Author's Note: A silly little drabble prompted by an anonymous asker who wished for a Science Bros fic involving crocs. My being a science major is to blame for the rest.
Disclaimer: If I owned The Avengers, it would probably suck. Good for you all that I don't.
Toward Friction and Frivolity
"Crocs?" he exhaled, exasperated, and stared pointedly in Bruce's direction. "You finally manage to scrounge up the initiative to take advantage of your situation, after countless months of living in this tower denying my every offer - much of which was astoundingly generous of me, by the way - and the thing you first think to ask me for is a pair of plastic, hole-filled shoes?"
"Well," Bruce replied, completely unstirred by the billionaire's little outburst, "they would be a rather good asset for the duller side of laboratory work." He smiled, in his own clipped way, at Tony's resulting shake of the head before returning his focus to the scalding cup of black coffee that sat before him.
"I will not have even one pair of those hideous excuses for footwear in my tower," Tony declared with a flourish, "and we, my friend, will be going fine shoe shopping sometime in the near future." Bruce merely looked into his cup, the smooth glassy surface of the liquid within reflecting his tiny smile.
He did, of course, manage to get the crocs.
They were acquired, to Tony's credit, with much less of a fuss than anyone would have anticipated; though Bruce never again introduced the issue, he found himself greeted about two weeks after that initial request with a large box thrust inches away from his nose by a sulking billionaire philanthropist.
"Purple?" Bruce inquired, sifting through the white tissue paper to gaze at his prize, and Tony nodded much too covalently.
"Put them to good use."
Now they're in Tony's living room, straining against each other as Tony pushes Bruce roughly against the wall, chapped lips and lidded eyes and the purple crocs pressed tightly into the grain of the floor, and he's counting in spite of himself - or rather because of that fact - the number of beats his heart drums out in the intervals where their mouths connect.
"I can tell you're thinking," Tony mutters when they break. "You're aware of how much stock I place in your intellectual merit, but you've got to stop doing that at times like these." Bruce responds with an uttered apology, barely audible and heavy with remorse and very, very like him.
"I was wondering what the coefficient of static friction between my new crocs and your floor might be."
"Somewhere around .64," Tony replies, without preamble. "Not enough to cause a friction fire that would reduce them to ashes, unfortunately."
"Unfortunately," Bruce laughs, and kisses him again.