 3:58am and that particular slate would be wiped clean.
"Steve, what are you doing?" Tony asked a moment later, setting his hands at his hips but not actually moving away from him. Steve supposed that should've told him something, supposed it should've been his cue to stop but honestly, that was the first time in a week of Halloweens, two weeks, three, he was losing count, that he'd felt anything like excitement.
He looked up at him from his awkward angle, his neck cracking uncomfortably. "I would've thought that was obvious," he said. And he licked him again just to make sure they both understood. It seemed they did.
That wasn't the day that they slept together. Eventually, once Steve had dipped his tongue into Tony's navel and made him shiver, grazed his nearest nipple with his teeth and traced his still sticky abdomen with his fingertips, he pulled back and somehow went on just as if nothing had happened at all. Tony eyed him oddly as they carved that same damn pumpkin Steve could've carved in his sleep by then, but otherwise he played along. Steve was glad; he needed some time to process what he'd done. He was surprised to find just how much time it didn't take.
The next day, he kissed him. He waited until lunchtime, until he heard the then familiar sound of pumpkin explosion inside Tony's workshop, shooed Pepper away and then let himself in; he said nothing, not a word, just stepped right up to him with an unfortunate kind of slip on a big glob of exploded pumpkin and the next thing either of them knew Steve's mouth was colliding with Tony's, awkward and a little too hard. Tony blinked at him in bemusement like he wasn't a certified genius as Steve pulled back; Steve just frowned, sighed and walked back out the way he'd come. The next day was better, no slip, their mouths meeting slowly and Steve found he didn't even mind the pumpkin juice that was clinging to Tony's goatee, or that globs of it on his shirt that pressed wetly to Steve's as they moved closer together. Under the bright tang of pumpkin, Tony was warm and tasted like coffee. Steve couldn't even pretend to dislike it.
By the fifth day, he had the kiss down perfect and Steve was starting to wonder if pumpkin was in fact some kind of heretofore unknown aphrodisiac. He pulled off Tony's shirt and Tony let him, pulled off his own and dropped them both to the floor as he kissed him again. Bare skin on skin was thrilling even with the sticky pumpkin juice rubbing off on his chest and Tony didn't seem to mind much considering the way he pushed him up against the nearest bench, sucked at his nipples then promptly dropped to his knees and proceeded to give him one of the top five blowjobs of his life to date. Afterwards, they carved the damn pumpkin. They drank some coffee, ate bagels at the kitchen counter while the radio played every cheesy Halloweenish song they could think of and then some. He couldn't decide if he was surprised or not that there wasn't much between them that seemed to have changed because of what they'd done there in the workshop. It all seemed to make some weird kind of sense, at least as much as reliving the same day over and over and over. Apparently there wasn't much in the way of sense left in Steve's world.
It was the sixth day that they slept together. They kissed in the workshop, Steve's hands in Tony's pumpkin-slimy hair, and when Tony made for his knees just like before Steve stopped him, turned him, sank to his knees instead. He didn't have a lot of experience, fumbled his way to dragging down Tony's sweats and the underwear beneath, shifted awkwardly on his knees against the hard cement floor as he looked up at him. There was no doubt in Steve's mind that Tony had been on the receiving end of this countless times in his life but he looked sort of surprised anyway, gasped in a breath as Steve touched his tongue to the head of his cock for the first time and wrapped his fingers around the base. A few more seconds, a few more tentative licks with the tip of his tongue and Tony was hard in his hand and gripping tight at the edge of the worktop; Steve sucked at him experimentally, made Tony buck forward with his hips as he stroked him not terribly smoothly but that seemed just fine. He guessed he needed practice but Tony seemed to like it - he came with a shiver, a gasp, a hitching breath and a moan that he didn't bother to hide as Steve swallowed around him. Apparently, he wasn't as bad at this as he'd thought. That or Tony was easy to please.
The rest they didn't do in the workshop. In fact, the rest came later - Tony pulled him out of the party and dragged him to his room, stripped him right out of the Han Solo costume and told him then in no uncertain terms just exactly what he wanted him to do. He produced a tube of lube and a packet of condoms from a drawer there by the bed, rolled a condom onto him quickly then slicked the both of them while Steve watched, rapt. Steve took him from behind, bent over the desk in the corner of the room. It probably shouldn't have felt as good as it did, considering Steve wasn't sure he'd stopped his near full-body blush the whole time. But it was good. Surprisingly so. It was a good thing Tony wasn't going to remember.
---
Part Two
Pairing: Steve/Tony
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 16,905
Summary/Notes: From the cap_ironman Halloween prompt table, (9. Tony tries alternate methods of pumpkin carving). Not exactly limited to that, though, since nearly 17,000 words of carving a pumpkin would be a little odd at best - an Avengers Halloween turns into Groundhog Day. Late because of the word count!
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October 31st that year was nothing to write home about, or wouldn't have been had Steve actually been away from home for it. Tony once had been, a couple of years prior; Steve had gotten transatlantic text messages all night long about how the British really hadn't quite embraced the Halloween ethic, that trick-or-treating was at best a drab affair in the British Isles and he'd seen more convincing costumes on second-graders than the men and women at the party he'd been invited to attend on his business trip. Steve had snickered on the couch in front of the Halloween movie marathon Peter had set up, refraining from informing Tony (whose Bela Lugosi vampire outfit was unlikely to win him any prizes itself, judging from the picture messages) that Halloween had come a long way since he'd been young - he definitely couldn't recall bucketfuls of candy or five-year-olds dressed as the living dead, and as usual he said nothing about the rampant commercialisation of any and all vaguely meaningful holidays, or the steady Americanisation of British culture that he was pleased hadn't extended to the people at that party spending hundreds of dollars on latex, modelling themselves into perfect zombies or werewolves, Freddy Krueger or convention-level Klingons.
Peter hadn't appreciated him interrupting Friday the 13th with his snickering and the unfortunately loud keypad tones of his cellphone that no one could figure out how to turn off - honestly, though, it was no more annoying than the way Logan insisted on crunching his popcorn, or the phone that kept ringing in the other room with MJ's friends calling to congratulate her on landing the part in the play she'd just auditioned for. Then a gang of overzealous, overfunded and thankfully underplanned self-styled supervillains had attempted to rob a bank (only to wind up holding an upmarket restaurant hostage in a more than usual display of villainous ineptitude), someone blew up a subway station and a helicopter crash-landed in Central Park; come to think of it, after that he'd never found out how the movie ended. They were kept reasonably busy for the rest of the night, spread all over the city in costumes that had nothing to do with Halloween. When he got back, he had fourteen unread texts on his phone, all from Tony and none of them acknowledging the fact that Steve hadn't replied for the last four and a half hours, probably because Tony hadn't noticed. He was amused but not terribly surprised.
Looking back, that had been the single most eventful Halloween they'd had in years. That year, however, was nothing special at all. Except perhaps for the fact that it started roughly three months too early.
It all started with drawings.
Drawings at least he could understand because that was what he did; a lot of the time he was the vaguely creepy blonde guy stationed at that spare bench at the back of Tony's workshop, playing with a box of art supplies roughly the size and weight of Kentucky while Tony... did whatever it was that people called what Tony did. It was too frenetic for tinkering, too definite for experimentation, that strange kind of otherworldly genius in his creations that Steve knew he shouldn't have felt so comfortable around if only because he'd never felt quite so at ease with Bruce or Reed or the myriad geniuses of his acquaintance. But he'd sit there in Tony's workshop for hours on end, set up an easel in there once and Tony had barely batted a lash in his direction while Steve played with his new oil paints and made just about as much mess in his own way as Tony usually did. He never asked what exactly had compelled Tony to make that space for him there. He figured friends didn't question friends' motives.
Steve knew drawing. Of course, Steve's drawings didn't usually find their way out onto every flat surface (and a few not so flat ones, too, if the leftover Chinese food sitting there on the workbench leaking grease into a couple of them was the yardstick they were measuring by) the way that Tony's had. Suddenly one doodle had spawned twenty full-sized sketches, all from that initial two minutes' work on the back of a business card that really hadn't been big enough for doodling in the first place, especially not with that overly flashy fountain pen of Tony's since all it did was bleed blue-black ink into the heavy stock and make the little picture look extremely sad indeed. Tony had pinned the card up on his bulletin board and stared at it that afternoon while Steve pretended he wasn't staring at Tony staring at it. Then the drawing had started in earnest. Suddenly there were pumpkin faces everywhere.
Steve knew drawing, knew the creative process; he knew that Tony's engineering was at least as much about aesthetics as it was the mechanical because otherwise the suit, the Suit, would never have looked the way it did. He hadn't been forced to make it in red and gold, after all, and no one could tell Steve that the principles of aerodynamics had been drawn upon heavily in the styling of that faceplate. Of course, Tony had never been designing pumpkins before, like this was a perfectly normal facet of their everyday life and not just another of his eccentricities where they'd come in from a mission or MJ's new play and find Tony had emailed out a poll to every last Avenger to help him decide which of his current favourites was the best. This was a novelty, especially for the middle of a wonderfully warm August - a mercifully quiet August, too, quiet to the point where Peter had started suggesting that all the bad guys who weren't currently deceased or in maximum security were probably off sunbathing on a private Caribbean island. Steve had been stuck with that image in his head for the rest of the day no matter what he did to dislodge it, so it was really only fitting that he scar poor Peter for life with a quick cartoon planted in his jacket pocket: Dr. Doom sipping piña coladas on a sun terrace with a worryingly tiny Speedo on over the armour, flanked by Bullseye and a sunburned Doc Ock.
Still, Steve hadn't quite been able to see why Tony was contemplating chilly October nights of encroaching ground frost and the over-average chance of rain, or a night that would probably bring out the villains en masse. Perhaps not the big ones - Victor Von Doom did have a well-documented flair for the dramatic, that much was true, but Steve had a feeling that wheeling out the Doombots on All Hallows Eve wasn't quite his style. He tended to prefer to ruin Christmas, they'd found, presumably something to do with his parents not giving Poor Little Victor that private robot army he'd been hinting at all year, or maybe it was just one holiday too far after Halloween and Thanksgiving in rapid succession; still, it was a little difficult to imagine him giving thanks for anything at all, especially not in monarchist Latveria, and the idea of Dr. Doom enjoying Halloween was a little too far-fetched even for Steve's vivid imagination.
This was probably why Peter found himself with a growing collection of Steven Rogers originals, Doom maliciously incinerating a turkey, Doom trick-or-treating with the Green Goblin and Magneto. Pete told him he might want to quit drawing all the cute little Victor Von Dooms if he didn't want everyone in the building to assume he had some kind of secret crush, but Steve thought the really worrying part was the pumpkin bombs showering candy over Manhattan like little burst piñatas. It all probably had something to do with the fact that by that point they were well into September and there were so many pictures everywhere he went that it was eerily like a million pumpkin eyes were following his every move. Obviously he was cracking up. Tony's pet project was stealing his sanity.
And then came the pumpkins.
At first it was just a couple of small ones, two tiny little things sitting there on the kitchen counter when Steve went to make coffee one morning. It was early October by then, at least, not the middle of summer and with all the drawings around he supposed he'd seen it coming; the odd part was that post-coffee he went for a run in the park and when he got back perhaps an hour later, all the drawings were gone. And there were the pumpkins sitting on the counter right where they had been, only now there were creepy little faces drawn on them oh-so-precisely in permanent black marker.
A couple more turned up each day after that and Jarvis started to cook more pumpkin dishes than Steve had ever dreamed possible - a couple of weeks and Steve and Pete and Logan were secretly conspiring to smuggle in pizza or burgers or even the vaguely toxic-smelling hotdogs that may have had a passing acquaintance with actual meat from the dodgy-looking vendor down the block, anything that wasn't orange or seemed a little like eating the remains of Tony's little science projects. Maybe it was a little strange that no one had really questioned what exactly Tony was doing in all that time but really, it was far from the strangest thing he'd ever done and when they saw him he seemed normal enough, or as normal as Tony ever got. He even ditched the sushi Pepper brought in sometimes and joined the rest of them in their mountains of greasy, cheesy pizza, and whenever Steve was in the workshop, it always seemed like Tony was working on something mechanical rather than doodling a progression of disturbing little faces on large orange gourds. Steve started to wonder if schizophrenia wasn't just around the corner, for one of them or the other. Perhaps both.
Then, at last, the day came. Tony stayed home from the office and after Steve's morning jog they had breakfast together while the others wandered in and out of the room, grabbing coffee or pastries or cereal or fruit on their way to wherever they were going, even if it was just back to their rooms to snooze or play with their Halloween costumes. Tony reminded them all there was a party scheduled for that evening, which explained why Pepper was perhaps more firmly glued to her PDA and her Blackberry than usual and was maybe a little wired on Tony's favourite espresso, and that costumes were most definitely required. Preferably ones that had as little to do with their other costumes as humanly possible. Steve just sat back through it all, sipping his coffee with a smile as he watched Tony play the perfect lord of the manor; once everyone else had shuffled on out, Steve read the newspaper at the kitchen table and got newsprint all over his fingers while Tony sat there and gazed off distractedly at the window rather than out of it - the Extremis probably had him tuned into three different newspapers online while he checked his email and played poker with a banker in Belgium, knowing him. All things considered, it was a pretty good sort of a morning.
The day went on. Steve's schedule wasn't exactly bulging at the seams so he worked out for a while then took a long, leisurely shower, replied to some email and played a little Solitaire, insisted on helping Jarvis out in the kitchen and narrowly avoided Hurricane Pepper and her attendant flurry of caterers as he headed to the workshop bearing coffee and sandwiches; no doubt Tony had long since lapsed into Tony-space, the place where both time and hunger apparently ceased to exist until someone came in bearing caffeine and something edible, preferably with a large proportion of meat. Something exploded as he approached the door, with a moderate bang and a wet kind of popping sound, and he supposed had he not known that at any time there was likely to be any number of odd or worrying sounds coming from Tony's workshop he might have been wearing a large, burning coffee stain all down his otherwise perfectly white t-shirt, jumping at the shock. He caught himself in time, however, and when he got through the door, Tony was scraping pumpkin off his forehead while quite a lot more of it dripped down his shirt. Pepper, who'd managed to sneak up on him, took one look inside the room and turned right back the other way. Steve honestly couldn't say he blamed her. He put down the plate and cups on the nearest flat surface that wasn't spattered with pumpkin goo and raised his brows at Tony.
"Was it evil?" he asked, gesturing at the remains of the pumpkin shell that was sitting on the desktop, though honestly the majority of it was layered all over Tony in stringy lengths mixed with bits of seeds. "Did it have to die?"
Tony pulled off his goggles and glared at Steve. Unfortunately for Tony, the fact that he was dripping pumpkin onto the floor off his tanktop and sweats did nothing at all for Steve taking him seriously. Tony shook his head; pumpkin slid out of his hair and hit the floor at his feet with a wet, solid splat. Steve wandered over to the cabinet across the room and tossed him a towel, though that was mostly just to hide his smile for a moment, however brief it may have been.
"I guess now I know not to use a laser cutter on a fruit," Tony muttered, attempting to rid his hair of the orange goop. He really succeeded only in rubbing it in further and Steve watched him as he leaned back against the nearest unsplattered wall, trying not to plan another cartoon for Peter's collection, thankfully this time omitting Dr. Doom. Unfortunately for all concerned, his imagination got the better of him and soon he headed over to his bench at the far side of the room, grabbed a pencil as he sat and started a quick sketch. Tony followed him over like a rat half-drowned in orange soda, dripping an unfortunate trail of pumpkin innards all over the floor that Jarvis was not going to find amusing in the least. Steve had a feeling he'd end up cleaning it up himself instead, just to keep Jarvis from despair and Pepper's head from exploding much like he imagined the pumpkin had, only without the aid of Tony's ill-conceived laser cutter carving method. For a genius, sometimes his logic left a lot to be desired.
"You know, traditionally you're meant to take out the insides first," Steve told him, with a smile he didn't try to conceal, glancing up from his drawing board to where Tony was standing, currently yanking off his pumpkin-smeared shirt. It sounded horribly wet as it hit the floor by his feet and Steve found himself making the exact same face that Peter had when he'd found that first cartoon. It wasn't pretty at all.
"Oh, so that's where I went wrong," Tony said, in his favourite tone of well-honed sarcasm, though he seemed to be having a tough time keeping a wry smile from his face. "I never would have thought of that. Thank you, Cap, High King of the Pumpkin Carvers."
"You can mock me all you like, Tony. I'm not the one who's covered in orange goo."
Tony sighed dramatically and sat himself down on a stool nearby, still attempting to towel himself off. It wasn't working at all, just seemed to be making him progressively stickier and stickier though the array of pumpkin debris at his feet seemed to grow and grow with an intermittent sort of slimy slapping sound in accompaniment. Steve watched him out of the corner of his eye as he drew; he could almost see the wheels turning in Tony's head, going over every little thing he'd done wrong (though Steve would have had to say ‘using hi-tech electrical equipment on a foodstuff' was the only point that mattered), replanning the carving of the pumpkin it had taken him nearly three months to design until Steve took pity on him and abandoned the drawing only half coloured on the desk. With a hefty sigh he left the bench and the two of them spent the rest of the caffeine-fuelled afternoon carving Tony's precious pumpkin. This time without the laser cutter, though somehow they both ended up thoroughly covered anyway - Steve strongly suspected that was mostly Tony's doing.
The party that night went off without a hitch, all of the Avengers and a not inconsiderable number of their friends and acquaintances all dressed up and chatting over overly expensive party nibbles when really all most of them wanted was a paper plate of cocktail sausages and cheese on sticks. It seemed the open bar went down a treat, on the other hand, and Steve couldn't say he was terribly surprised. Logan, with a little more hair than was normal even for him, was propping up said bar dressed as a rather convincing werewolf, making less convincing small talk with a couple of visiting X-Men; Pete and MJ had retreated to a corner with Peter's aunt May, the three of them dressed like something out of the 1920s; Jan and Hank seemed to be the king and queen of the party dressed as Antony and Cleopatra; and Tony... well, Tony had apparently decided against vampirism that particular year and had gone instead for dressing himself up as a Jedi. Steve was convinced that if he hadn't put so much time and effort into designing the admittedly rather unsettling pumpkin that was currently sitting on the counter in the kitchen, the candle inside it having gone out twice already and started to scorch what was left of the poor pumpkin's flesh inside, he probably could've built himself a fully-functional lightsaber to go with the rest of his costume. Instead, he was whipping out what was apparently a genuine Star Wars movie prop at every opportunity and got into a plastic swordfight with Reed Richards, who it seemed had decided to come as D'Artagnan. Steve was just glad Tony hadn't convinced Pepper to turn up as Princess Leia, though Steve himself made a rather dashing Han Solo. It all went surprisingly well, especially considering some of their past parties.
In fact, the only problem was when the caterers ran out of the odd little hors d'oeuvres that Tony liked, that and Johnny Storm and his little accident with the vodka; fortunately his sister had managed to put out the resulting fire rather quickly, but Tony would still be buying a new rug if the scorch mark and lingering smell of burned wool in the air was anything to go by. Slowly, everyone started to leave or retire to their rooms, leaving just a handful of them sitting around in the lounge sipping beers or coffees as the late night wore on into the early morning. Tony's Jedi cloak was missing in action and MJ's little black bobbed chorus girl wig was abandoned somewhere behind a couch - Jan kept insisting that the poor girl's red hair clashed terribly with her outfit and once Peter had dropped his aunt off at home, he managed to get into a giggle fit that lasted on and off for over an hour over something Steve said that really wasn't funny, so he was the one interrupting the movie that year. Even if it was just something quite genuinely appalling that Tony had dredged out of a secret collection of bad 70s horror.
Steve finally ambled off to bed one and a half movies later, somewhere about 3am, muttering something about never needing to see Plan 9 From Outer Space again in his life as Pete and MJ fell asleep on the couch and Tony started playing twenty questions with Logan - Steve didn't think it was exactly a fair match, considering Tony was probably the ultimate in quiz show cheating bearing in mind the fact he could Google in his head; Logan didn't seem to mind, however, as he lounged there peeling off sections of fake werewolf hair with one hand, cradling a beer in the other. Steve closed the door behind him, folded his costume and set it down on a chair, brushed his teeth and sank into bed.
It had been a long, long day, and relatively uneventful by their standards. Of course, by that point they'd moved on into the next day and the next month; it was technically November 1st. And that, not Halloween, was when it happened.
The clock stopped at two minutes to four. He knew this because he was watching it, the clock's luminous green face and its steady ticking just about as soothing as counting sheep and usually more effective at sending him off to sleep. At 03:58:04, the clock stopped ticking. The second hand stopped moving, didn't even quiver. Steve stared at it for a moment, wondering if the batteries had died or maybe it was the clock itself - it wouldn't have been the first time, since the clock had a nasty habit of giving up just at the wrong moment. Tony had nagged him more than once to just go on and get a digital one instead, but he preferred the old style display, found something comforting about it in a bizarre sort of way. Until it did this, of course.
He changed the batteries with the spares he had in the drawer by his bed; still nothing. He shook it - a fascinating facet of modern technology was that apparently there was a fair to good chance that it would work if you shook it, hit it, kicked it or otherwise abused it, or just turned it off and on again. That didn't work, however, and he resolved to go out the next day and buy himself a digital alarm clock that wouldn't have that horrible habit of dying miserably in the middle of the night, though he supposed he knew he'd never do it. He lay back down, sighed, pulled up the covers and stared up at the ceiling, settling into silence. Which was when he knew that something was wrong.
The walls there were supposed to be soundproof, that was true. The windows, too, they were apparently designed specifically to keep out the noise that would otherwise have filtered in from outside, all those usual city sounds like the sirens and the car horns, the kind of noises that blended together after a while into a sort of inimitable New York buzz that lurked there in the background through every moment of the day and night, the same backdrop to the day no matter the season, varying only in volume with the time of day. The walls and the windows were supposed to keep it out but all the same there was usually something there that Steve could hear, and he guessed if he could hear it then it was probably just about enough to drive Logan mad, or madder at least. But right then, he couldn't hear it. He couldn't hear Peter snoring softly on the couch the way he usually did or Tony's bright laughter, Logan grumbling under his breath in that way Steve supposed should have seemed vaguely threatening at some point but never really had. There was nothing, not even the white noise of the city. There was silence.
He left the bed. Quite honestly he wasn't entirely sure what exactly the problem was; as far as he knew Tony hadn't fixed the soundproofing and he hadn't eaten anything that the others hadn't, drunk anything they hadn't, so unless they were all also suffering a bizarre kind of vague hearing loss, vague because he could still hear himself and when he dropped the damn alarm clock on the floor he could hear that too, then he guessed there was something a little odd going on. Likely more than a little odd because when he crossed to the window, shivering as he went and that was odd in itself considering the heating there was usually very good, nothing was moving outside. Nothing. It wasn't just that the road was deserted, which was perhaps strange even for 4am, but there was an eerie kind of stillness out there, like nothing was moving, like the air was still right down to the atom, like Steve Rogers was the only living thing with any motion in the whole damn city. Perhaps he was, and that thought disturbed him, so much he turned and bolted for the bedroom door, reached for the handle and woke in bed to his 6am alarm.
It didn't feel like a dream, not at all, the sudden influx of sound around him jarring once he'd woken to the persistent beep of the alarm clock that a couple of minutes earlier hadn't been working at all. He could hear the cars outside, the hum of motors was faint but present, the coffee maker burbling into life in the kitchen and the shower running, probably Peter though that seemed odd for a Saturday morning, definitely not Tony or Logan. He got out of bed, frowned at the blue pajama pants he didn't remember putting on but guessed he must have, pulled on a t-shirt and headed for the kitchen.
There should have been glasses everywhere, plates and napkins, some sign that a party had occurred there quite recently and the high-class caterers had turned out to be somewhat less than inclined to assist in tidying the mess they'd helped to make. There was nothing, except for a copy of his favourite newspaper sitting at his usual place at the kitchen table, the coffeemaker making its oddly comforting low rumbling sound on the counter, filling the room with the glorious smell of espresso.
"Morning, Cap," Peter greeted him as he wandered into the room, hair still damp from the shower. Steve blinked at him dumbly for a moment, feeling horrendously out of sync though not entirely sure what that meant, but Peter was far too absorbed in the daily Avengers ritual of coffee-worship to notice that Steve seemed out of sorts. Or that it was shortly after 6am and he wasn't outside somewhere in the rapidly cooling streets, jogging like he usually did. Tony still ribbed him about that on occasion, something about there being treadmills in the gym and that way he wouldn't have to be dodging angry dogs or rollerbladers all the time, the blonde girl with the crush on him who he seemed to see every morning without fail. Steve liked to jog, though, and treadmills took a lot out of it, gave him one less reason to get out and actually feel like a normal human being for a few minutes of the day. There was something about being Captain America that had always set him apart from everyone else in a way; however much he understood it was a necessity, that didn't make it easy to swallow all the time. He needed connection - there were just times when Tony didn't seem to understand that the two of them fighting over the remote didn't actually count as that connection. It was something, yes, maybe something valuable, but Tony Stark was hardly representative of the United States as a whole.
Peter handed him a mug of coffee; Steve accepted it gratefully and took a seat at the table. He picked up the paper. The date on it was the 31st.
"Peter, have you seen today's newspaper?" Steve asked, catching him as he was evidently heading back to the room he was sharing with MJ, bearing two cups of coffee and a slice of buttered toast.
Peter turned back to him with a shrug. "I thought that was today's."
"It's the 31st's," Steve told him, holding it up to show him the front page, the same article about corruption in the DA's office that he'd read the previous morning.
"And that's wrong... because?"
Steve frowned. "Because that was yesterday, Pete."
"Uh, okay." Peter frowned right back at him. "I think you're imagining things, Cap. I mean, just wait till Tony gets up, I bet the first thing he does is remind you to wear a costume tonight that doesn't come with a shield or too many stars." He paused and took a sip of his coffee, lounging there against the doorframe like Steve wasn't staring at him oddly. "What are you wearing, anyway? MJ got us these great suits from the play she's in. I don't look a lot like Al Capone but maybe I can pull off Generic 30s Gangster even if I'd probably make a better Eliot Ness."
Steve was understandably more concerned with what it was that Peter was saying underneath all the idle costume banter than reminding him he'd actually been alive at the time of Prohibition.
"You're telling me it's Halloween?" he said.
Peter nodded. "I'm telling you it's Halloween."
"And I'm telling you that was yesterday." Steve sighed, rubbed at his eyes with one hand. "I remember it. Tony blew up a pumpkin and Johnny Storm set the rug on fire, the one Tony brought back from Nepal."
"The one that looks like Picasso painting a tiger eating a monkey?"
Steve nodded. Peter, however, just looked at him quite like one or both of them had lost their mind but wasn't sure which. Steve was quietly starting to believe that one of them had, and it was probably himself, when MJ came in, in search of her coffee and toast.
"MJ, what day is it?"
She frowned as she snagged the toast from Peter and took a big bite. "It's Halloween," she said. "Why?"
Steve winced. "I think we'd better wake Tony."
Peter nodded. "Stay right there," he told him, and MJ took a seat at the table as she eyed the both suspiciously. "MJ, stay with Cap. I'll be right back."
He retreated from the room muttering something about being an extra in a Bill Murray flick. Steve got the sinking feeling that he wasn't far wrong.
"That's not possible," Tony said, the first and second days.
"That's not possible!" Steve said, the third, fourth and fifth days, doing his very best impression of Tony. Tony didn't look anything close to amused, though everyone else in the room did, quite a lot. Then again, Tony was the only one who knew that had been exactly what he'd been about to say.
Tony scanned the building; Bruce scanned Steve. Neither of them came up with anything out of the ordinary, or at least out of the ordinary for the Avengers' HQ and Captain America. Steve was definitely Steve and it was definitely Halloween and yet Steve could tell them all exactly what was going to happen; Tony had to admit that yes, he'd been thinking of using his laser cutter to carve his blessed pumpkin and when MJ got home she'd gotten the part, not to mention the fact that while the party went ahead because hell if anyone could find anything wrong aside from the obvious fact that Steve was reliving a day, Steve was on hand ready with the fire extinguisher when, with the aid of Tony's best vodka, Johnny Storm set the rug on fire. They all sat around in the lounge afterwards, debating the feasibility of a time loop versus Steve suddenly being precognizant or deciding that April Fools' Day now somehow fell in late October. Steve wasn't sure he could've planned all this if he'd tried.
He watched the clock. At 3:58am, the clock stopped. Everything stopped - there was no talking, though Tony had been on his usual technobabble roll on the phone to Reed Richards, no movement; when Steve leaned over and pressed his fingertips to the space just under Tony's jaw, where his pulse should have been pumping hard just underneath the surface, there was nothing. He was cold, his skin retaining the shape of the tips of Steve's fingers like some kind of human clay when he moved away. He didn't want this. He felt sick. This was almost panic. It was happening again.
He woke with his alarm at 6am. Then they did it all again. And again. And again.
He'd seen Groundhog Day enough times before then, ironically, and that one episode of Stargate: SG-1, the Mystery Spot ep of the show that MJ liked so much though they pretty much all suspected that was just because she had a crush on Jared Padalecki. Unfortunately, each movie or show had a different take on the mechanics of what was happening within it - SG-1 had it down as some kind of alien mechanism and while Steve wasn't exactly a charter member of the fan club for Skrulls, he had a feeling they weren't in the business of tinkering with time or persecuting him in particular. Supernatural blamed it on a maybe-demon called Loki - Thor assured him, had assured him numerous times on numerous iterations of that godforsaken Halloween since oddly it seemed he was always the first to believe him, that it just couldn't be their Loki that was doing this. There was a long, complicated explanation as to why, steeped in mythology that Steve found himself curiously understanding less and less as the days went by, but when Thor sounded so very definite it was extremely tough not to believe him. At least that was one possibility that he could set aside.
He supposed in the end, in his philosophical moments that started to come with more and more alarming a frequency as the days or day went by, much like the movies and the shows in which it happened the trick was to find the definition that fit his universe. Unfortunately for Steve, he lived in a universe where gods and monsters, aliens and bizarre new technologies all existed, not to mention magic and that indefinable something that could, admittedly infrequently but even so, just mean the whole goshdarn universe was out to get you. It was difficult to know what to do, especially when it seemed that his friends just couldn't help even with all their combined effort. Maybe if they'd had more time, he thought, more than 6am one day to not quite 4am the next, not even 24 hours and even less when factoring in how he had to sit them down and convince them day after day that this really was what was happening, the serum in his blood hadn't finally driven him out of his mind, he wasn't secretly a Skrull and no one had him under mind control. He could remember the day that hadn't yet happened but for him had happened twenty, thirty times by then. Even sleeping through that time made not one tiny iota of difference. He just wished he knew why it was happening.
After the first forty-three days, he just stopped trying to convince anyone. He took a day off and ate ice cream in bed while watching MJ's DVDs of Grey's Anatomy, then went to the party and got good and hammered on an epic run on tequila slammers with Logan and Carol and someone's cousin who actually didn't quite look old enough to drink. Tony kept eyeing him oddly from across the room and Steve felt progressively guiltier and guiltier as the night wore on; Tony extricated him from Logan's hard-drinking clutches around midnight and took him to his room. Throwing up three pints of chocolate ice cream and a most of a bottle of tequila while Tony, dressed as a Jedi, rubbed his back in an oddly comforting manner, had never been high on his to-do list. Right then he knew exactly why.
He passed out in bed, fully clothed and clinging sickly to an oddly accommodating Tony sometime around 3am. When his alarm woke him at six, he had no trace of a hangover. Tony was gone. It was Halloween again, and he felt like he'd wasted a day. He told himself that wasn't something he'd be doing again.
Perhaps that was why he started it all again. He wasn't trying to convince anyone, he was past that point, had it down to a fine art stored up in the back of his head so that if, by some miracle, he happened to come across a solution before he lost his mind entirely, he'd be able to sit them down and run up the flag of Universal Explanation to enlist their help with relative speed. But, for a start, that wasn't what he did; if movies had taught him anything it was if at first nothing big leapt out to be corrected he should examine each and every last facet of his day to make sure there wasn't some infinitesimally minute detail that he'd overlooked, someone he was supposed to help, somewhere he was supposed to be, something he was supposed to do that was keeping him from moving on past four hours into November. It might have seemed a daunting task if he hadn't been facing multiple Halloweens stretching on and on into infinity. At the very least, it gave him a purpose that wasn't connected with ice cream and liquor and Tony Stark fetching him bottles of expensive imported mineral water to ward off the hangover that was never going to come.
Fourteen days later, he knew just about everything there was to know about everyone who ever entered or left the building on a regular basis, his fellow Avengers and visitors and staff. Twenty after that he'd been on first name terms (albeit briefly) with the parents and siblings and co-workers and high school sweethearts of just about everyone who'd come in for the party that night, including the catering staff and every taxi driver who'd been involved in dropping off or collecting their guests. There was nothing, aside from a few people he'd probably be calling on should this day ever end, alcoholics and a girl whose long-lost sister he'd somehow managed to track down. He was drawing a blank.
After that, he moved further afield. Slowly, he met everyone he could, sat strangers down for coffee, prevented every crime one by one that he could recall from the thousands reported to the city police that day, then quite a few besides that hadn't been. Nothing changed at all, not with anything he did, all the people that he saved, all the effort he exerted; each and every morning it was October 31st again and Steve could just have screamed. In the end, he did. He went ahead and broke things after some brief and not-so-careful consideration, starting with his alarm clock, only for them to reappear as if by magic the next morning, that morning, the same morning every single day. There was that same odd stillness there at two minutes to four, exactly four minutes and fifty-three seconds of it if his count was correct, and then suddenly it was 6am again.
Something needed to change. So then he just stopped trying, at least for a little while.
Days got more interesting after that, somehow. He spent an hour in the grocery store buying all the different kinds of fruits he could find and tried them all at lunch while Tony and Pepper both looked at him like he'd turned into an ape or told them he was giving up the shield and going into NASCAR. He spent a fortnight perfecting his chess game, crewed a catamaran and dyed his hair black. He got a tattoo one day, decided he hated it and was actually vaguely thankful for the first time in as long as he could remember that in the morning the day was just going to start over, no harm no foul and without the presence of a rather unfortunate-looking Japanese symbol there on his bicep. He'd always thought they were a faintly bad idea, especially when most of the people that had them didn't actually speak Japanese, but as a learning experience it served him quite well. He wouldn't be doing it again, after all, and wouldn't have to wonder if he'd been missing out all those years.
So then he learned Japanese. CDs from the local bookstore only went so far but he had Logan to help out, Logan who thankfully wouldn't be remembering the six weeks of free conversation classes he gave between beers and griping and protestations that if he wanted to learn Japanese he should just suck it up and go to Japan. The tattoo had been mistranslated mumbo-jumbo, as it turned out. He couldn't say he was exactly surprised. Given the overall cleanliness of the parlour he'd been to, he considered it a miracle he hadn't dropped dead of some kind of poisoning fifteen minutes after leaving.
He kissed Carol, which ultimately wasn't worth the broken rib she gave him just on reflex, even if it went ahead and healed miraculously by the next morning. He spent two days straight playing some kind of ultra-violent video game, finding it curiously satisfying to massacre zombies with a shotgun even if the controls for it had been completely incomprehensible for the first six or seven hours; after that it just clicked into place and by the time Logan wandered in to sit himself down in front of a sports channel until the party was ready to go, Steve was wholly unwilling to give up the TV for sports news or possibly horror movies. His thumbs may have ached like he was over eighty in body as well as technical age, but if he ever needed to defeat villainy via the medium of Resident Evil, he was all set.
Ordinarily, in any one week he'd spend maybe an few hours with a sketchpad and a box of pencils, lounging on the couch while Logan grumbled over hockey scores and Peter worked on lesson plans at the table. Since the start of Halloween he was sort of surprised and conversely sort of not to find that he'd been almost actively avoiding spending any time sketching at all - it wasn't that he felt he had to have something to show for every time he sat down to draw, but still the prospect of drawing something and finding he was really proud of the finished result only to have it vanish into the ether was vaguely galling. The only problem with that was that by that point he was heading past a hundred days or more at least and that was a long time to be without his favourite pastime. He went down to the park, bundled up in his jacket and scarf and one glove, wishing faintly that he could draw with gloves on both hands. He sat by the kitchen window and sketched the view from it idly as he hummed along with the bad Halloween radio show that he'd heard fifty times before by that point. Then he went down to Tony's workshop and sketched Tony with the laser cutter, knowing full well that in a few minutes it was going to blow up a poor, unsuspecting pumpkin all over him.
Right on cue, it did exactly that. Steve hadn't actually seen the look on Tony's face at the moment it happened before, he'd always been outside the room, and he had a feeling it was going to be a couple of years of that day before he forgot one tiny detail of it. Tony cursed rather colourfully, shook his head and splattered pumpkin parts all over the floor like a dog shaking off water and managed to catch Pepper's new shoes as she peeked through the door. Wisely, and just as usual, she turned around and went the other way while Tony pulled off his goggles and looked over at Steve as if daring him to say something. He refrained. He had a feeling he knew what Tony's reaction would have been if he'd said anything and potentially amusing as that might have been, he decided against it.
He went back to his drawing, adding in the pumpkin, catching it mid-explosion and amending the look on sketch-Tony's face to something approaching what it had been in real life, perfect comic horror that made Steve smile even when he knew Tony was peering over his shoulder. Of course, one of the main ways he knew that Tony was peering over his shoulder was that a wet, stringy strand of pumpkin hit his shoulder and managed to slither its way under the neck of his t-shirt. It oozed right down his back and thankfully caught at the waist of his jeans. He supposed it served him right.
"I guess you found that amusing," Tony said, pulling off his shirt. He dropped it to the ground by Steve's desk, wincing at the rather horrific sound it made weighed down with all that wet, pumpkin-smelling mess.
Steve smiled rather broadly, despite the fact he was wiping pumpkin from the small of his back with a tissue from the desktop. "Actually, I did," he said. "I guess now you know not to use a laser cutter on a fruit."
Tony looked at him oddly; Steve knew exactly why, considering he was repeating exactly what Tony had told him that very first day of pumpkin-explosion. Fortunately he seemed to shrug it off and started his traditional attempt at towelling unfortunate-smelling orange goo off his skin while Steve watched him do it for at least the twentieth time. The pumpkin clung to the same places each time, he thought, part of a seed lodged in Tony's hair by his ear, bits collecting at the waist of his sweats until he tried to rub it away with the towel and succeeded only in pushing it down under them a little, a fact he acknowledged every time with an unhappy sort of sound and a look on his face almost as amusing as the one Steve had down on the page.
Then he put down his pencil and leaned over. He licked lightly at Tony's exposed abdomen, an almost horizontal line just above the waistband of his sweats - it just seemed like the thing to do at the time, even if the angle strained Steve's neck a little, even if he tasted of raw pumpkin and that was hardly the most tempting taste in the world. Even if he hurt himself, he only had to make it to 3:58am and that particular slate would be wiped clean.
"Steve, what are you doing?" Tony asked a moment later, setting his hands at his hips but not actually moving away from him. Steve supposed that should've told him something, supposed it should've been his cue to stop but honestly, that was the first time in a week of Halloweens, two weeks, three, he was losing count, that he'd felt anything like excitement.
He looked up at him from his awkward angle, his neck cracking uncomfortably. "I would've thought that was obvious," he said. And he licked him again just to make sure they both understood. It seemed they did.
That wasn't the day that they slept together. Eventually, once Steve had dipped his tongue into Tony's navel and made him shiver, grazed his nearest nipple with his teeth and traced his still sticky abdomen with his fingertips, he pulled back and somehow went on just as if nothing had happened at all. Tony eyed him oddly as they carved that same damn pumpkin Steve could've carved in his sleep by then, but otherwise he played along. Steve was glad; he needed some time to process what he'd done. He was surprised to find just how much time it didn't take.
The next day, he kissed him. He waited until lunchtime, until he heard the then familiar sound of pumpkin explosion inside Tony's workshop, shooed Pepper away and then let himself in; he said nothing, not a word, just stepped right up to him with an unfortunate kind of slip on a big glob of exploded pumpkin and the next thing either of them knew Steve's mouth was colliding with Tony's, awkward and a little too hard. Tony blinked at him in bemusement like he wasn't a certified genius as Steve pulled back; Steve just frowned, sighed and walked back out the way he'd come. The next day was better, no slip, their mouths meeting slowly and Steve found he didn't even mind the pumpkin juice that was clinging to Tony's goatee, or that globs of it on his shirt that pressed wetly to Steve's as they moved closer together. Under the bright tang of pumpkin, Tony was warm and tasted like coffee. Steve couldn't even pretend to dislike it.
By the fifth day, he had the kiss down perfect and Steve was starting to wonder if pumpkin was in fact some kind of heretofore unknown aphrodisiac. He pulled off Tony's shirt and Tony let him, pulled off his own and dropped them both to the floor as he kissed him again. Bare skin on skin was thrilling even with the sticky pumpkin juice rubbing off on his chest and Tony didn't seem to mind much considering the way he pushed him up against the nearest bench, sucked at his nipples then promptly dropped to his knees and proceeded to give him one of the top five blowjobs of his life to date. Afterwards, they carved the damn pumpkin. They drank some coffee, ate bagels at the kitchen counter while the radio played every cheesy Halloweenish song they could think of and then some. He couldn't decide if he was surprised or not that there wasn't much between them that seemed to have changed because of what they'd done there in the workshop. It all seemed to make some weird kind of sense, at least as much as reliving the same day over and over and over. Apparently there wasn't much in the way of sense left in Steve's world.
It was the sixth day that they slept together. They kissed in the workshop, Steve's hands in Tony's pumpkin-slimy hair, and when Tony made for his knees just like before Steve stopped him, turned him, sank to his knees instead. He didn't have a lot of experience, fumbled his way to dragging down Tony's sweats and the underwear beneath, shifted awkwardly on his knees against the hard cement floor as he looked up at him. There was no doubt in Steve's mind that Tony had been on the receiving end of this countless times in his life but he looked sort of surprised anyway, gasped in a breath as Steve touched his tongue to the head of his cock for the first time and wrapped his fingers around the base. A few more seconds, a few more tentative licks with the tip of his tongue and Tony was hard in his hand and gripping tight at the edge of the worktop; Steve sucked at him experimentally, made Tony buck forward with his hips as he stroked him not terribly smoothly but that seemed just fine. He guessed he needed practice but Tony seemed to like it - he came with a shiver, a gasp, a hitching breath and a moan that he didn't bother to hide as Steve swallowed around him. Apparently, he wasn't as bad at this as he'd thought. That or Tony was easy to please.
The rest they didn't do in the workshop. In fact, the rest came later - Tony pulled him out of the party and dragged him to his room, stripped him right out of the Han Solo costume and told him then in no uncertain terms just exactly what he wanted him to do. He produced a tube of lube and a packet of condoms from a drawer there by the bed, rolled a condom onto him quickly then slicked the both of them while Steve watched, rapt. Steve took him from behind, bent over the desk in the corner of the room. It probably shouldn't have felt as good as it did, considering Steve wasn't sure he'd stopped his near full-body blush the whole time. But it was good. Surprisingly so. It was a good thing Tony wasn't going to remember.
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Part Two