All right all right all right, Steve with cooking implements, I am very here for this. We’re going to assume that, somewhere between the movies, the Avengers DID actually cohabitate in the Tower, because I’m having trouble letting go of that part of comic canon. This is probably right after the first movie, before Ultron and Winter Soldier. Unfortunately that means no Sam, which I am sad about, fortunately that means I am not within my rights to wallow in the pain that is Bucky Barnes. And awaaaaaay we go.
“All right, and that button does what again?” Steve asked, frowning.
Tony huffed a sigh and drummed his fingers against the counter, agitated. “C’mon, Cap, we’ve done this like twelve times, how do you not have this yet?”
Steve pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger, closing his eyes. “First of all, Stark, we’ve done this three times. And you could have just let me cook on the stove like a civilized person, there’s no reason I need to use the microwaver.”
“Microwave, Rogers, it’s a microwave, this is the single best invention of the modern age. Except maybe the strip club.” Tony paused, his fingers stopping in their rhythmic one-two-three-four-click, and added, “Don’t tell Pep I said that, I don’t do that anymore.”
“We had those in the forties, they were called burlesque clubs. Okay, explain it to me again,” Steve said, dropping his hand, and Tony bounced forward on his toes. Steve wondered for a moment how many cups of coffee the inventor had downed since that morning. Of course, all the evidence suggested that this could very well be the man’s base personality.
“These buttons let you set the number of seconds or minutes that you want to microwave something for,” Tony said, pointing to the numbered buttons. “The green one is ‘start,’ the red one is ‘clear.’ This one is for–”
“Oh, I know that one,” Steve said brightly. “That one’s for baking potatoes, right?”
“Yes,” Tony said in a tone of immense relief. “And this one is for popcorn.”
“What’s popcorn, again?”
Tony threw his hands into the air and dropped them onto his face, groaning. “I can’t. I can’t deal with this. I’m asking Pepper to do this. You know what, fine, Capsicle, you want to cook on the stove, go nuts. Knock yourself out. I’m going to go…build a robot to run the microwave for you.”
“Thanks for your help, Tony,” Steve called after him, and waited until the door had swung shut to grin to himself.
A ceiling tile silently lifted itself up and away, and Clint leaned through the space left behind.
“Hey, Clint,” Steve said cheerfully, reaching into the fridge and pulling out a box of leftover fried rice from the previous night’s dinner. He dumped out the contents onto a plate and spread it out, then popped it into the microwave and punched in thirty seconds. “What can I do for you?”
“How long do you think it’s gonna take him to realize that you’re doing this to get under his skin?”
Steve shrugged, hitting ‘start.’ “I dunno, probably one or two more times? I got him to explain the StarkPhone he gave me for a solid three hours.”
“I think the popcorn thing broke him, he might actually build a robot.”
The microwave beeped and Steve pulled his plate out, picking up his fork and closing the microwave expertly with an elbow. “Yeah, that was mean. It just too good to pass up.”
Clint snorted and said, “Well, Nat wants to know if you want to watch The Lion King with us. Have you seen that one?”
“Nope. I’ll be right up.”
“Bring chocolate to buy entry,” Clint said as he lifted the ceiling tile back into place and silently crept away.