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The night before the morning of, Steve decided to cook everything in the fridge.
Here’s the thing: Steve didn’t actually really like to cook. He’d done plenty of it growing up, out of necessity, and one of the things he liked best about the 21st century was that he didn’t have to do it anymore. There was no deep-seated love of cooking driving Steve’s all-day cook-a-thon; it was just plain practicality. He had, after all, come of age during the Depression, and he didn’t like for anything to go to waste. And after tonight, for one reason or another, anything left behind in the fridge would fall into the category of waste.
Here’s the other thing: even at the best of times, “stocking the kitchen” had never been high on the list of priorities for anyone currently living on the base, which meant that the ingredients Steve had to work with were a bit… haphazard. Among the detritus he scraped up were six half-empty bags of rice, twelve avocados careening toward overripe, most of what appeared to be a cornish hen, and absolutely no milk.
But there was food in the fridge and his ma had taught him you could make a casserole out of anything, so he pulled out everything that hadn’t already expired and decided to test her wisdom.
He chopped.
He measured.
He roasted.
He sauteed.
He even baked, a little bit, with results so disastrous they wouldn’t even tempt the Hulk.
He took out the trash to hide the evidence.
He chopped some more. Cooking, while not exactly Steve’s favorite activity, did at least keep him busy. And while absolutely nothing besides maybe (maybe) an asteroid hurtling toward Earth could have kept his mind off what they were planning to do the next day, grating carrots (seriously, what kind of sadist had written a recipe that demanded grated carrots?) was at least better than his other options, were were: listening to Tony and Bruce agonize over their equations for the thousandth time, standing pointlessly off to the side while Thor and Carol argued about the likelihood that what they were planning would cause in a tear in the fabric of the universe, and watching Scott play Rock Band.
Compared to all that, figuring out how to use the Kitchenaid mixer was honestly kind of pleasant.
Natasha showed up first. Her hands were bright pink and scrubbed raw, and Steve could tell she’d been checking their weapons over and over since they’d wrapped their last pre-mission meeting. She leaned in and sniffed at the potatoes he was mashing.
“Not enough garlic,” she commented.
“I’m sorry, is that you offering to help?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t think so.”
Thor poked his head in just as the tomato sauce was starting to simmer. “What’s all this?”
“A feast,” Natasha contributed.
Thor brightened, and Steve looked away; he’d nearly forgotten how delighted Thor used to look at everything. “A feast before battle! So you admit it’s a crucial component of any fight?”
It was a years-long argument about which Steve was not, even at this particular moment, inclined to yield. “Do I think feasting before a mission has an impact on performance? No, I definitely do not. But everybody’s gotta have dinner.”
“It’s a feast,” Thor said smugly.
“I’m cutting you off,” Steve said, snatching the tortilla chips from Natasha.
Bruce wandered in eventually, so engrossed in thought that he didn’t seem to notice any of them, much less the rapidly-expanding spread that was starting to fill every available flat surface in the kitchen. He was halfway to the fridge before he looked up. “Oh,” he said, blinking his way into the present moment. “Is someone cooking?”
Steve glanced around. “Nope,” he said, and went back to his brussels sprouts.
“Smells good,” Bruce said. “Is there enough for everybody?”
There was, to the naked eye, enough for all of Manhattan. Steve said, “Sure.”
“You have a smudge,” Natasha said, and then - and Steve wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes - she licked her thumb and reached out to rub Bruce’s chin.
Steve and Thor busied themselves with looking literally anywhere else.
Clint wandered in just as Bruce was setting the table. “Toss those over here,” he said, holding out his hands for the pile of plates.
“I’m not going to toss them,” Bruce said.
“Dude, I was in the circus, I’ll catch them.”
“I know you’ll catch them, but - ”
“If you know I’ll catch them, then why won’t you throw them?”
“Because I’m not throwing an armful of plates at you!”
“Okay, if I drop them, I promise I’ll clean them up,” Clint said.
“There’s going to be a but in there somewhere,” Natasha commented.
“I’ll clean them up after we get back,” Clint said with a grin.
“There it is.”
“Just throw him the plates, we have a hundred more,” Steve said, grabbing a new plate out of the cabinet and whirling it in Clint’s direction.
Clint shot out a hand and caught it like a frisbee. “Told you I’d catch them.”
“You got lucky,” Bruce argued.
Clint snatched up two plates he’d just put down and started to juggle them. “Does this look lucky to you?”
“How many can you do at once?” Thor asked, tossing him another.
“Six,” Clint said.
“He’s lying,” Natasha said.
Thor threw him two more, rapid-fire, and Clint immediately dropped them. “Probably more like five,” Clint admitted.
“Let’s get at least a few on the table,” Steve said, using a pair of Iron Man-branded mitts to pull a ribeye out of the oven. “Is there anybody else around?”
Natasha pulled up the base’s tracking system. “Scott and Carol and Rhodey went to see their families, and Rocket and Nebula are in orbit.”
“I wouldn’t want to spend my last night on Earth with us either,” Clint said, spinning a plate on each pointer finger.
“What about Tony?” Steve said.
“I must have missed my invitation, but luckily for you all I don’t mind party crashing,” Tony said, coming around the corner carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. “Red or white?”
“Both,” Natasha, Clint and Thor answered as one.
Tony dug into the junk drawer for a corkscrew. “I thought I’d be drinking these while I cried alone in the shower contemplating my imminent demise, but this is much better. What are we celebrating?”
“Christmas, Thanksgiving, and all of our birthdays, just in case we mess up and erase the rest of the year from existence,” Clint said.
“Well in that case, we need some champagne,” Tony said.
Enough plates survived the juggling for each of them to claim one, and soon they were seated around a table piled so high with food that even Thor said, “I think we may have overdone it.”
“We?” Steve said archly.
“Hey, Bruce and I set the table,” Clint said, passing the biscuits to Natasha.
“I set the table and you successfully slowed me down,” Bruce corrected.
“I provided moral support,” Thor said.
“I taste tested,” Natasha said.
“I brought booze,” Tony chimed in, and everybody raised their glasses in appreciation.
“I just hope it’s good,” Steve said.
“Yeah, this would be a super inconvenient time to get food poisoning,” Clint said.
“Why would you even say that,” Bruce sighed.
“I can’t get food poisoning,” Thor said smugly.
“But you can be poisoned,” Natasha said.
“I don’t like the way you say that with such certainty.”
“Will you guys can it for a second? I want to say something,” Tony said.
“I thought we said we weren’t doing big depressing speeches,” Bruce argued.
“Even though everyone knows speeches are important prior to a battle,” Thor said. “Just like feasts.”
“I’m not doing a speech,” Tony said. “I’m just - ”
“It sounds like you’re about to do a speech,” Steve said.
“Wasn’t it you who said ‘no speeches’?” Natasha pointed out.
“It was definitely you,” Clint said. “Which I thought at the time was a little weird, considering how much you like the sound of your own voice, but now it’s clear that what you really wanted was the clear the runway for your own speech - ”
“Jesus christ, I’m not doing a speech, would you all shut up?” Tony said. “I just want to say thanks to whoever cooked because I ate the last frozen pizza for lunch so I would have been hungry otherwise. You guys suck and I hate you. Let’s eat.”
“Cheers!” Clint said.
“That was a terrible speech,” Thor complained through a mouthful of chicken wing.
“That was a very us speech,” Bruce said wryly.
“It wasn’t a speech,” Tony said. “But if you wanted a speech, I could make a speech - ”
“No!” everybody said. At least two people threw napkins at him.
“That’s what I thought,” Tony said.
If you’d asked Steve a few weeks ago, he would have said that he thought they’d all be too nervous to eat that night.
And he would have been enormously, embarrassingly wrong. They ate, and they drank, and they ate some more, and then Tony went for a couple more bottles of wine, and then Steve cut them off because nobody wanted to be hungover tomorrow and you know it, and then Steve pretended not to notice when Natasha started passing around a flask under the table because look, if he could’ve gotten drunk he would’ve had a couple of swigs of his own, all right?
Eventually, Bruce glanced at the sink and said, “I guess we should start on the dishes.”
“Are you kidding me?” Steve said. “Leave ‘em.”
“You heard it here first, folks,” Clint said. “Captain America officially endorses not doing your chores. Children of the world rejoice.”
“This is really going to undermine your PSAs,” Natasha said.
“Those PSAs undermine themselves,” Steve said. “Who knows if that stuff we’re telling them is even accurate? When I was a kid, they said cigarettes were good for our health.”
“Do you think eating four thousand calories in one sitting is good for your health?” Clint said, leaning back in his seat with a groan. “Because if not, I probably shouldn’t do any PSAs either.”
“Nobody ever said you should, Barton,” Tony said. “In fact, after me, you’re probably the last one of us they’d be asking to do a PSA.”
“I’d be last if they knew how many kills I have,” Natasha said with a smirk.
“Uh, hello?” Bruce said. “The science experiment gone wrong isn’t exactly setting any positive examples over here.”
“I was literally a wanted criminal for several years,” Steve said. “The bar is apparently not that high.”
“What’s a PSA?” Thor mused.
“Seriously, someone’s going to have to roll me back to my room,” Clint said. He pushed himself up from the table gingerly and headed for the hallway. “Cap, if I explode the night before the biggest mission of our lives, I’m blaming you.”
“That’s his way of saying thanks,” Natasha said, squeezing Steve’s shoulder as she followed him.
“It was truly a feast to be remembered,” Thor said warmly, standing up and taking the last half-full bottle of wine with him. “I repeat, a feast. We can all agree it was a feast. I won that one, in the end.”
“Are we really not doing the dishes?” Bruce said a bit anxiously as he trailed after them.
“We’re really not,” Steve said, and waited until Bruce was out of sight to stack up the plates nearest him.
Across the table, Tony sat back and arched an eyebrow. “You know, it doesn’t say anywhere on your Wikipedia page that you like to cook.”
“That’s because I don’t,” Steve said. “Do you have my Wikipedia page memorized?”
“Hey, we all have childhood heroes,” Tony said. “I’m just one of the few who was unlucky enough to meet mine.”
“Kind of ruins the whole idea when you find out he’s an asshole, huh?”
“Your words, not mine,” Tony said. “So if you don’t like cooking, why’d you spend all day perfecting your Ina Garten impression?”
“Nothing better to do.”
“Really,” Tony said disbelievingly. “Tomorrow’s the end of the world, and you had nothing better to do than steam a bunch of broccoli? You do know about Pornhub, right?”
“Must have missed that one,” Steve said innocently, collecting a few more plates and dropping them into the sink.
“What a tragedy.” Tony wandered into the kitchen after him, swirling the dregs of a glass of wine. “I get it, though. I mean look, I emailed my accountant today. Stupid, right? If we survive long enough to pay taxes next year, I’ll happily give the IRS whatever it wants - hell, I’ll write them a thank you card for it. But it was kind of nice to do something… banal.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I guess it was.”
“And it was good to see everybody,” Tony said. “You know, in a casual way. When we’re not actively planning a suicide mission. So, thanks for that. And, you know. Other things. A lot of other things. Normally I would never say this because I don’t want to give you the satisfaction, but I couldn’t have done - well, a lot of things, without you. We didn’t always get it right, but damn, when we did, it was pretty spectacular, right?”
“It was,” Steve said. “Hey, Tony?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought ‘no speeches’ applied to small crowds, too.”
“Sure, but I’m known for breaking all the rules,” Tony said. “Speaking of - ”
And he stepped forward, cupped Steve’s cheek, and kissed him square on the lips.
And weirdest part about it was that Steve kissed him back.
Tony pulled away with a sly grin. “Sorry about that. It’s just that I met my childhood hero, and, well, you know. Might not get another chance.”
Steve laughed, out of surprise and confusion and something else he couldn’t quite place and didn’t want to think about too hard. “Sure, Tony.”
“See you in the morning?” Tony said, shoving his hands in his pockets and walking backwards down the hall.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “See you then.”
Tony winked at him and disappeared, his footsteps echoing down the hall.
And Steve turned back to the mess in the kitchen, took a deep breath, and... started loading the leftovers into tupperware. Because, hey. You never know.