Chapter Text
Here’s the thing. Tony’s not young anymore.
Sure, he’s not senile, but he’s well into middle age. He can admit that. As hard as it is to get started in the morning, the aches and pains that never really stop, the exhaustion… he has to admit it, otherwise he’d be ignoring the obvious and that would be stupid. And if there is one thing that Tony Stark is not, it is stupid.
Tony’s a genius.
But that’s beside the point, the point is that Tony’s not a kid anymore. Heck, he’s not even a young and virile man. He’s got crows feet, and grey hairs, and he’s got, well, responsibilities and common sense and all sorts of things that people who are middle aged have. He’s a very reasonable adult person. And as a reasonable adult person, he knows it’s stupid to expect anything, well, spectacular for his birthday.
Birthdays had been exciting things all his life. Not that he’d ever gotten what he really wanted, growing up. All the chemistry sets and mountain bikes and computer circuit boards in the world couldn’t make up for a lack of essential family time. He’d have given up every single gift he’d gotten ages one through eighteen (and there had been a lot, an uncountable amount from friends of his father’s and coworkers of his fathers, and men and women who wanted to make a good impression on the Heir of the Stark fortune. And then the few from Jarvis, and the few from his mother. Those would have been harder to give up, but he’d have made the sacrifice) to have had both of his parents, and Jarvis, and even Aunt Peggy, just spend one day a year with him, just being themselves, not getting rushed and pulled away by “important obligations, Tony. I just can’t make it today. Be a big boy and don’t cry, Tony. Stark men are made of Iron.”
Though that was mostly Howard. Maria had always made it to Tony’s parties, had, actually, always made Tony’s parties. They were always grand things, huge shindigs that brought the rafters down, where the presents were ostentatious and the cake decadent, and Tony had to pretend to like every minute of it because Stark Men Were mMade of Iron, even if Howard wasn’t even there to see him wilt under all the facades he had to keep up just to get through the day.
(After everyone had left and Maria had kissed him good night, Jarvis would sneak up to Tony’s room with a single cake he’d made himself, with a candle in it, and they’d have their own little celebration. Tony wouldn’t have traded that for the world.)
His sixteenth birthday had been a big one, huge, and by then he was drinking— albeit technically illegally since he was underage— and had almost completed several of his degrees at MIT, so he felt invincible and had been raucous and loud and probably a complete hellion through most of the party.
At least, that’s what Howard had told him the next day, followed by, “You’re a disappointment.”
What a great birthday gift from dear old dad. The only one he’d gotten from him that year. The lack of a physical gift from his Father was, by that age, expected.
Maria had given him a grand piano (said she’d had it specially made, just for him), and Jarvis had bought him copper wiring and circuit boards and a new set of needle-nosed pliers to replace the set Tony had lost the month previous.
Tony missed Jarvis, the original Jarvis, every day of his life. He loved JARVIS too, but man, he missed Jarvis.
Tony celebrated his twenty-first birthday by getting spectacularly and very publicly drunk. It was his first birthday not celebrated by a party at the Stark Family Mansion, at Tony’s request. Tony then had a repeat performance of that party (or at least the getting spectacularly and publicly drunk part) when Howard and Maria Stark died in a car accident later that year. The fact that Edwin Jarvis, the family’s butler, also died in that accident, didn’t make it to any of the news outlets, and if it was true that if Jarvis had survived Tony wouldn’t have fallen into the bottle with such unending panache, well, no one knew that either. It didn’t much matter to the world what would have happened to Tony if Edwin Jarvis, the Stark family Butler, hadn’t died the same night as Tony's parents, because he did die that night. They all died. And Tony’s life took a definite nose-dive in the following decade.
Birthday parties in Tony’s twenties and early thirties followed suit. They were loud and raucous and Tony delighted in being a hellion. There was always drinking, and strangers, and strippers, and godbless Rhodey for being there, and later, Pepper, and Happy, but they couldn’t stem the flow of gold-diggers and assholes. Except for those three people, anyone who’d come to one of Tony Stark’s famous birthday parties had to be someone after something. Money, attention, sex, power, a notch in the bedpost of the Tony Stark.
Tony didn’t like his birthday much. It was an excuse for a party, a very public one, and an excuse to drink himself under the table and forget what a fuck up he was, and pretend, like he pretended every other day of the goddamn year, that he was someone. Not someone important, or someone special, or someone who deserved love, because for all that he was a genius and a billionaire, he knew real worth didn’t depend on how much money he had in his wallet or how much power he had politically or how many times he could just say his name and get a get-out-of-jail-free-card. No, real worth was based on something else, some elusive thing that Tony didn’t have, and couldn’t get, because he didn’t even know what it was. So how could he be important or special or someone who deserved love if he didn’t have that?
And so his birthdays— his birthdays, because everyone expected Tony motherfucking Stark to have the biggest fucking bash for his birthday— became something spectacularly loud and garish and alcohol-influenced to hide the fact that Tony knew he wasn’t really someone good or special or worthy.
Obie didn’t help, and later, Tony found out why.
Pepper and Rhodey and even Happy tried to help, but Pepper and Happy were his employees and Rhodey, well, Rhodey was always out, wasn’t he? He was in the military. He had tours to do. The Air Force wasn’t likely to give the man the day off just because it was Tony Stark’s birthday.
Rhodey always sent him something in the mail. Something small and kitschy (a keychain, a bottle opener, a postcard) with a note, and honestly that part of his birthday always made him the happiest. Like Jarvis’s gifts, they actually meant something.
And then Afghanistan happened.
Tony was thirty-eight and still acting like he was young and full of vim and vigor when all he was was desperate and lying to himself, and his thirty-eighth birthday party had been just as X-rated and disgusting as all of his previous birthdays, aged twenty-one onward. When Tony was in that cave with shrapnel eating its way through his chest he thought, fleetingly, of how nice it would have been to have had a quiet get-together instead, for his thirty-eighth. A dinner with Rhodey, he could have invited Pepper too, and heck, maybe Happy and Obie. It could have been something actually nice. Something fond to remember.
But instead, like always, he’d gone for garish and loud instead.
Yinsen was right. He was a man who had everything, and nothing.
He got out of that cave and Yinsen didn’t. He thought, often, of what he could have done instead, how he could have saved them both, how, in winning, he’d also lost.
But even knowing that he could have done better, could have saved Yinsen if he’d just been better, he also found that he was proud of what he’d done.
Pride.
It was small. Something he thought he’d lost at age seven when he’d shown off the radio he’d just built and his father had told him it wasn’t good enough, that Tony would never be good enough.
But it was enough. Tony was proud of what he’d done. He’d rescued himself. He was his own damn knight in shining armor, and he’d actually done something worth being proud over.
And learned that he didn’t want his ledger to be as red as it was.
Tony’s thirty-eighth year was filled with pride, and reinvention, and betrayal.
Obie, Obie, Obie.
But Tony took care of that, and tried and tried and tried to push down the pain. He wouldn’t deal with it. He just refused.
Tony’s thirty-ninth birthday was big, though not as big as his thirty-eighth. By Stark standards it was fairly slow, but he’d needed a break, and honestly, wasn’t he getting too old for ragers?
He thought, though not very often, about when he’d been in that cave in Afghanistan, and he’d wished that his last birthday had been something close and personal. Maybe…
But then the arc reactor started to fail. He was being poisoned by the very thing keeping him alive, and he thought, well, if he was going to go out, why not with a bang?
The big Four-Oh. Forty years old. That was old enough, right? He didn’t need to reach forty-one.
So, the biggest, smashiest of birthday parties. A farewell present to the world.
Who cared if Pepper was upset and Rhodey had punched him in one of his own suits.
Who cared?
He was dying.
He doesn’t like to think, much, of what was going on with him then.
Well, who would? He was dying.
Of course, then he didn’t die, and a whole lot of things seemed to happen all at once. The Avengers initiative, SHIELD being SHIELD, a huge-ass alien invasion led by an actual fucking Norse God.
And then, somehow, Tony’s world got even bigger.
Not his public facade, not whatever was going on with Stark Industries or Iron Man, but the people he actually chose— chose— to see on a daily basis. That list used to have three names: Rhodey, Pepper, and Happy.
Three.
That was it.
And now there were suddenly so many more names, so many more people. Tony opened his tower to the Avengers. He found he loved being an Avenger, having people at his back that he— surprise of surprises— actually trusted. Thor and Clint and Natasha and Bruce. Steve Rogers.
It was, frankly, absolutely balls to the wall, wild.
But Tony couldn’t complain (actually he did, very loudly, especially when Clint used the last of Tony’s creamer and put the empty container back in the fridge, but then Clint complained back at him, which was also kind of nice). And though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone other than Pep, well, he kind of loved it. He loved having a full house of people who actively had his back. And yeah, they weren’t always buddy-buddy, but they were there. And they didn’t actively want to kill him
(Tony was 87% sure Natasha was joking every time she threatened to remove his head from his body. Less so when she threatened other body parts).
They weren’t— they weren’t really friends-friends. At least, not with him. Tony made them armor and paid their grocery bills and generally tried to make their day-to-day lives easier, but they weren’t, like, BFFs.
Tony wouldn’t have minded being closer, but he was also kind of the odd man out. Sure, he came to team dinners and joined in whole-heartedly on movie nights, but he could tell— well, he always felt that they’d probably be having a better time if he wasn’t there.
But he— he liked having company, and he liked these people— really, really liked these people. They were heroes, real, bonafide heroes, and when he was with them, fighting back to back with Black Widow and Thor and Captain America, he could pretend he was a hero too, and not some wannabe with too much money to know what was good for him. He was selfish. He knew that. If he were less selfish he’d stop bothering them with his company. He’d back them financially and then leave them alone, not make them let him keep playing at being a hero.
But he was selfish. And he knew they didn’t hate him. If there was one person good at sniffing out if people hated him, it was Tony Stark. They didn’t hate him. They just weren’t always as open when he was around.
And how could they be? Tony knew what he was like. He was loud and brash and could be particularly uncaring if he wasn’t paying attention. He was a jerk. A real asshole. He was self-aware. He was a genius, he knew exactly what kind of person he was.
He wasn’t going to change himself to be more likable either. It hadn’t worked when he was in boarding school and it hadn’t worked at MIT, and he knew it wouldn’t work out now. He could be quiet, if he tried very, very hard, but once his mouth opened it all came out.
No one tried to change him, no one told him that he should be different, or better (or at least they didn’t say it so often that he recognized that his particular brand of assholery had become completely unacceptable to them), and they kept inviting him up from his workshop on team dinner and movie nights and that was enough.
That was just fine.
Tony could, and would live with that.
They didn’t have to like him. He was happy just that they let him intrude on their team nights and what have you. He made them armor and weapons, he paid their grocery bills, and he fought with them and tried, actually tried to listen to orders (though that was a hard thing to accomplish most of the time), and in return they let him be one of them.
It was enough.
It was more than enough.
Really.
His first birthday after becoming an Avenger was… different. The battle was still fresh in his mind, a full month hadn’t even passed, and Tony found himself gazing up at the night sky more nights than he felt comfortable saying. Natasha had come up to him a week before (and Tony could never help thinking, whenever Natasha came up to him, about textbook narcissism and Iron Man yes-Tony Stark not recommended), had cornered him in the communal kitchen when he was in the middle of pouring his third cup of coffee (three cups minimum needed for him to function coherently), and had said, “Your birthday’s coming up.”
“Mmm,” Tony agreed. Unable, quite yet, to vocalize his thoughts. He’d only gotten three hours of sleep and desperately needed caffeine. (He hadn’t been sleeping much since Pepper had left. It had been too much for her, the wormhole, the chitauri. She was still CEO, and still one of Tony’s best friends, one of the people Tony trusted above all else, she was just no longer something… more. And waking up alone after a nightmare where the wormhole had closed with him on the wrong side, with him frozen and floating through an endless, painful, freezing space—there was no sleep after that).
“You’re not having a bash like your fortieth,” Natasha told him. It wasn’t a question, it was an order.
Tony hadn’t planned on it. If he was more awake he might have fought just to fight. He didn’t, as a general rule, love it when people told him what he could and could not do. But on three hours of sleep and two cups of coffee (if he was younger it would have been enough, but lately he hadn’t been feeling young at all) he didn’t have the energy.
Tony grunted in agreement.
“Good,” Natasha said, satisfied.
She paused, and Tony took the moment to fill his cup up and knock back a third of it. It burned his tongue deliciously and seared off the top layer of skin on the roof of his mouth.
“Are you doing anything?” She asked. “Small party?”
Tony thought of the cave, of what he’d hoped he’d done for his birthday all those years ago now. He cleared his throat, but even then, when he spoke it was rough. “A dinner with Pepper,” he said, “and Rhodey. Maybe Happy.” Not Obie.
“Sounds nice,” Natasha said, in a kinder voice than she’d used up till then. And then she walked away.
It was a spur-of-the-moment idea, and like most unplanned ideas, it went pear-shaped pretty quickly.
“Can’t get the time off,” Rhodey said with actual regret when Tony called. “Sorry Tones. I’ll make it next year.”
“No worries, Platypus, but you better get me the best damn tchotchke you can find. Something special that really says ‘Dear God how did this man live forty-two motherflippin years?’”
“Already on the way,” Rhodey said with a warm laugh. “But seriously. You want a little family dinner for your birthday? Next year, I will be there. Marking it on my calendar as we speak.”
“That’s what I keep you around for, Honeybear,” Tony said, not really believing that Rhodey would remember. He trusted Rhodey’s intentions, but a year was a long ways off.
Next he called Pepper.
“Oh, I’m sorry Tony,” Pepper said, real regret in her voice. “I have to go to our Tokyo branch and I thought since we’d— since we’d—” broken up, she didn’t say, “well, I thought you’d have something planned with the Avengers.”
“I do,” Tony lied. “A big party, everyone’s invited, I just thought it’d be nice to have a little dinner with the old crew too. Something, ya know, familiar.”
Pepper laughed, and then sounding not as pained, she said, “Well, have a good time with everyone, alright?”
Happy, of course, was available. So for Tony’s birthday that year Tony treated Happy to dinner at a cheeseburger joint. Happy’s gift was a new set of boxing gloves, though they both knew that Tony’s way of fighting could only really loosely be called boxing. The gloves made Tony smile, so maybe the birthday wasn’t a bust after all.
And Rhodey’s gift only arrived a few days late. A little bobblehead Kermit the Frog, wearing sunglasses. It made Tony laugh, and he put it in a place of honor on a shelf in his bedroom.
Time passed.
Living in a tower with five other people meant more birthdays to think about. There always seemed to be one coming up.
Steve got fireworks to rival the sanctioned 4th of July ones, a rooftop picnic and classic gift-giving. Tony got him a helmet with wings painted on it.
“It matches your costume,” Tony said, trying to be nonchalant, “and seeing how you always go flying off on that deathtrap motorcycle of yours, I thought it might be in your best interest to actually protect your head. I know everyone’s always gushing over these.” He squeezed Steve’s bicep. “But the real head of operations is up here.” He thunked Steve on the forehead with his middle finger. “Protect it, alright?”
“Thanks Tony,” Steve said, and in the dim light, lit only by fireworks cascading across the sky, the man almost looked pink-cheeked. Of course, that could be the alcohol that was running pretty freely at this roof-top barbecue, or the fact that Steve had been up here most of the afternoon, he might have caught some sun. Pale irish skin, no matter if it had been super-soldier-serumed or not, probably still pinked, if not burned. Or it could have been the reflection of the light of the fireworks. Red fireworks, backed by blue and white. What other colors were more appropriate?
And then it didn’t matter because Steve reeled him in for a hug and Tony could no longer see his face.
He felt warm though. And Tony chalked that up to the alcohol as well, and maybe the sun too.
“Any time,” Tony said, and meant it.
The rest of the night was a blur, but if Steve’s smile throughout the party was any indication, it was an unremitted success.
On Rhodey’s birthday he called the man and they talked for so many hours across so many time zones. “You’re a real dick,” Rhodey told him warmly.
“Why?” Tony asked. “‘Cause I got you the best gift a man could get?”
“You sent me a basket of sunscreen and a pair of sunglasses with the Stark Industries logo on the lenses.”
“I heard it was very sunny where you are,” Tony said. “Very hot.”
Rhodey laughed, and it was nice. It was normal.
Natasha’s birthday was subdued but nice, which was what she’d requested when Tony had asked. They took her to an upscale restaurant in the city, and she invited some other SHIELD agents she trusted, most notably, Agent Hill. Tony, of course, footed the bill.
Clint got her knives. (Why, Tony didn’t know. If it were up to him she’d have access to fewer knives, but hey, whatever. They made her smile, so that was probably enough.)
“If I knew you had that much of a knife fetish,” Tony said, as he handed her his gift, “I would have just gotten you something sharp and stabby and called it a day.”
“It’s not a fetish,” Natasha said sharply, with laughter in her voice. “It’s a means of protection. And manipulation.”
Tony laughed. “You have enough knives in your personal arsenal to protect and manipulate a small European country.”
She grinned and Tony didn’t know how it could be both shark-like and wolfish at the same time, but he was impressed.
“Well?” he prompted. “Open it!”
“Am I going to hate it?” Natasha asked.
“Yeah,” Hill said, a glass of sherry in her hand and a familiarly wolfish smile on her face. “Did you get Romanoff something she’s going to have to kill you for?”
“What kind of thing would that be?” Steve asked, with a frown, because somehow, despite their rocky start aboard the helicarrier, Steve actually tended to back him up. It was, frankly, unbelievable. And so in due course, Tony spent a lot of time frankly not believing it.
“A dress,” Clint said.
“Perfume,” Hill added.
“A key to his penthouse,” Clint tacked on, and then broke down in guffaws.
“Hardy-har-har,” Tony said. “I know better than to try and seduce a coworker at her birthday dinner, let alone the Black Widow. I’ve been to all the SI and SHIELD-mandated sexual harassment seminars.”
“You’re the reason for those seminars,” Hill said.
Tony waggled his eyebrows at her.
Natasha opened her gift, first ostentatious wrapping paper, and then box, and then let out a genuine, bonafide belly laugh. “You didn’t!” She said, delighted, pulling out a Russian nesting doll the size of a bowling ball.
“You got her a Russian nesting doll,” Hill monotoned.
“You know,” Bruce said, sidling into the conversation in that quiet way of his, “just because she’s Russian doesn’t mean this is something she wants.”
Tony rolled his eyes and looked at Natasha. “I saw you eyeing them in the window of that antique shop during the fight last month and I thought, hey, might as well get you something to remind you of home.”
Natasha very carefully placed the doll on the table. “They don’t remind me of home,” she said. “Home wasn’t a happy place. I can’t do what I do because I was raised in a happy place.”
Tony shrugged. He hadn’t exactly been raised in a happy place either, though of course, it was incomparable to what Nat had gone through. At least Tony had had Jarvis, and hadn’t been brainwashed, tortured, and altered medically.
“But they make you happy,” Tony said, gesturing to the doll, within which many other dolls lived. “I don’t know why, but they do.” And he was certain he was right. He recognized real happiness when he saw it.
“Yes,” Natasha said. She opened the first and biggest doll, cracked it at the waist and bisected it, revealing the doll’s slightly smaller sister. Like the first doll, this one was wearing a kerchief wrapped around its head and had on a beautifully painted dress.
“If you get to the smallest doll,” Tony said, “there might be a surprise.”
“I love surprises,” Thor said.
“I bet it’s a dick,” Clint said.
“You’re a dick,” Tony said.
Clint laughed.
Steve leaned over Tony’s shoulder to watch Natasha slowly, one-by-one, take apart each nesting doll to reveal, inside, an even smaller doll, and Tony was suddenly aware of Steve’s breath on his shoulder, and how close Steve’s chest was to Tony’s back.
“How are there this many tiny fake people within one another?” Thor demanded. He was also leaning close to watch, though he was doing so over Clint’s shoulder.
“Magic,” Natasha said.
“Not Magic,” Tony and Bruce said at the same time, and then grinned at each other as Tony desperately tried not to think of how close Steve was at that very moment. He was hyper aware of the man’s heat, of his breath at Tony’s neck. Tony had to clench his hand into a fist and let his fingernails jab into the flesh of his palm to make himself focus fully on Natasha.
“This has got to be the last one,” Coulson said, as Natasha revealed a doll the size of her thumb.
“Is it?” Tony asked, and Natasha opened that doll as well.
“They are shrinking!” Thor announced. “I am delighted.”
“Yes,” Bruce said, “they can get quite small.”
Finally, a doll the size of a pinky finger was cracked open, revealing the smallest doll, a doll no bigger than a bean.
Again Natasha laughed. “Stark,” she said through chuckles, “you really outdid yourself this time.”
Tony grinned.
“Why?” Clint demanded. “What is it? What did he do?”
Natasha handed the bean-sized-doll to Clint, revealing as she did so that this doll didn’t have a kerchief around her head, but instead let her orange hair flow free, and she wasn’t wearing a beautifully ornate dress, but instead a black catsuit.
“It’s you!” Clint said, almost accusingly.
“It’s me,” Natasha agreed happily.
“That’s pretty good,” Steve said. “Tony, did you paint that?”
“Me?” Tony said. “Gods no. I can’t wield a paintbrush any better than I can cook.”
“You can set things ablaze with a paintbrush?” Thor asked.
Clint cackled and Tony rolled his eyes.
“I had it commissioned,” Tony said. “I bought the dolls and then found an artist, the struggling artist in art school type, and commissioned her to paint the smallest one to be Black Widow. At the very center, a little Natasha.”
“She must have thought it an odd request,” Bruce said.
Tony shrugged. “She actually told me the same thing, but only because most of her commissions involve more dicks or tits.”
“Tony!” Steve chided, aghast.
“Stark,” Hill complained (because Agents of SHIELD were somehow adept at making Tony’s name itself, a complaint).
“Her words, not mine,” Tony said.
“Thanks Tony,” Natasha said with a smile, and that was enough. More than enough, really, even though the next gift-giver, Agent Maria Hill with her Natasha-like sharky grin, did beat Tony by a long run by giving Natasha an apparently very old and very fancy knife.
Natasha tested it on the table, and Tony ended up having to pay for that as well.