Big boom ... or what happens when Tony is sleep deprived and hungry
It had taken a while, a very long while, but Tony had finally gotten over the destruction of his kitchen for the second time over a lack of tea. Bruce was just glad that Tony had stopped sending him wounded looks all the time and had stopped sulking. The man could be irritating at times when he was at his best but when he was like that, well, it took all of Bruce's patience and willpower to stop more destruction at the hands of the Other Guy when Tony tested his patience to the limit.
Everyone had been told to be more careful around the kitchen and everything had run smoothly for months to come which helped Tony's sanity and prevented him getting another earful from Pepper. Had had relaxed so much that he had stopped patrolling the kitchen at odd times and gone back to his long sleepless stints in his lab. He was obviously trying to make up for lost time as the other Avengers had seen Pepper dragging him out of there many a time and insisting he ate something and slept. Normally, the billionaire was whining and protesting like a child who didn't want to go to sleep at bedtime which gave the other Avengers plenty of laughs and stuff to hold over Tony as a joke along with the candlestick jokes from when Thor had done his own spot of remodelling, I mean who thought a candlestick could stop whatever they had to face!
Pepper had had to go away on a business trip, however, and so couldn't keep an eye on Tony and he didn't listen to the other Avengers enough for them to take Pepper's role. Well, that wasn't true, he was still terrified enough of Natasha to listen to her but she wasn't going to chase her ex-boss around as she had just gotten back off a mission and was trying to sleep off the injuries and exhaustion. For that reason, JARVIS was in charge of making sure Tony ate and slept and generally was kept alive until Pepper got back to the Tower to take over again.
JARVIS did his best but, without a solid body or form to actually manhandle the billionaire out of the lab, there was only so much that he could do without calling on the other Avengers in the building and he didn't want to do that if he didn't have to. Tony did end up having to leave the lab after falling asleep while tinkering with one of his creations though, although it wasn't to sleep. He felt refreshed after his little nap but his stomach wasn't going to be ignored for any longer, forcing him into going to seek out some food as he had no more left in the lab with him.
Not wanting to leave his latest project for long, he decided, in his rather sleep deprived state, that the best idea was to take object with him. If he had been thinking straight, he might have realised that his slightly unstable invention would pose a risk to his precious kitchen but his brain was filled completely with equations and modifications and no other coherent thoughts were able to be crammed in.
Grabbing the nearest easy food, sugary cereal that Thor loved, Tony dug in, eating it dry whilst he contemplated the object in front of him. There were plenty of tests that he needed to carry out upon it, he wasn't quite sure what it actually was at the moment, and, in his addled mind, now was a good a time as any to start the tests. First on the list was fireproofing. And what better to use than the blowtorch that was in the kitchen for some reason. Tony didn't think anyone had ever used it, he certainly hadn't anyway.
Grabbing a frying pan to put it in, god forbid if he burned his surfaces, he began to test it. That was when it all went wrong.
The other Avengers were a bit worried. Pepper had told them that she was going to be away for a bit and to keep an eye on Tony for her, even if she had asked JARVIS to as well, and they had agreed. Without supervision goodness only knows what they billionaire would get up to and they wanted the Tower to remain standing and the man himself to stay alive.
Clint, Steve, Bruce and Thor, Natasha was still sleeping off her mission, were all collected in the training rooms. They hadn't seen Tony for over 36 hours and they were beginning to wonder what he was doing and whether he needed to be coerced into sleeping and eating. Last time Bruce had looked into Tony's lab on his way past, he had been in there but Bruce hadn't been able to see what he was doing at that point.
They had asked JARVIS where Tony was and when he had last slept and eaten and were surprised by what they had been told. Even if it had only been a nap, they were pleased that Tony had gotten some sleep and that it appeared he was now eating something. They thought that they would go and join him in the kitchen, maybe they would be able to persuade Tony to get some more sleep then.
They were just heading up to the kitchen via the stairs, Thor was still a little wary of the elevator, when a explosion shook the floor beneath them. They looked at each other in alarm. The explosion had felt like it was coming from the kitchen! They broke into a run, meeting up with a tired and bruised looking Tasha who was armed and ready to fight, even if it was just to kill the person who had woken her from the only decent sleep she'd had in three days then go back to bed.
The sight that greeted them when they got there nearly made Natasha use all of her various weapons, not at an unforeseen enemy that had infiltrated but at the billionaire who stood in the middle of the kitchen, blowtorch in hand and a shocked look on his face. The look she gave him before she stalked out and back to her bed promised months of torture to come, Pepper would be rather upset if she actually did kill the billionaire before Pepper herself got a chance at him, and the fact that Pepper was most definitely going to hear about this one and that he was on his own there. Oh he was screwed!
The other Avengers just stared, not sure if they were to believe that Tony had actually been the one to blow up his precious kitchen that he had spent so long protecting and holding grudges over. He was never going to hear the end of this one. Tony was looking very scorched and surprised at the situation in front of him, a sure sign that he needed sleep and probably shouldn't have been working unsupervised, and the other Avengers had to hold in smirks at the sight of his face. Tony was going to blow a gasket, metaphorically but maybe also literally, with Tony you never knew, when he looked in a mirror as his little explosion had managed to scorch the entirety of his precious goatee off.
"Huh," Tony finally said. "Well that wasn't meant to happen ... I don't think?"
"What do you mean you don't think?" Steve questioned exasperatedly.
Just after, so Tony's sleep deprived brain could process it all, Bruce asked "Tony, what did you do?"
"Well, I was testing this ... I'm not actually sure what it is," he confessed, "... thing and then it just exploded. Maybe it was ..." he started muttering theories under his breath as he looked through the remnants, obviously not having noticed that he had destroyed his kitchen again yet. And was that a frying pan in the mess as well? Well, it may have been a frying pan before Tony and his experiment got to it but there was little resemblance left now in the mangled metal remains.
"This is what we have labs for, Tony," Bruce reminded his friend, barely managing to restrain himself from rolling his eyes as the other Avengers just about managed to resist face palming at the billionaire.
Deciding that, to save themselves from the wrath of Pepper upon her return, they better get the billionaire to his room before he could do any more damage to the tower, they got Thor to pick him up and carry him. Tony tried to protest but he was ignored by all of the others in favour of walking away.
He was quiet until they passed a reflective surface. The shout echoed around the whole tower of "MT GOATEE!" Steve and Bruce didn't laugh ... much. Clint, on the other hand, was much less controlled and rolled around on the floor laughing. That would teach the billionaire not to experiment in the kitchen again ... hopefully!
Tony was forbidden from experimenting in the kitchen again and forced to sleep more often to prevent sleep deprived creations from bringing the tower down. The genius was dangerous enough fully awake.
I could just see Tony get so caught up in his work that he just had to test his experiment, wherever he was. Pepper is going to be so angry with him! Hope you liked this one. Unbeta'd so sorry for any and all mistakes I have made.