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Chapter Text

Tony Stark was effortlessly good at most things he tried, but there were two things he was genuinely bad at: giving and receiving gifts.

On his last birthday, he’d jumped out of a fifty-first floor window just to avoid a surprise party, which sounds worse than it was, Pepper, since by the time he’d hit the thirtieth floor, the Iron Man suit had molded around him exactly as it was supposed to do, so really, it was more like an impromptu field test than a retreat. Science.

Plus, it had turned out there was a robbery going down in Hell’s Kitchen that could use a personal, superheroic touch, and so everything had ultimately turned out fine.

Well. Almost fine.

Because Tony had returned to the Tower an hour later, exhausted and triumphant and maybe – just maybe – looking forward to some leftover cake, to find Steve and Natasha sitting together at the Avengers’ shared kitchen table.

At first, Tony couldn’t believe that he’d managed to sneak up on two of the most situationally aware people he knows. He’ll go to his grave swearing that that’s the only reason he sunk a little further into the shadows of the hallway rather than announce his presence.

At second, Tony registered that Steve’s normally impeccable posture collapsing into itself like a deflating soufflé, and Natasha’s comforting hand on one shoulder.

“I did warn you,” Natasha was saying, but almost like she regretted being right.

“Yeah,” Steve sighed. “Yeah, I know you did. It was a stupid idea. But if I’d told him about the party ahead of time, he’d have found some way to avoid it altogether. And it could’ve been worse – he could’ve picked one of the windows that doesn’t open.”

Oh God, they were talking about him. Tony tried to make himself even more unobtrusive, which was no small feat for someone who glowed in the dark.

“Break Glass in Case of Emergency,” Natasha agreed, and Steve huffed a rueful laugh. Tony desperately wished he could see Steve’s face, and on the other hand, was desperately glad he couldn’t.

“I know I’m going about this all wrong, but I don’t know how else to…” Steve trailed off, but Natasha seemed to know what he meant, because she nodded sympathetically.

Tony, meanwhile, had stuffed his whole hand into his mouth to avoid doing something utterly stupid and inappropriate to the situation, like laugh hysterically. He could count on one gauntlet the number of times he’d heard Steve admit defeat and still have several fingers to spare, but then, Tony had always prided himself on accomplishing the impossible.

It didn’t feel as gratifying as it usually does. In fact, it felt a lot like falling out that window, but this time, without the suit to catch him.

Tony moonwalked out of the hallway as quietly as possible, and then hurried down to his lab to think.

In the spirit of scientific accuracy, he can admit in the privacy of his own lab that there are apparently three things he’s terrible at: giving gifts, receiving gifts, and enduring Steve Rogers’ disappointment.

But that’s fine, that’s no problem, it just means that this Christmas, Tony needs to find Steve the perfect present to make up for the Birthday Debacle. And, possibly, stay in his presence long enough to bestow it.

Chapter Text

Implementing the second half of the Home for Christmas Protocol was simple. Tony had been intending to set up the Avengers’ Christmas decorations in the main common area, which was where they tended to throw parties and which, as they’d all discovered last May 29^th, had an entire wall of windows. So instead, he crammed a Christmas tree into one corner of the TV room, which had zero windows and only two doors. Tony, always the futurist, was not content to leave this problem half-solved.

And so he also put large poinsettia displays by both doorways, to thwart quick exits.

He was standing in the center of the room, contemplating the air vents, when Bruce found him.

“Hey Tony—why is that there?!”

Bruce glared at the door-poinsettia he’d just toppled over, and Tony waited a few beats to see if a Code Green was imminent, but Bruce just scowled and tried to nudge the poinsettia closer to the wall.

“No, you can’t!” Tony blurted out. “It has to stay there; it’s optimized for, um, maximum Christmas cheer. JARVIS ran a simulation.”

“Is that why the wreaths are such weird shapes?”

“Weird? What’s wrong with – I mean, no, they just…came that way.”

They had not come that way. The wreaths had, in fact, been fabricated in Tony’s lab. And it’s possible that, in addition to the gift things and the Steve thing, Tony was also not amazing at wreath-fabrication.

Because Tony is a mature adult who can acknowledge his own flaws, he could admit that now, in the light of the TV room, the wreaths looked like a reindeer festively trampled a bowler hat.

“OK,” Bruce said, making a clear and visible decision to Drop It. “Well, I was wondering if you could help me with something? I noticed Nat having some trouble with the tensile strength of her grappling hooks on the last few missions, and I figured I could use the compound from the Hulk pants to design her a new set for Christmas, but I’ve been running into some problems…”

“Yeah, I actually have some notes on that, after the last mission—” Tony and Bruce both glanced around the TV room apprehensively. Even though neither of them could see Natasha, it was probably safer to just not allude to The Dumpster Incident out loud at all.

“Right,” Bruce agreed with a shudder. “Anyway, you’re not too busy?”

“To play scientist with you, Bumblebee? Never.”

Later, after they’d developed the compound for the grappling hooks (suck it, wreaths!), and then tested the compound for the grappling hooks by exploding it all over the lab and emerging triumphantly with two major scientific breakthroughs – first, that the compound formed a natural rope that could hold even the Hulk, and two, that the compound should definitely not be aerosolized – Bruce said, as he was resetting the Days Without a Decontamination Shower count back to zero: “You should really get credit for these, too, Tony. I couldn’t have done it without you. Do you have a Christmas gift for Natasha? We could always split the grappling hooks.”

And Tony, who as previously noted is bad at all gifting, the Steve thing, wreaths, and also on occasion, at telling the truth, said: “Of course! I have gifts for everyone! But in this case, I’m pretty sure I can return it.”

Chapter Text

The other part of the Home for Christmas Protocol – the actual gifting – proved to be somewhat harder. Tony found himself constantly ruminating on what to get Steve for Christmas. When he was in a meeting about the new StarkPhone upgrades, when he was arguing on the phone with Pepper about the new StarkPhone upgrades, when he stopped by the R&D labs to monitor progress on the new StarkPhone upgrades, when he was redesigning the new StarkPhone upgrades – in short, at every moment of his life – at least half of Tony’s brain was stuck on the problem of Steve’s gift.

It was a puzzle now, and Tony was determined to solve it. Because if there was one thing – okay, six things – Tony was uniquely unsuited for, it was letting a puzzle go once he’d decided to solve it.

It was just math, he decided, as he absent-mindedly soldered Christmas lights to what used to be a StarkPhone. Everything was just math, once you made the math complex enough. And although Steve Rogers was, without a doubt, the most complex math in the universe – Tony’s pretty sure there’s a theorem to that effect, or there would be once Tony got around to writing it – Steve was lucky enough to have a very competent mathematician as a friend.

“JARVIS, start a spreadsheet,” Tony said, blinking down at the smoking remains of…a thing. What had he been doing again?

“Of course, Sir. Would this file be titled StarkPhone Stress Test Data?”

“Don’t be cute. No, this is about Steve’s Christmas present. The two of us are gonna figure it out once and for all.”

“I am certain we will. Before we begin, however, I should warn you that your most recent project is currently on fire.”

“Wha—” Tony yelped as he was hit directly in the face with the spray of a fire extinguisher. The victim of his tinkering gave off a loud sizzle and some horrible-smelling smoke, which finally cleared enough for Tony to see Dummy, extinguisher-in-claw, whirring eagerly.

“Yes, good job, you did it, you saved the day.” Tony pet Dummy on the top of his claw, and narrowly ducked a fire extinguisher to the face. “Okay, it’s definitely time to put that down now, the fire is gone – oh, why the hell would I say the word “fire,” goddamn it, Stark,” Tony finished as Dummy sprayed a distant and very much not-on-fire workbench that Tony hoped hadn’t contained anything important, but suspected had in fact been a set of nearly completed blueprints that Pepper had wanted done weeks ago.

“JARVIS,” Tony sighed, squelching over to inspect the damage. “Start a column in the spreadsheet for “Interests and Hobbies.””

That’s how Clint found him several hours later: mostly dry but still a bit foamy, explaining to JARVIS very seriously why “motorcycle” should go in the “20^th Century Nostalgia” column rather than the “Avengers Gear” column.

“I have zero questions about any of this,” Clint said, scratching one of Dummy’s struts affectionately.

“Well good, because I wouldn’t have answered them. Did you have a reason for coming down here, aside from judging my choices and seducing my bots?”

“How dare you, Dummy’s a lady.” With one final pat to Dummy’s strut, Clint sauntered over to one of Tony’s more cluttered workbenches and perched on it with his feet resting on a chair.

“No defense of yourself?”

“Nope.” Clint gave him a wide grin and leaned back on Tony’s bench with the distressing crunch of something delicate being sat on. “Except that in this particular circumstance, what I actually need is a favor.”

“Yep, there it is.”

“Whatever, Tin Man, you love it. But okay, so you know how Thor is always telling stories about the glorious battles of the whatsits and the…y’know…stuff,” Clint made a gesture that might have been a swinging hammer or might have been something obscene, and honestly Tony couldn’t rule out either one. “Back when he was in Asgard full-time? He’s always telling Steve his team workout regimen is “a pleasant diversion” which I think is Thor-speak for “it sucks.””

Tony considered this, and decided that of course Clint is absolutely right.

“Okay, so I thought, maybe we could figure out a way to give him a real challenge. Like, some kind of god-level obstacle course?”

“That’s…a surprisingly adequate idea, Barton. What d’you need from me, then? Some extra pocket money? JARVIS, transfer—”

“No – wait, I mean, yes, because my bank account literally contains five dollars and a pizza coupon, but actually, I could use your help coming up with some obstacles fit for a god. Designing ways to piss off a superhuman seems like the kinda thing you’d be into. The gift could be from both of us.”

If Clint kept being this unfairly smart, Tony would be forced to drop him in something slimy next time he’s up in the suit, just to restore balance to the Force, but let it never be said that Tony is good at holding grudges when there’s science to do, and this project was shaping up to involve some awesome science.

“Barton, how do you feel about retrofitting some fire extinguishers?”

Chapter Text

It wasn’t that Tony was panicking, exactly. Tony knew that he was not great when it came to panic, but luckily for him, billionaire geniuses with an artificially intelligent pal don’t need to panic very often, because there are few problems that couldn’t be solved with either money or processing power, and Tony had plenty of both.

“Of course, Sir,” said JARVIS, and it was possible that Tony might’ve been panicking, just a little, because he definitely hadn’t realized he was speaking aloud.

“It’s not panicking if you have a spreadsheet,” Tony insisted.

“Shall I add that definition to my system dictionary?”

“No, but “holiday kindness” could clearly use an update.”

Tony glanced from the spreadsheet – which was actually now four spreadsheets and a diagram – to the scribble of calculations that were his best attempts to represent the contents of the spreadsheet mathematically.

It had all been…less illuminating than Tony’d hoped. He sighed, tossed the notes and one of the spreadsheets into his virtual trashcan, and dragged himself in the direction of fresh coffee.

***

“Clint wants these,” Natasha said, breezing into the kitchen at 4:30am. Tony cursed and caught his coffee mug right before it tipped, and then had to juggle both the mug and the piece of paper that Natasha had just shoved into his hands.

“What’re you doing up so late?”

“Talking to you.” Natasha raised her eyebrows and nodded at the only slightly coffee-stained paper. It was covered in her own small, neat handwriting, which, after Tony took a few sips of his coffee, resolved themselves into actual words.

“Arrows with a gravity field?” Tony mumbled. “Why would he—oh, I see. Yeah, this is doable. This is very doable. Why didn’t Clint just ask me himself?”

Natasha gave him her best are you stupid look, which she seemed to reserve particularly for him.

“He doesn’t know he wants them yet. Best kind of Christmas gift.” The “you dumbass” was unstated but strongly implied. “Also, Bruce wants a new centrifuge. And I know you know that, because neither of you could shut up about rotation speeds the whole time I was trying to watch The Holiday.”

Tony had a vague memory of Natasha turning up the volume on the TV higher and higher, which of course only forced Tony and Bruce to talk louder. You’d think a super-spy trained in manipulation would’ve anticipated that outcome.

“Well yeah, but—” Tony cut himself off before he could explain the clear difference between a normal thing you buy for a person, and a Christmas gift. He had a sneaking suspicion that this was one of those Raised by Gilded Wolves situations, where Tony would say something that seemed entirely obvious to him, only for the other Avengers to react with expressions that ranged from “annoyed” to “pitying,” and really, no part of that spectrum was ideal.

“Thanks for the tip,” he said instead, and then another thought emerged from his sleep-deprived fog: “Hey—how’d you know it was Clint and Bruce that I still needed gifts for?”

“Finish your coffee, Tony,” Natasha said kindly, which – okay, fair enough.

She was just turning to go and Tony was contemplating slinking back to his lab when he was struck with sudden inspiration.

“Wait, Natasha, what about Steve? I know you know what he wants—”

Natasha turned to face him, presumably so she could make sure he saw her smug expression, even as she continued to back out of the kitchen. “Oh, I definitely know.”

“Then tell me, please—just a hint? I’ll owe you? Natasha!”

Tony begs so rarely that it must also be one of those things he’s bad at – or at least very out of practice with – because it had absolutely no effect on Natasha whatsoever, who gave him a fluttering little wave of her fingers before disappearing entirely.

Chapter Text

By Christmas Eve, Tony had tried everything that might solve the mystery of Steve’s gift. He’d made and discarded seven more spreadsheets, and reams of half-written equations. He’d bullied JARVIS into trawling the internet for gift suggestions – JARVIS was still refusing to speak to him for that one – and he’d even tracked down Natasha and tried the begging thing again, but the only result of that was that she disappeared so entirely that nobody has seen her in three days, and it’s only the facts that her tea mugs are piling up in the dishwasher and the TV is always turned to the Hallmark Channel that inform them she’s still in residence in the Tower at all.

Tony had finally caved last night and called Rhodey, who’d laughed at him for ten minutes and then hung up. The one thing he refuses to do is call Pepper, who would be just as helpful as Rhodey, but with the addition of a very unkind conversation about giant stuffed rabbits that Tony would prefer to avoid.

So Tony was now at the point where all he could do is wait for the situation to resolve itself, one way or another. And since Tony was spectacularly awful at waiting, as a rule, he was instead passing the time before Christmas Day by dismantling something festive in the TV room.

“Stark!” Thor boomed, and didn’t so much trip over the poinsettias in the doorway as roll right through them with impressive unconcern. “I have been searching for you! Steven assisted me in my quest – I should have known to consult him from the start.”

Tony ruthlessly suppressed the throat-tightening, stomach-wobbling feeling of hearing Steve’s name, which was – clearly, unequivocally – anxiety about the present thing and definitely no other reason.

“What’s up, buddy? You need help with a gift for someone?”

Tony found himself almost looking forward to the idea; anything was better than continuing to vivisect this LED snowman.

“Not at all; my gifts have long been purchased.”

Tony felt himself going a little cross-eyed as he tried to parse his way through that sentence.

“Uh huh?”

“No, it is you I have come to help. I have been researching the Christmas traditions of Earth – as you know, Asgardian Yule celebrations are very different. We all get very drunk, and my father sets wreaths on fire, and I ride a goat through the streets. It is a very poignant ceremony.”

“Yeah? Sounds a lot like Christmas in my mid-20s.”

“Then you understand the solemnity of the event,” Thor said seriously. “But it is not of Asgard that I wish to speak. It is of your need for The Christmas Spirit.”

“My what?”

“According to Earth’s holiday customs, those who live in New York and are successful at their jobs must find The Christmas Spirit. Is that not true?”

Tony thought of their television, perennially turned to the Hallmark Channel, and shut his eyes with a sigh.

“And I am a being from beyond this world, who appears when you have most need, yes?” Thor was starting to look rather hurt at Tony’s lack of enthusiasm.

“I mean, it’s a little more complicated—”

“And so I understand it to be my duty to bring you The Christmas Spirit. Behold my offering!” With a magnificent flourish, Thor held out a large bottle of bourbon, a jaunty red ribbon affixed to its neck. Tony’s mouth snapped shut mid-objection.

“Thor, buddy, you really have mastered the true meaning of Christmas.”

“This is the correct brand of spirit?”

“It’s perfect.”

Tony went to fetch two glasses and then poured a generous measure into each. Toasting Thor with one of them, he announced “God bless us, every one,” and threw the drink back in one swallow.

Several hours and one bottle of bourbon later, Tony and Thor were still in the TV room, doing unspeakable things to the Christmas decorations in the service of a traditional Asgardian Yule. Thor, who’d been supplementing his glasses of bourbon with something from a flask that shimmered oddly in the light and that he hadn’t allowed Tony to touch, was looking remarkably unsteady as he and Tony rewired a light-up reindeer into the shape of a goat.

“Thank you, my friend,” Thor was saying as he wrenched an antler into a new shape. “I enjoy my time on Earth, but I have been thinking of home more and more, during these holidays.”

“Can you visit? Y’know, take the Rainbow, uh, Connection—”

“Rainbow Bridge.”

“Right, that.”

“I have chosen to be here,” Thor said simply, and Tony couldn’t decide if that actually made sense or if he was just extremely drunk.

“I’ve never liked Christmas traditions,” Tony said abruptly. He hadn’t meant to say it – has rarely talked about this before, but something about the bourbon, and the talk of holiday traditions, and Thor’s comforting equanimity, had made him blurt it out. He fiddled with the rein-goat’s wiring as he continued: “Most of my childhood, we hade those big Christmases. Y’know, like—” Tony glanced sidelong at Thor, wondering what reference would translate, and then remembered what Thor had apparently spent the entirety of December doing. “Like the movies. Anything you could imagine, we had it. And I hated all of it, of course, the whole exhausting production. I couldn’t wait to spend Christmas on my own, and so, once I went to MIT, that’s exactly what I did. I’d stay in Boston, sometimes alone, sometimes with Rhodey. Used to drive my mom crazy.”

Tony swallowed and forced his hands still. From the corner of his eye, Tony could see that Thor looked attentive but not overly so, as if this was merely an interesting story that Tony was telling him.

“When they died, it’s not that I ever wanted those big Christmases back. Some “don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” kinda thing? No, that wasn’t it. But even as I got better at bullshitting my way through those kinds of parties – big, expensive, crowded – I just never got the hang of bullshitting my way through Christmas.”

“Yes, that must suck,” Thor said gravely, and Tony burst into laughter.

He wasn’t normally good at these sorts of conversations, but this one hadn’t been so bad.

“So bring on the goats, I guess,” he concluded with one final gulp of bourbon. “I think this guy is done, and then once we add him to the rest of the herd, we’ll just need a small charge—”

A tiny bolt of electricity sparked off Thor’s fingertips and arced toward the goat display, which lit up brilliantly with red, blue, yellow, and green light.

Thor and Tony both cheered loudly, and turned to each other with reckless grins. Tony opened his mouth to suggest some other decorations they could creatively destroy, which of course was the exact moment that the entire Tower plunged into darkness.

Chapter Text

“It was real festive to have all those candles lit for Christmas,” Steve said, regarding the singed goats with a tilted head. It was several hours later, after Tony had repaired enough of the Tower’s wiring to turn the lights back on – he’d thought the Tower’s systems were impervious to most attacks, and was trying to suppress the itchy desire to start working on new contingency plans – and all the Avengers were gathered in the TV room for the official Christmas celebration.

The unofficial one had involved them trying to find their way to the common areas in the dark, which had resulted in several minor mishaps involving the now-bedraggled poinsettias, and a new sensory deprivation training regimen for Christmas, from Steve to all of them.

Natasha and Clint were now sitting in the large armchair that they tended to share, passing spiked hot chocolate back and forth (how they’d managed to both make hot chocolate and also find the right bottle of alcohol in the dark was a mystery better left unsolved). Bruce was cross-legged on the floor, inspecting one of his gifts as though he could divine its contents; Thor was sprawled along the sofa, adorning Mjölnir with mistletoe (which seems to just be begging for another fire, but if it made him happy…). Steve, as mentioned, was facing the goats with a funny expression on his face – which, if Tony didn’t know better, he might even call fond – and Tony? Tony was hovering.

He wasn’t trying to hover, and he thought he was covering it fairly well from everyone except Natasha, but he would just…really, really like to be done with this part. The togetherness, gift-exchanging, sitting-still part.

Tony was so great at fake parties, it took him living with the Avengers to realize how bad he was at real ones.

Not to mention, he still did not have a gift for Steve, and he had approximately twenty minutes before that fact was revealed to everyone, including Steve, who had probably gotten him something thoughtful and perfect for Christmas, because Steve himself was thoughtful and also perfect, so it stood to reason.

“If we don’t start opening presents soon, Bruce is gonna combust, and then we’re gonna have a whole other problem on our hands,” Clint drawled from the depths of his armchair.

“I’m an adult, I can wait,” Bruce said, already tearing at the wrapping paper. “Ooh, a centrifuge! Is this the one—”

Natasha said something sharp in Russian, and when they all turned to Clint, he translated serenely: “She says she loves you all, and she’s so grateful that we’re all here together for Christmas, and if you could please pass her a present…What? It’s not my fault what you actually said can’t be translated into English!”

Natasha locked eyes with Clint and then very deliberately threw back the rest of their shared cocoa. Clint threw up his hands.

“Fine! Open mine, then.” He gestured at a large object hulking in the corner behind the tree, which was very clearly a ballet barre shrouded in wrapping paper.

And so it went, until there were no gifts left under the tree, and Tony was practically vibrating with tension. He was so busy worrying about how disappointed Steve would be – or worse, not disappointed at all – that he barely noticed that Steve hadn’t given him a gift yet either.

“I have a—” Tony blurted out, over the low murmur of Avengers playing with new toys. “For Steve, it’s just—” He made a gesture that hopefully indicated “in the workshop” rather than “in the depths of hell,” and then booked it out of there as fast as he could. Okay, so that brilliant stalling tactic gave him maybe ten minutes to come up with something brilliant that he could pretend he’d had all along. Tony had worked under worse pressure.

Seven minutes later, Steve walked into the workshop.

Tony whirled around, trying vainly to cover the multiple glowing screens of calculations from Steve’s view.

“I was coming back!”

“I…know you were? But I wanted to give you…” Steve paused, and for a second Tony thought he looked almost nervous, but then figured it must be the glow of the screens, washing him out. What would Steve have to be nervous about? “Oh that looks cool, what’re you doing?” Steve rushed out, fidgeting a little.

Oh crap.

“It’s your Christmas present,” Tony finally confessed miserably. “Or rather, it was supposed to be. I wanted to get you something you’d actually, objectively want, but I could never get the math to work right. It just kept being nothing.”

“You…got me math for Christmas?” Steve asked slowly.

“Not exactly.” Tony started to explain the whole humiliating failure over again, and stopped abruptly when he actually registered the look on Steve’s face. He looked delighted, was staring at the numbers on Tony’s screens like it was magic, and Tony found that all he could say was: “Yeah, Steve, I got you math for Christmas.”

“I want a copy, how do I—”

“JARVIS?”

A nearby printer whirred to life, and when Tony went to retrieve the pages, found that JARVIS had taken it upon himself to illuminate them like medieval manuscripts.

“It’s amazing,” Steve breathed out.

“Plus, I think that integral sign is a sleigh, so—” Tony shifted from one foot to the other, and cast about desperately for some way to change the subject. “Hey, what did you come down here for, anyway?”

Steve’s face went from wonderstruck to nauseated so quickly that Tony thought they were under attack.

“Okay, well now it seems even stupider…” Steve swallowed and bit his lip.

“Steve? Seriously, are you OK?”

“Um, well, okay, stay there.” Steve rushed over to Dummy, and when he returned, Tony could see that he’d affixed a Santa hat to the top of Dummy’s claw. Dummy whirred in delight at this new game, while Steve continued to look five seconds from passing out.

“Merry Christmas?” Steve did a kind of jazz hands motion and then stared at Tony like this should all make sense to him.

“…Thank…you?”

Steve huffed. “I always meant to apologize for your birthday, you know. It wasn’t fair to—I mean, I just wanted you to know how much I—how much the Avengers appreciate—But I went about it all wrong. I know I did. So now I’m trying again. This Christmas, I got you—” Steve did the sweeping jazz hands motion again, but this time Tony thought he actually did understand.

“You got me nothing,” Tony concluded, a grin spreading slowly over his face. “You know how much I hate gifts, and so you got me nothing.”

“Well, not nothing,” Steve corrected, cautiously optimistic now. “There’s Dummy’s hat, for one, and—”

Steve paused again. Tony hadn’t heard this many unfinished sentences out of him since he’d gotten choked by a Doombot last summer. And maybe it was that – or maybe it was the slight flush that was creeping up his neck, or the way his hands were fidgeting in front of him in a totally un-Steve-like way, or maybe it was Tony himself, and his giddy certainty that what he was feeling now was Christmas, at last – but without any fear or doubt, Tony crossed the three feet that separated him from Steve, and kissed him.

When he pulled back slightly, it was to find Steve smiling that wide, goofy, wholehearted smile that Tony always secretly delighted in putting on his face.

“So that’s the other thing I got you for Christmas,” Steve mumbled breathlessly. “If you want it.”

As it turned out, Tony might be terrible at giving and receiving gifts, feeling Steve’s disappointment, wreath-fabrication, telling the truth, giving up on puzzles, holding grudges, panicking, begging, waiting, emotional conversations, and real parties, but at some point when he’d been worrying about all of that, he’d also gotten very good at loving Steve. And luckily, that seemed to be exactly what Steve wanted for Christmas too.