“You’re going on a date... with a human” Rhodey asked, unbelieving.
“It’s not a date,” Tony mumbled, doing another twirl in the mirror. “He said he didn’t think mermaids were real—”
“He said ‘mermaid’,” Rhodey deadpanned.
“He didn’t know it was offensive!” Tony defended. “So I corrected him, and explained that the proper term was mer-person—”
“Well aren’t you a hero to all mer-kind.”
“Stop interrupting me!” Tony complained. “He said he had to go but I should come back sometime soon and hang out with him. Maybe his friends would come around for a bit after or something. I don’t know. It’s not a date.”
Rhodey crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s a date, Tones.”
“It’s not a date!”
“It’s a date.”
“What are you two bickering about?” Pepper asked, swimming up to them.
“Tony has a date with a human—”
“It’s not a date!”
“And he’s insisting it isn’t,” Pepper finished for him.
“It’s not a date,” Tony tried one last time. God, his friends were so annoying.
Turns out, it was a date. Tony wouldn’t tell Rhodes and Pepper that over his belly-up, dead-ass body, but yeah. It ended up being a date. It was a good date. A great date.
Steve thought so, too, because he invited Tony back to the surface for the next night. Tony answered yes a bit too hastily, but sue him.
Sure, he knew this was going nowhere—he wasn’t going to sprout legs and Steve wasn’t about to grow a tail—but why not have a little fun. Flirt a little. Make out a lot.
Fuck, he was screwed.
“So, was it a date?” Bucky asked when Steve made it back to the apartment.
“Yes,” Steve conceded. “It was a date.”
“Told you! You’re dating a mermaid!”
“That’s actually a very offensive term,” Steve explained, repeating what Tony had taught him. “Mer-people or mer-person is the preferred term.”
“Whatever they’re called... dude, your boyfriend is part fish.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. Jesus. And he’s not part anything. Another offensive stereotype. He’s not part fish, nor is he part human. He’s a mer-person.”
Bucky rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine. Just tell me this... he doesn’t have gills, does he?”
Steve smirked. “No. He does not have gills.”
A week passed. Then two. Tony swam to the surface every night, crawled up the beach, ate dinner, and then made out with Steve. It was wonderful.
“Going up to see your booooooyfriend?” Rhodey teased. Tony was sat on a rock, shining his tail and humming to himself.
“Not my boyfriend,” Tony mumbled. He figured that’s where this was headed but Steve hadn’t brought it up and Tony was not going to be the first to approach the topic. He’d been known to be very poor at reading situations. Fuck, he’d not even realized that Steve and he were going on a date the first night.
“You want him to be.”
“I think you should meet my friends,” Steve said abruptly. He’d taken to bringing a giant wooden bin to the beach and filling it up before Tony arrived. It was much easier for Tony to sit in and Steve wasn’t constantly getting wet with the tide.
“Oh?” Tony asked, taking a sip of wine. A wonderful human invention, alcohol.
“Yeah. Buck’s kind of an ass but I think you’ll like him. The rest are fairly normal.”
“For humans,” Tony supplied. As much as he liked to pretend he and Steve were on the same level, the truth was that Steve was a human and Tony was not. Their cultures were vastly different. Tony could be dating a shark and it would be no different.
Okay, it would be a little different. The kissing wouldn’t be as good, for starters. And sharks weren’t handsome. At all.
“I’ll meet your friends. But I think I’d like to meet them during the day, if that’s okay with you.”
Steve grinned. “Yeah, that’s okay with me.” He leaned over and kissed Tony quickly. Tony splashed him, which led to Steve dunking Tony’s head under the water. Tony spit water at Steve when he surfaced.
“Jerk,” Steve said.
“You love me,” Tony joked, only realizing what he said after it was out of his stupid fat mouth. Damn it. They hadn’t even had the boyfriend talk and here he was spouting the L word. He didn’t know about humans but that was definitely not a word used lightly among mer-folk.
“I do.”
If Tony had knees, they would have gone weak.
“You’re meeting his friends? How come we haven’t been introduced, yet?” Pepper asked. Tony was obsessively trying to get his hair to stop clumping, but he wasn’t having very good luck with it.
“Yeah. Are you embarrassed of us?” Rhodey asked. “Your hair looks fine, by the way.”
“He asked first,” Tony said. “And yes, I’m embarrassed of you.”
The first meeting went stunningly well, much to Steve’s relief. He’d gotten there early, waded out, and carried Tony to the bucket instead of waiting for him to crawl up onto the sand like he usually did.
Things were going swimmingly—no pun intended—until Sam asked, “Have you two figured out how to do it, yet?”
“Do what?” Tony asked. Bucky chuckled. Steve flushed.
“Uh… it’s a, uh, thing. That humans do sometimes when, uh, they.” God, could he have sounded like more of an idiot? “When they’re together.”
“You know how humans wear clothes?” Tony asked Pepper and Rhodey. He’d explained that humans do not in fact all have different bodies, but that they covered up strikingly similar bodies with pieces of fabric. “Well, it’s because they’re hiding stuff.”
“Huh?”
“There’s these body parts that everyone has but it’s super secret and people don’t talk about it. They even go so far as to call them ‘private parts’.”
“Okay.” Rhodey was very fond of learning about the craziness that was human culture.
“But sometimes when people like each other, they take out these secret body parts and, like, touch each other with them.”
“Do they smell from always being in hiding?” Pepper asked. Tony stared at her breasts for a few moments, trying to figure out what was wrong about them. He’d been informed that these were among the aforementioned ‘private parts’.
“I don’t think so. They also stand under water from the roof for long periods of time and rub themselves with wax to get clean.”
“Your boyfriend’s a dork!” Bucky laughed, pointing at Tony.
He’d been in a rush to see Steve, and by extention his friends, and hadn’t been watching where he was swimming. He went though an unfortunate seaweed garden and was now coated with the slime.
“Shuddup,” Tony muttered, picking a long string of seaweed out of his hair.
“I think you look cute,” Steve said, pecking Tony on the lips.
“You have to,” Tony pouted. “You love me.”