Snowdrift

Last Christmas – the one that went down in history as That Time Grandma Phyllis Almost Choked on a Chestnut – Tony raked in a pretty impressive haul. An excess of five hundred dollars collected from the extended family, a new soldering iron, a heap of prototype tech to mess around with and take apart, and, to the amusement of everybody except him, a pair of fluffy pink earmuffs from his cousin. They’d been passed around the dinner table, chewed by the dog, worn as a bra and generally heartily mocked, and Tony had cast them aside in the mess of his room, utterly failing to remember that they even existed once he’d woken up on Boxing Day to calls of, “You’re missing Home Alone!”

But right now, with his breath fogging in front of his face, his hands bundled deep into the pockets of his coat and the tips of his ears red and stinging, he really wishes he’d had the foresight to dig the stupid things out of whatever dark recess of his bedroom he’d thrown them into, pinkness be damned, and jam them onto his head. Fuck the cold, and fuck his ears for being so susceptible to it.

He knows he looks like some kind of Scrooge, sitting right at the back of the stands and trying to gather as much heat as possible from the uselessly meagre radiator nearby, but honestly, he doesn’t care. He’s having a bad day, and hanging around here, waiting for someone whose name he can’t remember to tell him to do something he doesn’t really want to do, isn’t making it any better. Sure, he could look at the bright side. Getting an internship is one thing, but getting an internship where he gets to play around with electronics all day is entirely something else. And he could be grateful that the local rink decided to take him on at all, but strangely, he isn’t in the mood.

What’s making the whole thing worse, if that’s even possible, is that Pepper is doing precisely the opposite of what she, as his designated best friend and unofficial cheerleader, should be doing. She’s having fun.

The stands are practically deserted – as, Tony thinks, they should be, because it’s the middle of November and nobody wants to be sitting in a plastic chair in a painfully cold ice rink for any extended period of time – but the rink itself is dotted with kids at some kind of class. Pepper’s oohing and aahing, pointing at the little kids holding each other’s hands and slipping around on the ice like an uncoordinated centipede, laughing at the brisk instructions of the teacher (a delicate, waifish woman who looks to be in her mid-fifties, with her white-blonde hair pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head). And Pepper, god damn her, is wearing a hat, and a scarf, and gloves, and Tony’s more than a little bit jealous.

“Remember what I told you, Marianne!” The woman’s voice drifts up towards them from the rink. She’s got a subtle accent, but Tony can’t decide where exactly it’s from. “Back straight, toes pointed… That’s more like it.”

“I wish I could ice skate,” Pepper says, and Tony lets out a little sigh. “It’s so nice to watch. It’s like ballet, only it’s…”

“Not ballet?” Tony supplies helpfully, leaning subtly closer to her and trying to will some of her body heat over to him. “Looks like hell to me. If hell froze over, I mean.”

“Ha ha,” Pepper says drily, with a roll of her eyes. “Stop being so grumpy, Tony. I wish I was interning here. Did you know they train Olympic skaters?”

“You’re saying that like I should be impressed.” Tony sniffs, wiping his nose on the shoulder of his coat and desperately hoping that he’s not getting some kind of life-threatening flu. “Name one Olympic skater who’s a household name.”

Pepper glances sidelong at him through the curtain of her red hair. “I raise you two. Torvill and Dean.”

“They only count as one,” Tony replies with an apologetic tilt of his head. “God, it’s so cold. I think I’ve contracted pneumonia. They’re going to have to chop off my legs. This is it, Pep. Wheelchair bound, the rest of my life.”

“Oh my God, would you stop being such an ass about this? It’s an experience. You’ll be able to see actual Olympic figure skaters doing their routines and watch them training and… Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Tony raises his hands in an ‘I’m not armed’ kind of way, and then immediately regrets it as pinpricks of chill start to scatter across his fingers. Jamming his hands furiously back into his coat pockets, he sighs, a stream of condensed breath billowing out in front of him. “Alright, okay, fine. I’ll stop complaining.”

They fall silent, watching the kids tumble across the ice, ungainly and uncoordinated for the most part. The teacher lady is skating between them with an agility that Tony supposes comes only with experience, correcting the positions of their arms and moving alongside them to make sure they don’t slip and fall. After a while, she calls them to the edge of the rink, gives them what appears to be a quick pep talk, and sends them trotting off home.

Pepper sniffs, pushing herself to stand, and tugs at Tony’s coat insistently. “C’mon. You need to find your boss and I need to get a hot chocolate.”

“I’ll put in an order for a coffee.” Muttering, partly to himself and partly at Pepper, Tony gets up and follows her down the steps to the edge of the rink. It’s colder down here, though Tony hadn’t really expected anything different, and with the rink so empty it looks a little eerie. The teacher is tightening the laces of her skates, kneeling on one knee, and Tony figures he should probably introduce himself to her if he’s going to be interning here.

Pepper, apparently, has the same idea, because she mumbles a quick, “Good luck!” in his ear and gives him a sharp push in the woman’s direction. Failing abysmally to correct his feet, he trips spectacularly over his frayed laces and almost lands face-first on the floor, only managing to right himself at the last minute on the edge of the barrier that separates the stands from the ice.

“Hi,” he says, as the woman looks up from her skates in surprise. “I’m Tony.”

“I take it you’re not here to skate,” she says wryly, pushing herself to her feet. Her accent is something Eastern European; very slight, but noticeable enough. “The new intern?”

“Yep, that’s me. Sorry I almost fell on you.”

“I suppose I could be persuaded to forgive you.” She’s leaning against the barrier now, and there’s a very slight smile on her face. “Irena Bartel,” she says, holding out a gloved hand. Tony shakes it, relishing the second-long warmth of her grasp. “Technically, I’m in charge of you, but you’ll be mostly reporting to Phil Coulson. He deals with the technical side of the rink. He’s not here at the moment, but he’ll be back to introduce himself and get you set up in an hour or so.”

“Great,” Tony says, failing to contain the irritation that seeps into his voice at the knowledge that he’ll have to wait around in the cold for another hour.

Her smile widens incrementally. “Perhaps you should consider investing in a hat.”

“Yeah, I’ll think about it. Thanks.” Sighing, he jogs towards the middle of the stands and flops into a seat, waiting for Pepper to come back with his coffee. With a lack of better things to do, he surveys the ice. Empty but for Ms Bartel (it seems strange to think of her by her first name; she doesn’t really exude the ‘call me Irena’ attitude), it looks kind of calming, and for maybe five seconds Tony can see the appeal. Then a loud, heated conversation drifting along the corridor to the rink breaks his concentration, and he looks up to see two people, a man and a woman, stroll into view. They look to be in their mid-twenties, and they’re walking with the same straight-backed stance. It sounds like they’re bickering.

The woman, proud owner of a head of perfectly waved black hair, throws herself into a seat ten or so rows in front of Tony and irritably jams skates onto her feet. She’s saying something, but all Tony hears is, “…you weren’t so arrogant I’d—”

“Please don’t delude yourself into thinking it was my fault you didn’t land the jump. It’s embarrassing,” the guy shoots back. He’s a good few inches taller than her, pale and dark-haired and lean, and he foregoes a seat, bending double to put on his skates. Ms Bartel, Tony notes, is looking on with a cantankerous expression darkening her features. “Sif, sweetheart, listen carefully, because I’m only going to say this once. I—” and he pauses to jab himself in the chest “—am not the one who’s at fault here.”

“Quiet,” Ms Bartel cuts in, softly commanding, and they both fall immediately silent. “It happened in the past. Learn from it, forget it, and move on. Both of you,” she adds, this time directly to Mr Supercilious, who bristles. “Warm up, please, and then we’ll run through some routines. Where are the rest of them?”

“Messing around in the changing rooms,” the woman, Sif, says. Supercilious is already on the rink, stretching his arms behind his head lazily. Impatiently, Ms Bartel disappears, presumably to get ‘the rest of them’, and Tony sinks down further into his seat, hoping beyond hope that they don’t notice he’s there.

Sif follows the guy onto the rink, kicking a leg up onto the barrier and stretching out like a ballerina. Thankfully, Tony doesn’t have to watch them stretching in stony silence, because Pepper returns from the café with two steaming polystyrene cups. Slipping one into his hands, she sits down beside him and whispers, “What did I miss?”

“Okay, so, that—” he points at the woman, who is now somehow standing on the tips of her skates, arms reaching into the air “—is Sif, and that over there is Mr Tall-Dark-and-Conceited. They’re waiting for all the other guys to turn up because they’re all having a mad orgy in the changing rooms or whatever, and then they’re all gonna warm up – God only knows how they’re gonna manage that – and do a dance. Oh, also, the woman’s Irena Bartel, and I have to wait, like, another three years for some guy called Phil to show up. How much do I owe you for the coffee?”

“Four fifty. It’s stupid expensive back there.” Pepper sips at her hot chocolate. “So, what’s the gossip?”

“Well, apparently, Sif didn’t land a jump,” Tony mumbles, “and she blames the guy, and he’s all, ‘Fuck you, I’m the Ice Queen, it was totally your fault.’ I guess they’re probably also mad because of the aforementioned orgy that neither of them got invited to. I’d be mad too, all things considered.” Blowing on his coffee, he takes a sip, relishing in the warmth that spreads through him after it.

On the ice, Sif has started a slow lap of the rink. She’s just over half way round when a group of five or six burst onto the scene, laughing and generally looking like they’re having a fairly good time. Skates on, they head onto the ice, stretching in whatever way they see fit, while Ms Bartel watches from the sidelines like some kind of all-seeing eye.

Pepper is practically collapsing with excitement at the chance to see some ‘real skating’, but what actually happens for the next hour is a whole lot of nothing. They do a couple of circuits, skid around a bit and do some twirls, and Ms Bartel shouts at them to extend their legs and tighten their turns and various other meaningless things. The only remotely interesting moment is when one of them almost slips, and Tony nearly misses it because he’s staring into the rapidly diminishing contents of his coffee cup at the time.

Once they’re done spinning around, they spend a few minutes taking off their skates and tying the laces together for reasons Tony doesn’t really understand, and then they troop off back to the changing room, Ms Bartel in tow. Pepper gets up to stretch her legs and announces a trip to the toilet; Tony replies with a grunted mmhm, still cuddling his coffee cup and trying to make himself seem as small as possible. He’s still sitting there, half-curled in his seat, when a dark figure slinks back onto the rink, skates itching lines into the ice as he heads for the middle.

Tony watches, almost just to spite himself. It’s the arrogant guy from before, except for a moment Tony doesn’t really recognise him, because the tension that was previously keeping his back ramrod straight is utterly gone. He’s still poised, but it doesn’t look false; in fact, he looks the calmest Tony’s seen him in the last hour. He does a few lazy figure-eights that span the whole of the rink, sometimes moving forwards, other times backwards; picking up speed, he jumps, arms straight in the air as he performs a succession of tight spins; then he’s moving again, somehow in control of his impossibly long legs, arms moving with a completely unforeseen grace, fluid and simple and clean. He spins again, this time with one leg horizontal in front of him and his torso tucked inward. Tony counts two turns, three, four, five, six, and then half way through the seventh he falters, slips, grasps fruitlessly at the fluidity he had previously held.

He skids to a halt, digging flakes of ice out of the flat surface. It’s only when silence descends on the rink that Tony realises he’d gotten used to the sound of skates dragging on the ice.

And it’s only when the guy looks up at him and calls, haughty and cool, “What are you looking at?” that Tony realises he’s staring.