The Great Prank War of Avengers HQ
In every family, there are a few defining moments that stand out in the history they have together.
A marriage. A birth. Moving into a new house. A death. A divorce. A falling-out. A handful of little moments, some less pleasant than others; some that you carry with you, and some better left in the past. All of these become a part of a family's collective identity, and a part of the stories they have to tell.
The Avengers had those moments too.
They could trace the birth of the team back to the Battle of Manhattan. They could trace the initiation of the newbies back to the Battle of Sokovia. Steve and Tony's spat over the Accords was, at first, remembered mostly with embarrassment and regret; slowly, however, it came to be celebrated as the bad thing that turned around for good, and that introduced them to Peter Parker, Scott Lang, and the royalty of Wakanda.
But there were, as well, a few less serious moments that made the Avengers hall of fame.
You've already heard about the Great Nerf War of Avengers Tower.
This is the story of the Great Prank War of Avengers HQ.
"Hey, buddy, I think you dropped this!"
Bucky looked up. He'd just sat down on the couch to numb his brain with TV after a hectic day, but not a second after he realized he'd forgotten the remote, he heard Peter's yell from across the Common Room.
Bucky's eyes bugged out. He ducked.
WHAM.
Various gasps and exclamations went around the room from the Avengers present. Bucky lay inelegantly on his back and blinked.
There was now a mangled piece of plastic—once a functioning remote control—sticking out of the wall where his head had been.
"Ooh!" Peter's hands flew to his mouth. His expression was caught between laughter and terror. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Super-strength—I forgot—"
Bucky paused for a moment, then got his elbows underneath him and pushed himself upright on the couch. "You wanna tell me how you actually feel about me, Parker?" he grumbled.
Peter waved his hands in front of him. "It was an accident, I'm sorry."
Bucky looked up. He seemed to be fighting a losing war against the smile on his face.
"Don't—" Peter wrapped himself meekly around the pillow he was holding. "Don't, uh, Winter Soldier me, or whatever it is you do."
Bucky couldn't take it anymore and burst into laughter, clutching his side.
While Tony loudly chewed Peter out for throwing his tech around and destroying the remote, Clint sipped on a smoothie and made a mental note of what he just saw.
He was forming a plan. A dastardly plan. And this spider-kid might just turn out to be an asset.
It was the Fourth of July, otherwise known as International Harassing Steve Day.
The Common Room kitchen had a hard tile floor that was great for sliding. Clint wore his fuzziest socks, took a running start down the dormitory hallway, and made a grand entrance, bursting into the Common Room with a pose like John Travolta and sliding to a halt.
The little American flags he'd stuck into the waistband of his boxers—red, white, and blue boxers, worn over his pants—fluttered slightly in the resulting breeze.
He could already hear Steve's sigh. "Oh no."
Clint put on his worst imitation of a pirate accent and hollered into the room, "Arr ye ready, kids?"
Nobody got the cue but Peter, who'd obviously been raised on Spongebob. He popped up and hollered back, "Aye-aye, captain!"
Clint cupped a hand over his ear. "I can't hearrrr you!"
Peter yelled louder, and Pietro, who'd apparently caught on to the game, laughed and joined in. "Aye-aye, captain!"
"Whoooo—" Clint slid up to a bewildered Steve and started to sing. "Froze as a Capsicle under the sea? Cap-tain Ro-gers!"
Steve's eyebrows shot into his hairline. Peter and Pietro were losing it.
"Defending our freedom and fighting Na-zis!" Clint called out.
"Cap-tain Ro-gers!" Peter chanted, bouncing on the couch.
Bucky looked quizzically at Steve, as if checking that he was okay. Steve gave an exaggerated frown, and Bucky just snickered.
Clint hollered again, "If patriotism is something you wish—"
"Cap-tain Ro-gers!" chanted three voices.
Two of those voices were Peter and Pietro. The other one was Bucky. Steve clutched his chest and looked aghast and betrayed. Bucky just grinned back.
Clint dropped and did the worm on the carpet. "Then drop on the deck and flop like a fish!"
"Cap-tain Ro-gers!" Pietro yelled alone, because Peter was laughing too hard to speak.
Clint sprang to his feet, produced a party popper from thin air (like only retired spies can), and pulled the string, showering Steve with confetti. "Happy ninety-eighth, old man."
"Thanks," Steve deadpanned, as confetti landed on his nose. "I feel very celebrated."
Bucky leaned back and kicked one ankle over his knee. "Would you rather listen to that, or do those USO shows again?"
Steve looked down at the book in his lap. "I think I'd rather have teeth pulled."
Bucky just cackled.
"Wait!" Peter was almost falling over the armrest of the couch, leaning to get closer to the conversation. "You're ninety-eight?"
Bucky threw his arm over the backrest behind Steve. "Sure, kid. Was born in 1918. I'd only been alive for one year before it." He sighed nostalgically. "That was a good year."
Steve elbowed him in the ribs. "Jerk."
Bucky snickered.
Steve turned back to his reading and didn't look up. "Unless it gets me a senior discount, I'm thirty-two."
"Ninety-eight," said Bucky.
"Thirty-two," said Steve.
Clint left them to argue and turned to Peter. "It's like that Macklemore song. I wear your grandad's clothes..."
He hadn't bothered trying to follow the rhythm, but Peter popped up and immediately chanted the verse. "I look in-cre-di-ble! Wait, wait, hang on," he said, collapsing onto the couch and sticking his nose into a screen in one motion, "I've got it on my phone..."
"I'm in this big ol' coat, from that thrift shop down the road." Clint was bowdlerizing, but he knew better than to tempt the swear jar. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder and grinned. "He's thrifty too, it's perfect."
Steve looked like he was pouting. "Growing up in the Depression will do that to you."
"Yeah," said Bucky, "but you're on a whole 'nother level, Stevie."
"I'm telling you, orange rinds really work for cleaning!" he exclaimed.
Peter was waving his phone in the air, mouthing along as it played the song out of the tinny little speaker. "I'm gonna pop some tags, only got twenty dollars in my pocket—I'm, I'm, I'm huntin', lookin' for a come-up, this is—"
"Language!" yelled Clint.
Peter fell over laughing and couldn't finish the last word, "—awesome!"
Steve rolled his eyes. Bucky already had his arm over the backrest behind him, so he just wrapped that arm around Steve's neck and tugged him roughly into his side. Steve grinned and let him.
Clint left that day feeling that two valuable things were accomplished.
Number one, he'd annoyed the snot out of Steve, and that was a victory in itself.
Number two, he now knew Spider-Kid was open to shenanigans.
It was Saturday, team breakfast, and all the senior Avengers—sans Thor—were gathered together when Clint made the announcement over his waffles and jelly donuts.
"I wanna recruit the kid."
The other Avengers slowly turned to look at him, each in different levels of grogginess and confusion.
"You mean Parker?" Steve finally said.
Clint stuffed a wedge of waffle into his cheek. "Yeah."
"We are recruiting him." Tony raised an eyebrow over his protein shake. "That's what training is for."
Clint swallowed and hastily clarified, "No, no, not for the Avengers. I know we're doing that." He leaned forward. "I mean for the prank team."
Natasha, sitting beside him, indulgently rolled her eyes.
Steve crossed his arms and looked Very Serious in the way that meant he wasn't serious at all. "Barton."
"C'mon!" insisted Clint. "You can't tell me it's not a good idea. It'll make him feel at home, like he's just one of the guys."
Natasha smirked. "Return of the recruitment manager."
Clint puffed out his chest. "And proud of it."
Steve shook his head. "I don't mind what you do in your off time. I just don't want things to get destructive. If the rest of us get caught in the crossfire..."
"Aw, c'mon, Cap." Clint leaned on his elbow and tried his very best puppy-dog eyes. "You can't endure a little pain to make the kid feel welcome?"
Steve and Bucky shared a Look.
Bruce, with the steam from a chai tea fogging up his glasses, muttered, "Well, way to guilt us into it."
Clint leaned back in his chair and sighed. "It just bugs me that I can't think of a name for the team." He counted off on his fingers. "We got Hawkeye, Spider-Boy, and Quicksilver. There's no real catchy way to stick all that together."
Natasha shrugged. "Clint and the Peters?"
"Pranksters?" offered Bruce.
"Pains in our sides?" muttered Bucky.
Tony began, "More like pains in our a—"
"Language!" barked out Steve.
"Heyyy!" everyone cheered, then dissolved into laughter.
Steve laughed along with them, then finally steeled his face into something resembling seriousness. "No."
Clint, however, was Not Deterred.
Plans were set. A solemn alliance was made. Peter was free for all of summer vacation, and visited the HQ nearly every weekday. At first, Clint was the mastermind behind the whole operation; it was too easy to convince two troublemakers like Peter and Pietro to lend their talents toward causing everyone else some harmless annoyance.
The Avengers woke up one unassuming Thursday morning to find the HQ positively covered with cut-outs of the face of Nicholas Cage.
They were on the walls. They were on the ceiling. They were wedged in the couch cushions. They were in the kitchen drawers. They were on the light switches, each with a perfect hole cut in the mouth area so the switch could stick out.
Repeating, tessellated Nicholas Cage faces were the background of every single laptop in the computer lab. Steve had a lovely forest landscape as the background on his personal computer; JARVIS granted Peter emergency access, just this once, and Peter photoshopped Nicholas Cage faces onto it, like grotesque apples hanging off the trees.
There was an HQ-wide attempt to locate and destroy every single cut-out, but they never found all of them. Even a year or two later, Nicholas Cage was still popping up in obscure kitchen cabinets and sock drawers.
A few weeks after the Great Nicholas Cage-ing, an extra-large pack of googly eyes was smuggled into the HQ.
Half the team was called out on a small mission in Europe and left the HQ unattended for a few days. When they returned, there were googly eyes on every food item in the fridge.
The deli ham stared wall-eyed out of its packet. The bread loaf peered out of the cabinet with extra-large eyes. The carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce all greeted their unassuming victim with a rattling of plastic eyes when the produce drawer was pulled open.
Even the egg carton had eyes, positioned just so that the flap looked like a huge mouth. If one opened the carton—which Steve did, to make his breakfast the next day—one would find all twelve eggs peeking out with their tiny, rattly eyes.
This wasn't a one-off event though. This was played for the long game.
Over the next few weeks, googly eyes appeared on Natasha's knives. On Tony's suits. On Steve's shield. On Mjolnir, when Thor came through one evening on his way to Nifelheim, and Bucky's metal arm, when he unwisely decided to take a cat nap on the Common Room couch.
By this point, the other Avengers were all beginning to suspect Clint. Shortly thereafter, googly eyes mysteriously appeared on his bow, arrows, and quiver.
If he was hoping this would steer suspicion away from himself, he was sadly mistaken. Natasha later broke into his dorm room and confiscated the bag of googly eyes.
So far, so good. Nicholas Cage and the googly eyes caused laughter and fond annoyance whenever they popped up, and gave the other Avengers something to smile about in the midst of the stress of saving the world.
Clint was insanely proud of himself. Now, it was time to up the ante.
Everyone in the HQ was used to the sudden wind and ruffling of their hair when Pietro zoomed by. That boy never walked at a normal human speed if he could help it, even for something as trivial as darting into the kitchen and back for snacks. Everyone knew what it meant when they saw lightning-blue blur in the corner of their eye and heard the loud accompanying woosh.
It's just that the woosh usually didn't come with the thwack of something sticky hitting one's back.
Tony sat at the kitchen island, groggy and barely cognizant after pulling another all-nighter, and he almost choked on his coffee. Vision was painting a serene mountain landscape, but when he felt something hit his back, all he did was turn quizzically to see Pietro speeding past. It was difficult to get behind Bucky and Natasha—assassin training dies hard, and they were always watching their six—but Pietro managed it, and then sped off, leaving only the sound of his and Peter's giggling in their wake.
They finally found Clint on the balcony, wearing shades and getting a bonafide farmer's tan in the summer sun. Pietro, and Peter riding piggy-back, zipped to a halt beside his lounge chair.
"It is done," Pietro announced with pride.
Peter took a few big gulps of air and laughed. His hair was a mess. "That was so fast. Oh my gosh."
Clint grinned. "Great job, guys. Now quick, get lost before anyone figures it out."
Peter slid off of Pietro's back with a clunk, shoved his web-shooters in his pockets, and ran away. Pietro was already gone. Clint shut his eyes and leaned back to enjoy the last moments of quiet before the shouts began.
"BARTOOOOOONNN!"
It wasn't ten minutes later that Clint was brought to call. The boys had already disappeared, and that just left Clint to take the blame.
"I've been sitting here the whole time!" he cried, throwing his hands in the air before the assembly of annoyed Avengers. "I couldn't possibly—"
"Yeah, but we all know you have those two little evil sidekicks," hissed Natasha.
Clint could barely keep the grin off his face. He pushed his sunglasses back up and folded his hands behind his head. "I will not confirm or deny anything."
Everyone else walked around for the rest of the day wearing "kick me" signs stuck to their backs—and weren't able to remove 'em, 'cause they were stuck down with web fluid.
Clint had a great day.
But something shifted that day. All of the sudden, Peter and Pietro stopped waiting for Clint's plans and politicking, and they just started pulling practical jokes all on their own.
Pietro was hiding behind the couch when Tony shambled out of his lab after a long all-nighter. Tony slithered over to the coffee machine, turned it on, and slithered away. Pietro zipped out of hiding, turned the machine off, and was back behind the couch before Tony turned around.
Tony grunted and turned it back on. The moment he moved away to open the cabinet, Pietro turned it off.
Tony, thoroughly confounded, turned the machine on again, stared at it, then slowly turned his head. Pietro zipped out from behind the couch.
"Hey!" Tony barked, and let fly a string of threats and profanities as Pietro ran away cackling.
A couple days later, most of the Avengers found thin, near-invisible webbing stretched just inside the door of their dorm rooms. A few found it the hard way, and were stuck in their doorway for an hour until the web dissolved or Peter, laughing his head off, came to rescue them.
Some of the Avengers tended to have a soda with their lunch. Pietro shook the cans at light speed. Peter left sticky webbing on cabinet handles, doorknobs, and light switches. His victims could be stuck there for hours.
One day, when Ms. Potts was visiting the HQ, Pietro switched out every condiment in the cabinets for pepper. Peter replaced Bruce's glasses with ones that looked identical but had the wrong prescription. Pietro threw a rubber snake onto Wanda's feet and made her shriek. Peter hung from the ceiling and dumped buckets of water on whoever passed by.
Pietro drew rude things all over Steve's shield. Peter waited until Bucky was asleep and drew them on his arm.
By this point, it was a competition. Peter covered Mjolnir in pink paint and sparkly glitter. Pietro stole the paint and gave the War Machine suit a thorough coating. Peter stole it back and replaced Dum-E's fire extinguisher with one that shot paint.
Pietro caught enough birds to fill Sam's closet. They pooped on everything. Peter asked Vision to help him with a "science project" in the lab, and the Avengers woke up the next morning to find their android stuck to Tony's biggest electromagnet and Peter nowhere to be seen.
Pietro stuck sticky notes over every inch of Tony's cars. Peter, using his super-strength, outright moved all of Tony's cars out of the garage and onto the roof of the HQ.
Needless to say, everyone was mildly annoyed at being caught in the crossfire.
"You need to do something about this." Steve confronted Clint the afternoon after painting over the Sharpie ink on his shield. He'd crossed both arms over his big chest, and his 'Captain America Is Disappointed In You' Face was firmly in place.
Clint threw his hands in the air. "Okay, seriously, I mean it this time. I had nothing to do with it. No idea what possessed 'em to dump a bucket on Nat—I mean, that's hazardous for their own health."
Natasha rolled her eyes. "No, but they are doing it because of you." Her stare was like daggers, even when she was calm. "I talked to Wanda. She says Pietro is trying to prove he's the 'Prank King'."
Clint frowned. "Prank King?"
"You don't know anything about that?" asked Steve.
"No!" cried Clint.
Natasha clarified. "They're competing for your approval."
"Com-Pete-ing!" Clint exclaimed. He looked around the room with a wide grin. "Get it? 'Cause they're both named Peter?"
No one looked impressed. Clint slumped.
"Okay. I'll go talk to 'em."
Peter looked heartbreakingly similar to a kicked puppy. Pietro was scowling, his arms crossed over his skinny chest, and looked like he'd rather be anywhere but here.
It almost broke Clint's resolve. But not quite.
"Look, guys," he said. "This is going too far. It's driving everyone crazy. You gotta stop going at each other's throats like this."
Both boys had the decency to glance apologetically at one another and look ashamed.
"Sorry, Mr. Barton," mumbled Peter.
"We not trying to cause harm," Pietro said defensively. He shrank into himself a little. "We just...how you say...get carried away?"
Clint nodded. "I know. I know you guys are good kids, and you're not tryin' ta hurt nobody. But you're going about this all wrong."
Peter stared at his feet. Pietro stared at the wall. Neither of them were looking at Clint.
He had them right where he wanted them.
"What have I told you all along?" He leaned forward with a gleam in his eye. "If you wanna be the Prank Kings, you gotta work together."
Pietro frowned. Peter lifted his head. Clint could see the gears jamming in their smart little brains, and then slamming into reverse and whirling the other way.
A sharkish grin spread across Pietro's face. Peter's jaw dropped open, and he stared with wide, eager eyes.
Clint grinned. "What if I told you I've been working on the Ultimate Prank?"
"The ultimate prank?" whispered Peter.
Pietro's grin turned feral. "Go on."
Avengers HQ was designed to hold a lot of people. Between the core team, the ever-growing roster of recruits and allies, the offices for A.R.E.S. (Avengers Research, Equipment, and Support), and the occasional guest or client, there could be a hundred-odd people at the compound on a busy day.
Many of those people came from different backgrounds—some were ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. lackeys, some were respected astrophysicists, and some were just mostly-normal guys in high-tech suits—but all those people, with the exception of Vision, had one thing in common.
They all ate to survive.
And what they ate had to go somewhere afterwards.
Now, Tony Stark was no slob. He didn't punish his friends and colleagues with grody, claustrophobic office-building bathrooms where you could see the shoes of the person next to you. He was rolling in disgusting amounts of wealth, and he was all too happy to spend it on his dream compound.
So if that meant installing multitudes of private, pleasant, sound-proof, and well-ventilated little bathrooms, and populating them all with fancy, high-tech toilets shipped straight from Japan that have heated seats and wash your undercarriage at the press of a button, so be it!
There were more than enough of these "perfectly serviceable" little bathrooms in Combat, where the A.R.E.S. offices were. But in the Commons, where the Avengers actually ate and slept and lived, a few more luxuries were required.
Like showers. And vanities. And some way to take care of all the laundry.
So of course Tony went all-out on that too. The dormitory wing was much more spacious and comfortable than the name suggested; like a good hotel, every room had its own adjacent bathroom, and like a very good hotel, every bathroom had fresh towels every morning, a laundry chute, and a jacuzzi tub.
The rooms were huge—big enough for two queen-sized beds, with room to spare—and some members of the team, like Wanda and Pietro or Steve and Bucky, opted to share. In that case, they also shared a bathroom. That meant double the towels, and they were color-coded.
Was this more luxury than most members of the team were used to? Yes. Did Tony accept complaints? No. His argument was that no one was forced to use the jacuzzi tub, and they could be Spartans and take cold showers and shave with a blunt knife if they really wanted to.
(It took Steve a year to finally try the jets in the tub. He decided he didn't like it. Bucky had less qualms.)
The point is that Avengers HQ had a lot of toilets. For Clint's Ultimate Prank to go off properly, he needed access to all of those toilets within a small span of time. That required three things: speed, efficiency, and a distraction.
Said distraction was Pietro.
It was a slow Saturday. Only a few core members of A.R.E.S. were at the office. Thor was in town, but only to say hi on his way down to New Mexico.
Bucky sat in his room, curled up on an easy chair in a patch of sunlight, reading Tarzan for the umpteenth time.
There was a knock on his door.
"'S open," he called without looking up.
With a woosh, Pietro was in the room, swinging his arms. "Cho wants you to see something."
Bucky frowned. "The hell does she need me for it?"
Pietro shrugged. "Didn't say."
"That's...weird." He waved a finger vaguely at the ceiling. "Why didn't she have JARVIS page me?"
Another shrug. "Sent me instead."
Bucky frowned. Pietro worked very hard to keep his face neutral.
With a raise of his eyebrows, Bucky sighed, grunted, tossed his book aside, and got to his feet. "A'right, let's see what she wants."
"Good, davai." Pietro turned around so Bucky couldn't see his grin and zipped out the door.
No more than two seconds after both men left the room, Peter snuck inside.
"You sure nobody's coming?" he whispered into a little comm link in his ear.
"You're good," Clint answered. He sat in the security office for the Commons, watching the camera readouts for the dorm wing, and leaned back in his chair with both hands folded behind his head. "Nobody's headed that way for a while. Just don't get side-tracked and you'll be fine."
Two shots from both sides had the rim of the toilet lid fully coated with web fluid. Peter frowned. "You sure JARVIS isn't gonna say anything? He can see all this, you know."
Clint chuckled. "Nah. I already talked to him. He told FRIDAY to keep it quiet too. You know, for an AI, he's got a killer sense of humor."
"The compliment is much appreciated, Mr. Barton," said JARVIS—only over the private comm line.
Peter jumped. "Oh my gosh. Don't do that. Spooky."
"Toilets, kid, toilets!" said Clint.
Peter started running. "Okay, okay, I'm going!"
It all went off without a hitch. Clint was almost alarmed by how easy it was. Within half an hour, every single toilet lid in the compound was stuck down with web fluid.
Peter jogged into the security room, slightly winded and out of breath, just as Pietro returned from Combat. "Okay," he panted, both hands on his knees. "Now what?"
Clint spun around in his swivel chair with a cheshire grin. "Now, we hide. 'Cause they're gonna kill us."
And that's when the shouting started.
"BARTON!"
"YOU'RE A DEAD MAN, CLINT!"
Clint's expression was a mix of delight and abject terror. "Run!"
Pietro sped out of the room, Peter yelped and pulled himself onto the ceiling with webbing, and Clint just started running like a normal person.
Like the lone wildebeest pursued by savage lions, he was soon overrun.
Bucky tackled him. Clint narrowly avoided crushing his nose in the carpet, but now a super-soldier had his shoulder in an arm-lock and a knee in his back.
"Oh, woe is me," Clint lamented, "I knew I should have kissed my wife goodbye—ow, ow, not the hip—!"
It was chaos. Everyone was yelling at Clint. Peter and Pietro, either out of sympathy or resignation to their fate, had slunk back to the circle to suffer the same abuse.
That didn't make it easy to keep a straight face.
"That stuff doesn't dissolve for hours!" snapped Sam. "What's a guy supposed to do, go find a tree?"
"You were in the Cub Scouts, Wilson," Clint shot back, "you can't tell me you haven't done it before."
"That's not the point, man!"
"We share the same!" Wanda shrieked, shaking a finger in Pietro's face. "You will suffer this yourself!"
Pietro's grin was a mile wide. "I went before we did it."
"Argh, môj bože—!" She grabbed his collar and shook him.
And that's when someone else stomped into the ring. Someone with flaming red hair and a blood-chilling death glare.
All yelling stopped. The room went dead silent.
Natasha was glaring right at Peter.
She grabbed him by the ear between her finger and thumb and started to drag him away.
"Ow, ow, ow!" He struggled, but couldn't get out of her grasp. "What? Where are we going?"
"You're going to fix this," she growled under her breath.
Peter valued his life too much to argue.
It was only when they got to the bathroom adjacent to Natasha's room that the problem emerged.
"What do you mean, you can't fix it?"
Peter squirmed. "I have to make the solvent by hand. I don't have any more. I used it all up on the last mission."
"How long's it take?" asked a very impatient Tony. "Whatever it is, I've got the chemicals in my lab."
Peter shrugged. "I mean, just the osmosis and molecular binding alone takes like twenty minutes..."
Steve had spent the last five minutes glaring down with his arms crossed, as if he hoped to intimidate the webbing straight off of the toilet. He finally turned to Natasha. "May I?"
"Please," she answered, with a hint of frustration.
Steve crouched, braced one hand against the lid and the other against the bowl, and started to pull. A scowl of concentration turned into a grimace, and every serum-enhanced muscle in his arms strained and bulged. He stopped, adjusted his grip, and tried again, but nothing moved.
"Nothing," he panted, and stood up, shaking his hands. The porcelain rim had left red marks in his fingertips. "I'm just cutting off circulation here. Buck?"
Bucky looked reluctant, but he gave it a try. The metal arm didn't react so badly to getting its fingers pinched—didn't react at all—but all they heard was the porcelain starting to creak and groan.
"Nope." Bucky backed up and raised his hands. "Bad idea. We're gonna break it."
"Aw, c'mon, Terminator, don't do things by half measures." Tony looked over his shoulder. "JARVIS, where's my gauntlet?"
The armor climbed like a red glove up to Tony's elbow. Little rockets opened out of the sides and belched jets of blue fire, but the toilet lid didn't budge.
"Damn it," he panted. "Bruce?"
"Nuh-uh." Bruce shook his head. "The, uh, Big Guy doesn't really do...y'know...detail work."
"Maybe I could..." began Wanda, flexing her red powers between her fingers.
Before she could do anything, Thor shoved forward. "Never fear!" he bellowed. "I shall conquer this handily."
With that, he shouldered into the little bathroom, grabbed the edge of the lid, and pulled.
The whole toilet ripped out of the floor. Water sprayed. The electrical line sparked. The closest Avengers yelled and ducked for cover.
On reflex, Peter webbed up the pipes.
The shower stopped. Only little rivulets squeaked around the corners of the webbing and dribbled over the bathroom floor.
The Avengers stood around for a second, stunned and thoroughly drenched.
Steve stared at where the toilet used to be. "I'm making an executive decision."
Clint didn't miss a beat. "No more pranks, got it."
THE END
A/N: Sorry for the late update! Hopefully this is entertaining enough to make up for it.
The first song Clint sings to make fun of Steve is a parody of the Spongebob theme song, courtesy of tumblr, and the second is of course "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore. Pietro's davai means "let's go", and môj bože means "my god".
Raina and I debated having an AI in the toilets that turned on the bidet and stuff when you asked it to, but we decided that after the fifth time of trying to take a dump with a little voice sassing him the whole time, Tony would realize his mistake and stick with buttons. LOL
Stay tuned for the epilogue! Reviews are googly eyes.