Work Text:
Kitchen Nightmares
Clint loves cooking. He is pretty damn amazing at it, too. Give him some time and he’ll whip up what the other Avengers refer to as “magic on a plate” seemingly out of thin air. No matter how simple or complicated, his food always turns out delicious. Whether he is cooking or baking, it doesn’t matter if they just got new groceries or if he is basically cleaning out the refrigerator. Clint’s food has truly spoiled them all, and when he is gone for longer stretches of time on SHIELD assignments, they definitely miss him for more than just company and bad puns.
The thing is, Tony likes cooking. He really does - he spends a lot of time trying to make dinner or hot breakfast, and the results are… Interesting. Oftentimes burned or stone cold with very little in between, unless you count his food being over- or under seasoned. Or any imaginable combination of forgotten or randomly added ingredients.
To say that Tony is bad at cooking would be putting it very nicely. He may be a genius with a remarkable brain and way more PHDs than anyone really needs, but that doesn’t mean he is fit to be let loose in a kitchen on his own devices. Which, of course, doesn’t stop him from trying.
Clint loves Tony, and Tony loves Clint. Which is why Tony wants to surprise him with a meal some days, on which he’s spent hours, trying to get it right. To be fair, he really puts a lot of love and effort into the whole thing, because again, his intentions are good, but the execution needs work still.
As a result, Clint is choking down almost inedible food on a regular basis, because he recognizes the love and effort, even though he has suffered through more than a few awful meals.
So, it’s a thing.
Whenever he catches Tony early enough, with JARVIS help, because the AI really is amazing, Clint casually asks,
“Hey Honey, need any help?” in an attempt to keep an eye on his boyfriend and keep the damage to a minimum. But Tony, bless him, without a fail will just beam at him and say something along the lines of,
“Nope, you go relax, I’ve got this!” and pull Clint in for a kiss before shoving him out of the kitchen to keep working in secret and almost set the house on fire in the process.
Tony doesn’t “got this”. He really, really doesn’t, but Clint also doesn’t want to crush his excitement or enthusiasm.
While the interest and good intention is definitely there, Tony never had the opportunity to actually learn how to cook. Growing up, there were always butlers and chefs to take care of the meals, nevermind the fact that Howard Stark would have freaked the fuck out if he had found his son on a kitchen stove - that one incident when Tony was six had been more than enough, and he’d never treid again, up until he was an adult. All through college, he’d either lived on cup noodles or whatever Rhodey had cooked, and then there is that one time where he spent three hours on scrambled eggs, which caused Pepper to be worried about his well-being more than anything.
So yeah, Clint knows all this, and he absolutely understands what it is like to have missed opportunities. He himself has experiences with that, although on a different level under different circumstances, but the point is: missed opportunities, never learned something as a kid, wanting to catch up - Clint gets it. He really does.
This is why Clint lets Tony have his way, and silently pulls up the pizza delivery app on his phone, knowing they’ll more than likely need it in the near future.
Not even Lucky wants any of the scraps Tony cooks. The very same mutt who will dig through the trash can because it’s fun and there might be something edible in it, refuses to even touch whatever Tony is cooking. Lucky might come over to inspect it, but more often than not, he’ll just sneeze at the offering and leave the room. It’s kinda sad and kinda hilarious at the same time.
Tony continues causing absolute havoc in the kitchen nonetheless.
One morning, Clint enters the kitchen, running frantically because there is a lot of smoke. He can see the flashing lights and feel the vibrations of the extra loud smoke detector in the kitchen - all accommodations to his damaged hearing. Lucky is barking like crazy, and even though he woke up about 20 seconds ago, Clint is on his feet and scrambling, worried because there is smoke and the alarm is going off while Tony was not next to him in bed when he woke up. He needs him to be okay, because he doesn’t know what he would do without him.
“Fuck!” Clint is cursing and coughing, smoke stinging his eyes and creeping into his lungs, which is bad.
Thankfully, as it turns out, the fire was relatively small and Tony is perfectly fine - he slips into his boyfriend’s frantic hug with ease, squeezing to reassure him that everything is alright - well, apart from the smoking pan on the stove and the wide open window. At least JARVIS has turned the alarm off now.
“Fucking shit. Are you okay?!” Clint asks, despite seeing so for himself and being able to hold Tony close to reassure himself that he is, in fact, fine and in one piece. With a heavy sigh of relief, he adds,
“Next time just set an alarm clock, huh? It’ll be evil still, but much more gentle than the smoke detector going off”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I was gonna make eggs and bacon… Extra crispy, as it turns out.”
Tony shoots him a lopsided grin, almost sheepish as he runs a hand through the messy mop of hair on Clint’s head. If the archer wasn’t so genuinely freaked out about his safety, Tony would have laughed. He loves early-morning-Clint, because he’s always rumpled and disheveled in his own adorable way. Especially before coffee, when he is a tired, grumpy mess and Tony wants to kiss him senseless every single day.
Today, Clint is wide awake and sags into his partner in relief. The two of them hold onto each other for a bit, simply enjoying each other's company. A cold chill from the open window creeps into the room, and the smell of burned breakfast is slowly getting less and less. Small favors.
Both men look over at the pan, where nothing edible is recognizable as such.
“Extra crispy indeed. Idiot.” Clint adds, fondly as he presses a kiss into Tony’s dark hair. It only makes him laugh.
Another morning, the kitchen is not filled with smoke, which is honestly always a plus, but Tony is standing near the stove, unmoving and staring as if he isn’t sure what exactly he is looking at.
Cautiously, Clint steps closer - thankfully, he already had a cup of coffee before his workout routine and is as much of a functioning human as he can be.
“...Tony?” he asks, stepping closer. The man in question shakes his head slowly.
“It was supposed to be french toast.”
“...Okay?”
“It was supposed to be french toast.” Tony repeats, then sighs.
“I’m not sure what it is now.”
“So, uh… Wanna walk me through your steps to see where it might have gone wrong?” Clint asks, and he is looking at a defeated man.
“The step is I’ll order breakfast online, goddammit.”
“Are you sure? We can make some together, if you want to.”
“Yeah, about that, I kinda used up all the ingredients and fucked up too many times…”
A long beat of silence passes, and even the dog looks up from his pillow in the corner as if to say “Silly human”.
“...Ordering online it is.” Clint agrees, and for once, keeps the snarky comments to himself.
One would think that the day would come where Tony gets discouraged by failure after failure - it doesn’t. On the contrary, it makes him want to prove even more that he can do this, which also means that he refuses to accept any help, determined to figure it out on his own.
Spite and stubbornness have kept him alive at more than one point in his life. There is no way Tony Stark will be defeated by a simple breakfast recipe - or any other for that matter - again.
So, one day, he greets Clint with a wide, toothy grin and a “taste it” as he shoves a pot and a spoon in his direction.
And because Clint loves him, he does taste it. He only barely manages to keep himself from coughing, but he is not sure for how long things can go on like this. Sooner or later, he will have to sit Tony down and talk about this. He would love to encourage him to keep going, but the results and waste of food are too much to bear at this point. Not to mention the fire hazards.
*+~
Prompt 16: "Taste it (evil grin)"