—-
Natasha preferred her coffee black.
Steve liked his tea scorching hot with six sugars. If it wasn't steaming, it wasn't hot enough.
Clint enjoyed his 'girly drinks' - vanilla cappuccino with two pumps of nonfat milk and one pump of liquid sugar.
Bruce drank only tea.
Thor devoured sturdy mugs of hot chocolate, a 'mighty drink not found on Asgard'.
Tony had never preferred one drink over another. He just liked to spend his time with his teammates. People he could finally trust for once in his life.
—-
When Natasha was bleary eyed in the mornings and grumbled her demands for coffee, Tony, who had already been up for hours, poured her a cup as he nursed his own. Natasha liked to read the newspaper and the occasional trashy romance novel while Tony preferred to keep his eyes glued to his phone. Sometimes they both just watched the sunset on the roof, hands empty save a mug of coffee. They didn't speak much, and that was perfectly fine with both of them.
When Steve was reading something new in the kitchen, Tony liked to watch. The way he made sure his water was still boiling in his cup, as if to stave away the glacial ice that had previously trapped him. The way he stirred in each of the (many) spoonfuls of sugar into his tea mug. The way he poured Tony his own after Steve caught him staring. (It was more sugar than water, but Tony didn't mind.) He joked how ice wouldn't kill Captain America, but diabetes would. Steve's exasperated smile was hidden behind a book, but Tony knew it was there as he continued to drink his tea.
When Clint went out to get his Starbucks fix, Tony asked for him to bring 'a surprise' back for him. The surprise was that Clint turned it into a prank and added caffeine drops to the sugary pink drink. The combination sent Tony into a sugar and caffeine induced haze, in which he built some new bots. Lots of tiny ones. (They liked to follow Clint around like ducks, but Tony insisted that it was Clint's problem now). The little bots -affectionately nicknamed 'chickadees'- eventually became part of the security system of the Avengers' tower, even though nobody truly understood what exactly they did.
When Bruce was in the middle of a breakthrough, Tony would bring him his tea and have some himself. Green, cinnamon apple, Ceylon, peppermint, mango, lemon. Jarvis had taken the initiative to start them on a 'tea of the week.' It was on Tuesdays if you were wondering. But somehow Bruce and Tony always ended up drinking Bruce's favorite green tea. The two could solve all of the world's mysteries as long as they never had an empty cup.
When Thor first discovered hot chocolate, he forgot all he had learned about Midgardian customs and threw the mug on the floor in typical Asgardian fashion. Tony paid the cafe back for that little incident and threw in a little extra of course. He then proceeded to go out of his way to buy premium hot chocolate (which was more chocolate than not and only slightly less expensive than one of his favorite suits). The hot chocolate came with the condition that he would only use the special unbreakable cups that Tony had made for him. The mugs looked like beer mugs, but Thor insisted that they simply added to the aesthetic (a word he had learned from Lady Darcy).
And if one day, a reporter or a politician or one of their weekly baddies joked that Tony's drink of choice would always be a large tumbler of whiskey followed by ten more, well. They wouldn't be saying that again if Tony's teammates had anything to do with it.
—–
Days, weeks, months went by. The Avengers assembled and fought and lost bled and won and lived.
life went on.