Who: Tony Stark & Steve Rogers (and Jarvis!). What: Dinner and diplomacy! Or at least one of those. Where: Tony's place. When: The night after the Victors' Ball.
The scent drifting in from the kitchen - lemon, soft cheese, wine, something bitter-summer green - made his stomach turn, and Tony forced himself to eat another cracker. If someone had told him to jump out the window and fly, it would have seemed no less impossible than choking down a full meal. It had been a rough day, the kind that started at three in the afternoon with a shuffle to the mirror to survey the damage wrought by a night of heavy drinking, provoking a man roughly eighteen times his size, and additional heavy drinking (results of survey, same as ever: not too shabby, if slightly more banged up than usual) and proceeded into a delicate lying-around phase, punctuated by coffee, water, juice-and-vodka painkillers, and toast shoved in his general direction by the help, whose disapproving look was just one of many, many reasons not to open his eyes. Now, a little before nine o'clock, he was finally starting to get his balance again. The very last thing he wanted to do was risk upsetting the equilibrium with anything richer than generously spiked tomato juice.
But - duty called. Hospitality was nothing short of a sacred charge. People said a lot of things about him; no one had ever said he was stingy.
So the menu was set - four courses. The time was a little earlier than his usual, in deference to the provincial tendencies of the Districts, where people apparently didn't sit down to dinner at eleven. His residence, the top floor of one of the city's showier towers that reflected brightly in the lake below, was turned out in its usual welcoming fashion. If you were going to extend someone a mandatory invitation, the least you could do was do it right.
The only thing not quite up to snuff was Tony himself. Even after an obscenely long shower and a couple turns through his wardrobe (more casual than last night; his usual disheveled, voguish style) he was feeling decidedly low wattage. But frankly, considering the company, he doubted that would be a problem. Rogers didn't strike him as the type to need or want unbounded energy and sparkling repartee, or at least had never given any sign of enjoying Tony's brand of it. That was - well, no, that wasn't intriguing; plenty of people disliked him. It was the sheer scope of Rogers' distaste that made him an attractive object of curiosity. Maybe it was perverse to force someone who clearly didn't like you to break bread with you just because you found them interesting, but Tony had never had much of a handle on relationships that didn't start and end with hierarchies, and Perversity would have made him a better middle name than Edward. He sensed an anger in Rogers he wouldn't have dared to articulate, a hated of things he'd never have been bold enough to name unless he were so stone drunk he couldn't even lie to himself. An absence of cowardice was, in Tony's world, pretty exotic.
Not that he was even conscious of most of it. Rogers was a novelty, and Tony had the power to compel novelties to come spend time with him just by saying hey, we didn't get to chat - come by around nine, I promise not to make you have any fun. That was all.
And when his Avox (with an uncharacteristically reflective, not at all waspish expression) ushered Rogers in, there wasn't a lot of nuanced contemplation in evidence. "What are you drinking?" was his greeting, as he stood at a sideboard in the wide-open living room, eagerly making his first real cocktail of the day. "I've been trying to wash the taste of last night out of my mouth since - lunch. Those things always last too long. At least the food wasn't awful. I remember the last time District 4 had a winner, I couldn't eat shrimp for like - a month." He strained his drink into his glass, and turned with an expansive spread of his arms - and a satisfied smile. "Thank you, Miss Maximoff."