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Tony’s not exactly used to housemates, but even he can tell that there’s something a bit odd with some of the occurrences in the recently named Avengers Tower.
Sure, some of that comes down to the fact that his new buddies consist of a god, a time traveller, and three people who’ve all been on the run from government(s) at various points in their lives. He wasn’t surprised in the slightest when the surveillance camera outside Natasha’s door mysteriously stopped working. Or when Thor accidentally shorted out all the electronics in the kitchen. Or when Bruce turned out to eat literally anything put in front of him, up to and including a smoothie with a generous dash of motor oil, far more concerned with getting anything into his stomach than the specifics of what it might be.
They’d lived weird lives. He gets it. Maybe, eventually, they’ll actually grow to trust this place- trust him- and some of these little idiosyncrasies will disappear. Maybe they won’t. That’s fine, it’s not like he can force it. Until then, all he can really do is try and accommodate their quirks as unobtrusively as possible, and get on with the business of saving the world.
Then he stumbles into his lab one morning and finds a plastic spider sitting on DUM-E’s head.
‘…What?’ Tony says, because he keeps pretty good tabs on the weird bullshit entering his lab, and plastic spiders aren’t one of them.
DUM-E rolls forward, chirping a greeting, and nearly dislodging the spider. Automatically, Tony reaches out to catch it.
It’s… not a very impressive toy, all things considered. Cheap plastic. Black with a red hourglass-
Okay, so he’s holding a toy black widow spider.
Next question: why?
The obvious answer has something to do with the spider, well, spy-der, currently residing three floors above him. Then again, he hadn’t really picked Romanoff as the type to go in for spider-themed toys, or puns, or, well. Fun in general. He turns it over in his hands a few times, then sighs resignedly and pulls up schematics for a new search-and-rescue model of the iron man suit- first responder times in the invasion are the sort of thing they could definitely work on improving. Unfortunately, he has far more important things to do with his time than puzzle over the mystery of who, exactly, left it here.
Tony loses himself in his work for several hours, but JARVIS eventually bullies him into heading up to the tower for brunch, where Clint is introducing Thor to the wonders of bacon and apparently needs his opinion on the right set of condiments.
‘By the way, Tasha got called back to SHIELD,’ Clint says, once the three of them are properly armed with coffee. (He’s the first person Tony’s ever met who takes it just as dark as he does, and thus, Clint is his new best friend). Tony glances over to see the archer turning a plastic spider over in his fingers.
‘Wait, you found one of those too?’
Clint freezes. ‘She left you one?’
He reaches into his pocket and pulls it out. ‘I found it on DUM-E when I went into the lab this morning. Is there a meaning behind it, or…’
Clint snorts. ‘Yeah, I guess? Just a silly thing we do. If she’s been called out on a mission and doesn’t have time to give me the details, she’ll leave one of these behind.’
‘An interesting messaging system,’ Thor observes.
Clint shrugs, lips twitching into a slight grin. ‘Mostly I think she wants to remind me not to do anything stupid, since she’s kind of always here anyway.’ He glances over at Tony. ‘Apparently, she’s decided you need watching too. Welcome to the club of human disasters Nat isn’t willing to let die from our own stupidity!’
‘Hey! Rude!’
‘Is it accurate?’ Steve asks with a shit-eating grin, sidling in and stealing an almost Thor-sized serving of bacon.
Tony glares, then slumps. ‘Probably.’
Steve is the one who does the drawings.
That’s… not news, exactly. Tony’s pretty sure that “Cap was an artist in his free time” is not actually an aspect of the legend his father ever emphasised, but young Tony found out about it somehow anyway. Some of his sketches had survived- they were in the Smithsonian exhibit, right next to that bible the Howling Commandoes had carried and absolutely filled with dirty innuendoes, even if the museum never lets anyone see those pages.
Tony’s seen him wandering around with a sketchpad, and even caught him drawing Clint one morning when Birdbrain was practically face-down in his pancakes. So, yes, Tony knew that Steve could draw, and he really should have realised what his sources of inspiration were… but it still came as a surprise.
Steve Rogers, it turns out, is a goddamn troll.
It starts small. The aforementioned sketch of Clint asleep in his breakfast, quickly hidden when he saw Tony looking. Something a little bit mischievous in Cap’s grin when he saw Thor pouting over an empty box of poptarts. The way his eyes lingered on a very frustrated Natasha, the first (and, thus far, only) time Steve actually managed to win a sparring match against her.
And then the drawings started turning up.
He found out from Christine Everhart, of all people.
The paparazzi was predictably crazy about a bunch of superheroes, and everyone associated with them was catching the backlash. Pepper had already been dealing with this bullshit for a few years now, and made it something of a personal mission to take Jane Foster, Darcy Lewis, and a few others under her wing until the media storm died down. Still, someone caught a bunch of photos of them having a day out, including one where Pepper was clearly about to answer her phone.
Given the time the photo was taken, Tony was certain that was the moment he called her to ask about some of the tower remodelling.
The photo was not, in all honesty, an impressive one. Pepper, Jane and Darcy all looked a little bit tired of all the attention they were receiving, but not tired enough for it to be worth commenting on. Jane was facing away from the camera, and Darcy was more of a blur. What it did show, however, was the screen of Pepper’s phone.
On which was clearly shown the caller name “Tony”, and a very impressive sketch of him lecturing Butterfingers, who did not look at all repentant and was wearing the dunce hat with pride.
Christine Everhart, ever the nuisance, had decided that this was apparently the story she wanted to chase, and for the following seventy-two hours, social media went into a bit of a meltdown as it tried to identify the artist.
And Steve…
Steve Rogers is a goddamn troll.
They turn up at SHIELD, next. He drops in for a consult and rather than an agent playing galaga, he finds five agents snickering over a remarkably accurate sketch of Natasha, the one and only time Tony’s ever seen her look anything less than perfectly put together. (That was not a fun battle. In Clint’s words: slime monsters, why.) At some point, Fury’s desktop background becomes a drawing of Iron Man faceplanting right into a wall. Hill calls him into her office for something or other, and the only thing he can pay attention to is the framed art of Clint falling off a building.
Thor’s return to Asgard is completely overshadowed on twitter by art of the God of Thunder tripping over his own cloak. The Hulk’s face upon losing an eating competition to a scrawny eighteen-year-old college student is forever immortalised in ink.
It isn’t until Steve slides him a sketch of Nick Fury as a pirate, complete with pointed hat and parrot on the shoulder, that Tony reluctantly admits this habit of his is actually kind of fun.
‘You know, my brother always used to stab me before big battles,’ Thor says, sounding mournful. He always does, whenever he talks about the good times back before Loki went all… that. Even when those good times included stabbing.
Natasha jerks an eyebrow at him. ‘We could stab you. If you wanted.’
‘No stabbing before the fight,’ Bruce says automatically. Since Tony’s looking at him, he catches the exact moment he realises this is a completely useless request to make and resigns himself to healing stab wounds at some point in the near future. It’s almost cute.
Not that Tony wants to be stabbed! Not at all. It’s just kind of funny that Bruce thought, even for a moment, that he might stop these idiots. Tony worked out a long time ago that the Avengers are, for all intents and purposes, chaos incarnate, and there’s literally no point trying to stop any of them once they decide on a course of action.
Still, they fall silent for a moment, considering his request.
‘We could do after,’ Clint offers.
‘Post battle stabbing?’ Thor considers it. ‘A novel idea.’
Bruce groans, and bangs his head against the side of the plane. ‘I hate all of you.’
Two things you need to know about Bruce:
Firstly, Bruce Banner is a spectacular cook. He has travelled, on foot, across most of the world, and learned culinary tricks from pretty much every country on earth. He knows a good recipe for literally everything- Tony’s yet to find a dish to request that Bruce won’t immediately pull out the cherished family recipe of someone’s grandmother/aunt/homophobic mother but she told me not to share the recipe with anyone so fuck her, have the family meatloaf.
Secondly, Bruce Banner was on the run from Thaddeus Ross for quite some time, and his body got used to not knowing when its next meal might come. Also, he has an angry green rage monster lurking beneath his skin, and Hulk needs to eat far more than your average human.
You wouldn’t like Hulk when he’s hungry. No one likes Hulk when he’s hungry.
The end result is… chaos, mostly. Bruce is very good in the kitchen when he puts his mind to it, but he also has a habit of getting halfway through cooking something elaborate, getting hungry, and deciding he might as well give up and eat everything now.
That’s why it takes Tony so long to spot. Bruce is always abandoning his meals half-done, there’s no reason to assume his baking would be any different!
It’s not until he turns up to team movie night with several bowls of uncooked cake mix that Tony realises this particular recipe might be left unfinished for a reason.
They still have popcorn, of course- you can’t have movie night without popcorn- but Bruce’s increasingly elaborate cake batters are the food of the gods, and Tony wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tony walks into the common room on the first of October, and stops.
There’s a spiderweb stretched across the doorway. The smell of roasting pumpkin wafts from the oven. A man with a sheet over his head is cheerfully queuing up spooky episodes of Scooby Doo on the TV.
‘… Do I even want to know?’ Tony asks.
‘It’s nearly Halloween!’ Clint says, delightedly, from beneath the sheet.
‘It’s the first of October,’ Tony points out, flatly.
‘Exactly!’
‘… That means it’s still thirty-one days away, Katniss.’
‘That means we need to work out costumes now.’
‘It’ll be gone by tomorrow morning,’ Nat murmurs to him, appearing silently at his shoulder like the ninja she is and gesturing towards the vaguely spooky everything which has materialised in his tower. ‘He’ll bring the decorations back for the actual day, but for now he just wanted to make sure no one forgot.’
Tony blinks. ‘Does this happen at SHIELD, then?’
‘Oh, yeah. Well, it used to. Sci-tech academy faked a whole quarantine breach with big radioactive spiders last year and sprayed fake webbing everywhere, I don’t know how much they’ll let through this year. But October’s always been a crazy month for us.’
‘Huh.’ Superspies apparently like Halloween. Good to know.
‘So. Costumes. Any ideas?’ Clint asks, rocking back on the balls of his feet and turning towards them like an excited puppy.
Tony’s eyes linger on the screen. ‘If we’re doing Scooby Doo, I call dibs on Velma.’
‘Aw, no fair.’
‘Dibs is dibs, no arguing with that.’
‘Wasn’t going to.’ Clint pauses. ‘Well, Thor’s not here right now, so that crew does actually have the right number of people…’
‘You really think Steve and Bruce would agree to a group costume?’ Nat asks, amused.
Clint turns his puppy-dog eyes on her. ‘I’m sure you could convince them. If you really wanted to.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Please, Tasha? It’ll be great!’
‘And here I was, planning to go as myself,’ Tony mutters, too quietly for anyone to hear under the now ferocious bargaining going on between their two resident superspies. Still, he can’t quite hide his grin. Tony’s not sure when he last celebrated Halloween properly, if ever. He’s certainly never been pulled into a group costume before. It’s certainly a novel experience, but not one he’s going to complain about.
… Then again, there is a fake cobweb in his face right now and he’s supposed to be meeting with the board in eight minutes.
‘So… Cheeseburgers?’
Steve glances up at him. ‘Really, Tony?’
‘Really. Post-kidnapping cheeseburgers, it’s a tradition. Ask anybody.’
‘I could do with some food,’ Natasha admits. They’re all a little worse for wear- Tony and Steve may have been the ones that were actually kidnapped, but this particular crew were slightly less dumb than most, and actually had a half-decent plan for interfering with the rescue mission.
Only half-decent, of course. It still failed dramatically.
Regardless, it’s been a few months since the last code green, and Bruce looks torn between being absolutely ravenous and falling asleep on his feet. Clint and Nat are flying the quinjet, and if it was anyone other than the spy twins, Tony would be a little bit concerned about how they’re practically asleep on each other’s shoulders. Cap made it as far as the plane and then decided to lie down face-first on the floor and groan. Tony is… Tony is fine, he’s basically unhurt, but he’d still have liked to be home sometime around yesterday.
‘I can’t believe your life is so crazy you have post-kidnapping traditions,’ Bruce mumbles.
He shrugs. ‘It’s a good tradition.’
‘Sounds like it,’ Cap mumbles into the floor. ‘Can we get fries, too?’
‘Curly ones,’ Natasha says from the cockpit. ‘They’re the best.’
‘Finally, someone with good taste.’
Steve rolls over a little bit, and Tony sees him crack one eye open, before apparently deciding he can’t be bothered arguing and returns to his impromptu nap.
‘Curly fries and cheeseburgers,’ Tony repeats. ‘Sounds easy enough. Put the order in will you, JARVIS?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Thanks, J, you’re the best.’
Avengers Tower rises in the distance, and despite the bone-deep exhaustion, Tony can’t help but smile.
It’s nice to have someone to share these traditions with sometimes.