They are ready for this
Tony had never seen any of his teammates this excited.
Steve was actually vibrating.
Couldn’t sit still.
Tony was about ready to hit him with some kind of tranquilizer dart.
Clint had an actual notebook full of notes, plans, diagrams, itineraries…
Bruce kept grinning in such a way that Tony wasn’t entirely certain if the grin wa actually Bruce’s or if it was the hulk’s….and should he see if he could get Bruce in to see a dentist while he was borrowing the hulk’s smile…did they share cavities? Really how did that work? He needed to adjust some of JARVIS’ scanning capabilities…get a couple scans of the hulk to determine what was actually shared so you could poke at Bruce and take care of it and what they would need to poke at the hulk to take care of…how old was Bruce? Did he need a prostate exam and if he didn’t share…wait….no. Stop. Bad. Reverse. What was Natasha up to, focus on someone else and get your head off this topic.
Tony shook his head to clear it. Bad. No. Bad brain.
Natasha was…reading a woman’s magazine in Russian, based on pictures, as he couldn’t read Cyrillic from this distance and angle and he wasn’t going to get closer because she was dangerous, something to do with cooking or baking.
Tony knew she had packed her new samovar for the trip to Malibu.
Apparently it was now an emotional support samovar and he was saying absolutely nothing.
He liked his spleen where it was.
He’d chatted with the friends of Dorothy, everything was in place for Steve’s birthday.
He’d forewarned cooper that everyone was coming over, so Cooper was ready.
Charlie, Ian, and Isaac, were back from Virginia.
Had been for a couple weeks.
There’d been a celebratory dinner at a synagogue in another town, something from one of Cooper’s past cases.
Tony had seen some pictures, it was good to see his friend get the recognition he deserved, especially since he was confused by it and needed exposure therapy in order to understand that he was awesome and amazing and not just because he was friends with Tony.
So yes, they were on their way and they would have today to settle in at the house, tomorrow to pick up anything they felt they needed or wanted or whatever before Steve’s birthday or before meeting the family….the only ones actually having to have a first meeting here were Clint and Steve, Natasha had already snuck out here and met everyone and he’d known cooper for years and Bruce had known him…technically for longer….so only two of them were meeting the family.
Really, someone needed to sit on Steve.
He vibrated anymore in that seat Tony would start worrying about the structural integrity of the frame and airplane seats on fancy jets were oddly a complicated thing to replace.
Right.
Time to distract, captain more vibratory functions than a high end dildo.
“Steve! How about a round of Pictionary.”
Steve startled. “What?”
“Pictionary. You draw a picture for a clue and everyone has to guess what it is, like charades, but with drawings rather than gestures and pantomime. I’ll go first.”
Tony purposely sketched an awful drawing of something unidentifiable and showed it to the collective. He then listened to the guesses until someone opted for something he liked as an answer and awarded Clint with the point for identifying his scribble as thermoplastic elastomer.
Clint’s drawing wasn’t much better, and honestly that was far too many legs for a dog, but Steve caught on and proceeded to put their dumb sketches to shame…but he was now thoroughly distracted and Tony could stop worrying about the chair frame or the upholstery.
He was pretty sure Clint and Bruce had cottoned on to his nonsense drawings and picking whatever outlandish thing they guessed that amused him as the right answer.
They were probably competing to see how unhinged they could make their guesses just to watch steve consider the sketches like some odd Rorschach test.
Once she finished her article Natasha joined in and her answers definitely showed that she had Tony’s number on this one.
When Tony agreed that his sketch was a white spotted jelly fish camouflaged in kelp, Steve took the sketch studied it incredulously while Bruce and Clint agreed and pointed out the aspects of the scribbles that fit the guess, Steve finally sorted out that they were having him on and crumpled the picture up and threw it at Tony.
Tony was saved from further reprimand by the preparations for landing.
But Steve was smiling…so was Clint and Bruce and Natasha was too, just a little, so…maybe he was getting this sorted out.