#Steve buys his own pair of cooking Goggles

[corrodedcoughin]

They’ve been seeing each other for just under a year when Steve points out that they’ve never actually made a meal together. He doesn’t think mucb of it, just a passing comment but Eddie sees it as a ‘couple activity’ and declares that It Must Be Done. And what better reason than to celebrate Wayne’s upcoming birthday?

Now the meal they plan is one of Wayne’s favourites, hearty chilli that takes hours of low heat simmering and ingredient preparation. The pair of them head out to get the groceries the weekend of Wayne’s birthday and start cooking as soon as they get home, hoping to be finished before Wayne’s shift ends. Eddie has dug out an old scrap of paper with a recipe neatly writing along the fading lines detailing the step by step instructions. It’s covered in various stains, the writing has run in places, the condition of the paper is a testament to the love this meal has in the munson household and it makes Steve smile to see something so care-worn.

Side by side they start on the vegetables, Eddie wearing goggles to protect himself from onion attack as he calls it and Steve with sunglasses at Eddie’s insistence ‘Steve this guy is going to be firing stray tear bullets and I won’t let you be a casualty’. The pair of them looking a sight for sore eyes. Fully kitted up in ‘Protective Gear’ Eddie is chopping the onion, letting out little screams of pain and terror as he sentences the vegetable to its frying pan death, acting as executioner. Honestly he’s having a great time role playing as an onion.

In between his tiny screams he hears Steve’s own mutterings timed with his own cutting motions. A notable and iconic ‘vooooosh, vooosh’ clear lightsaber sound effects as he decapitates a chilli pepper, clearly lost in his own little world. Eddie can’t help himself, or more accurately, doesn’t even think it through. He drops his knife and turns to Steve, grabs him by the face and solemnly states ‘I love you’. They haven’t said it before, both thinking it of each other but too jumbled up in their own thoughts to say it out loud, not wanting to shatter what they have.

There’s no hesitation now as Steve lets a slow smile spread across his face and leans into Eddie. ‘I know. I mean….I love you too, sorry tried to do the Han and Leia Thing and uhh I just… I love you’ Eddie leans in to kiss him, intends to keep kissing him goggles be damned but feels a wetness on his finger tips where he’s holding Steve’s face.

Pulling back, he begins to say ‘hey, you okay? Sorry to spring this on you, I-‘

The sentence isn’t finished before Steve is ripping off his sunglasses. ‘Dude. The onions. FUCK they’re strong. Oh my god. Shit shit shit!’ Eyes streaming and furiously rubbing at them. Then? Screaming as the chilli sets in.

Wayne comes home that night to find a chilli half way through being cooked and two very happy boys. ‘Sorry it isn’t ready yet, had bit of a delay.’ Eddie reports from his place on the couch, goggles pushing his hair back and feet on Steve’s lap. Wayne glances over to steve who is sitting back with a wet cloth over his eyes and held in place by sunglasses. Wayne would ask questions but he knows better than that by now. Instead he just takes his jacket off, grabs a beer and waits for his chilli with his family, sometimes ignorance is bliss.

[anonthenullifier]

Quote prompt! "What do you mean it's on fire?!"

Thanks for the prompt! Immediately it made me think of a way to finally write out one of my head canons for Vision. I hope you enjoy this!

*****

In one hand Wanda casually grips a wine glass (a Sauvignon Blanc, according to Vision but she’ll drink anything that’s offered) and in the other she directs the angle of the camcorder propped up on a little table top tripod. “What are you doing now?”

“We are,” with stilted movements, Vision’s goggle covered eyes never straying far from the tripod, he answers, “placing our tomato purée into this centrifuge.” Wanda waves her hand, trying to elicit a bit more from him. “Um we have it set to spin at 20,000 gees per minute which will force the components to separate.”

“Using this,” Helen, who is only marginally more at ease in front of the camera, pats the machine lovingly, “we can separate out the purée by density. So by the end we’ll have the pulp, oil, and water of the tomato in three distinct layers.” Wanda sends them a thumbs up as they place the tubes inside their holders and let’s them have a few minutes of peace before moving them along.

This whole evening is part of a new initiative Tony (via Pepper who is the actual brains of PR) has set up to “normalize” the Avengers more. Each of them was tasked with finding an activity to document that let’s the public realize they are all normal-ish people. Vision had spent many hours brainstorming with her what he could do since his main hobbies are reading, watching television with her, and floating around the compound. Even though all are true hobbies, she had to inform him that it was a grossly incomplete list because (amongst other omissions) for the last two months he’s been hosting Molecular Gastronomy Mondays (or MGM as the team fearfully refers to it) with Helen. Initially he adamantly refused this suggestion, not wanting to make Helen uncomfortable, but Wanda finally convinced him after they spent a whole day watching YouTube cooking channels and she ever so casually mentioned how it seemed there was a dearth of scientific explanations in these channels and how she wished everyone got to enjoy MGM like she did.

Since it was her doing to tip them into filming, Wanda agreed to direct. She always attends these nights anyway, driven by hunger and morbid curiosity (even after the egg yolk explosion that required a lengthy shower and a week-long aversion towards anything eggy), but tonight she just has to be a tiny bit more involved. “Why do you need to separate it?”

The question seems to rejuvenate Vision, his body turning towards her enough for his apron to be on display, an image of two circles and a square labeled Proton, Neutron, Crouton . “Tonight we are crafting a translucent tomato consommé. In order to remove all color we have to get food particles no larger than seven microns.”

“And the way to do that is with centrifugal force.” Helen joins in, excitement finally coming through, which was Wanda’s hope in pestering them with questions to unlock their usual talkative selves whenever science is involved. “This,” another loving pat is given to the machine, “is actually an old one from my lab. You can buy food specific ones but we spent the last few weeks adapting it to be food safe.” With a push of a button the machine’s insides begin to spin. “Now we can make the spheres.”

Wanda sips her wine as they gather all they need: a beaker from the fridge that she knows has been sitting overnight, a bottle of extra virgin olive oil, a medicine bottle of white powder, an empty beaker, and a pipette.

“Now,” Helen ( whose own apron tells the world to Quiche the Cook ) talks while Vision arranges all the items in an orderly fashion, “we’re going to demonstrate the process of spherification.”

With a wave of his hand Vision begins this segment by explaining to the viewers (by way of speaking exclusively to Wanda, a technique she suggested to help calm his nerves), “Last night we mixed water with alginate - which itself is derived from brown algae though there will be no discernible taste from it.” The little smirk that always accompanies his factoids is adorable and she hopes it translates well on video. “It has to sit overnight to remove all air bubbles. Dr. Cho.”

Smoothly they transition the baton of explanation, a pre-planned segue to keep it lively, Helen now narrating as Vision performs the next task, “What we do now is mix our olive oil with calcium chloride. This will cause the polymers of the alginate to cross link and form a gel. By dropping the olive oil mixture through the pipette, it will form spheres. If you watch Vision-”

Wanda zones out the rest, eyes taking in a little plume of smoke rising from behind the steady hands of Vision, following it as it dances through the air until it is drawn into the kitchen’s exhaust fan. Curiosity piqued, she leans as far to the side as she can without accidentally knocking over the camera. Amongst the whirling tubes of tomato lingers a far more sinister force. “Um Vision...the centrifuge is on fire.”

Vision pauses, pipette of the olive oil mixture poised over the alginate water, and a wary half-arced smile on his face that he gets whenever he is hoping to discover some new source of humor instead of derision. “What do you mean it’s on fire?”

“That it’s on fire.”

The two cooks turn towards the machine, Vision with an “Oh dear!” and Helen’s less composed, “Dammit!” Wanda knows she should help, but instead she turns the camera a bit to the right, the Sauvignon Blanc pairing perfectly with the entertainment of watching Helen cautiously open the machine while Vision uses the fire extinguisher to stop the flames.

After a hesitant glance inside, Helen pushes her goggles up onto the top of her head and laughs. “Of course.”

“I am beginning to suspect sabotage of our endeavors,” a serious accusation that is tempered by Vision’s less-than-serious delivery.

An equally facetious tone emerges from the usually stoic woman, “Steve did say our bacon foam made him uncomfortable.”

Wanda zooms the shot in to capture the full effect of the radiant amusement on Vision’s face as he weighs the hypothesis, “Or perhaps we defer to Occam’s Razor and accept that electrical engineering is not our forte.”

A dry, “I’ll stick with sabotage,” sends the two mad scientists into conspiratorial sniggers and Wanda knows this will accomplish exactly what Tony wants.

She keeps the camera going as Vision turns towards her, a breathtakingly friendly curve to his lips as he brings her into their conversation, “It seems your promised dinner is ruined,” a dour statement said with just enough self-deprecating verve that it itself should demystify the way the public sees him. But then he goes a step further, cementing firmly his humanness on camera, “Shall we just order pizza instead?”