Gathering: New Year's Eve Gala

[concierge]

The annual Nexus New Year's Eve gala began at 8 in the evening. Too grand to be contained by the lobby or dining hall, the gardens at the front of the hotel were employed, with long strings of white lights forming a twinkling canopy from the front doors all the way to the hedge maze. The weather was temperate and calm, and the night perfectly clear.

Drinks were served at various bars set up throughout the gardens and lobby, with champagne cocktails being the specialty of the night. Wheeling through the crowd was a bartender with golden cart providing warm drinks on the go: Tom and Jerrys, rum punch, negus, and Irish coffee.

Crisply-dressed wait staff wove through the collected guests with an abundance of hors d'oeuvres for all different tastes. The Bistro remained open with a limited selection of items for those who were wanting something more substantial.

Above the front doors was hung a large, gold-rimmed clock counting down the last hours, minutes, and seconds of the current year.

Comments

Re: For Natasha

[captain_rogers]

The truth was that the holidays had a way of bringing the melancholy out in Steve, despite his best efforts to the contrary. No matter how much he rationalized the fact that it had been seventy something years before since he had had what could be termed a merry Christmas, the truth was that there were a few things that could not be rationalized away and so much of his situation fell under them. It was, in part, the reason he had sought out Natasha in the first place. Whether or not she would have understood what it was like to know the memories in his head were so old that no one else held them so near to the present and still have them fresh and bright, belonging to a handful of years past as far as his head was concerned, he suspected she understood more of him than she'd say aloud.

So he did not speak of the New Year's spent hunched over a fire with the Commandoes, or of the fact that while the bitter wind had made them all shiver and Dum Dum's hip flask had done little to keep out the cold that had bled through the ramshackle barn they'd been camped out in, he had been happier that night than he had on any New Year's since.

Neither did he speak of the fact that his last had been spent with Rumlow razzing him about his sour face, or the appreciation he had felt for the man when he'd showed up at Steve's favorite gym with a six pack of beer and offered to spar with him rather than follow up on any of the grand plans he'd boasted of for days before. That betrayal was too sharp to speak of. Certainly when they were out looking for something other than his softening the fine edges of the pages of his books in reading and rereading the ones he had on hand.

Her presence at his side was neither entirely warm nor solid, as she was too difficult to grasp in every way of the word to call her either of those, but she was familiar, and she was trusted. She was also, naturally, happy to play pain in his ass with her teasing. Not that Steve felt much like complaining for all his grumbling when she teased him with an edge of a smile to her husky voice.

"That depends," he replied, pulling at a huff that was more show than truth before he continued on. "Are we talking dancing dancing, or whatever they're doing nowadays?" The 'old man card' was easy enough to pull when he didn't mean it, and Natasha wasn't fool enough to think he'd grown up in puritan times. "If that's the case, you're definitely going to have to buy me dinner first. A fella's gotta look out for his reputation, can't have everyone thinking I'm easy."