Who: Tony Stark & Natasha Romanoff What: Early to bed and early to rise makes a man absolutely insufferable. Where: The Hotel Maximoff. When: The morning after the dedication festivities.
On any normal morning, the sunlight saturating the thick mist enveloping the hotel might have been painfully bright, a blinding white wall of no that sent Tony burrowing back under the covers until his eyes adjusted to the harsh reality that they would at some point once again have to start responding to stimuli. The dense, humid scent of jungle, of earth and rain and all those godforsaken flowers, might have turned his already delicate stomach. The prospect of marching downstairs at nine - nine! - in the morning would only have been conceivable as some kind of punishment. There was nothing short of a national emergency or (perhaps) a serious fire that could have roused him this early after a party and induced him to have breakfast side by side with other people.
But this was no normal morning. He was up. He was rested. He was showered and fresh and almost preternaturally clear-headed. He was pouring his own coffee from the urn at the buffet table, and while he wasn't prepared to risk any of the pastries or the eighteen different things the kitchen seemed to have done with eggs, he had food to look forward to in his near future. More than that, he had good news to deliver - unexpected news, which was the best kind. He could go home and report that his encounter with Rogers had gone off smoothly (at least, as far as these things went), and that he hadn't ruined anything at all on that front. He was proud of himself. He was practically humming. It was a significant upturn considering how he'd felt about thirty minutes before turning in - and well-deserved, he was sure.
And then, he had a nice little hot cup of gossip to dish out, all the better because he was going to serve it right back to the person who'd first poured it.
Natasha hadn't sounded as though her night had gone all that swimmingly, but he wouldn't have expected anything different. She'd had a closer connection to these games than most of them; the associations would have been fresher, that miserable, heavy feeling of responsibility too recently dissipated not to form right back up again like a cold fog. For Tony, the more vivid memories and sensations of the arena had faded into the kind of condensed and reconstructed horrors that old traumas always eventually became - it had been decades, after all. Mentoring, though ... that scar wasn't quite as old. That one he could still feel if he pulled at it wrong. So - sure. She'd had a shitty night. Nothing else could have been expected.
But now the sun was up, the day was kicking off, home was just around the corner - and here she was, not quite on time, but he could be magnanimous. He gave her a brilliant smile and stretched his leg out under the table to nudge her chair out for her. "Good morning, Miss Romanoff." He blew happily on his coffee. "How did you sleep?"