Fic: Christmas Special Night (Chap. 1 Frosty the Snowman)

[bookishwench]

After their latest game night on Thanksgiving, the Avengers (and Loki, for whatever reason) were revisiting their tradition from the previous year and gathering at Tony and Pepper’s place leading up to the holidays. Nick Fury had originally mandated the gatherings as compulsory team bonding exercises, and while he rarely checked in to see if they were following orders, they still grudgingly but somewhat merrily were carrying out his mandate by watching holiday fare in Tony’s home theatre and eating what appeared to be their own weight in Christmas treats. This year, they had decided to watch Christmas specials after Tony had adamantly refused to host any showing of Hallmark Christmas movies.

“Why?” Natasha had asked.

“They give me horrible nightmares,” Tony had said, shrugging.

“Nightmares?” Peter had said, looking confused. “I watch those with May all the time. What’s so scary?”

“Usually they involve me being trapped in an overly cozy inn during a charming Christmas festival filled with mulled cider and roast turkey and gingerbread cookies,” Tony had said, shuddering.

“What’s so horrible about that?” Clint had asked. “It sounds okay.”

“You’re not actually a man, are you?” Tony had said, shaking his head.

“I believe I understand!” Thor had said. “When I visited your Disney World, I rode the Small World attraction, and the boat broke down, leaving us stranded for three hours listening to that song, over and over. I eventually could take no more, dove from the boat, waded through the waters, and pulled us back to dock myself. I then needed five hours in complete silence to regain my composure. Is this not somewhat the same idea, friend Tony?”

“We are totally on the same wavelength, Thunder Thighs,” Tony had said, nodding approvingly. “Want another mince pie?”

“Please!”

Tonight’s special had been “Frosty the Snowman.” As Jimmy Durante’s final note faded away, the lights came back on in Tony’s home theatre.

“Now that’s classic Christmas spirit!” Clint said, then took a satisfied gulp of hot chocolate, winding up with a whipped cream and sprinkle mustache.

“I do not understand this story,” Thor said slowly.

“What’s confusing you?” Pepper asked kindly as she started passing around a plate of peppermint-frosted brownies.

“Why did the children befriend the snow demon?” Thor asked.

“Not everything that comes out of the ice and snow is automatically a demon,” Loki snapped, taking a brownie and chewing it sullenly.

“No, perhaps not,” Thor said, smiling apologetically at his brother. “But this creature encourages a small child to embark upon a journey that nearly results in her freezing to death. That seems suspicious.”

“It’s not meant to be taken literally,” Bruce said, swiping two brownies off the plate and dunking one in his hot chocolate. “It’s a kids’ TV special. The rules of reality don’t apply.”

“It is kind of a weird story, though,” Peter admitted. “I mean, it’s fun, but it’s a strange plotline when you start thinking about it.”

“Well, yeah, of course it is,” Clint agreed as he squirted yet more whipped cream on his hot chocolate, making it resemble an Alp. “For one thing, the villain’s a bizarre choice.”

“What, Hinkle the bumbling magician?” Tony asked. “What else would you have in a story about snow than a weirdo magician who annoys the hell out of everybody with his stupid tricks?”

“Am I meant to apply that to myself?” Loki asked, giving him a freezing look. “I should remind you that my magic is not, what was the word you used? Bumbling, I believe?”

As he spoke, ten other Lokis appeared in the room, some of them nodding emphatically, others crossing them arms in annoyance, and at least one of them stealing five brownies and stuffing them into a pocket universe while everyone but Peter was distracted.

“Plus, Hinkle’s a lot more powerful than he thought,” Bucky said. “He winds up creating the wintery equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. Friendlier, less prone to murdering people, but still, he’s basically a golem.”

“I wasn’t really talking about Hinkle anyway,” Clint said. “I meant the school board of whatever backwoods town this is. This whole mess would never have happened if the kids weren’t forced to have a full day of school on Christmas Eve. Who does that?”

“Russia, at least when I was a kid,” Natasha said, licking a spot of brownie frosting off her thumbnail. “The girl, Karen, reminds me a little of a child-size version of the Snow Maiden we had on New Year’s, except she would have worn blue, not red.”

Bruce smiled at her from across the room but said nothing, sipping his hot chocolate.

“You know what nearly always bugs me in Christmas specials?” Peter asked.

“The lack of arachnids?” Tony asked.

“Oh, there’s a whole story about spiders and Christmas from Ukraine,” Peter said, brightening. “It’s kind of my favorite. See, a widow brought a tree inside her home for Christmas, but didn’t have any money to decorate it, so her kids went to bed sad, but in the morning, the tree was covered in spiderwebs.”

“Okay, kid, for normal people that’s not charming. That’s nightmare fuel,” Clint said, grimacing.

“No, no, the cobwebs turn out to be made of silver and gold, so they’re not poor anymore and live happily ever after,” Peter said. “See? They were saved by their friendly neighborhood spiders!”

Clint seemed to be considering this, then shrugged and said, “Nope, sorry, still creeped out.”

“Anyway, what’s weird to me is, why are there never any parents in these specials?” Peter asked.

“Because they wouldn’t let their kid wander off with a snowman to the North Pole?” Bruce said. “Well, if they’re sane. And paying attention. Which means I could have trotted off with ol’ Frosty with no problem.”

“Karen does mention that she doesn’t want to worry her mother by being later for dinner,” Pepper said. “Granted, she’s planning on going to the North Pole and back in about two hours, but that’s fairly typical reasoning for a kid.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t the parents be waiting at the bus stop or dropping them off or something?” Peter said.

“When Steve and I were kids, almost nobody did that,” Bucky said. “We all walked to and from school every day.”

“Let me guess,” Tony said. “Uphill? Both ways?”

“You forgot to add barefoot in the snow,” Steve said, but he was smiling. “No, parents pretty much stayed out of kids’ lives back then. You had breakfast, then left and came home for dinner. They just trusted we’d go to school.”

“Which was occasionally not what happened,” Bucky said, grinning. “Every kid played hooky now and then, unless you were a hopeless goody-goody.”

“Like Steve here,” Tony said, gesturing with his coffee cup.

Bucky outright belly laughed, and Tony looked taken aback.

“Are you kidding? Steve might have been tiny, but he was the mastermind of everything we did, some of which, as I recall, was distinctly illegal,” Bucky said, then looked over at Steve and smirked. “Do you remember the time we hopped that train with Herman and Pauly and thought we were going to New Jersey?”

“When did we figure out we were headed to Florida?” Steve asked, laughing. “It must have been somewhere around South Carolina, I think.”

“Yeah, and then we had to try to figure out how to jump off, and Pauly got his foot stuck in the hinge of the boxcar door, and he nearly got brained by that lamppost,” Bucky said.

“His mom was not happy about him losing that shoe,” Steve said. “I can still hear her yelling at him all the way down the street.”

“You were all the way out in South Carolina? How did you get back to Brooklyn?” Peter asked.

“We jumped on another train, this one heading north. We nearly made it home before sunset, so our folks just thought we were late for dinner, which meant we still caught it, but not as bad if they knew we’d been crossing state lines all day,” Bucky said. “What were we? Ten?”

“Nine,” Steve said. “It was fourth grade. I had a crush on our teacher, Miss Brooke.”

“Yeah, she was a looker alright,” Bucky said with a sigh. “I still remember that red and white striped dress she wore at least twice a week. She looked like a candy cane with curves in all the right places.”

Loki pursed his lips in concentration, considering, before going up to Steve and shaking his hand.

“What?” he said, as Loki turned to Bucky and did the same to him.

“First rate mischief,” he said. “Both of you. I fully approve of your youth.”

“And I of your spirit of adventure!” Thor said, raising his mug of hot chocolate. “I drink a toast to your friend Pauly’s lost shoe! May it dance forever in Valhalla!”

“And I’m still stuck over here trying to get my brain to process you weren’t some kind of perfect choir boy,” Tony said. “I’m almost hurt.”

“Oh, he really was a choir boy, too, literally,” Bucky said. “Being a good boy and occasionally being a little wild weren’t mutually exclusive back then. Plus he had a face like an innocent baby angel. The nuns loved him. They were sure he was going to be a priest when he grew up.”

Peter looked horrified.

“A little wild? Half the police department would be out looking for you if you tried something like that today,” he said.

“Different times, kid,” Bucky said, smiling bittersweetly and clinking his mug with Steve’s. “Very different times.”

Tony gave them both an appraising look.

“You would have been my kind of people. I may need to get very drunk tonight, because I find myself agreeing with Loki,” he said.

“Heavens forfend,” Loki said, putting a hand to his heart and clutching imaginary pearls.

“Whatever happened to Herman and Pauly?” Bruce asked, and the suddenly somber looks on their faces made him immediately wish he hadn’t.

“Herman was killed in action in Italy in ‘43,” Steve said quietly. “Pauly got polio in seventh grade. He didn’t make it.”

The room became very quiet.

“Sorry,” Bruce said, looking uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s okay,” Bucky said. “Like I said, they were different times. Not all of them were laughs. Doesn’t mean we don’t still remember them, though.”

Thor soberly hummed his agreement, taking another swallow of hot chocolate with a thoughtful expression.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting Frosty to wind up being quite so melancholy,” Clint said.

“Me neither,” Tony said. “Mostly I was just wondering about the science of building a more durable Frosty.”

“The what?” Bruce said, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m just thinking,” Tony said, leaning forward towards Bruce and beginning to speak more quickly, “if you built a durable, adaptable body form, maybe from synthetically grown biological material, and then created software for an AI strong enough and realistic enough, is there any reason you couldn’t essentially create a new, fully autonomous lifeform?”

“Wait, wait, wait, are you seriously considering making a sentient robot?” Bruce asked.

“What precisely do you think I am, Mister Banner?” JARVIS’s voice asked, sounding rather hurt.

“But you don’t have a body,” Bruce said, staring towards the ceiling. “No offense meant!”

“Right, so we just download JARVIS to the cyber equivalent of Hinkle’s old top hat, toss the info into a custom-built body—no snow, obviously, that was stupid—and voila! You’ve got—”

“The makings of a really bad science fiction disaster,” Clint said. “This is a horrible idea. Tony, if you want to build Frosty, go to the park and start rolling snowballs.”

Tony stopped for a second, quirking his mouth to one side.

“Why not?” he said. “Anybody else up for making snowmen in Central Park?”

“At 11:00 at night?” Natasha said. “That could get very interesting very fast.”

“We’re all superheroes here,” Tony said shrugging, then looked at Pepper. “Well, mostly. If trouble happens, we fix it and then go back to sticking carrot noses into snowballs.”

“I’m game,” Steve said.

“Same here,” Bucky said.

“Yeah, but do we have any coal?” Peter asked.

“Sure. Santa leaves me a whole sack of it every year,” Tony said, grinning.

“I certainly do,” Pepper said, grinning back. “You earn every piece.”

“I do indeed,” Tony said, giving her a kiss before taking her hand and leading the way to the elevator as the Avengers (and Loki) went off to play in the snow.