This was inspired by two fics I really like, one where Bruce has a hard time deciding what mustard to put on a sandwich, because he "likes all of them", and another one where he's quite fond of fuzzy socks.
Warnings: bit of swearing, ScienceCuties slash and implied... ScienceCuties/Pepper (that should have a name... Green Pepperony?)
The Mustard Problem
by wuemsel
Tony had never seen Bruce eat mustard. Well, on anything. He'd never seen Bruce eat mustard out of a jar, obviously, but also not on sandwiches or cheese or tofu sausages. And he had seen him eat those. Unfortunately.
Only without mustard.
This realization hit him one day, when he looked at the impressive collection of jars of mustard neatly piled up in one corner of Bruce's equipment desk, where he put all the stuff he wasn't currently using (and where his glasses lay, which he'd asked Tony to hand him).
There was other stuff on the desk he wondered about - an Iron Man tie, one single black sock with a hole in it, thirteen unopened granola bars, a half empty bag of gummi vampires, a My Little Pony Club member card, a scalpel - but the mustard struck him as exceptionally odd.
Probably because it was a ridiculously big pile.
"Babe?"
"Hmnyeah? Glasses, Tony. Under the... uh... that thing," Bruce muttered without turning to look at Tony and blindly held out his hand.
"Why are you hoarding mustard?"
"The thing," Bruce said, too preoccupied to listen. "You know, the... What?" At last, he turned on his chair to look at Tony.
"You have all kinds of mustard known to man on this desk," Tony said. "Is there something you're planning behind my back? Are you secretly building a mustard bomb?"
The frown on Bruce's face evened out into his usual You're-a-bit-annoying-look. "I like mustard," he said. "Have you found my gla-"
"This isn't the Mustard Pile of a man who likes mustard. People who like mustard eat it."
"Mustard Pile?"
"You hoard it. There's a difference. And granola bars."
Bruce blinked tiredly. "I don't hoard anything, I sometimes take food up here with me and then I forget about it. Could you please give me my gla-"
"Not food. Just mustard. Unopened jars of mustard."
"So... okay, mustard," Bruce said in the half-amused-half-annoyed tone that usually indicated he was going to get truly irritated soon. "Can we get back to work now?" He gestured for the desk to show he was still waiting for his glasses.
Tony ignored it. "You don't find it odd to hog all the mustard in New York?"
"My goodn... Will you shut up if I tell you I'm planning a big sex-kink-whatever-thing with it and you just ruined the surprise?"
For the briefest moment, Tony glanced back at the mustard, then narrowed his eyes and turned back to Bruce. "You're hiding something. I wanna know what. I have a right to know, I paid for everything in this room. Also, I'm your boyfriend whom you love very much." He nodded to himself and folded his arms in front of his chest, waiting.
Bruce stared at him and blinked exaggeratedly as if to clear his head. "I'm hiding something... because mustard," he said. "Right. I do love you very much, though there are times when I wonder why."
"It's the same with the fuzzy socks!" Tony exclaimed, snapping his fingers and pointing an accusing one at Bruce, who'd flinched, startled.
"The fuz-"
"You have fuzzy socks everywhere! Your whole room is covered in awfully colored fuzzy socks. And the ones with bunny ears - never mind. I noticed it before and then I got distracted, because one of you undressed or something, but it's just like the mustard!"
Bruce tilted his head to one side slightly. "Are you... having a nervous break-down? It doesn't look like any I've had, but it does look a lot like one you'd ha-"
Tony wasn't listening. He grabbed a random jar of mustard off the pile and held it out to Bruce like it was obvious proof for everything he was going to say. "Hoarding transportable food in jars and stuff to keep your feet warm in case you'd have to sleep outside, that's what this is. Don't deny it," he added with a scowl that instantly softened into a pleading look. "C'mon, deny it. You're not really gonna pack up a little back with socks and mustard and run away, right?"
"No," Bruce said, "I'll take the granola bars, too."
"That's not fun... Well," Tony said at Bruce's pointed look and scratched his brow, "not funny-funny. Not to me," he added when Bruce's expression didn't change. "I worry about shit like that. It's your fault," he said, pointing the mustard at Bruce accusingly.
"I didn't do anything," Bruce said in a mock-cute voice, only half pretending. "I was just testing these equations, and suddenly you went insane." He scooted closer to Tony with his chair. "Why d'you worry about me running away? With all the mustard and all the socks?"
"I don't know!" Tony said, exasperated, and thumped the mustard down on the desk, as if it was to blame. "Because you have in the past, and because I said I wouldn't try to find you-"
"Hunt me down, I think the phrase was we agreed on."
"And because I'm allowed to fucking worry, too," Tony said. "Just cause most of the time I know anyone leaving this," he gestured down himself chin to crotch, "has to be considered dangerously deranged and best be forgotten, anyway, doesn't mean... whatever it doesn't mean, I didn't plan to say this and I don't know what I'm even saying. You're dangerously deranged quite often, by the way." He paused, thinking. "And I still wouldn't want to forget about you. Not that it'd be easy what with your alter ego being bound to show up on the news occasio..."
At Bruce's expression, Tony trailed off, then said, "You think I'm never afraid of you and Pepper leaving me because I'm me?"
He could only stand meeting Bruce's softening look for a second before he had to avert his eyes. He picked up the My Little Pony Club membership card, absently studying it.
"I'd prefer to be one-dimensional, too. All the real heroes are. Look at Captain Flag. But sometimes I'm lame like this, and if you say something deeply profound now, I'll throw away your membership card." He held up the card. "Why do you have this?"
"Thor asked me if he could sign me on," Bruce replied. "So he'd get some special something for luring in a new member."
"Huh. I'm hurt," Tony said, turning the card in his hands. "Why didn't he ask me? We're buddies."
Bruce shrugged. "I think he thought I owed him, because he let me take a blood sample."
"Ah," Tony nodded. "Yeah, probably." He put the card down.
"I'm not gonna run away," Bruce said, before Tony could turn to him again and pretend the whole scene hadn't happened. "If I were, though, I wouldn't pack twenty kilos of mustard. Just the socks."
Tony lifted his gaze at that and caught the grin. "That was my second guess," he said. "The mustard is for making a pile under your blanket so we won't know you're gone."
Bruce dragged his chair closer until he could grab Tony's hips and looked up at him with his best puppy-dog look. "You wouldn't know I'm gone? And here from all that sweet paranoia, I got the impress-" He stopped, swallowing a giggle, when Tony flipped his finger against his nose, shutting him up.
"Maybe I do hoard stuff," Bruce said after a moment, glancing at his desk. "But you skip sleep every so often because of the nightmares, and Pepper works out too much sometimes when she gets scared. We all do... things."
He looked back up at Tony to find him studying him with such earnesty that Bruce frowned and stood, ready to hug him.
"What?" he asked quietly, taking Tony's arm.
"I know why I do my things."
"Because they add to the general awesomeness that is you?" Bruce guessed.
"That too. Obviously. My point was my things don't scare me."
Bruce snorted. "Yeah, I sort of figured that was your point." He moved to take a step away, but Tony held him back.
"I hate being paranoid, and I hate relationship talks, especially with you. Pepper's fine. She does all the talking and I say all the right things and secretly think she's exaggerating. But with you I turn into Pepper. Honest now, how does it look when you two do this?"
Bruce shrugged. "The same. Only right after, we talk about you."
"Why do you make me go Pepper on you? That ain't buddies."
With a little chuckle, Bruce stroked Tony's hair in what was just a slightly mocking gesture. "Honey, I think you'll find Pepper usually has a valid argument at hand. Sometimes two. You have mustard."
"No, you have too much fucking mustard, and that's the fucking..." Tony bit off the rest of the sentence and took a deep breath, glaring at Bruce, but still holding on to his arm. "From one fucked up awesomely gorgeous genius to another, frogbunny mine - hoarding food and socks is messed up. And, more importantly, it is scaring me. And I count most of all in this. Right - rethorical question? Right. So stop doing it."
At Bruce's brows-arched-worried-puppy-about-to-schnugg-you-look, Tony closed his eyes with a sigh and touched his forehead to Bruce's. "Please," he added, as if he thought Bruce's expression meant he was waiting to be asked nicely.
"Okay," Bruce said, waiting for Tony to make the first move, which took a while, and then it was just a slight one so he could hug Bruce tightly and press his face against Bruce's neck, a half-suppressed, not very Tony-like little noise escaping him.
Bruce returned the hug, gently petting Tony's hair.
"I won't run ag-"
"Don't," Tony cut him off and moved away. He didn't look at him at first, then glanced up with a humourless little smile. Completely looking and sounding like Tony again.
"No need to lie to the awesome boyfriend. It's okay. You run and I'll find you, like I do. If the three of us get married, that can be my vow. I promise to love and cherish and physically worship Pepper in good times and bad, and I promise to chasehunt you down and drag your ass back home till the rest of forever."
Bruce frowned. "I don't get physically worshipped?"
Tony snorted. "Not if you're in fucking Mogadishu, you're not."
Bruce arched one brow suggestively and touched his nose to Tony's. "I'm here now," he muttered.
Tony's hand reflexively strayed down Bruce's back. "Hmnwell, yeah..."
"We could use all that mustard," Bruce continued and giggled into Tony's neck, when Tony laughed out loud.
"Gross."
"You say that now," Bruce said, looking at Tony and wriggling his brows.
"So all this was just an elaborate way to come out with your weird mustard kink," Tony said, running his hand through Bruce's hair. He glanced at the desk and shrugged a little. "I guess I could live with that. Stranger things have been licked off-"
Bruce kissed him - the sort of pretending-to-be-just-kissing-you-to-shut-you-up-kiss that was in fact among the best kinds, as Tony had found out over time.
"As good a confession as any," Tony said with a smug grin, once he could again.
Bruce snorted, nuzzling Tony's neck. "Nah," he muttered, "the mustard's just a prop. This was my elaborate way to get you to propose, obviously."
"I said if, not when," Tony pointed out, stumbling an ungraceful step back, when Bruce lightly pushed him towards the desk.
"Working on it," Bruce muttered. He took the My Little Pony membership card out of Tony's hands and let it drop to the floor. It was quickly followed by the rest of his non-mustard desk-clutter.
The unfair thing about it all, Tony mused for a long while afterwards, was that he now found it hard to even look at jars of mustard in the various fridges in various kitchens in the tower without feeling just slightly... turned on. Not that he'd ever tell Bruce and have him suggest that had been the elaborate, genius plan.
And, after all, Tony thought as he closed a fridge door very late one night and turned to shuffle back to bed, he'd take a ridiculous kink over sleep-robbing paranoia any day. And Bruce thought he wasn't cut out to be a shrink - pft, nonsense.
Smiling to himself at that, Tony crawled back into bed, into the dent he'd left between Bruce's curled-up form and Pepper's sprawled out one, kissed each of them on the forehead and rolled over, stealing all of the blanket from Bruce, and went to sleep.
THE END